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November Issue 2006

I. Pinckney Simons in Columbia, SC, Features Works by Janet Kozachek

I. Pinckney Simons Gallery in Columbia, SC, will present the exhibit, Milongueros: Paintings of the Argentine Tango and Beyond, featuring works by Janet Kozachek, on view from Nov. 1 - 30, 2006 and for "Vista Lights" on Nov. 16, from 5:30-9pm.

The following is an artists' statement offered by Kozachek: "This exhibition of new works ties my old passion for paint, inks, and mosaics with my new passion for dance. What makes this body of work special is that it is a documentation of the experience of dance itself. For the past several months, I had taken up the Argentine Tango at the Vista Ballroom in Columbia. This was something quite new and challenging for me because although I have always been interested in depicting dancers in my figurative work, I had never really participated in such frolics, romps or rollicks personally. The effort was humbling but most certainly the joys were worth the efforts and I believe that slowly developing a kinesthetic understanding of this subject brought greater depth to my visual perceptions of it."

"Ekphrasis, the process of honoring one art form by means of another is an endeavor which can be traced back to the descriptions of art objects in the poetry of ancient Greece. My husband, Dr. Nathaniel Wallace, a scholar and artist, most recently wrote a treatise on what might be called a triple ekphrasis - a poem about a relief sculpture about a dance. Dr. Wallace's contributions to the field of comparative literature and art criticism have of course shaped my own interest in the influence of one art form upon another. And his own intrepid explorations into various art disciplines created a spark of courage in me to try to go some distance towards understanding things outside of my immediate sphere of training and experience."

"So how does a visual artist understand dance? Having the good fortune to study with gifted teachers who possess extraordinary patience with their students as well as dedication to their craft was an auspicious beginning. When I began to sketch the Tango dancers at their art an exceptional thing happened. Almost like mana from heaven, all that I yearned to see, appeared before my eyes. There were numerous instances of this but I will name a few here. History tells us that the Argentine Tango to some extent grew out of an unfortunate turn-of-the-century demographic problem in Buenos Aires. There were many more men than women and thus the competition for a female partner was fierce. To oversimplify, men who could dance the best would have a better chance to win a partner. But since there were few women to practice with the men had no other recourse but to practice with each other. Hence the birth of all-male dance practicas. One could easily surmise that some of these men developed a great facility for dancing with each other. I yearned to know what that would look like. My eyes were soon treated to dances between two men that were unforgettably sublime. I recorded what I could but still not enough to do the subject justice."

"The beginnings of the man and man dance however, in the incipient stages of the Argentine Tango, is ironic in today's dance demographic. Go to any dance party and one will see the inevitable odd women waiting their turns for the precious few men. So if the early pragmatism of same sex Tango dancing should prevail, should there not be today more women dancing with women? I yearned to see such a phenomenon for several months when who should appear but a woman who was adept at both the male lead and the female follow and not content to allow so much waiting. Finally."

"While painting the figures of the contemporary Argentine Tango my brief readings in the history of the dance whetted my appetite for knowing what the Tango looked liked as it was danced in the early years - in 1914 in particular when it suddenly became internationally popular. My desire was eventually gratified once again by my discovery of the photographic archive of these dancers sporting exquisite costumes in the US Library of Congress. It was beautiful to see such precious photographs of early Tango  luminaries as M. Maurice and Carlos Sebastian. Their writing was equally inspirational. This time the design of the early years of Tango crept into my work."

"While history helps build a foundation for understanding, history in the making helps us understand how an art form evolves. Being in the presence of modern day Tango artists was a rare privilege. The Tango teacher, Harby, was especially inspirational for his dedication to his art form and his desire to impart the subtle particulars of the dance to his students. Over a period of several weeks, these movements made their way into the exuberant colors and lively twisting of my figurative sculptures."

"Rather than hold to one medium for this exhibition, I sought to interpret the dance through a variety of techniques. So once the relief sculptures were complete I moved on to works on paper."

"For reasons that I cannot fully explain, my new study of the Tango dance recalled to me my previous training as a Zen painter in the Beijing Central Art Academy in China. The pre-dance walking exercises in Tango reminded me of the long hours of calligraphy practice required before painting - often in a style referred to as 'walking or running'. The sweeping movements, the pauses to collect, recalled to me the Chinese master's method of wielding a brush. Even the persistent upright posture and centering evoked memories of the vertical brush. As an experiment which took on a life of its own, I created two hundred paintings of Tango dancers using the Chinese brush and inks. In the spirit of ekphrasis, only the best materials could be used to honor the dance. I used hand ground inks and a rare mulberry paper that I had acquired from northeastern China (formerly known as Manchuria) several years ago."

"The paper came in a large block marked with a red star within a red circle - the logo of the finest double-ply mulberry paper. I had carted the block around with me as we moved from place to place, always untouched. Chinese painters themselves would often hoard this high grade paper, afraid to touch it until their skills were at an apex - in large part due to the fact that once used, the paper is irreplaceable. The Chinese masters I studied with warned me not to use the paper until I had a very special project. Most artists do have something precious akin to the star and circle hidden unused in the recesses of their studios. I had an aunt who was a talented seamstress who kept one drawer full of fine velvets, taffetas, and silks which she couldn't bare to use. Periodically, she would open the drawer and run her hands over the lovely material, then with a satiated smile as she imagined all the clothes she could design with such stuff, closed the drawer and walked away. I had done so with the star and circle paper, running my hands over the ivory block while imagining the paintings that would grace its surface."

"After a number of months of sketching and photographing, I decided that my time for my special project had arrived. I opened the star and circle block."

"Much like the dance itself, Chinese brush painting is often a performance art which takes concentration and speed. Once the inked brush touches the paper, its absorbs quickly and permanently. Just as a dancer cannot take back a leap into space, the Zen artist cannot take back a mark once made. There is no erasing in this art form - it has to be right as soon as one touches the paper. So while practicing the Tango steps, I practiced writing with brush and ink on countless pages of newsprint, building up speed and dexterity - with a brush, that is, the dance is still a work in progress. Then I cheated a bit. I could not quite leap onto the star and circle mulberry page untethered. So I created a large number of scale paintings on newsprint which I could place underneath the mulberry paper and paint through partially to ensure the composition was correct. Then after several tries, I would take out my training wheel paper and paint directly onto the mulberry paper. I had seen some artists in China doing so - making what they called a hua gao (template). Painting on the fine mulberry paper was exquisite. The paper was exceedingly responsive to the touch of the brush, picking up every subtlety of movement. And unlike most Asian papers made today, which tend to leave a flat undifferentiated mark when the ink is watered down, this paper retained  the three-dimensional look of the ink and water marks. I painted in three degrees of abstraction, which are actually codified in Chinese painting terminology: xiao xie yi -  a somewhat tight rendering of the subject (literally translated as 'lesser writing of an essence'), da xie yi - a somewhat abstract style yet with a discernable subject (literally, the 'greater writing of an essence'), and finally, po mo - a style in which the subject disappears, leaving only an impression (literally 'splattered ink')."

"The special inks required for the paintings were ground by hand from two sources: the soot of pine trees and the soot of the teng tree. The ink ground from pine is the blackest of all inks, with a rich darkness the depth of black velvet. It has the added effect of producing a pungent pine scent while being ground with water onto a slate mixing bowl. The ink from the teng tree, from which teng oil furniture polish is also obtained, is lighter and more transparent than the pine, which makes for good tonal gradations and highlight areas. Artists who valued tonal gradations as well as darkness would grind the two inks together, which is what I did."

"Hopelessly seduced by the velvety inks and the responsive paper, I had great difficulty moving on to oils and acrylics as planned, making the bulk of my work for this exhibition these small works. But move on I did, signaling the end to this phase of my synergistic experiment in dance and painting. To officially close this episode of ink paintings, I carved a small series of stone stamps to be impressed upon the paintings. A fascinating  requirement for Chinese brush painters is the carving in stone of special stamps that are affixed to the finished product. The challenge to carving these is that the language used in the stamp must be ancient Chinese, a script much closer to pictographs than modern Chinese - modern here meaning after 221 BC."

"So what would the word 'Tango' look like in this ancient script? I first would have to find out what the Chinese word for Tango was - an imported foreign word. Fortuitously yet again, I met a Chinese couple at one of the monthly milongas and after a brief conversation with them in Mandarin I asked them what the Chinese term for the dance was. After they told me the sound I could look up the word and use special dictionaries to trace the characters back to ancient ideograms. One can learn interesting things about an aspect of one culture by looking into how another culture describes it. The Chinese word for Tango is a compound word, the first part having two possible meanings, and the second part meaning a dagger axe. The 'Tan' character that was chosen to describe the dance could mean a 'searching or feeling out'. It could in another context simply mean to lean forward. So Tango to the Chinese meant 'The dance of the searching dagger', or 'Leaning forward dagger dance'. Whether it was coincidence of phonetics or that the dance looked to the Chinese like a somewhat menacing form of martial arts one can not know for certain. Suffice it is to say that the characters made good compositions when carved in stone and printed."

"As summer waned and autumn approached, my medium changed once again to acrylics on paper and oils on canvas. The acrylics started out simply as designs for posters, the publicity for this exhibition suddenly yet voluntarily falling into my court. But just as the Tango dance itself began as a means for physical exercise and grew into a passion for this art form, the 'posters' became increasingly so elaborate that they became art works in their own right."

"Although the medium changed, there was something in the approach which remained consistent with the brush paintings. That is, that the brushwork changed with the degree of movement of the dance. Tango dance, like Tango music, has varied rhythms. People can be quite still, move very subtly and slowly, or so fast as to be a blur. One could freeze frame the rapid movements with high speed film and digital maneuvering but the conundrum for me here was that while making the subject more clear and hence understandable, it would not be truthful to the dynamics of the dance. In painting these dancers, then, my choice was to use a series of splattered, dripped and calligraphic strokes while keeping forms discernable but generalized."

"Milongas, the name for the dance parties for which this series of paintings is named (Milongueros refers to the people who attend the Milongas), are dark events. Lights are dimmed extremely low so as to create an atmosphere of quiet meditation and to promulgate soulful connections to dance partners. It is a romantic's dream. It is an artist's great problem. Forms were obscured by darkness or haloed by backlit artificial lights. It hurt to sketch. So I sketched only minutes at a time. The camera flashes which enabled me to see and which I prayed would not destroy the mood of the dance would wash out shadows and make people appear somewhat ghostly. But rather than fight the strangeness of the lights, I decided to project this mysterious uncertainty onto the paintings relying on intuition and memory to fill in the areas of confusion and obscurity. The advantage here of experiencing the dance empirically was that after several months I could begin to kinesthetically sense what I couldn't see."

"In conclusion, the project I have just described may strike the reader as peculiar and out of sync within the current paradigm of economic recession and war. To paint, to dance, may seem like frivolity in a world living in the shadow of violence and want. Yet times of war make art not less relevant but even more so. From time to time, my fellow tango students and I would chat over ice cream or walks around town about why we bother to try to learn such a difficult dance. The most poignant answer I heard was from Steve, who said that dance was 'a civilized way of relating to other people'. For those who question the relevance of art, it may be wise to consider that the day we stop making art, writing literature, or dancing is the day we become uncivilized. And the surest way to really do battle with ignorance is to support its antithesis."

Janet Kozachek received her Master of Fine Arts Degree in Figurative Painting from Parsons School of Design in New York and her Certificate of Graduate Study in Chinese Art from the Beijing Central Art Academy in China. She has exhibited her work internationally and won numerous awards including several sub-grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Orangeburg Fine Arts Center, a South Carolina Humanities Council Award, and a Puffin Foundation Award. In 1999 Kozachek  co-founded and served as the first national president of the Society of American Mosaic Artists. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions and on South Carolina Educational Television.

In the spirit of ekphrasis, Argentine Tango dancers will be present at the gallery during "Vista Lights" on the evening of Nov. 16, 2006, to perform their art in celebration of these paintings.

For further information check our SC Commercial Gallery listings or call the gallery at 803/771-8815.

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