Mother and Child
I was very glad to get Giang Dinh’s “Mother and Child” for the Tikotin show, and glad too, that by independent decision this image appears on the catalog’s front cover and on the invitation card. For it nicely represents the guiding thought of this show: that origami can sometimes be an art, as high as any of the traditional arts. Mere modesty & self-restraint keep me from saying there are even heights of artistic expression which origami can reach that are not possible in other media of sculpture. (Of course origami has its limitations too.) If one asks why that is, here—what makes this work art and great art at that—there are some obvious points to start with. Immediately noticeable are the clean modern lines, the long curves and fluid surfaces. Also the work has a manifest simplicity: while there are certainly areas where it is not easy to guess how the thing is folded, the bulk of it, and the main inversion at the bottom, is perfectly obvious and followable by the eye; there ar...