John Cederquist Kosode: Predecessor to the Modern Kimono
April 10 - May 1, 2001
It is always true that languages contain a wealth of wisdom that can only be actualized when viewed from the perspective of another language. This outsideness leads to an exchange in which each language reveals to the other what it did not know about itself. New insights are produced that neither wholly contained before.
John Cederquist has always been dialogizing languages - visual, ideological, and aesthetic. Cederquist has stretched the language of furniture; he has made images of furniture, but more than this, he has made images of its language, sociologically probing its values and belief systems.
Artistic play with languages is not a mere play of forms. For a language that has entered into dialogue with another language becomes self-conscious; it comes to see itself from an alien perspective and to understand how its own values and beliefs appear to the other language. It begins not just to speak, but also to hear how it sounds; it not only represents the world, but imagines itself as the object of representation. *
So it is with Cederquist's new Kosode kimono cabinets. In tackling Japan's distinctive world of decorative clothing, dialogizing it with a language he has already de-centered, Cederquist has created an even more polyphonic artistic statement. No longer content to call into question the objectness of functional furniture by illusionist surface play, Cederquist adds another language to the mix, interanimating the languages of furniture and human decoration.
Cederquist is a great artist, like all great artists, exploring the richness and ambivalence of languages by creating images of them and forming hybridizations of them; for after all, the reasons we speak, the reasons artworks and texts are made, is to say more than what has been said.
Barbara Smythe-Jones
March, 2001
*I am indebted to M.M. Bakhtin (1895-1975) for his theory of dialogic language in The Dialogic Imaginationa: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin (Unviersity of Texas Press, Austin, TX) 1981; Cary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford Unviersity Press, Stanford, CA) 1990, p. 310.