Pangaea
Yoko Teauchi arrived from Japan the other day, and in her luggage was the sculpture she made last year called Pangaea. It is made of two sheets of paper 24cms square. They are both marked at the edge with a coloured pentel pen. One is placed on the wall, and the other is wet and formed into a sphere about the size of a ping-pong ball by squeezing and tightening it in cling-film, and being left to dry completely.
This descriptive mundanity of the work of course completely detracts from its purity, and it is one of the most purely abstract things I have seen. It is a serial work, in as much as there are several colours in the pentel range that she will use to make the work, perhaps as many as twenty.
Because of its simplicity and scale, it is quite difficult to know where the work belongs. Certainly the ‘gallery’ might be too demonstrative, the display too gestural , which is what I have come to think of such places in recent times. And my fear is that the world is too busy to see things of such accomplished simplicity, too noisy for reductive thinking.
Well done, Yoko: it stays in the mind , and to paraphrase Berthold Brecht and Sol LeWitt, and once you have understood it, you own it! SC
notes from an urban hibernation 