Twenty years ago Carlos Runcie Tanaka, a Peruvian sculptor, was in Richmond’s Fan District for a few days. In case you don't know it, Tanaka was/is a star in the international art world.
Let me tell you, after watching the sculptor fold and crease a piece of paper in a local bar, I’ve got two words of advice for him -- show business. This concept would combine the origami with Tanaka’s considerable talent for yarn-spinning. OK, maybe I’m getting a bit ahead of myself.
Like so many tales, this one began with Happy Hour: The Baja Bean was a Fan District watering hole. It was located in the basement of
what was originally a schoolhouse. The old building itself looks like a stone and
brick fortress. It was a typical crowd of mid-week regulars -- there
were about 20 decidedly adult faces situated around the three-sided,
horseshoe-shaped bar. The group was approximately equal parts white
collar, blue color and no collar.
When then-chairman of Virginia
Commonwealth University’s sculpture department Joe Seipel came in the
room, with Carlos Tanaka at his side, Joe was smiling more broadly than
usual. Seipel, who enjoys telling a good story, also loves to
present a cool visiting artist to his pals at Happy Hour (at least in those days he surely did). It’s a
tradition left over from the Texas-Wisconsin Border Café (1982-99), the
nearby much-missed eatery/saloon which Seipel, himself, once co-owned. Seipel
(who went on to become the Dean of VCUarts; he has since retired) introduced Carlos Tanaka to those who hadn’t already met him.
One of Tanaka’s
grandfathers was British and the other was Japanese. Both men married
Peruvian women. In his career Tanaka has
done much traveling, owing to his acclaim as an artist. At an art confab
somewhere in South America he had met and gotten to know Seipel, plus a
couple of other members of the art faculty at VCU’s world renown fine arts
school. Then they arranged for him to come to VCU as a
visiting artist/scholar. That’s how a Peruvian artist ends up in The
Bean at beer-thirty.
Note: Carlos Tanaka was among the hostages
taken by the Tupac Amaru in that bizarre 1996 incident in Lima, Peru, at
the Japanese ambassador’s home. Nonetheless, his horrific experience as the
hostage of hell-bent terrorists for 50 days apparently had done little to
diminish Tanaka's sense of humor.
Eventually, someone in the bar asked him about the crab-folding thing.
Bingo!
Someone
else promptly supplied Carlos with a blank sheet of paper.
For the next 20 minutes the crab-folder
told stories, made observations, ad-libbed and entertained everyone on
hand. Nothing else was happening in the room for that spell. The product
of the process was an intricate paper crab made from an ordinary piece of white bond
paper.
Looking at the crab was fun; it almost seemed cute ... for a
crab. But watching the artist fold the paper, over and over -- each fold
exactly where it had to be -- as he offered his lighthearted patter,
like a professional entertainer, was a rare treat. To the delight of the person who had
supplied the sheet of paper, the crab-folder gave it to them.
Of
course, someone else had to have one, too. Then another. In that happy hour session Carlos folded four or five paper crabs. He never ran out of
offbeat stories about drinking, playing practical jokes, making art,
fools in high places, and so forth.
Note: The upbeat Carlos Tanaka never
mentioned the dark time he was a hostage. I found out about that later.
The
next time I saw Carlos in The Bean, a couple of days later, he gave me a
paper crab as a souvenir (as shown above). Soon afterward he went back
to Peru. As he’d been away from his studio for months, traveling and
lecturing, the artist had said he was glad to be going home. I haven’t
seen him since, but we've kept in touch, via the Internet.
Occasionally, I have seen his name associated
with a big art happening in South America, the USA or Europe. Anyway,
whenever Carlos is ready to take a break from the sculpture gig, I
still say a lucrative career in show biz as a crab-folding monologist awaits.
Well, I suspect I’ve spent too many of my personal allotment of hours in bars.
So while it’s easy to say many of those hours were wasted, every now and then
something genuinely unusual has happened, out of the blue, that makes me
say -- “I’m glad I was there.”
If nothing else, those memorable times provide fodder for a story to tell at a subsequent Happy Hour. Like our ancestors, we listen and we observe. Sometimes we learn. All so we can recount stories about what seemed impressive, or at least unusual.
Note: To see a gallery of Carlos Tanaka's work click here.
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