Ruth Asawa: Defining an Artist Jack Fallon Viewers invariably ascribe labels to art and artists. Art is “modern,” “post-modern,” “Western,” “Asian.” This tendency towards a kind of scientific classification is sometimes employed beyond a degree of usefulness, to the detriment of understanding well the very art it is meant to explicate. Contemporary studies suggest this has been the case with Ruth Asawa, the -based artist whose oeuvres’ timeless, popular appeal defies strict categorization.1 Despite this, critics have sought to categorize her works by affixing labels such as “Japanese,” “Japanese-American,” “Feminine,” “Feminist,” “West Coast,” and even “the Fountain Lady” in efforts to define her as an artist. To what extent do these labels hold, and to what extent are they necessary? By contrasting recent scholarship with perceptions of Asawa during most of her life I hope to show that the above descriptors, while perhaps impossible to abolish absolutely, are not representative of the central themes in Asawa’s work. I intend to illustrate this by providing context to a few of her works; in particular her famous wire sculptures and the fountains she made for Japan Town and in San Francisco. Ruth Asawa married Albert Lanier at the age of 23 in 19492 and subsequently stayed home to care for their six children.3 Because she assumed a maternal role early in her adult life, Asawa became identified as a “properly domestic” wife and mother. Perhaps we should find it unsurprising, then, that her audience claimed she should be naturally inclined to produce art that was “feminine,” that was influenced by “female” craftwork and art forms which women had traditionally produced after completing household chores. Such were the descriptions of her wire sculptures when she began creating them. Admittedly, the sculptures may have lent themselves to this reductive characterization 4 5 by their reliance upon a simple crochet stitch, ’ but the use of wire and the undeniable artistry of their composition certainly elevate

1 Daniell Cornell et al., The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 8-10. 2 Jacqueline Hoefer, “Ruth Asawa, A Working Life.” In The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air, edited by Daniell Cornell. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 17. 3 Hoefer, “Ruth Asawa,” 18 4 Hoefer, “Ruth Asawa,” 16. 5 Leah Ollman. “The Industrious Line.” Art in America 95, no. 5 (May 2007): 161. 83 them beyond the intentionally denigratory designation “craftwork.” Connoting a lack of originality or critical insight, “craft” does not express the physical challenge of wielding industrially produced metal into complex shapes by hand. This work, often injuring Asawa’s hands,6 was hardly an “appropriately undemanding” task for the so-called “weaker sex.” Furthermore, many of her untitled sculptures (figs.1 & 2 for example) drew inspiration from her rural childhood, her education and her life experiences. Born to poor, Japanese migrant parents, Asawa and her six siblings were required to help their parents with farm work, which was the family’s livelihood.7 Often riding home on the back of a wagon at day’s end, Asawa recalls dragging her feet in the ground, creating flowing patterns to amuse her six-year-old imagination.8 She would remember these shapes when she began to study under the architect and theorist at . Fuller popularized the geodesic sphere and experimented with housing and other projects utilizing contractible, lightweight materials that exploit the geometry of their assembly to create extremely strong and durable structures. Under his tutelage, Asawa would explore themes in her work such as ambiguous positive and negative space, and the idea of composing larger objects out of smaller ones.9 On a $40 trip to Mexico, which she could barely afford, Asawa was introduced to Mexican basket weaving.10 Employing the weaving techniques learned from this trip, the impressions she left in the ground as a child were finally made manifest in the organic forms of her wire sculptures. These pieces were the first to make her famous. Critics initially rejected her work, saying: “It cannot be sculpture if it cannot stand by itself.”11 A 1955 Time magazine article, pairing her with Isamu Noguchi for no apparent reason other than their common Japanese heritage, discredited her by introducing her:

6 Emily K. Doman Jennings, “Critiquing the Critique: Ruth Asawa’s Early Reception.” In The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air, edited by Daniell Cornell, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006) 133. 7 Hoefer, “Ruth Asawa,” 10. 8 Douglas Martin. “Ruth Asawa Dies at 87; Artist who wove wire.” New York Times (August 18, 2013): A20. 9 Ollman. “The Industrious Line,” 161. 10 Hoefer, “Ruth Asawa,” 16. 11 Diana Burgess Fuller and Daniela Salvioni. Art, Women, California 1950-2000: Parallels Intersections. (Berkeley, University of California Press), 2002 84 “Ruth Asawa, 28, is a San Francisco housewife and mother of three…” 12 A year later an Art News article described her work as “domestic sculptures in a feminine, handiwork mode–small and light and unobtrusive for home decoration…” in contrast, presumably, to supposedly more substantial work by men.13 Yet along with insulting commentaries like these, Asawa concurrently gained recognition in other circles as a serious artist, winning a spot in the Whitney Museum the same year as the Art News article’s release.14 Like the incomprehensibly one-sided Möbius strip15 that is partially responsible for inspiring them, the interior and exterior surfaces of Asawa’s wire sculptures are continuous; and of equal interest to their unique forms are the fascinating shadows they cast. Multiple lights shone upon these sculptures enhance the theme of multiple realities; each light produces a unique shadow, yet all of the shadows originate from the same object. The shadows may create a plane, may appear solid, but the sculptures themselves are airy, have no planar surfaces, and thus challenge the hitherto binary conception of positive and negative space.16 Asawa conceived of the sculptures as “drawings in 3D” made by constructing a “line” of wire into a two- dimensional row of loops, which creates volume by joining that row at the ends. This concept stretches the definition of what a drawing can be17: is a drawing on a large paper, the ends of which have been attached to create a cylinder, still a drawing? Asawa has done away with the limitations of canvas and draws freely in the air with a medium that beautifully straddles the realms of two- and three-dimensionality. Asawa was Japanese-American and a woman; whether or not she related to those identifiers, the question remains as to whether they relate to her art. I believe there is no evidence to support the claim that there is a female influence in her wire sculptures any more than a male influence can be seen in any given male artist’s work. Take for example, Alfred Stieglitz’s “Equivalents,” in which hundreds of safely non- gendered photographs depict clouds; it would seem absurd to

12 Ollman, “The Industrious Line,” 163 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 159. 15 Karin Higa, “Inside and Outside at the Same Time.” In The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air, edited by Daniell Cornell, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 30. 16 Cornell, The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa, 143, 156. 17 Ibid. 85 suggest that these works were influenced by Stieglitz’s identification as male. Yet while men’s art is seen as neutral, as uninfluenced by gender, women’s art has historically been seen as “feminine.” Asawa’s perceived identity as an artist and how this perception bears on her works becomes more nuanced when considering her race as well as her gender. When asked to make a fountain (fig. 3) for the plaza in Japan Town,18 Asawa decided to relate to the community’s heritage with a fountain inspired by paper folding, and it was assumed that this was a choice influenced by the Japanese art of origami. However, this seemingly obvious symbol of Asawa’s heritage was in fact mediated by an influence not from Japan, but from England via Germany, through her instructor at Black Mountain College.19 Albers, like many instructors at Black Mountain, originally taught at the Bauhaus in Germany before it was closed by the Nazis. He encouraged students to conceive of architecture and design from craft-based thinking and to study the nature of materials by exploiting the strengths inherent in them. Paper folding in the English School of Thought that he taught espouses just such a philosophy, and the goal, less aesthetic than mathematical, is to test the strength of angles created by folding, with the ultimate goal of erecting a piece upon which one “could stand, as if it were made of wood.”20 Origami then, but no paper crane, Asawa’s fountain has a symmetry and rigidity that speak to the structural integrity of the paper folding she learned at Black Mountain. It is worth considering why Asawa was commissioned for the Japan Town fountain: to what extent was Asawa’s heritage relevant for the commission? While I could not find records of the reaction to the fountain by Japan Town residents or frequenters, I suggest that Asawa was chosen based on the assumed cultural relatability of the artist, not of the commissioned art. Would an origami-inspired fountain created by an artist with no claim to Japanese heritage have satisfied the spirit of the project? My feeling is that it would not have. It is not the “Japanese” aesthetic of the art that qualifies it for the space, but rather the cultural identity of the artist; the Japanese imagery is simply the reaction of the artist to the commission. Asawa is undeniably “Nisei,” or second- generation Japanese, but she said of herself that she was emphatically not ethnic, and of her art she said:

18 Hoefer, “Ruth Asawa,” 26. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 86 …you start with general principles. You don’t think of something that’s Mexican or Chinese. You think of a thing that’s in nature and which has principles that apply to anything you do…I don’t think of myself as Japanese.21 The Japanese-American identity is a complicated one for people like Asawa who were forcibly relocated to internment camps during World War II. Asawa optimistically only ever cited the positive aspects of internment, such as the opportunity to learn to draw from detained Disney animators and the time to explore her artistic qualities.22 Yet it was her “Japanese-ness” that sentenced her to that fate, and perhaps her rejection of an ethnic identity was a consequence of the persecution she endured. Given Asawa’s own self-description as American then, we should consider this to be a more representative “label” than a Japanese or Japanese-American designation. Asawa’s near refusal to identify as Japanese or as a woman in dialogues about herself as an artist, for the most part, were not extremely impactful given the abstract nature of her work. Issues of race and especially femininity came into a very public sphere however, upon the appearance of her most controversial work, Andrea, a fountain in Ghirardelli Square, San Francisco.23 Conceived as a laboratory for urban planning, Ghirardelli Square was the first public, historical space restored to serve commercial interests in the United States.24 It became a model for plazas all over the country and the intense scrutiny that it was subject to as a result served to magnify the issues that Andrea brought to the fore. , a major orchestrator of the square’s renovation, recommended Asawa for the commission because of the abstract forms in her portfolio. Halprin envisioned an abstract sculpture with water shooting as high as thirty feet,25 but Asawa surprised everybody by installing a fountain (figs. 4-6) with two mermaids, one “merchild,” many frogs, two turtles, and lily pads. Andrea’s controversy lay in its overtly sexual imagery: it depicts the exposed breasts of the mermaids, the suckling of the merchild (fig. 5), and apparently “fornicating” frogs (fig. 6). Halprin criticized Andrea

21 Ibid., 27. 22 Ollman, “The Industrious Line,” 160. 23 Hoefer, “Ruth Asawa,” 24. 24 Alison Isenberg, “‘Culture-a-Go-Go’: The Ghirardelli Square Sculpture Controversy and the Liberation of Civic Design in the 1960s” Journal of Social History Vol. 44, No. 2, Winter 2010: 380. 25 Hoefer, “Ruth Asawa,” 24. 87 on the basis of the overall “baseness” of representational art, which, according to him, precluded the possibility of intellectual engagement by telling viewers, “like Disneyland,” what to think and how to feel.26 The mermaid was modeled after an Italian friend of Asawa’s, and her nakedness was an uncomfortable reminder of the infamous “Go-Go” clubs featuring nude female dancers that had once existed around Ghirardelli Square and which persisted in the adjacent, Italian North End neighborhood.27 The infamy of these venues was part of the impetus for creating a definitively straight-laced shopping plaza out of the former Ghirardelli chocolate factory. With Andrea, Asawa challenged the “appropriateness” of the square by addressing the very question of the role of sexuality in public that the Ghirardelli architects hoped only to suppress. Whatever it was saying, the fountain was considered a radical statement and therefore, almost overnight, Asawa went from being seen as feminine to being seen as feminist.28 Asawa said of the fountain, “as you look at the sculpture you include rather than block out the ocean view which was saved for all of us, and you wonder what lies below the surface.”29 Ironically, although Halprin criticized Andrea on the basis of the alleged limiting qualities of representational art, the fountain spawned numerous interpretations, many of which centered on definitions of femininity. Breastfeeding, for example, had been associated with a life of servitude, whereas bottle- feeding was at the time a symbol of the modern, free woman.30 But Asawa, verbally, and through her actions, expressed her disagreement with the notion that being a stay-at-home mother was somehow an affront on a woman’s integrity or autonomy. She rejected many lucrative commercial opportunities from companies that tried to woo her with benefits such as free child-care. By this time Asawa was perceived neither as a traditional, domestic woman nor a female activist in the eyes of the public.31 To some she seemed conservative, while others recognized that her work challenged contemporary ideas of art and assumed that Asawa was a “modern” woman; her depiction of breastfeeding in the fountain was perceived as oddly inconsistent with either image. In addition to notably avoiding the contemporary feminist agenda, Asawa’s fountain can also be read as promoting queer

26 Isenberg, “‘Culture-a-Go-Go’”, 389. 27 Ibid. 28 Isenberg, “‘Culture-a-Go-Go’”, 388. 29 Ibid., 389. 30 Ibid.,395. 31 Ibid. 88 rights by suggesting that the mermaids are a lesbian couple with their child.32 The frogs’ “amphibian orgies” intimate themes of family and procreation, normalizing the possibility of a queer family unit via analogy with the natural world. But, irrespective of the controversy surrounding the sexual readings of Andrea, the fountain is undeniably a scene of nurturing. While feminist theory at the time aspired for equality by emulating men,33 Asawa believed women could be empowered and still fulfill a maternal role.34 Her inclusion of odd, round orifices at the ends of each of the mermaids’ tails, where they fan out and fold back, as well as their shapely bodies (the real Andrea had just given birth35) can be read as naturalistic. If they were too abstracted or idealized, the mermaids would lose their wholesomeness, and a wholesome glorification of the female was perhaps the best possible response to the questionable sexual morality of the clubs nearby. In contrast to both “progressive” women as well as women who were seen as perpetuating the status quo, Asawa advanced an image that was seen as regressive of the feminist agenda while at the same time breaching the boundaries of comfortable, conservative propriety. What is perhaps most interesting about the Ghirardelli fountain is that immediately after its installation Asawa lost the label of “Japanese” artist and instead was called “The Fountain Lady.” Her style was now called “West Coast.” Andrea may have sparked controversy and confusion amongst critics, but the public received it well and ultimately it was considered a positive addition to the square. The notoriety of the affair was undoubtedly what prompted the inordinate amount of commissions that Asawa accepted for fountains thereafter, fixing her status as “The Fountain Lady” and testifying to the love, and power, of labels. While I do want to be careful not to erase Asawa’s gendered and racial identities, I do not believe these identities significantly influenced her artistic style. I do not mean to suggest that her art exists in a vacuum, that it is ignorant of her past, but it may be the case, for example, that the racism she experienced into adulthood36 resulted in her focusing on the parts of her identity not defined by race. Her

32 Ibid.,394. 33 Ibid.,395. 34 Cornell, The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa, 148. 35 Isenberg, “‘Culture-a-Go-Go’”, 395. 36 Martin, “Ruth Asawa Dies at 87,” A20. 89 ethnicity may have shaped her evolution as a person and as an artist, but it shows through her art indirectly at best. Her instruction in Japanese calligraphy as a child,37 for example, may have influenced her understanding of positive and negative space, but this lesson has never shown itself in her art in a way that preserves its Japanese origin. I agree with current scholarship that Asawa’s Japanese heritage and femininity are not ultimately useful labels for defining her as an artist: but what then, if any, would be useful descriptors for her? I contend that Asawa should be characterized as having been influenced by the frugality and agricultural background of her childhood and by her formative education at Black Mountain College, itself a continuation of the Bauhaus.38 The influences of Josef Albers and Buckminster Fuller are present in her work. If her work must be restricted to a single art movement, I believe that she is best associated with the Studio Craft movement39 because of her work with baker’s clay and for having utilized the crochet e-loop to great advantage in her wire sculptures. Stripped of the erroneous “Japanese,” “Japanese-American,” “feminine,” and “feminist” descriptions, Asawa can be recognized for who she is: an American artist who created original sculptures out of wire and fountains cast from models made of baker’s clay. She advanced the recognition of women and Japanese-Americans by virtue of her success, but it would be a mistake to map these identity labels onto the themes she explored in her art. The more we become more aware of the societal tendency to “other” minority groups, the more we can desist with the inclination to reduce individuals to categories. Asawa has helped inculcate a culture that challenges white and male superiority with her nonconformity and her individuality. Reflecting on the progress she has brought about, perhaps we may venture to categorize both Asawa, and her art, as pioneering.

37 Cornell, The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa, 138. 38 Cornell, The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa, 138. 39 Krystal Reiko Hauseur, “Crafted Abstraction: Three Nisei Artists and the American Studio Craft Movement: Ruth Asawa, Kay Sekimachi, and Toshiko Takaezu” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 2011), Abstract.

90 Bibliography Cornell, Daniell et al. The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Doman Jennings, Emily K., “Critiquing the Critique: Ruth Asawa’s Early Reception.” In The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air, edited by Daniell Cornell, 128-137. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Fuller, Diana Burgess, and Daniela Salvioni. Art, Women, California 1950-2000: Parallels Intersections, 21, 85-87, 92-93: Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002 Harris, Mary Emma, “Black Mountain College.” In The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air, edited by Daniell Cornell, 42-66. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Hauseur, Krystal Reiko. “Crafted Abstraction: Three Nisei Artists and the American Studio Craft Movement: Ruth Asawa, Kay Sekimachi, and Toshiko Takaezu” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 2011). Higa, Karin, “Inside and Outside at the Same Time.” In The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air, edited by Daniell Cornell, 30-41. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Hoefer, Jacqueline, “Ruth Asawa, A Working Life.” In The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air, edited by Daniell Cornell, 10-29. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Isenberg, Alison. “‘Culture-a-Go-Go’: The Ghirardelli Square Sculpture Controversy and the Liberation of Civic Design in the 1960s” Journal of Social History Vol. 44, No. 2, Winter 2010: 379-412. Martin, Douglas. “Ruth Asawa Dies at 87; Artist who wove wire.” New York Times (August 18, 2013): A20. Ollman, Leah. “The Industrious Line.” Art in America 95, no. 5 (M 2007): 158-21.

91 Figure 1. Untitled by Asawa.(Asawa does not name her wire sculptures.) http://untitled-rugblog.com/2014/02/27/california-design-ruth-asawa/

92 Figure 2. Untitled by Asawa (Asawa working on a wire sculpture with four of her children at home.) http://www.photoliaison.com/Images/Imogen_Cunningham_Album/images/ Ruth%20Asawa,%20Sculptor,%20and%20Her%20Children,%201958_jpg.jpg

93 Figure 3. The Japan Town Plaza Fountain by Asawa http://www.fotothing.com/photos/169/169e0355494959093aefd646eb0dc46d.jpg

Figure 4. The Ghirardelli Square Fountain “Andrea” by Asawa http://th04.deviantart.net/fs70/PRE/i/2012/001/8/8/__andrea___by_designer_spy- d41qm77.jpg

94 Figure 5. Detail of the Ghirardelli Square Fountain “Andrea” by Asawa http://mermaidsofearth.com/wp-content/uploads/Timothy-J-Carroll2-L.jpg

95 Figure 6. Detail of the Ghirardelli Square Fountain “Andrea” by Asawa http://www.artandarchitecture-sf.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/DSC_2149.jpg

96