OVER TWO SPRINGTIME WEEKENDS, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House was host to an exhibition of forty-five freshly cut flower works organized by Sogetsu Ikebana Los Angeles. Situated throughout the house by curators Ravi GuneWardena and Hollyhock House director Abby Chamberlain Brach, the arrangements seemed to be placed with an eye toward formal context and specific resonances between architectural and floral shapes. The evocation of broader nature through a relationship to composition and context is a hallmark of ikebana arrangement, and for a brief moment the members of Sogetsu Ikebana LA were able to reach for the traditional ideals of this ancient Japanese art form while simultaneously provoking contemporary metaphors and meanings in relation to the specificity of Wright’s design.
That design of this home, built between 1919 and 1921 and Wright’s first commission in Los Angeles, was created for the arts patron Aline Barnsdall as the start to an ultimately uncompleted artists’ colony atop Olive Hill in Los Feliz. Indicative of what would become Wright’s California Modernist style, the house has a repeating pattern of abstracted hollyhocks in stone, stained glass, and wood. Some of the floral work on display attempted to directly mirror the organic elements of these architectural motifs. Haruko Takeichi’s tall display of anthurium, for example, was flanked by a dried bamboo structure framed by repeating diagonal elements that mimicked the stained glass surrounding the room. Approached differently, Alfonso Mendoza’s arrangement also used dried bamboo in its structure to mimic the stone floral motifs found throughout the home, with blooms, leaves, and seedpods composed in more or less the same place as they would naturally appear on a hollyhock plant.
While such arrangements prove the capacity of ikebana to act as a material and a medium directly capable of something akin to figurative representation, the most successful works on display were of a more subtle and suggestive nature. The graceful repeating curls of dead branches and iris leaves that spilled from the side of the tall black glazed vase of Cindy Utsinger’s arrangement formed a nest for dozens of small star-shaped, pale-lavender blooms. These organic proliferations seemed to suggest that repetition is often life’s evidence of intention or that a self-similar mass is its own kind of home and its own kind of architecture. Meg Shimizu achieved a similar feat through the gentle meeting of a limp strand of sage-colored tillandsia and the curled-over ends of a dried palm frond that acted as a subtle enclosure for the pink jewel tones of snapdragon, tufts of fresh green moss, and myriad small golden dots of yarrow.
Photo: the author.
Ikebana is particularly suited to architectural contexts, given that it was originally developed as one of the art forms set within the tokonoma, a revered space within traditional Japanese homes reserved for nothing but the display of items for aesthetic appreciation. Wright’s Hollyhock House has no tokonoma, but some of the ikebana works on display had the power to draw out the understated and elusive spaces and history of the building’s design, which seemed structured for display in much the same manner as a tokonoma. Fireplaces within the house are the most obvious visual focal points for such consideration. And indeed, set on the tiled floor and mantel of the fireplace in the children’s room, Jina Wakimoto’s bent bamboo and anthurium arrangement in twin angular teal vases seemed to suggest the way growth is both a stilted reach upward toward adolescence and a glance backwards toward beginnings and first lessons. The nearby oil portrait of Betty “Sugartop” Barnsdall, Aline’s only child and the room’s occupant, was a reminder that growth is not merely a metaphor, but a process common to all life.
Perhaps the simplest and most effective arrangement in this regard was a moribana-style composition by GuneWardena set on the floor of the children’s bathroom. Placed in the far corner of a modest room clad in pale-green tiles blemished and lightly cracked from wear, GuneWardena’s arrangement seemed to respond not only to the space but to the patina of time as well, as though it were equally worn and aged while nonetheless still living. Its somber white camellia, in a full bloom almost past, desperately reached upward to the southeasterly light that shone from a slim stained-glass window and came over the empty tub. Beautiful in its resilience and terrible in its evocation of the transience of life, GuneWardena’s simple and slightly awkward arrangement was emblematic of the means by which attention to form, particularly as other life-forms, can provoke all too human sympathies and emotions.
Photo: the author.
One of ikebana’s most important attributes is its ability to remind us that time is equally a quantity and a quality. It is one of the dimensions life is forced to squeeze through during its existence, and the quality of that path through time wears itself on the surface of anything that has made the journey. It is apparent in the windblown curve of a stem, or the worn edges of petals or leaves, the brightness of a sun-soaked bloom, or the subtle tones of a plant eking through in shaded margins slightly bereft of the sun’s light. At the same time, as some of the works on display in this exhibition show, ikebana shares qualities with some of the most celebrated and important forms of contemporary art. Site-specificity, ephemerality, improvisation, accessibility, and endless variation are all hallmarks of both ikebana and contemporary art. But it is perhaps its simplicity and some primal connection to the other beings that live and die along with us that sets ikebana apart. Our most basic natures, most basically expressed, seem somehow resonant with the urge to set plants and flowers in a vase and find a place for them in a home. As Okakura stated regarding that first urge in The Book of Tea, “[w]e entered the realm of art when [w]e perceived the subtle use of the useless.” What is useless here is, of course, beauty. But, as Sōetsu Yanagi described using an as yet untranslatable Japanese word, beauty with inner implications is referred to as shibui. It is that beauty, “shibui beauty…that makes an artist of the viewer.”
