Tetsuya Yamada at Francis M. Naumann

Duchamp and Brancusi, one a rational anti-esthete, the other a visionary devoted to the spiritual dimensions of his craft, are submitted to an unlikely pairing in Tetsuya Yamada's new work. The 45 ceramic sculptures in this show are collectively titled "Morice," a name invented by Brancusi and adopted by Duchamp that seems to have designated a person of noble heart and spirit and reflected the two artists' reciprocal appreciation. Yamada proposes an affinity between their works as well. His sculptures sit atop plywood stands themselves resting, in some cases, on wooden kitchen stools; the former are drawn from Brancusi's bases, but, rather than being made from solid blocks of wood or stone, are created out of paired pieces of plywood or laminated particle board, slotted and inserted into each other. The results mimic the cinched-waist basic unit of Brancusi's Endless Column.

The stools may allude to Duchamp's proto-readymade, the Bicycle Wheel, and the ceramic works descend from his Fountain, though as variations rather than duplicates. Some are bathroom-fixture-like basins; others have the shape of nipples; and others stand vertically, with multiple allusions, from phallus and exclamation point to Brancusi's Bird in Space to pawns in chess (of which Duchamp was an avid player). Many retain elements of Duchamp's found urinal, such as the water supply connection and multiple holes in the basin, but only for their formal properties. Indeed, Yamada's sculptures look as if he had approached Fountain without any knowledge of its origin or purpose and posited it as an esthetic prototype, a template or ideal for the production of kindred forms. (It is relevant to this work that Yamada was awarded an artist's residency a few years ago at the Kohler bathroom and kitchen fixtures plant in Wisconsin.)

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However, Yamada's achievement is not simply to marry the conceptual features of a Duchampian found object to the formal ones of a Brancusi sculpture. He also introduces notions of craft and material expressiveness to the readymade. While the works in "Morice" explicitly refer to prefabrication--the plywood reads assertively as an industrial product associated with cheap furniture, and the white ceramic objects are first and foremost linked to plumbing--the variations among them make their individuality salient. The delightful conglomeration of the 45 works at Francis M. Naumann added to this effect. The group had the feel of a family portrait (some works are short, some tall, some thin, some wide) in which each individual is related in some way to the others but there is no single set of identifiable features that they all share.

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