Michele Oka Doner

Strategic Misbehavior Michele Oka Doner

Contents

Introduction Ai Kato 7

Strategic Misbehavior Deborah Rothschild 9

Artwork Michele Oka Doner 23

Biography 56 Exhibition Checklist 57

Introduction

Tower 49 Gallery is honored to present a provocative installation by Michele Oka Doner. Strategic Misbehavior converts Tower 49’s corporate environment into a theatrical stage set with fantastical elements inspired by the natural world. I was first introduced to the work of Michele Oka Doner at a private sale exhibition, The Shaman’s Hut, at Christie’s in November of 2015. I was taken with the fine delicacy and elegance Michele consistently mastered throughout five decades of work. My second encounter with Michele’s work was A Walk on the Beach, a site- specific art installation at the Miami International Airport, consisting of cast bronzes including seaweed, shells, stems, and assorted aquatic forms. Michele transformed a busy commuter atmosphere into a walk along the shores of Miami. Glancing at the ground, travelers were mesmerized to discover ethereal, golden, natural motifs guiding them through the airport. Michele expertly imbues urban and cold settings with a serene and whimsical ambience, calming viewers and striking intrigue with art in unlikely spaces. I was eager for Michele to grace Tower 49 Gallery with the feeling of discovering nature in a concrete jungle. Tower 49 Gallery is an art exhibition space, but also serves as a public access way and lobby space for Tower 49 offices and tenants. I anticipate that all who enter Tower 49 will explore and engage Michele’s mythical, mystical creatures, reliefs,and photographs–all inspired by the natural world. This is the first exhibition at Tower 49 Gallery focusing on a theatrical exhibition, in which sculptures on the ground floor interact with people passing through the lobbies. The sky lobby features Michele’s collection of photographs, Into the Mysterium. These photographs blur the borders between walls, creating an unexpected aquatic experience. The curator and catalogue author for this exhibition is Deborah Rothschild, former Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Williams College Museum of Art. Strategic Misbehavior was made possible by the efforts of Michele Oka Doner, Deborah Rothschild, Frederick Doner, Sebastian Sarmiento, Aaron Yassin, and Guy Reziciner.

Ai Kato Exhibition Director of Tower 49 Gallery

Strategic Misbehavior Deborah Rothschild

Throughout her professional life Michele Oka Doner has been acting up. From her elegant and gracious bearing one would not guess that she is a troublemaker. But she has been subverting long-held ideas about art making for over five decades. With a light touch and understated finesse, she consistently pushes against convention and blurs boundaries, ranging from the appropriate gender for an artist to acceptable materials, installation techniques, sources of inspiration, location sites, and subject matter. She consistently expands our point of view so that we are carried to the shoreline or underwater as we walk on a shimmering simulacrum of the beach and ocean floor, or we are transported far below ground to look up at tree roots metamorphosed into a giant chandelier.1 She is able to imagine a six-inch piece of bark and a section of root (fig. 1) transformed to a fifty-foot concrete monument with embedded hydrating systems (fig. 2), making this impossible vision a reality by learning and applying advanced aspects of digital technology, structural engineering and architectural construction. With the installation at Tower 49, this Miami born, New York based artist, recasts an office building’s corporate entrance lobby and 24th floor gallery into a theatrical mise en scene for experiencing and contemplating primal mysteries. The entrance lobby of Tower 49 is an imposing twenty-foot high interior with granite perimeter walls and dramatically veined red marble interior walls (opposite page). It is a tower of monolithic proportions where swarms of workers come and go absorbed by their mobile devices and distracted by professional or personal matters. The building’s lobby was not initially created for staging art, but primarily as means to transition people from the street to workplace as efficiently as possible. Oka Doner challenges this

9 function by provoking interaction with and breathing life into the formidable Tower 49 space. The “Roman” scale and the assertive marble walls are difficult to work with. Rather than fight them, Oka Doner disarms the situation by introducing unexpected, out of place elements: disconcerting humanoid sculptures of bronze; a wall of strange hanging wax life forms; and three large works on paper, printed directly from roots, twigs, branches, and other organic material. A further unexpected intervention is the addition of living elements–green palm fronds that are placed at the base of the three large-scale sculptures (p. 8, 38). When visitors enter through the north doorway, they are confronted by “giant figures from another realm evoking primal feelings with their feral bodies”2 that appear to have risen from the primordial mud. Mana (2015), the largest at seventy inches high, is a fossilized half-tree/half man (is he wearing loafers?) (p. 25) It is cast in bronze largely from the roots, bark branches and organic detritus that Oka Doner gathers on her legendary foraging expeditions through south Florida, or wherever she finds herself (fig. 3). The figure looms before us charred, flayed and disemboweled, but powerfully erect and somehow casually confident. One element cast from wood protrudes at groin level confirming the figure’s Zeus-like virility. Michele Oka Doner is a voracious reader interested in world mythologies, arcane cosmologies, and ancient texts. She names her pieces according to their origins and the titles are an integral part of her work. For example, the word “mana” refers to a supernatural power concentrated in an object or person. It is a term at the source of many Pacific languages and is believed to have originated from overpowering natural forces such as gale winds, thunder and lightning that early Pacific peoples could not explain. Mana’s comrade, Purana (2015) (p. 24), stands upright on small, blackened feet and relatively short legs. His gnarled form supports a large torso and shoulders. Deciduous tree trunks and/or root systems as well as twisting vines seem to have been enlisted in his fabrication. Purana refers to a class of ancient Sanskrit texts that detail the history of the universe from creation to destruction. Like Mana, this effigy seems to have survived destructive forces. These two male figures flank Primal Self Portrait (2008) (p. 23), a well-proportioned human scale female that mirrors Oka Doner’s frame. The red iron oxide that has been pushed into the crevices of her cast bronze body “evokes blood, a life-giving fluid,”3 and brings

10 Fig. 1 Root-and bark study for Micco, painted white for scanning. Approximately 6 in. long, 2012.

Fig. 2 Micco, Concrete Pavilion, Doral City Hall Park. Concrete formulated with small stone aggregate, 25 × 50 × 35 feet. Commissioned by Codina Partners. Installed 2013.

11 to mind both torture and menstruation. Although, like the two males, she is headless and armless, she differs from them in form, color, and texture: instead of dark brown/black her surface is gold and red. She too appears flayed, but her “skin” is not formed from discernable roots, vines or bark. Instead, the vertical striations that mark her were created by hand as Oka Doner attempted to simultaneously “carve the body up and relate it to geological and other forces of nature.”4 Comparisons abound to African ritual objects, to tortured Renaissance figures such as Donatello’s Penitent Magdalene, or to contemporary works like Kiki Smith’s raw and textured bronze Virgin Mary. In the narrow entry space of the lobby, the three figures stand like forbidding archaic divinities, palm frond offerings at their feet. Adjacent to this group is a concierge desk, which is transformed into a dais for Primal Self Portrait’s smaller and more amorphous cousin, First Radiant Figure (2008) (p. 31). Recalling the dripped sand structures children often make at the beach, this humanoid of indeterminate gender seems at once to be rising from and melting into its base. The feet of the craggy creature are large, froglike appendages that merge into its tall base. Although lower on the evolutionary ladder, First Radiant Figure is linked to Primal Self Portrait by virtue of similar patinas and striated bodies. Birth of Adam (2007) (p. 26) dominates the east wall and “references the community from where all these giants dwell. It is the beginning.”5 With this powerful eight-foot relief print, Oka Doner further unsettles the dominion of Tower 49’s monolithic lobby and shakes up its business-as-usual comings and goings. Charged particles seem to radiate from the nude figure making it look as though Adam, the first man, is coming into existence and solidifying before our eyes. The artist has accomplished a remarkable feat by conferring movement and energy onto a static, two-dimensional image. Adamah means “earth,” and according to the Old Testament, Adam was formed from “the dust of the ground;” (Genesis 2:7). Oka Doner fittingly yet iconoclastically creates her Adam from foraged bio-debris found on the ground. The twigs, dirt, branches, and leaves that form the figure are considered lowly materials generally not thought of as suitable for high art. There is an element of mischief too in drawing attention to Adam’s generative organ– the dark focal point of the image, which one would like to think was printed from a fig leaf.

12 Fig. 3 Michele Oka Doner gathering materials in Miami, 2002.

13 Next to the Birth of Adam on the far wall, the delicate relief print Lungs seems to respire (2007) (p. 27). Like Adam it appears to be charged with moving energized particles. To Oka Doner Lungs references both the human body and the organic wax forms suspended beside it. Printed from a similar amalgam of found organic material as Birth of Adam, this beautiful image not only depicts human lungs, it also reads as the radiating dendrites of cells and the trunk and branches of a sapling. Patterns that recur in nature from microscopic to astronomic have always fascinated Oka Doner. Thus, reverberations bounce off the various iterations of the life forms she creates. A third print, Gath I (2008) (p. 28) on the opposite wall is similarly constructed; a crouching, amorphous human form radiates coiled energy, causing it to appear ready to pounce. For the artist, the large suspended wax objects on the west wall are a mix of foodstuffs and strange otherworldly creatures upon which the bronze giants dine (2018) (fig. 4). These plant forms, invented crustaceans, and animal carcasses are air-dried, cured, and ready to be devoured by the omnivorous bronze deities. While making them, Oka Doner recalled seeing paintings from ancient Egypt and Rome. Her vast bank of visual archetypes had subcon- sciously brought forth images such as the fresco on the wall of a popina, or working-man’s cafe, from first-century Pompeii, where foodstuffs hang above patrons’ heads (fig. 5). Oka Doner notes that the image of hanging edibles is “an ancient motif that acknowledges the bounties of the earth gathered and prepared for human consumption;” adding that at Tower 49, “We are feeding our misbe- having giants.”6 Primordial Creature (2010–2018) (p. 34) completes the ground floor lobby mise en scene. It is a fictional airborne crus- tacean also made of wax that “flies through the giants’ airspace.”7

High above us on the 24th floor of Tower 49, in the Sky Lobby Gallery, we enter an undersea world of undulating otherworldly creatures. Fifty-four photographs comprise Into the Mysterium (2017) (pp. 40–53), a project Oka Doner embarked upon after encountering by happenstance the collection of nearly one million spineless aquatic life forms housed in large specimen jars at the University of Miami’s little-known Marine Invertebrate Museum (fig. 6). A year later she returned to photograph a selection of them. Seen together these strange images induce a peaceful, meditative state of floating wonder. In her titles Oka Doner draws attention to

14 Fig. 4 Installation view of suspended wax sculptures, west wall Tower 49 Gallery, 2018.

Fig. 5 Fresco from the backroom of a popina (café/bar). Note the foodstuffs hanging above the customers seated at a table. Pompeii, first-century A.D.

15 16 Hands, from Into the Mysterium, 2006.

18 Dance, from Into the Mysterium, 2006. uncanny—sometimes delightful, sometimes creepy–human corre- spondences, such as “Hands,” (pp. 16–17 ) “Dance,”(pp. 18–19 ) and “Warrior” (pp. 54–55 ). She transports us back to our aquatic roots, where our genetic inheritance is embedded in gelatinous, translucent life forms. The artist notes that, “All of us are originally natives of the sea. Giants and humans, strange fruits, all living things, life itself, comes from the Mysterium.”8

With stages set on two floors, only our presence is needed to activate Oka Doner’s prehistoric drama. Upon entering the lobby, visitors will immediately sense something amiss as they encounter alien creatures that invite unruly forces into what is usually a highly civilized space. Oka Doner disrupts the center of commerce that is Tower 49 by inciting interaction between pedestrians and the unfamiliar giants whose strangeness they cannot help but confront. As the primeval menagerie unfolds, we may wonder, “who are these creatures, how did they arrive, what are they doing, and why are they here?” Narratives can be invented and enacted as Oka Doner interrupts our daily routine via these unsettling but strangely beautiful creatures. With a gentle but firm shove, this naturalist/ artist shifts our thinking, encouraging us to rise out of workday preoccupations to engage with the great epochs of geologic time. We are led to ponder questions of survival on earth, while simultaneously celebrating the gift of life—a gift that stretches back eons and encompasses infinite manifestations.

Notes 1 Referring to her A Walk on Beach, (1995—2006) fashioned of thousands of intricately cast bronzes and tons of randomly distributed ground mother-of-pearl. The 2018 ceiling piece at the Neue Gallery in Manhattan is not a light and so technically not a chandelier. It consists of vines coated with charcoal paint containing mica and measures 6 × 4 feet. See also Radiant Site (1991) at the Herald Square subway stop consisting of 11,000 tiles glazed with varying degrees of gold that give the impression of light in the underground space. 2 Email to the author from Michele Oka Doner, 3/14/18 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Email to the author from Michele Oka Doner, 3/15/18 7 Email to the author from Michele Oka Doner, 3/14/18 8 Ibid.

20 Fig. 6 Michele Oka Doner and Nancy Voss, Director and Research Professor, Emerita, with specimen jars at the Marine Invertebrate Museum, Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science, University of Miami, 2015.

23 Primal Self-Portrait, 2008 24 Purana, 2015 PrimalMana Self-Portrait 20082015 Cast bronzebronze, Unique ed 1/3 5970 x 1730 x 1421 ½inches inches

25 Mana, 2015 26 Birth of Adam, 2007 27 Lungs, 2007 28 Gath I, 2008 29 30 Gamete, 2018 31 First Radiant Figure, 2008 32 Transgenic, 2018 33 Conjurer, 2018 34 Primordial Creature, 2018 35 Provender, 2018 36 Bird, Remembered, 2002

38 Primal Self-Portrait, 2008

40 Installation view, Into the Mysterium, Sky Lobby Gallery, Tower 49, 2018.

42 Installation view, Into the Mysterium, Sky Lobby Gallery, Tower 49, 2018.

44 Installation view, Into the Mysterium, Sky Lobby Gallery, Tower 49, 2018.

46 Installation view, Into the Mysterium, Sky Lobby Gallery, Tower 49, 2018.

48 Installation view, Into the Mysterium, Sky Lobby Gallery, Tower 49, 2018.

50 Installation view, Into the Mysterium, Sky Lobby Gallery, Tower 49, 2018.

52 Installation view, Into the Mysterium, Sky Lobby Gallery, Tower 49, 2018.

54 Warrior, from Into the Mysterium, 2006.

Biography

Michele Oka Doner was born and raised in Miami Beach, Florida where botanical and aquatic ecosystems are central to sustainability. In the late 1960s, Oka Doner studied at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where she received a Bachelor of Science in 1966 and a Master of Fine Arts in 1969. The artist moved to New York City in 1981, when a range of associations swirled around the body, the individual, the environment and global viability.

Deborah Rothschild was raised in Miami Beach just a few blocks away from Michele Oka Doner. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude from Vassar College and received M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. As curator at the Williams College Museum of Art from 1981 to 2009 she organized exhibitions of work by living artists including Adrian Piper, Tony Oursler, James Turrell, and David Hammons, as well as history-based exhibitions such as “Prelude to a Nightmare: Hitler’s Early Years in Vienna, 1906—1913” and “Making it New: the Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy.”

56 Exhibition checklist

Birth of Adam, 2007 Lungs, 2007 Gath I, 2008 Relief print from organic material Organic Material on abaca paper Organic Material on abaca paper 101.2 × 53 ½ inches 4 × 4 feet 4 × 4 feet

Bird, Remembered, 2002 Mana, 2015 Purana, 2015 Cast iron, iron Container Cast bronze, ed 1/3 Cast Bronze Edition 1/3 4 ½ × 20 ½ × 8 inches 70 × 30 × 21 inches 67 × 22 × 16 inches

Primal Self-Portrait, 2008 Provender, 2018 Conjurer, 2018 Cast bronze Unique Wax and Organic Material Wax and organic material 59 × 17 × 14 ½ inches 27 × 24 × 14 inches 21 × 8 × 8 × inches

Hippocampus, 2018 Mysteria, 2018 Transgenic, 2018 Wax and organic material Wax and organic material Wax and organic material 35 × 8 × 3.5 inches 30 × 17 × 10.5 inches 26 × 9 × 3.5 inches

57 Gamete, 2018 Femina, 2018 Primordial Creature, 2018 Wax and organic material Wax and organic material Wax and organic material 39 × 13 × 9 inches 26 × 18 × 8 inches 34 × 35 × 9 inches

First Radiant Figure, 2008 Another Kingdom, 2006 Second Kingdom, 2006 Cast Bronze, Unique Archival pigment print Archival pigment print 24 ½ × 5 ½ × 7 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches

Rising Orb, 2006 Root Stock, 2006 Cobra, 2006 Archival pigment print Archival pigment print Archival pigment print 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches

Solar, 2006 Germinating, 2006 Embryo, 2006 Archival pigment print Archival pigment print Archival pigment print 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches

Cosmic Dance, 2006 Grace, 2006 Hands, 2006 Archival pigment print Archival pigment print Archival pigment print 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches

58 Electricity, 2006 Light Wand, 2006 Inner Glow, 2006 Archival pigment print Archival pigment print Archival pigment print 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches

Double Portals, 2006 A Source Within, 2006 Lightning, 2006 Archival pigment print Archival pigment print Archival pigment print 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches

Origin, 2006 Firmament, 2006 Heliotropic, 2006 Archival pigment print Archival pigment print Archival pigment print 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches

Monumental, 2006 Nodes, 2006 Pulse II, 2006 Archival pigment print Archival pigment print Archival pigment print 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches

Pulse, 2006 Running Away, 2006 Diacritical Marks, 2006 Archival pigment print Archival pigment print Archival pigment print 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches

59 Solid Wave, 2006 Wizard’s Trove, 2006 Motion, 2006 Archival pigment print Archival pigment print Archival pigment print 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches

Corona, 2006 Flesh, 2006 Dance, 2006 Archival pigment print Archival pigment print Archival pigment print 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches

Shadow, 2006 Attached, 2006 Materialization, 2006 Archival pigment print Archival pigment print Archival pigment print 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches

Offering, 2006 Homunculus, 2006 Ripe, 2006 Archival pigment print Archival pigment print Archival pigment print 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches

Inner Vision, 2006 Inner Life, 2006 Radiating, 2006 Archival pigment print Archival pigment print Archival pigment print 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches

60 Warrior, 2006 Guardian, 2006 Relic, 2006 Archival pigment print Archival pigment print Archival pigment print 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches

Oracle, 2006 Inner Oracle, 2006 Sorcerer, 2006 Archival pigment print Archival pigment print Archival pigment print 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches

Emergence II, 2006 Emergence, 2006 Filament, 2006 Archival pigment print Archival pigment print Archival pigment print 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches

Genesis, 2006 Elysium, 2006 Cave, 2006 Archival pigment print Archival pigment print Archival pigment print 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches

Crevice, 2006 Pelagic Trove, 2006 Archival pigment print Archival pigment print 15 × 22 ½ inches 15 × 22 ½ inches

61 62 Wax in process for Purana with End the Feast in the foreground. Left side, behind Purana, are Tortoises, clay 1977. The studio is an accretion of fifty-five years of work as well as accumulated natural objects Published by Tower 49 Gallery on the occasion of the exhibition Strategic Misbehavior by Michele Oka Doner, May 2018–April 2019

Front matter images: p.2 Mysteria, wax and organic material, 30 × 17 × 10 ½ inches, 2018. p.4 Installation view, detail of the west wall of Tower 49 Gallery with hanging wax figures, 2018. p.6 Primordial Creature, detail (see p. 34). p.8 Installation view, Mana with palm fronds, entrance to Tower 49 Gallery, 2018.

Photo credits: p. 2, 4, 6, 8, 15, pp. 26–35, 38–53: Photo by Jeffrey Sturges; p.11: Photos by Aaron Yassin (top), Nick Merrick (bottom); p.13: Photo by Carina Landau; p.21: Photo by Frederick Doner; p. 23, 24, 25: Photo by Nick Merrick; pp. 62–63: Photo by Stephen Arnold (Courtesy, Christies), pp.16–19, 54–55 and all Into the Mysterium © 2006 Michele Oka Doner and Aaron Yassin.

Tower 49 Gallery, one of New York’s most unique and striking contemporary art spaces, offers exhibitions free of charge and open to the public in the street-level lobbies and on the 24th floor of its Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) designed building. Spearheaded by Ai Kato, Exhibition Director, the gallery’s mission is to originate exhibitions that challenge conventional ideas about public art, featuring such internationally acclaimed contemporary artists as Friedel Dzubas, Frank Stella, Mark di Suvero, and Jules Olitski. Tower 49 provides a sanctuary of contemplation in an extraordinary space for the public to discover the important role that art plays in our daily lives.

12 East 49th Street New York, NY 10017 www.tower49gallery.com

ISBN-13: 978-1-7322965-0-3