Junko Chodos Metamorphosis: The Transformative Vision of Junko Chodos
In Metamorphosis, Chodos exhibits art of various media; pencil sketch, abstract oil paintings, collages of photograph, and mixed media amalgam collages using at times paint and photograph. Her work typically is large generally being many feet square. Its size would welcome a sense of enrapture, and its abstractness allows for a dazzling myriad of possibilities as one’s eye tries to find a recognized object. In her collage, she uses such small strips that it often is difficult to parse what images they may have been originally. A closer look will reveal what seems to be a scatological assortment of often ephemeral objects; entrails, parts of crabs, roots, are mixed in with slivers of machinery, statues of humans in pained expressions. The whole is greater than its parts, but the strips of counter-intuitive components invites the interpreter to reflect on existence in all its haphazard harmony.
Chodos was born in 1939 in Tokyo, Japan in the heat of the Second World War. She studied philosophy of art and Eastern and Western mystical traditions. In the background of her studies was Martin Buber, and her thesis work was titled Spirituality in Line: Interrelationship of Art and Theology. From her life’s war-torn beginning, the formative education of Buber’s relational dialectic, and questing into art for semblances of the transcendent, she later moved to the United States and as an artist has created works that daringly explore the sacred.
Chodos states that art does not become religious or spiritual by its use of religious image, and implies conversely that art with explicitly religious themes is not necessarily ‘religious art’. The theme or subject of the artwork plays less a role in its transcendence and spirituality than the process of the artwork’s life. Its birth in the artist, expression, and its dialectic life in the interpreter ignite what she calls the ‘centripetal force of art’. This force is what acts against the shattering forces of nihilism, isolation, and meaninglessness. Drawing from Buber, Chodos calls revelation the act of drawing forth the art from the fragments of the self into the center of the artist’s psyche and then centripetally draws artist, art, and interpreter together. The artist and interpreter in a mystical way enter into a co-creation. Thus all that is required for any artwork to be transcendent, or ‘religious art’ is for a free and honest process of an artist to meet an open interpreter who both conjoin in participation, responsibility, and commitment.[1]
She writes of the irony found at the core of religion, using the deaths of both Jesus and Buddha as examples. It is the irony of finding victory, peace, and life in the moments of these two figures’ deaths that she compares to the irony of ‘great art’ conveying beauty by means that may conceal beauty. Irony and impossibility are bound to Chodos’ concept of transcendence also. She relates the metaphor of a mole living underground who believes there is a better world above ground-when the mole does at last break through the earth, it instead finds “flaming fire, and the thundering sound of wind around him. His body is burnt by the sunbeams and in the light of the day he becomes blind and deaf.”[2] Due to the very nature of transcendence, it must remain for the mole to perceive it in darkness, in ugliness. The glimpses that the mole may inadvertently catch through cracks in the earth only instill a deep anxiety, an impending feeling of doom, an ‘experience of thanatos’.
It is the artist who grasps this abyss, this fear, this awe, and finds that reason cannot aid them in resolving their situation. Only through the leap of ironic creation, can one face their human situation. Religion and its theologies are one expression of this and art another. If they are neglected or aborted in reliance on reason alone, it will result in what Chodos says is ‘insanity’. While these two ironic endeavors are both forms of relief keeping alive transcendence’s tension, they differ in that religion’s theologies and narratives become authoritative by degrees of sanctification and narrowed repetition. Art on the other hand dispels authority, invites consideration and devotion only through the power of experience instead of culturally approved hierarchies. Art acts against one’s will. Its transformative power lies in the unseen and unplanned routes it will draw one on their centripetal journey towards relation with the work, artist, and themselves.
Chodos’ work is an expression of possibility for new relationships between art and theology. She speaks of the grace that brings new light to their interaction which will allow them both new outcomes that subvert our expectations. One way she suggests that this can occur is to reexamine the usual assumed cause and effect relationship between art and theology. She states that Western culture too often sees only narratives and theologies as inspiring artists. Instead, she suggests that art be given equal consideration as forming our theologies. For example she suggests inquiring into how Van Gogh’s paintings of shoes have influences modern theologies. Following this, it might be possible to also ask how depictions of dying gods influenced early Christian theologies.
Recalling her mole analogy, Chodos’ Roots series of sketches and mixed collages speak to the transcendent in the forgotten, the unseemly, and the ordinary. In the series, she explores levels of abstraction where Root Series Number 2 falls on the end of greater abstraction, and Root Series Number 10, The Fasting Buddha lies on the other with its titular image more accessible. The tangled array of roots are created with other organic components, lending themselves as metaphors of the unseen or underappreciated life sustaining web that supports humanity. The series is useful as a meditation on the somewhat arbitrary cultural definitions of sacred and secular. Like the mole among roots who would be consumed by the light of the sun, our daily goings-on are the fruit of the transcendent in its graceful and ironic self-giving and are the source of our divine seeking imagination.
Roots Series Number 17 Garan (Cathedral) is a great example of the culmination of these themes. While at first glance appearing to be only a teasing and erratic mix of color comprised again of unrelated images, it begins to pull into a three dimensional place of worship. The eye carries to the lower center which is darker, alluding to a holy of holies, or door to mysteries. The jagged forms of the collage may be the expressionist architecture similar to Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia Cathedral, the stalactites of a primordial cavern, or the fronds of a dense jungle forming an apse. We partake of Cathedral, we cannot merely passively consume it. One enters in via the path laid in detritus of the collage’s bottom and as all cathedrals, one makes it holy by their presence, not vice versa.
I am drawn to Chodos by her great trust in her art’s interpreters. She weaves the machined products of technology seamlessly together with organic threads (Interplanetary Icon series) in a natural way that is honest with our world’s surroundings without judgment or pandering. She stylistically and abstractly reinvents icons, our selves, our notions of the holy in a way that seems unmanufactured and doesn’t lead its interpreter’s by the hand. Her Relic, a mixed media collage inspiring the interpretation of a human ribcage dances where reason cannot venture, where our biology, experience, and sense of the divi
