CCA News
Enter the Outsider: CCA's Kota Ezawa Scores with Smithsonian and New York
Posted on Monday, April 4, 2011, by Simon Hodgson
For Kota Ezawa, it's crunch time. The German-Japanese artist and Film Program faculty member has barely recovered from the tumult and applause surrounding the acquisition of one of his digitally animated works by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC. Now, he's plunged into a residency at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito and is presenting a public piece in the most iconic city in film history: New York. From March 31 to May 15, Madison Square Park is hosting Ezawa's City of Nature project, in which he distills images of nature -- a waterfall, a mountain, a marlin -- from movies and shows them as animations on four LCD screens. The commission is officially a part of Mad. Sq. Art, a program of the Madison Square Park Conservancy.
Ezawa sourced more than 40 movies for the project. "I was really interested in scenes where nature drives the story," he says. "Shots without human presence. No people. No buildings." Eagle-eyed viewers will detect some familiar films -- Brokeback Mountain, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, The Old Man and the Sea -- as well as a few that are less recognizable, for example a jungle shot from Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, or a waterfall from the 1960s German Western Winnetou.
Both Ezawa's six-week commission in the Big Apple and the Smithsonian acquisition (the latter was derived in part from Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad) are deeply significant events in the career of this modest and thoughtful filmmaker and media artist. "It's so nice to be involved with the Smithsonian," he says, musing on the decline of government-run art programs and institutions in America. "It feels like a rare honor, because they're almost extinct." Inclusion in the museum's permanent collection is even sweeter for Ezawa because his work was accepted along with that of Nam June Paik, the Korean video pioneer with whom he studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
Born in Cologne in 1969, Ezawa came to San Francisco at age 25 as part of a German study-abroad program and attended the San Francisco Art Institute. He was here for a year, liked it, and has made his home in San Francisco ever since, although he retains an apartment in Berlin. His journey is similar to the one undertaken a generation earlier by his father, a Japanese linguist who stayed on in Germany after coming to the university town of Tübingen to teach.
Ezawa found the American art school experience a stark contrast from that of Düsseldorf. The Kunstakademie faculty, which included such august names as Gerhard Richter and Joseph Beuys, were regarded almost as gods by the students. At the Art Institute, his first instructor was Nayland Blake. "He was this gay leather guy. I thought: He's my professor? And I realized that this hierarchical structure of the art world was not the only way." Kota sees this as a hidden strength of the Bay Area art scene. "San Francisco is more provincial than New York or London," he admits, "but it means that it pays a lot more attention to students coming out of the art schools."
Ezawa's most recent CCA course was part of the ENGAGE at CCA initiative. He encouraged his light sculpture class to "infiltrate urban territory." While cycling around San Francisco he unearthed a suitable location for their final exhibition at 165 Grove Street, the vacant lot opposite City Hall. When he learned that the site had already been allocated for a project by the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, he approached them and they joined forces to create an urban installation. The final project was presented as a one-night-only show, titled Glow in the Dark.
"The project was a fascinating challenge in several ways,”" he says. "First, we welcomed the challenge of producing a visual art exhibition that takes into account the condition of people with low or no vision. Light art, of all visual art disciplines, can provide an experience for people with low vision. And secondly, this particular area is a fairly disenfranchised neighborhood. We picked up a lot of trash!"
The final exhibition combined four or five collaborative and individual student works. One was a neon inscription: "To see a world you otherwise could not see."
"It was great to have a project with real-world reverberations. It can be hard to get in touch with a 'real' audience. Most art projects take place in white cubes. But a couple hundred people came to our event. It was really amazing. There was a lot of enthusiasm from all different sides." Passersby stopped on the sidewalk, pulled out their phones, and took pictures of the installation. A staff member of the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery remarked on how wonderful it was to see an art project happening in this space, which had been empty and neglected for about 10 years. There was a great crossover of CCA students and their peers as well as clients of the Lighthouse, their friends, and people who just happened to be in the area.
In his own art practice, Ezawa is equally intent on reaching new viewers. "At the Art Institute, I always asked the security guards for their opinions. Security guards in museums and art schools often have an incredible knowledge of, and affinity with, art because they spend so much time looking at it. The artist Robert Ryman is just one of many well-known artists who started out as a guard. The best person you can have a conversation about art with is 'the passerby.' I like when people happen upon art, in contrast to the dedicated art audience that is looking for art."
This osmosis between the "artistic" world and the "real" world is reflected in Ezawa's own journey from Cologne to California, as the outsider who gradually creates his own niche. He has made works about the O. J. Simpson verdict, the NBA brawl between the Pistons and Pacers, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. "Just as painters like to paint what's in front of them, I like to digest in my work the things that I encounter. I grew up with American culture in Germany, so it wasn't completely foreign. But I have a gaze at America that's a little removed. I think of myself as an insider-outsider, because I've lived here for so long."
At CCA also, his practice has evolved and shifted. "For 10 years I was making installations, now I'm turning into a filmmaker." He has just begun a 10-week residency at Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, where he plans to follow his own advice to his students. "Residencies are like going to graduate school. You want to develop and change. Push yourself in a new direction." Despite his many recent accolades, this outsider's journey remains resolutely unfinished.