Since 1990, Karen LaMonte has explored figuration in glass through the motifs of marionettes, mirrors, and clothing as surrogates for the human. With her life-size, cast glass dresses for which she is widely known, LaMonte concentrates on two notions of skin. ​“I believe we have two skins that outline and define who we are,” she has explained. “One of course is our natural skin, but we obscure and conceal it beneath clothing, which is a secondskin, our social skin.”

 

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EVERYWOMAN EMBODIED

 

In her Floating World series, Karen LaMonte elaborates upon the notion of a “social skin” by incorporating the cultural specificity of Japan and the material connotations of glass, ceramic, bronze, and rusted iron. The project offered LaMonte the opportunity to work the complex system of signification embedded in the archetypal garment of Japan: the kimono.

 

LaMonte spent four years researching the kimono for this project, including a seven-month residency in Kyoto, funded by the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission. While there, she educated herself about all aspects of the kimono—its production, form, function, symbolism. She learned about the rituals associated with wearing a kimono, and the complex endeavor of dressing in one. She even collaborated on a project with a master kimono maker, Minami-san. When she returned to her home and studio in Prague, LaMonte brought back more than 250 kimonos. LaMonte’s work with the kimono has echoes of Japonisme, and the legacy of the Western gaze upon the Japanese subject, which can be seen in the subject matter and compositional devices used by European avant-garde artists such as Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and Vincent van Gogh. However, LaMonte’s interest was not in compositional devices and fantasy—or even gender, for that matter—but an exploration of the language of the kimono, beauty, and the social dynamics that are reflected in clothing.

 

Quite distinct from the sensuous curves and baroque drapery of her European-American dress sculptures, LaMonte’s kimono sculptures reflect a different cultural norm, one in which the human form is depleted of all curves to become an idealized cylindrical form. “How the kimono is worn parallels the relationship between Japanese individuals and their society,” LaMonte explains. “Putting on a kimono is literally about erasing the individual’s identity and joining the group.”

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This notion is at the heart of LaMonte’s kimono project: “the erasure of the individual.” The intent to “erase” the individual in deference to the group is even reflected in LaMonte’s casting process. For the Floating World series, the artist built a mannequin based on the biometric data of the Japanese population compiled by NASA. She selected the measurements for the fiftieth percentile of forty-year-old Japanese women in the year 2000 at 1 gravitational force. That is, LaMonte created an average female—“the exact everywoman or no-woman,” as she describes it. The figure is not individual, but the median of a collective. The kimono are embodied—the clothing appears occupied, inhabited, and perhaps even haunted. Yet the lack of visible skin, flesh, limbs, head, and facial features denies the figure an individual identity.

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(IM)MATERIALITY

 

LaMonte’s exploration of different materials—glass, ceramic, bronze, and rusted iron—endows each subject with different degrees of presence. Glass has the disordered molecular structure of a liquid but the physical state of a solid. It is neither one nor the other, but rather both simultaneously. Moreover, glass has metaphorical associations with light, the ethereal, the immaterial. LaMonte describes her work in cast glass as an effort to “negotiate the visible and invisible.” The combination of all of these factors allows all of LaMonte’s glass sculptures to give the impression of being apparitions. The glass kimono sculptures give the viewer the sense that this Japanese everywoman is a specter that persists in spite of her immateriality. She may well dematerialize into pure light. 

 

For an artist so celebrated for her glass sculpture, working with ceramic, bronze, and rusted iron offered LaMonte entirely new sets of material symbolism to explore. She refers to clay as “our universal corpus,” extending a corporeal metaphor from unformed earth to formed sculpture. To create a kimono in clay is a reverential nod to Japan’s rich history of ceramics.

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The ceramic kimono sculptures also introduce color to LaMonte’s repertoire, whether sumptuous green celadon glaze, black or white unglazed clay, or the reddish-orange of terra cotta. The opacity of the ceramic kimono provides an earthy yin to the spiritual and translucent yang of glass.

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LaMonte’s castings in metal play longevity against vulnerability. The kimono in bronze and rusted iron also enable the greatest exploration of surface decoration—a fact that aligns LaMonte’s sculptures beautifully with the patterning that is so important in ukiyo-e (woodblock) prints. Relief impressions on the kimono are an opportunity for LaMonte to include some of the iconography characteristic of these Japanese garments. “Bronze,” the artist notes, “celebrates effort and achievement. We cast our heroes in bronze.” To cast the Japanese everywoman in the medium once reserved for men in positions of authority is a way to value her as much as her male counterpart.

 

At the same time, bronze busts of national leaders focus attention not on the body but on the individual identity and likeness of the subject. These are precisely the elements intentionally rejected by LaMonte in her sculptures of the Japanese everywoman. Bronze memorializes and has a durability not characteristic of the more vulnerable materials of glass or ceramic. To memorialize is to acknowledge the “having been there”  of the memorialized—the ghosts who, in LaMonte’s sculptures, are simultaneously present and absent. 

 

Iron, like bronze, is significant in industry, peace, and war. It is the material of African currency, of weaponry, and of farming implements. LaMonte associates it with temporality and ephemerality by virtue of its intentional rusting, giving it a sense of age and neglect. Iron itself is haunted by the ghosts of agricultural life, when the blacksmith occupied a pivotal role in small-town life, salvaging iron from worn implements and re-forming another by melting the old one down in the forge.  In other words, iron denotes a nostalgia for bygone days and traditions of the past, an impression underscored by the rusting stains that belie the fact that these sculptures were made in 2012, not centuries ago. Rusted iron also signifies how the kimono has lost its standing as a daily garment as a result of the Westernization of postwar Japanese culture. Today, kimonos are primarily worn only for ceremonial occasions.

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HAUNTINGS AND TRANSFORMATIONS

 

Regardless of her chosen medium, LaMonte enacts a transformative process that involves a cast and formation by fire. Casting itself is a process that uses a negative to create a positive. Hence, it is a process whereby there is a loss of the “original” physical presence—the model (real or fabricated)—whose body is used to create a mold. There is a subsequent recuperation of that former presence when the casting is done in the mold. The fact that LaMonte will create the same figure in each of the four mentioned mediums underscores the significance of repetition, replication, and reproduction to this particular series.

 

Each material—ceramic, bronze, iron, glass—records the details of the fabrics differently. LaMonte’s repetitions of the same posture or gesture in various mediums are an insightful melding of material and content, form and iconography. The nuances of meaning that haunt glass, ceramic, bronze, and iron provide an interpretive lens through which we may better understand LaMonte’s cultural and aesthetic explorations of the kimono. Through her sculptural hauntings in a floating world, LaMonte proposes a modern-day Japonisme that is informed by history and sociology, not fantasy and desire.