タイムライン 時間に触れるためのいくつかの方法 | TIMELINE: Several ways to touch time

We lead our lives while engaging with “time” in a variety of ways. Given that everyone is to be born, grow up, age, and eventually die, no one shall be free from the persistent flow of time.

The process from birth to loss of an artwork has been often discussed in connection with the life of a living being: an artwork is said to be “born,” in some cases “grow up” and “ma­ture,” and eventually “age” and “die.” However, we then find ourselves having paused and pondering. Is it truly precise to say that the life of an artwork and that of a human follow similar trajectories?

The diversification of materials and techniques came about in the world of art in the mod­ern era and is still going on presently, transforming modes of the lives of artworks in every possible direction by virtue of plastic and polyester, bot­tles and cans, video and television, ephemeral matters that instantly melt away or disappear, and even traditional materials associated with painting, which have resurfaced due to rediscovery after being overlooked for a long time. Today, the terms that we have often heard so as to indicate a complex formulation of an artwork, such as “mixed-media” and “intermedia,” have come to be commonly used and widely known in society at large. However, exactly what kind of “objects” are mixed in those works, exactly what are those things between which artworks wander for inter-mediation, and how complex, as a result, have forms of the lives of artworks — or their “longevity” — become? Answers to these questions are still in the air.

How can we, as living beings of the present day, put in stark relief the lifetime process of an artwork as an object — as a being that exists physically in the world with a concrete form that constantly changes due to internal and external transmutations developing inevitably as time goes by? What will our attempt reveal and make visible? How do the life-death trajectory of an “object” and that of us differ from, intersect with, and draw apart from each other? The TIMELINE ex­hi­bi­tion grew out of such questions.

This ex­hi­bi­tion is intended to serve as a platform for the participants, who engage directly in making, presenting, and conserving artworks while working as an artist, an installer, a con­ser­va­tor, and an art historian, respectively or multiply, and who are concerned with all those aspects together, to exchange ideas about diverse temporalities and lives of both humans and artworks. Creating artworks, or conserving and studying artworks at public institutions, they have different specialized skills in respective fields, yet share one method: they tackle art squarely though the act of “touching” artworks that have physical forms. Constantly speculating and experimenting by trial and error on how to formulate things, how to preserve them, what would stay, and what should be eliminated, their contemplations, while negotiating with the flow of time, ceaselessly come and go between objects and non-objects, a process that eventually guides them in a new direction each time.

Up until he left this world in 2006, through­out his life, Shoichi Ida devoted himself to the development of a body of work that expands the definition of printmaking. As a deadly illness tormented him, the artist worked on creating connections between organic materials that would change their states across the ages until decaying eventually, including fragments of skin and drops of fluid from his own body, literally embedded in his pieces, and his physical existence itself that was coming to an end. In this sense, his series Tantra is indeed a lifelog of the artist himself, therefore setting a point of departure for our project and playing an essential role in this ex­hi­bi­tion.

Despite the fact that stone is a solid material with hard resistance, Ayako Ohno creates rather light and witty forms or situations as if canceling such strength, by approaching it through her particular acts of “carving” and “incising.” In contrast to natural stones left on the road or rocks lying around on a river bank that secretly and slowly transmute just by staying as they are, how are those ones that have become “artworks,” given forms and names by Ohno, presented to us and how are they going to be in the future?

Takumi Kato is an artist who has employed the act of “drawing” as a means to continuously think about the “materiality of paintings” — about paintings that are complex objects each comprising a wide array of materials — which humans have carried on in an unbroken line since ancient times. By “drawing” with fine minute paint brushes, Kato analyzes and reconstructs the primitive act, which has been repeatedly practiced for ages, namely leaving traces on a support, in an attempt to shed new light to behaviors of objects and actions of humans surrounding what is called painting.

Dai Hijikata exhibits, as an artist, installation works that change their states in response to external factors such as temperature, humidity, and light, and also works, as an installer, for art festivals and ex­hi­bi­tions. Overall, his activities are always in close relationship with objects that are variable and fluid. Hijikata’s gestures to control a temporarily and spatially limited site, namely an ex­hi­bi­tion situation, by means of installation and de-installation, is inseparably intertwined with his own act of making as well as the temporality latent in his resultant works. Plurality of time is certainly put forth in his practice.

mirukusoko + The Coconuts form a complex artist unit that incorporates its seven members’ respective specialized skills such as those of architecture and design and civil engineering techniques including electrical facility equipping and land­scape gardening. The collective creates installations for each of which they undergo repeated discussions and exchanges of information like a guild in medieval times. Through their collaborative act of forming a physical composition, various ideas from different backgrounds together gain visibility as a single artwork. What kind of relations are constructed between their thoughts and the objects that have come to the world as a result of this process?

In order to display the timelines of the lives of the artworks that they have made, conserved, analyzed, and repeatedly contemplated in a more comprehensible and visible way in the museum environment, this ex­hi­bi­tion juxtaposes physical artworks with both results of scientific analysis on them and an archive of oral interviews with the artists. It is an attempt to place a scientific and analytical stethoscope at the artworks presented in front of us so that we can strain our ears to learn stories of their past and future — what they are made up of, how they have led their lives, how their lives have arrived at the temporality in which we live, and where are they headed for toward the future. In planning this ex­hi­bi­tion, we have looked into different possibilities to figure out the best way to document and describe the full scope of how artworks in the form of physical “objects” constantly transmute in the framework of human temporality. The timeline of this process itself is shared with the public in a variety of forms, resonating with the lives of the artworks. In this space, where trajectories of the diverse lives of the artworks are confronted, dissected, deconstructed, and interconnected, how are we going to re-encounter “time”?

Just like how the relation between “time” and each of us is equal, opportunities to relate oneself to objects by engaging with, making, exhibiting, viewing, and conserving them, as well as giving thoughts to these approaches, are all equally open to anyone.

Such time to reconsider time, which constantly flows in and out of artworks, and of ourselves, may give us a chance, in return, to reflect upon and reweave each moment of our everyday life, here and now.