Tetsuya Yamada: Chant: Beyond the Ready-made

The “ready-made” of the title refers to Marcel Duchamp’s infamous urinal that shocked the bourgeoisie in 1917. It’s impossible to shock most folks these days, of course. So Yamada goes in for the cool, sleek beauty of porcelain and the soothing effects of repetition in these sculptural installations. In fact, what appear to be advanced abstractions are really duplicates of the molds used to make toilets and other porcelain fixtures at Kohler, the Wisconsin manufactory where Yamada lived and worked as an artist-in-residence. About My Wife is So Proud of Me, the installation by Lars Gerlach and Helen Stringfellow (aka “tectonic industries”) that is also on display—well, we won’t assume that either artist has an obsessive-compulsive disorder. We’ll just say that if someone with an obsessive-compulsive disorder decided to clean up his yard, this is probably what would result. 1021 E. Franklin Ave., Minneapolis; 612-872-7494; www.franklinartworks.org

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