Texts
Taiyo Kimura / Unpleasant Spaces
Catalogue pp.18-22, 2004, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, ISBN 3-930693-24-0
Editor: Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Dr. Andrea Jahn
Dr. Andrea Jahn, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart
Anyone seeing for the first time the work of Japanese artist Taiyo Kimura,born in Kamakura in 1970, will be surprised on different levels: first by his method of portraying the body, represented here in various media, then by a plastic execution with the simplest of materials, and finally on account of his subtle sense of humor, which comments on even the most shocking subject—and Kimura has quite a bit that could spoil the appetite—with a wink of the eye.
For his first solo exhibition in Germany, at the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Taiyo Kamura assembled in the historic cupola hall a selection of pieces that underlines the diversity of his work. The way he laid out his installation is programmatic. The tall, broad hall is obstructed and its access is regulated through narrow passageways designed to lead us to his artwork in a deliberate fashion. Kimura squeezes his audience into confined spaces and barrages our senses with intrusive, unpleasant video images and sounds, which we would prefer not to experience in the first place. But they allow us no respite: opposite us we see a wall comprised of twenty-four screens with chewing mouths, grinding their food with varying degrees of noise, spitting it out, or making it stick to the lens of the camera. They are magnified views of a body part, which, ignoring its communicative or erotic meaning, is captured in the moment of consumption: a moment governed, in Japan just as in industrial western nations, by strict regimentation. As Kimura demonstrates the process in moving close-ups, he heightens the repulsive effect. He alludes thereby to landmark video pieces by Vito Acconci and Paul McCarthy from the 1970s, which used their own bodies as instruments in controlled performance situations in order to explore perceptions and forms of interaction in an assault on societal taboos. Like Acconci and McCarthy, Kimura also uses the dimensions of the video monitor (which is about the same size as a human head), and for Kimura, too, the emphasis is on the close-up and “close space,” which acts as a kind of space of contact with the viewer. As he arranges screens of different size next to and on top of each other, he suggests the presence of a group (with large and small heads).
It is his play with what we consume as nourishment, the in and out between the interior and the exterior of the body, that Kimura makes the most of here. It is thus not about the simple provocation of the observer but rather the dissolution of body boundaries. To reveal the interior, the already chewed up, the already digested, and to transport it back to the exterior, is not only a breach of societal conventions but also a confrontation with artistic and social stereo types of representation and perception through the transgression of boundaries. All transitional forms have in this sense an undermining effect: every appearance, be it a representation of a body or objects that do not fit the norm, subvert the current order. If we precede from the thesis that body boundaries cannot be observed independently of the functioning of other societal and cultural boundaries, a discrepancy from, if not a threat to, societal norms become manifest in the transgression or penetration of body boundaries.
The sculptures that Kimura has developed under the title Routine should also be understood against this background. They are masculine figures depicted standing next to one another against a wall, apparently urinating. Their misshapen, overweight bodies are stuck in baggy track suits, which in themselves have something revolting about them. Kimura continues his play here with corporeal provocation, depicting weakness and incontinence: puddles on the floor and pee stains on the pants. The faucets to which they are connected add the ironic pendant. At no time do his figures seem “natural,” even when they appear disturbingly familiar; nor “alive,” the illusion ironically shattered by the alienating effect of the faucets put in place of heads. Here, as in his video wall, the artist makes palpable the all-too-human, he really shifts us into the flesh in making apparent what normally can take place only covertly. These images are quotidian, indeed almost insignificant, and yet they have the power to touch us in an unpleasant way. In this lies the core of the artist’s work. It is from the strange and contradictory elements of ordinary life that he creates his confrontation with questions of identity, group psychology, and the relationship between mind and body. Situations that take place every day in rush-hour traffic: shoulder to shoulder with others whose touch, smell, and noises one cannot escape. The tension and annoyance of our own bodies make all the more palpable to us the experience of persons in such a situation; individual boundaries and individual needs—in short, the captivity in the individual body—dominates perception and denies every attempt at rational control. This experience exposes the division between mind and body as a fiction and makes us conscious of our dependency on all bodily things.
For Kimura, life, with all its impositions and repulsions, should find its way into art. In all of these things, however, he lets us smile, and then in the next moment cooks up new screwy images and ideas. The best examples of this are his meticulously crafted drawings and the accompanying texts that, as funny as they are, have something quite poetic about them. Scribbled directly on the wall we read: “I like the garbage, trash, dust, and dirt that gets pushed to the sides of the highways and collects there. / I like this bleak picture because it escapes the attention of people who race by in their cars along the road. / Hence it is allowed to be dirty.”
With his interest in the roadside Kimura also directs his attention to the margins of society, to the failures, the homeless, the scum. In this process of artistic confrontation, the individual body functions as a metaphor: “It is still fresh in my memory that, in the hospital, / I swallowed a stomach probe. An unusual case: / A thin tube forced its way into my body. As it did I was just like a piece of meat. / I had the same sensation when I saw a dead cat on the side of the road. / Just like the cat, like a piece of meat, that’s how my own corpse looks.” Or elsewhere: “I am terribly ashamed to hear my own voice recorded on tape. / It sounds like my naked genitals. / I reveal myself like a person of the lowest origins.”
In these observations, movement and communication between interior and exterior and between the individual body and the mass of society are the focus again and again. The observations are thus about the problematic, if not wholly impossible, relationship between the inner and outer world: “I recently saw a blind man fighting his way through a throng of people / at the station with a cane / The clattering blind man’s stick hit passersby. He was in a panic. / I imagine it, I close my eyes / and walk like a blind man through the throng of people. / I panic myself.” At times, Kimura’s observations also capture loving relationships that come about only through is understandings:”My friend’s budgie flirts with my friend’s thumb / It seems he wants to have an affair with the thumb. / Thus he is pitiable. / It is strange that through this pity I, too, begin to consider my thumb as a living thing.”
In other cases, these graffiti are to be understood as performance sketches that boil down to making absurd or annulling our world, with its countless machines and instruments, through simple interventions. A dog appears covered in pocket calculators, displaying numbers when one pets him. Or two shopping bags on wheels that roll away as soon as a stranger approaches. In this panopticon of curiosities there are so-called hot-water bottle people, who obtrusively and unpleasantly give off heat, and conveyor belts lying on one another that serve solely to move each other. Another scene has a sewn-together suit in which hundreds of thrashing mice are stuck. A particular exercise consists in “back-to-back handing over of a cat” or in an all-out chow-down from the same bowl with one’s own dog. Kimura thus limits the technologized world of the everyday with natural phenomena and thenceforth develops situations characterized by seemingly childlike comedy. By directing his gaze to things and situations that discreetly and unexpectedly run counter to normality, the artist demonstrates the absurdity of our world.
Kimura’s research terrain is the gutter, the muggy tightness of a packed subway train, the dusty side of the road, and the urine-soaked corner—in the broader sense, these are the corners of our consciousness in which there is place for the embarrassing, the repressed, the depraved—there Kimura goes looking for clues. For the plastic execution of these ideas he uses the simplest materials: papier-mâché, straw, fabric tarpaulins, worn-out clothes, and empty milk cartons. At the same time, his sculpturally worked-out installations develop a particular aesthetic that lends a new form to the repressed.
He finds a highly expressive title for this approach in his central installation A Dream from Which One Cannot Awake: A whole flock of pigeons populates the middle of the cupola hall—not very attractive themselves in their dirty, uniform gray, as though they too stood as a metaphor for the proverbial “gray masses”—undefined, exchangeable, faceless. “Pigeons” whose heads are made from swivel casters. They derive their function from an open framework that may be moved by the visitors over the flock of pigeons as though in flight. In this “cage” a group of pigeon heads sits closely packed, larger than and in no way appropriate to the seated pigeon bodies, though just as gray and anonymous—though in any case turned towards one another, almost conspiratorially close together, as though they share a special knowledge. Here the artist is concerned with the power of crowd psychology, the particular explosive power of which consists in this case of being controlled by “leading heads,” who are in turn blind and are fit at best to turn around on the back of the crowd.
The confrontation of the individual with the crowd plays an important role in Kimura’s at first rather minimalist-seeming milk carton installation. This arranging in rows of common Japanese milk cartons contains its own secret. Like in a 3-D animation film, small figures appear to gather in the individual boxes and to pack themselves in ever more densely from carton to carton, like in elevators. A close inspection reveals that, at a specific point, they begin to seek out our gaze, this happening as soon as the interior distress threatens to become unbearable. As though this were the only way to escape peer pressure.
Seen from these viewpoints, Kimura’s work cannot easily be placed in the context of international contemporary art. As much as his video performances resemble the early video works of Paul McCarthy and Vito Acconci and his sculptures are reminiscent, at times, of those of Sarah Lucas, his works only have a qualified relationship to the artistic developments that emerged in the 1990s in the United States and Western Europe. His art is deeply Japanese—naturally only insofar as we are entitled at all to place artistic expressions directly in the context of social and economic factors. It is possible to make this connection because Kimura himself traces the fundamentals of his work to these sorts of origins. It is about a certain social atmosphere that characterized Japan in the 1990s, after the rapid economic growth of the 1980s had ended in the collapse of the so-called bubble economy and its overheated consumerism. According to Kimura, a markedly apocalyptic mood became noticeable in popular consciousness, something that also found expression in the artistic developments of the last ten years. The generation of young artists of the 1990s expressed their mistrust of the existing social system and its culture of repression with two different tendencies: on the one hand, by exploiting images of a continually available computer-generated virtual world, and on the other, by addressing the body, its uncontrollability and its transience, in a fundamental way.
With his work developed from both performative and sculptural elements, Kimura walks a middle path between the artists Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami, strongly influenced by Manga culture, on the one hand, and representatives of the Japanese Arte Povera movement, Saburo Muraoka and Chiharu Shiota, on the other. Like Shiota, Kimura works only indirectly with his own body, since he acts in his video performances only for the camera or transfers the body experience onto his sculptures and installations. The extraordinary aspect to his work is the concentration on the plastic qualities of the physical; he equips his figures with mechanical instruments so as to rob them of their “natural” character. For him, the body is part of the social system in which it—like a technical device—must function. The unpleasant spaces into which people are always forced are Kimura’s central theme—making conscious the absurdity of this way of life is his artistic endeavor.