Jun Kaneko: The Space Between is a survey of the artist’s six-decade career. A large-format, hard-cover volume abundantly illustrated with color images of Kaneko’s work in all media, it is a classic coffee table book, with a couple of refreshing differences.
Art books typically include essays by several different authors on various aspects of the featured artist or exhibition, often resulting in a disjointed presentation of ideas. Art historian and ceramics scholar Glen R. Brown is the sole author of this survey. He has interviewed and written about Kaneko for over twenty years. Both artist and author have fairly straightforward attitudes toward the origins of and inspirations behind the work.
“Everybody is different, and their experience should be different,” Kaneko states. “I do not make art hoping that somebody will understand.” Brown describes Kaneko’s work as “offer[ing] no revelations, no whispered wisdom, no fragments of the absolute—in fact, no messages at all.” Of his own approach to writing the book, Brown says,
“I will in the following pages provide context for Kaneko’s art, both historical and biographical…When I slip into interpretation…I am only recalling, in impoverished abstraction, my own consciousness of the work.” The tortuous speculation on the artist’s psychological motives that characterizes so much arts writing is absent here.
The book is organized as a biography, connecting Kaneko’s progression from painter to ceramicist, and his significant bodies of work to the places he has lived and the people he has studied and worked with. Some of the turning points in his career were quite serendipitous. Having never touched clay, he became intrigued with the material while house-sitting for a collector of ceramics when he first arrived in the U.S. The desire to make architectural-scale work in clay came to him almost as a joke during a visit to the Omaha Brickworks.
Kaneko arrived in the U.S. at a key moment in the history of modern art. Clay and other craft media were breaking the bonds of function to become purely expressive art forms. By becoming a ceramicist, Kaneko was able to expand his paintings into three dimensions. Brown gives us an insightful and entertaining account of his long and continuing career.
