The relationship between the three solo exhibitions
You have had solo exhibitions at museums in succession, from the 1997 solo exhibition at Chiba City Museum of Art, to this exhibition in Mito, and then the solo exhibition at Iwaki City Museum of Art. Could you please tell us about the themes of each museum and how this exhibition in Mito fits into your life work as an artist?
Last year, I held an exhibition at the Chiba City Museum of Art, and this time I will hold an exhibition at the Mito Art Museum, followed by the Iwaki City Museum of Art. Although each exhibition is completely different, I have the idea of a large exhibition that connects the whole. On the other hand, the curators of each museum have their own ideas, and the exhibition is not something that can be realized by me alone, but is realized through collaboration between me and the curators, or with the museum. So, I did not decide the positioning of each one myself, but I think the basic idea was how each museum would put together the exhibition in discussion with me. At the Chiba City Museum of Art, the curator in charge was Hideya Warashina, and he wanted to title the exhibition “Relationship – Tatsuo Kawaguchi,” and he organized the works on three axes: works from the 1970s and recent works, new works that have not been exhibited, and works using lotus flowers, which are particularly related to Chiba, in consideration of the venue’s convenience and the meaning of presenting my own works from my collection. As the subtitle “Sealed Time” indicates, the works for the upcoming exhibition at Art Tower Mito were selected from that perspective. At Art Tower Mito, Asai is in charge and works from the 1990s, that is, from 1990 to 1998, will be exhibited. As I said earlier, the exhibition is organized under the overall concept of “Sealed Time,” so that each work can be viewed with that intention. Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that the keyword drawn from the overall selection of the selected works was “Sealed Time.” At the Iwaki City Museum of Art, the exhibition will be wider in terms of age than at Mito, and will include works from the 1970s and 1980s. The curator in charge at Iwaki City Museum of Art is Mr. Hirano (Akihiko), but each curator has their own way of thinking, which has a big influence on the decisions about my works, and I think that each of them is trying to shape the exhibition from a different perspective of my work.
However, when the artist himself talks about what kind of exhibition it is, I feel that it gives some kind of instruction to the viewers, and that is a concern. I think that people should be free to look at the work itself, and there is no need to be bound by the subtitle “Sealed Time”, and the audience should be free to look at it even from the words. The words of the artist are very important for the work and the exhibition, but I would rather not follow them too much, rather just use them as a reference. In that sense, I’m not sure whether it is appropriate to have such an interview and have the audience look at it. If possible, I would appreciate it if you could see the whole exhibition, including the Mito Art Museum and the Iwaki City Museum of Art, although my solo exhibition at the Chiba City Museum of Art has already ended.
The keyword “relationship”
The word “relationship” came up in your talk. This word is a keyword in your work, but when did you start thinking of making it the theme of your work?
It actually appeared as a title in 1970. It was at the “Kyoto Independent Exhibition”, and you wrote the title on the entry form, and if you made a copy of that form and handed it to the receptionist along with the entry fee, they would give you a receipt. In other words, the exhibition procedure itself was lined up as a work. The procedure itself was lined up as a “relationship”, and there was nothing else in the works that were entered. In other words, if there was anything, it would be the copy of the entry procedure form. I guess that was the beginning. So, “relationships” are invisible, but how should I put it? “Relationships” are not in the material itself, but in some way between one thing and another, between one thing and another person, and relationships appear and disappear again. In that sense, I think that if we link the act of creation itself, the act of creating relationships, with art, we can create quite new artistic expressions. And by considering “birth” and “death” as a relationship, I think that by relating things in genres other than art, such as fossils in this case and newspapers, to art, the possibility of blindness will emerge. It is never about expressing the relationship itself, but about making the relationship real, making it visible or palpable, and since relationships are not necessarily invisible, I think there is a possibility that we can draw the invisible into the context of art. In that sense, I think it is a very convenient keyword for cutting through a world. I think it’s about how to create new relationships.
【Asai】
When it comes to turning invisible things into artworks, you’ve recently been working on energy, especially life energy. Is that also an attempt to create new relationships?
【Kawaguchi】
That’s right. However, life energy is, for example, the various energies that matter possess. What’s different from that is that I’m also a living organism, and life energy is very mysterious. How can we sense something invisible like life energy? There may be various ways to do this other than visually, but in my consciousness, there are various types of energy, such as electrical energy, which I’ve been involved with up until now, but when it comes to life energy, which I don’t understand myself, I have the awareness of abandoning the idea of understanding and presenting it in a place of connection.
【Asai】
Among the works exhibited at the Chiba City Museum of Art, Kawaguchi covered his own past works with copper to create a new work (“Relationship – Chiba Lotus”). The previous work is related to the next work. In that sense, the relationship continues indefinitely in time.
【Kawaguchi】
That’s right. That work is conscious of that, and it’s not that the current work should not be related to the past works, but rather that the past works are related to the current work and new works are born from that. I’m planning to exhibit something more thorough in my solo exhibition at the Iwaki City Museum of Art, which will be a new work made only from photos of past works, but the photos of the past works are sealed with lead along with the seeds so they can’t be seen, and it will be made up of about 90 of them. For example, in the future, if my body doesn’t respond well to my commands, I would like to paint my old works, any of them. In that case, I would like to try painting my own works, so I would like to know if they are new works or just old works. As I mentioned earlier, I used “Relationship” in the title of the “Kyoto Independent Exhibition.” For example, in my early paintings, there are circles connected to each other and the circle on one side is invisible, and there is a sense of correlation on the other side. In the mirror work, there is a relationship between image and object, or between virtual image and reality. In “Group
Group I as the origin
Please explain briefly about the “Group I” that you just mentioned.
【Kawaguchi】
“Group I” was formed in 1965. It was formed in Kobe, where I was born. The first exhibition was a form of exhibiting each member’s work at a gallery in Kobe’s International Conference Center. We also held a symposium, and after that there was the “Independent Art Festival” on the Nagara River in Gifu, which was an outdoor venue, and among the sculptural and objets d’art works on display, we dug the earth, or rather the riverbed. The nine members simply dug holes and filled them in. I think there are probably many purposes for digging holes. For example, it wasn’t a hole for throwing away garbage or digging something out, but for the first time since the beginning of humanity, a hole existed for the purpose of making the hole itself exist. In other words, I think that the hole was made to exist for a purpose. I forgot to mention that the “group rank” comes from words like unit rank, position rank, and phase rank, so the idea is that each member occupies a position in the “group rank”. Then we do various things, for example, we did an “impersonal exhibition”. Each person paints a different picture, but we painted the exact same painting and exhibited it. We did things like one person painting the same picture twice. Then we did the “Parasite” exhibition.
【Asai】
Mr. Kawaguchi originally majored in painting at Tama Art University, right? What motivated you to move from painting to a broader artistic endeavor beyond painting, such as with Group I?
【Kawaguchi】
I wanted to be a painter. I thought that if I went to art school, I would be able to become a painter. So while I was painting during my time at school, I was aware that there must be some form of expression that doesn’t fit into the form of painting, and that expression doesn’t have to be limited to one form at all. I loved painting, so I did that, and formed the “Group “. There were nine young people who formed the group at the time, but we all had a very strong spiritual hunger, and we couldn’t quench that hunger by reading books, watching movies, or doing other things, so we gathered together. The formation of the “Group ” was the catalyst for moving from painting to other forms of art. So when I dug the hole, I experienced limitless freedom. There was a kind of superegotic self-liberation, and a sense of community, with nine members doing the same thing, which was a good feeling. However, on the other hand, I felt an endless sense of anxiety, that all the hard work I had put into studying to become a painter at university was becoming meaningless. That was the kind of anxiety I felt. It was like everything was falling apart, and there was nothing in front of me. From that point on, I had to create everything myself, and that was the biggest part of the horror of being forced to have a mental structure that was perfectly in line with being alive. I was no longer able to go back and paint. Of course, I’m not denying painting, and I still love painting, but there are elements of what I’m trying to do that cannot be captured by painting. In particular, “relationships” use real space and time as very important expressive elements, so it’s quite difficult to paint an image or something on a canvas.
【Asai】
How does it relate to the state of art and society at that time, especially in Japan but also around the world? For example, were you aware of the activities of the European Situationists, who were among the earliest critics of modern society driven by mass media?
【Kawaguchi】
Well, maybe we were aware of that on the one hand, but rather the opposite, we were wondering if what we did was out of the blue, or if someone else in another country must have done it, so we were searching for something like that. Then we found that there were people who were looking for new spiritual expressions, who were trying to achieve something by going beyond the formalities of painting and sculpture, and by knowing that there were people like that, we felt reassured that we were not doing something crazy, and that we were not something completely unique. At first, we did things on impulse, and I feel that it is a little different from doing it because of some kind of influence. In that sense, it is often said that digging the hole of the “Group ” was quite early in the art world, but I think that it was the result of being faithful to our desires and taking such actions.
【Asai】
Was it just a coincidence that these incidents happened simultaneously all over the world?
【Kawaguchi】
I think each of them probably had different consciousness. I think it also differs depending on the country. However, the fact that they did not take the form of painting or sculpture may be something they had in common, but I think each of them tried various forms of expression.
【Asai】
It seems that they were active as “Group I” for several years, but what happened to the group after that?
【Kawaguchi】
There were some members who came and went, but they never disbanded in the end. So even now, when I go back to Kobe, I meet with people from Group I, but I don’t do any artistic activities. I’ve done things like making a film called “15 Seconds of Observation” and publishing a book called “Existence,” which are not necessarily in the format of something that can be exhibited in a gallery or museum, so some people don’t make works with the ideas of Group I, but do business or live in that way. I think Group I was meaningful to me in the sense that it liberated me from the conventional education I had received.
【Asai】
Around the 1970s, I think people started to consciously visualize and shape “relationships,” and around that time, I think Kawaguchi himself began to see a certain direction in his work. And I feel that the representative work of that is “Land and Sea.”
【川口】
That’s right. I happened to be living on the coast of Suma, and if I hadn’t lived there, I might have done something else, like “Mountains and Sky” instead of “Land and Sea”, but it’s the relationship with time, and the tides on the earth, low tide and high tide. I think it’s important to be aware of the large movements of the earth that we can’t see directly, the changes in how it looks, and to be aware of those things, or to feel for a moment that the earth is rotating at an incredible speed even as we talk like this. I think that’s what sneaks in between the land and the sea. Also, there was an exhibition called “Tokyo Biennale” organized by Yusuke Nakahara on the theme of “Humans and Materials”, and I had the chance to present my work there, so I was able to make something like that. I might have made it even without that exhibition, but I might not have been so excited to make it so big. I don’t know. I guess it was when I encountered the exhibition “Man and Matter.” There were many different artists participating, about 40 of them. I had the impression that people who do contemporary art all have a lot in common, but when I actually participated, I thoroughly experienced how different each artist is. Ah, I do my job, and each person does their own job. Or rather, the importance of differences. At first, I was aware that the whole group was working under the idea of contemporary art, but each person was working from their own perspective. I realized that that was okay. At that exhibition.
【Asai】
The next turning point was when you created works using plants in 1982. For example, Nakahara points out this in the text “Seeds, Life Energy, Art” in the catalog of the Chiba City Museum of Art.
【Kawaguchi】
I encounter plants when I collect them, but I encountered seeds as a new encounter with a plant. Seeds are mysterious, depending on how you look at them. There is life inside the seed, and if it’s an apple, an apple will grow from that seed. It’s a natural thing, but I think I was reminded of how amazing it is. I think that had some kind of influence on the work.
【Asai】
Then in 1986, the material covering the seed changed from copper to lead…
【Kawaguchi】
That’s right. One of the motivations for that was the Chernobyl nuclear accident. It was originally covered with a copper plate, and I think it was to convey the energy of the seed to the audience. By covering it with lead, the idea of conveying it to people became more like a protection, or protection from radiation, and that’s when things started to change. It wasn’t my own consciousness that changed, but rather a society or an incident, or something like that, that caused the change.
【Asai】
Viewers, especially critics, tend to take up the artist’s testimony on this topic and talk about this work in the context of so-called “ecology” or “anti-nuclear.” If it’s linked to “ecology,” I think it becomes an easy theme to talk about as a story, but I don’t think the meaning of that work is actually directly linked to “ecology” or the “nuclear issue.”
【Kawaguchi】
I’m reflecting on it. There are times when I think I shouldn’t have said “Chernobyl.” I think it’s easy to talk about because I said that, and that’s why many writers and critics take it up. For me, Chernobyl may have been a trigger, but the fear of nuclear weapons is something I’ve always been conscious of, as Japan is the only country to have suffered an atomic bomb, and if you use words that make it an easy episode to talk about too lightly, then that’s the only thing people will talk about from then on. In that sense, as Asai-san said, it’s not just that, but it’s also difficult to make it into an episode that is difficult to talk about, difficult to put into words, and that’s one side of the problem. I think that because I myself used the word “Chernobyl” frivolously, it has a negative impact on my work.
About the works on display this time
The “Sealed Time” exhibition is made up of Kawaguchi’s works from the 1990s onwards. I understand that it is not possible to simply divide an artist’s activities by year, but I would like to ask you if there have been any changes in the themes of your works or your awareness when creating them since 1990.
【Kawaguchi】
I don’t have any particular desire to divide them by era, but I think it depends on whether you see the 1990s as the end of the 20th century, the so-called end of the century, as we move towards the 21st century, or as preparation or a sign for the 21st century. I don’t really see the 1990s as the end of the century, but as an era opening up to the 21st century. In a sense, this work corresponds to the future of the 21st century, so the big theme of relationships remains the same, but I am conscious of relationships that open up toward the future.
【Asai】
In terms of materials, this is the first time that fossils have appeared…
【Kawaguchi】
I have encountered fossils since elementary and junior high school, but for some reason I have been very interested in fossils since junior high school. Fossils are just materials, but they give you endless imagination, allowing you to imagine the creatures that may have lived there. In that sense, I think they are very similar to the imagination that a single piece of art gives you. I tried using fossils because I thought that I could link them to art and fossils rather than from an academic interest in biology, and release the imagination that fossils have in the context of art. However, the fossils themselves have a strong impact, and if I use them as they are, I will return to biological interest once again, so I would like to try expanding the theme of “relationships” that I have been dealing with for a long time through fossils by using frottage, which is a means of artistic expression — it is like rubbing art in Japanese — to copy the surface and incorporate it into the work. Also, when it comes to “relationships,” it is easy to introduce relationships with real society into the work, but for example, 100 million years ago, or this time I started with a frottage of stromatolite fossils from 4.5 billion years ago, but through fossils, and especially through frottage, I can encounter things from the past that I, a living being, would never encounter, an enormous amount of time, and I think that this allows me to expand time. So I am collecting fossils from the Tertiary period from about 4.5 billion years ago and frottaging them.
【Asai】
If the work using seeds is connected to the future through the growth of the seeds, can we interpret the work using fossils as expanding the relationship toward the past in terms of the time axis?
【Kawaguchi】
I think that’s good. In other words, seeds are premised on birth, but when thinking about birth, it’s natural that “death” will occur. Fossils are like the crystallization of “death,” and I’m aware that “birth” and “death” are inevitable. I make frottage of fossils, and there are species that are already extinct. For example, when I think about our extinction, I’m not sure how to interpret it, but there are creatures that have been completely wiped out from the earth. It may be possible to condense the relationship between “death” and “birth” in a certain work, but on the other hand, I express “birth” through seeds and “death” through fossils. Alternatively, we could say that through seeds we are connected to “birth” and through fossils we are connected to “death.”
【Asai】
The frottage work is now placed in a yellow box, but is there any significance to the yellow color used there?
【Kawaguchi】
At first, I was going to attach the frottage of the fossils to a box made of beeswax, but there is bleached beeswax and unbleached beeswax, which means that it is not bleached. The unbleached beeswax is relatively yellowish. However, it fades when actually used. On the one hand, I wanted to preserve the original color of the beeswax. So I mixed natural yellow ochre into the beeswax to represent the color of the “soil” in which the fossils would have been buried. Another reason why I use beeswax is that although humans produce many different substances, they do not always produce things that are good for living things or the earth. Bees make beeswax, and they produce honey and beeswax, which are not harmful to the earth. By connecting the fossil frottage to the beeswax box, extinct creatures are reborn. I don’t think that’s possible, but I thought that by meeting the energy of beeswax, they could be reborn. As for the meaning of yellow, I collect 100 dandelion seeds every year and make them into works, and the dandelion flower before it turns into fluff is yellow. I’m also interested in sunflowers, and the color of sunflower flowers is yellow, and I think the color yellow is connected to rebirth. I think this is my own biased way of thinking, but I think the fossil frottage wrapped in yellow, a warm color, is further connected to rebirth, and my interest in warmth is currently directed toward the color yellow.
【Asai】
In another work, “Relationship – Expansion,” which is being shown for the first time, newspapers are used as part of the material.
【Kawaguchi】
I started this around 1994, and it comes from my interest in “expanding relationships,” as I mentioned earlier. There are various “relationships” that emerge from reality, and among them there are various ways of relating art to other things, or between the visible and the invisible, but among them, I want to further expand the relationship between art and other things, or in other words, to expand the motif of relationships in art. And when I thought about what the quickest way to do this would be the newspaper that we read every day. Because newspapers themselves have the function of relating society and people through information. I don’t know if it will lead to the expansion of the “relationship” I’m talking about, but the information published in the newspaper is in the form of photos and text, and by incorporating that information into my work, I wonder if I can expand the “relationship”. However, if I take out everything, it becomes just a newspaper, so I take out the images of the information that I am particularly interested in from the newspaper, and cover the seeds with lead, making them completely invisible, but if I mix beeswax with zinc oxide or natural chalk, it becomes something like an intermediate term between visible and invisible, and within that, the images of the information reflected in the newspaper become a work of art. It continues to expand that relationship indefinitely, but because of my physical strength, I have made 160 pieces for now, and I will display them on the wall. I have a lot of newspapers from then, and they are the newspapers that contain information that I am interested in, so I stack them all together to make one mass, like a mass of information energy, and create a work in a way that you cannot see the pages. In that sense, I am creating a work of art that expresses my awareness of expanding relationships.
【Asai】
Finally, what kind of works do you want to create from the late 90s towards the 21st century?
【Kawaguchi】
I think that if you see my work at Art Tower Mito, you will sense something that is heading towards the future. For example, there is a strong relationship between the life form of a seed and water. It is necessary for life. It is not an obvious relationship, or a relationship where you simply look at the thing directly, but for example, when there is beeswax in front of you, or lead, or something in the water, your gaze passes through something, bounces off, or stops halfway. You can’t see the whole work with just your eyes, or you can understand and experience the whole work, but in order to do that you have to use a part of your brain more, or you have to release the various senses that the person has, or you have to introduce something like memory, or you can say it’s a more complex relationship, something a little different from a clear relationship like “land and sea.” The world itself may be complex to begin with, but you can experience that kind of complex relationship without it being complicated. That’s what I want to do. And the issues of “birth” and “death,” not in a pessimistic or hopeless sense, although we may certainly perish someday, but with an eye on the future, I think I want to fully utilize the power of art, assuming that there is a future. That’s what I want to do.
May 15, 1998, at the Kawaguchi Laboratory at Tsukuba University
(First published in the catalogue of “Kawaguchi Tatsuo – Sealed Time” [Venue: Mito Art Tower / Period: August 8 – November 29, 1998])