Origami Minimalism

I’d like to use this space to say one or two things I didn’t have a chance to in the brief discussion surrounding the displays.

It’s always fun to stand around & listen in on comments when the speakers don’t yet know whose work they’re talking about. For example I was stunned to hear, just after I first put my things my things up, “yes, I’ve done this one and maybe that one too.” --I’d invented and folded the head/bust models in the months before the Convention-- having broken off contact with the origami world and not folded anything for close to ten years—so you can imagine that this declaration came as a surprise. Then, I was delighted to hear some precocious teenagers debating whether this was or was not origami, a question I’d very much wanted to force. “Not everything that is paper sculpture is therefore origami”, the older one wisely observed. (Even when the thing is from folded paper and there’s no glue or cuts?….). And then came Miri Golan, insisting how much these heads and busts reminded her of Eric Joisel…. Ouch.

I’m after different quarry than Eric Joisel, whose enormously ‘literate’ oeuvre I’ve since seen and been admiring on the Net. Actually, when in my ignorance I started working on these human figures, I quite consciously thought of this work as ‘anti-origami’—going against the grain of most of the professional origami I remembered, and of what I too was starting to slip into a decade ago, which presumably is why I left the field. Where what was making such quantum strides forward was technical sophistication, I kept yearning for simplicity; where the aspect of diagrammatic repeatability was gaining ground, I kept wanting forms that each time you made them would come out different, so that giving someone instructions was no guarantee of a pleasing

end-result. The individual touch would still be needed. (And maybe I was bothered too by an image of grown-up men endlessly making these paper dolls….Just what was the point?) But be that as it may, when getting back into this business I first tried to strip out as much of the ‘origami language’ as possible. For instance: I tried making forms with almost no folds, or only ‘structural’ ones; or used curving or wavy wrinkles instead of hard and straight creases; or I would rely also on the paper’s ‘cut edge’ to indicate a form’s profile (ever notice that origami tends to hide the cut edge of the paper in a mountain fold, or in corners narrowed to a centerline? As if it were ashamed of its material origins.) After asking, ‘how far can you go in paper sculpture without using the distinctive sculptural idiom that modern origami has evolved’, I started reintroducing the familiar elements one by one, in a search as obsessive and precise in its way as the origami of any good folder is, as that of Lihi Salomon for instance is. The result, or the aspiration, is what Boaz Shuval rightly calls an ‘origami ‘minimalism’.

It pleased me no end to give the presentation that came sequentially, entirely by accident, just after Paul Jackson’s. Paul had just finished saying how it’s been proven that with origami you can make pretty much anything, so that the direction forward for ‘artistic origami’ now doesn’t involve new forms and complicated folds so much as getting the right paper and preparing the right textures to go with the forms. By this he didn’t quite mean the selection of exquisite papers such as those in

Hermann Mariano’s fine display or Gilad Aharoni’s glorious insects, but rather things like the rubbed-pastel preparation shown in Paul’s own ‘organic’, crease-repeating pieces. So, stepping up next to the plate, I was thrilled to be able to point to all these figures made from the lowest of possible materials: plain, unadorned brown paper (in one case literally from a disassembled shopping bag). Partly this was the ‘anti-origami’ orientation, or the minimalist conceit again; but partly, too, there was a desire to find even in this humblest of materials something to love.

That anyway was the conscious intent; but the results were nevertheless surprising. Sculpted brown paper turns out to look like earth, like unfired clay. Something raw and unprocessed or instinct-primal…. Together with the ‘minimalist’ approach to folding, such ‘origami’ naturally takes on African, Egyptian, Sumerian hues. Paper sculpture of this sort can, it seems, resonate with the idiom of human sculpture developed over its entire historical range—all 30,000 years of it—and not just with the language of an artform which, it must be confessed, began its period of full flowering only sometime in the past half-century.

There was one thing more, that I noticed in passing but wasn’t able to conserve. Those first, soft creases in brown paper—how delicate, how gentle they are. In what already looks and feels like skin there suddenly appears this miraculous tenderness that, in the human body one finds for instance in the space under the shoulderblades; in the nape of the neck; on a woman’s body at the beginning of its uppermost cleft. Those soft shadows that generate an infinite compassion. Alas, these creases and their qualities quickly get lost through overwork. But they are there in the paper, all the same, awaiting a finer hand than mine to draw them out.

Saadya Sternberg

March 2004