Texts
Weiche Brueche Japan / Smooth ruptures Japan
Catalogue pp.56-60, 2002, Kunstraum Innsbruck
Editor Dr. Markus Neuwirth, Universitaet Innsbruck, Elisabeth Thoman-Oberhofer, Kunstraum Innsbruck
ISBN 3-933096-94-4
Univ. Prof. Dr. Markus Neuwirth, Institut fur Kunstgeschichte Universitaet Innsbruck
In 1980 Sony invented the Walkman, nothing but an easily portable cassette recorder, later also radio, with headphones. From a technical point of view this was nothing special – a fact which, initially, even threatened its market introduction because, for some inside the company, it did not meet certain technological standards. But the success was overwhelming, as was the immediate international reception. This sort of user orientation had a revolutionary impact. In 1984 Shuhei Hosokawa analysed the relevant phenomena, summing them up as the Walkman effect. The most remarkable of which is an isolation from the surroundings. The urban space is explored on foot walking or running, its pervasive sound scape shut out. The portable sound, characterized by its own tempo, together with the bearer’s movements causes a different sense of space. The Walkman brings forth an autonomy on the part of the bearer who may wrap her/himself in music’s, albeit deceptive, “splendid isolation.” Those around, however, are refused access to the listener and her/his choice of music. Hosokawa refers to an example of the mechanism of closeness and distance: “At a party a boy hesitates to approach the girl he’s in love with. Nevertheless he gets her to dance with him. Very calmly he steps close and puts one ear-piece of his headphones to her ear so that she may also hear “his” music. They are enclosed by “their” music. The happy couple dance to a different music, a different rhythm from the rest of the guests.” This stroke of luck agreeably contrasts with the overall lack of communication. The apparatus creates connection and distance. On the one hand being independent, and hence isolated, the radio user simultaneously and “blissfully” submits to a flood of information from above. One is a part of the “lonely crowd.” In his experience of space the individual is swallowed up by the masses.
In 1970 Taiyo Kimura was born into a generation that grew up against this background and was confronted precisely with these problems. ln 1995 he took a look at the situation in his work Black Hole. Approaching from the middle distance one makes out the contours of a light-coloured teddy bear on a pedestal. What attracts attention is some black dots at first hard to identify. What initially might be taken for flies swarming around the animal when getting closer turns out to be scores of earphones sprouting from the teddy. And one also increasingly becomes aware of a mixture of sounds. Close up these are recognizable as a multitude of different radio programs. Though hardly one will be able to differentiate the exact number-it is sixteen stations. Merely at the full hour an imperfect simultaneity may be noticeable: the jingles announcing the news. After that the programs disperse. The single is dispersed in the sea of information and stimuli. The indifference, the impossibility of filtering out, the proliferation of media are causing an abyss which one is lost in: the Black Hole. The object reverses the principle of isolation. That which, turned inward, cannot but be interpreted as an overstimulation for one person is being multiplied (there is around 400 phones)and turned outward. The revenge of the Walkman changes into the revenge of the cuddly toy.
Mass psychology, or mob psychology, is the force behind many of Kimura’s works and reflects a marked feature of Japanese society, i.e. the disciplined masses. A clear manifestation of this trait may be observed in the sophisticated transport system the functioning of which is the necessary precondition for the prospering of economical as well as private life cycles. While the subway stations are its coordinating points and nerve centres. The poison gas attack by the Aum sect, in which several subway lines in Tokyo were simultaneously hit on 3rd March 1995, consciously targeted this system. The nerve gas was set free there not just with a view to a high number of victims but in order to cause social collapse, a psychological elimination. The apocalyptic imagination of the radicalized community, whose appeal in equal measure might be symptomatic for a situation of radical social changes, obviously aimed at the very centre of the traffic network.
In his 1997 book, “Underground, The Tokyo Gas Attack,” Haruki Murakami, by means of interviews with victims and perpetrators, has attempted to retrace what happened and how individuals have come to terms with it. What is remarkable about the accounts of the victims is not only the trauma itself but the course of events during the attack which latter, at first, could not be made out as such. Each individual, with her or his functions and duties within the system, noticed different things. Especially the initial not knowing how to react to the poisonous liquid, respectively its vapours, and, finally, the realization of how grave the danger actually was. The subsequent actions of the people and the helplessness in handling the situation illustrated, with all possible implications, the soundness but also the vulnerability of the network of connections. Highly significant, for instance, was the immediate distinction made between prostrate victims and people walking along the other side of the road as if nothing had happened. Suddenly there were two systems one of which everyone was inevitably subsumed under. The dividing of society in two in the short term had succeeded. Precisely this aspect has occupied the Japanese analysts lastingly.
Moreover the interviews have shown that the individual reactions of the survivors to such a trauma often are causing irreversible damages to the soul and tragic incisions in the manner of living. ln 1997, i.e. in the year the book was published, Taiyo Kimura gave his answer in the form of a performance. His activities in the subway have been documented photographically for the influential Japanese art magazine Bijutsu Techo(BT). By putting a clear plastic bag over his head and mingling with the crowds of fellow passengers he highlighted the feelings of restrictedness, the shortage of space and oxygen, the claustrophobia. The most oppressive thing, however, without a doubt was the indifference of the bystanders. The artist additionally emphasized the absurdity of such situations by hanging some underpants out as if to dry on the handrails of a train car. The indifference was given a fitting answer.
The bringing together of what does not belong together particularly characterizes Kimura’s minute drawings fitted with texts which he scrupulously collects in books. From this refuge of ideas and experiences, almost taking on the character of a diary, he draws forth a concentrate in order to develop his performances and objects. The sceneries are arranged loosely and without consideration for the rectangular surface. From this picture material the artist chooses ideas he then transfers. one-to-one, onto the walls of the exhibition rooms thus evoking graffiti in public toilets. The crowd aspect keeps recurring, such as the people who do not want to wake from their dreams, or people licking the floor. In Innsbruck KIMURA cleverly positioned this latter scene on the gallery wall close to the floor so that the visitors have to bend down or get down on their knees to be able to make out the drawing and thus to take on, involuntarily, the posture of those portrayed. At the same time thus showing their backside to the receptionist. What is also causing trepidation is the idea of mice being sewn into an item of clothing. The outward shape of a person is thus animated by the restless and aggressive movements of the locked in. In the drawings the artist gives poignant expression to a widespread impression within Japanese society, a feeling of being “full up” or “fat up.” In a strange ambivalence one accommodates a self-image of basically having everything one needs while, at the same time, suffering from angst. Man is being degraded and harnessed into a hopeless circulation of consumption for its own sake. He is no more but a peripheral temporary store in which commerce let loose leaves ingestion and excretion to degenerate into a banal ritual. A tea ceremony in which the leaves are taken in the mouth and chewed, hot water poured on top and everything spit out, this is only one possible travesty making apparent the undermining of tradition. Under the telling title Video as a Drawing the partial realization of such ideas in short sequences of performances has been summed up. Being provocative, highly imaginative and extraordinarily physical Kimura creates very personal allegories of ingestion and excretion in the era of mass consumption.
The new work, Untitled, created for Innsbruck 2002, brings to the point the interrelation between isolated individual elements and the homogenization within a closed, all-encompassing system. From a distance all that can be made out at first is a humming, vibrating white box. On stepping up and looking inside one will detect countless tiny, perpendicular paper cylinders. Laughing faces, fixed onto tiny metal springs, are restlessly moving to and fro-each inside its own cylinder, all of them agitated by the same electric massage device, yet without any prospect of ever being able to get into contact with each other. The collapse of the crowd will happen as soon as the -invisible-device stops shivering.
Permanent change and the immobility of the outward fixing are set in a volatile relation to each other. The disappearing of the individual in the crowd, among an unbelievable amount of information and stimuli, the self-referential, a breakout forever beyond hope, the realization that everything is linked to everything else, the realization that individuality is an illusion-all these points of merge, in Kimura’s oeuvre, to create an autonomous zone of black humor.