Reviews artasiapacific.com^131Opposite page
Installation view of real and reproduced
protest posters from The Umbrella
Movement Visual Archive (2014) for the
exhibition “Before the Rain” at 4A Centre
for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, 2017.
Courtesy Umbrella Movement Visual Archive
and Research Collective, Hong Kong.
This page
EI ARAKAWA
Installation view of “Tryst” at Taka
Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, 2017.
Photo by Kenji Takahashi.
Courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery.
TOKYO
Taka Ishii GalleryIn his recent solo show titled “Tryst” at Taka
Ishii Gallery, New York-based Japanese artist Ei
Arakawa stayed true to his practice and engaged
with conversations in Japanese art history. His
subject was five dynamic paintings produced in
the early days of the Japanese artistic group Gutai.
Founded in 1954, Gutai promoted a renewed sense
of individuality within modern Japanese art, and
arose in opposition to the social realism that was
prevalent during aggressive reconstruction in
postwar Japan. Now in the permanent collection
of Les Abattoirs, the museum of modern and
contemporary art in Toulouse, the five paintings,
which were painted between 1959 and 1960 by
Gutai artists Jiro Yoshihara, Akira Kanayama,
Atsuko Tanaka, Shozo Shimamoto and Kazuo
Shiraga, were originally brought to Europe by
collector Anthony Denney and marked a period of
critical and commercial success for the group.
Roughly 60 years later after their creation,
Arakawa reimagined each painting as an LED
canvas. Two of the works flanked a laterally
inverted Art Basel banner spread across the floor.
Each pixelated “painting,” mounted on four-
wheeled frames, was the same size as its original,
with attached hard drives, stereo amplifiers and
sequencers producing light and sound. Their
raw and audacious compositions—produced by
postwar pioneers of social, political and artistic
“happenings”—were visible from a distance, but
barely recognizable up close.
Querying the context of contemporary art,
with a show that was part performance, part
spectacle, and entirely musical, the artist attached
a small speaker to the back of each canvas with
a printed screenshot of the original painting in
Les Abattoirs. Through the speakers, we heard
Arakawa and a few friends retell the story of
Gutai in song, taking on the roles of the five
painters and other associates of the group: fellowmembers Saburo Murakami, Tsuruko Yamazaki
and Sadamasa Motonaga were also represented,
as were critic Michel Tapié and writer Allan
Kaprow, whose book Assemblage, Environments
and Happenings (1966) made a case for Gutai’s
importance within a sea of competing aesthetics
from all over the world. Monitors on the wall
showed scrolling song lyrics, charting the history
of Gutai from inception to its end, with the death
of group leader Yoshihara in 1972.
With technology in mind, Arakawa proposed
that the screen is now our most probable channel
to view artworks, and in turn produced an
exhibition that also responded to contemporary
cultural institutions’ capacity as a form of storage.
How can we preserve and present a body of works
that sought to exist in the moment? If the artist is
not present or even deceased, how does that work
exist at all? Any answers are further complicated
by Kaprow’s claim that “audiences should be
eliminated entirely.”
Arakawa’s five “paintings” formed a sequence
of audible screens, and together retold the
circumstances that decades later inspired their
creation. The exhibition was characterized by an
absence of the human body and an ambiguity
expressed in the installation. Its organization was
a tryst made public and a rendezvous of painting
and performance with neither present, but with
the resounding echoes of both.
That aside, the real rendezvous was not
between artwork and institution, but between
audience and exhibition. While this visitor faced
one monitor to follow a song as it played, a horde
of tourists poured into the otherwise empty
gallery. Lacking context but eager to understand
what was happening, they slowly ambled over to
face the monitor that I was watching. With their
backs to Arakawa’s creations, we huddled together
and lip-synced lyrics, as if upending Kaprow’s
earlier call to eliminate the audience. In “Tryst,”
Arakawa tied together commentary on the state
of the art institution, art historical frameworks
and sources of awkward entertainment. Think of
the experience as a form of virtual karaoke, where
the disconnected view of the museum or art fair
was seen through a monitor, accompanied by a
chorus of disembodied voices and the sound of an
absent orchestra.
STUART MUNROEI ARAKAWA
TRYST