International Artist Taro Izumi Collaborates with Cadence
Installation view, Taro Izumi. ex, 2020 ©Museum Tinguely Photo: Gina Folly
Cadence Theatre Company and Virginia Rep joined hundreds of theatres from around the world to contribute to "Cloud (pillow/ raised-floor storehouse)," created by award-winning artist Taro Izumi.
On the installation, Izumi writes, "Each sound recorded in every theater space by the collaborators while suppressing their presence is a kind of “soundless sound.” In other words, this work is reconstructing a huge fictional theater filled with people whose presences have disappeared, becoming united with the theater as if they were a part of its space. By applying audio recordings for the first time as materials rather than video footage, this work provides an opportunity to rethink cultural institutions as vessels that shape human existence from both the inside and the outside... The collection of "silences" has been brought together into a tremendous roar as a main part of the work “Cloud (pillow/ raised-floor storehouse)” that reverberates through the entire museum every day."
View a video documentation of the work and read the artist’s full essay on the installation below.
Exhibition information
Taro Izumi. ex
Period: September 2 — November 15, 2020
Venue: Museum Tinguely (Basel, Switzerland)
Taro Izumi's exhibition page：https://www.tinguely.ch/en/exhibitions/exhibitions/2020/taro-izumi.html
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ex.taroizumi/Artist Website: http://taroizumi.com/en/
Contact: taroizumistudio@gmail.com
A title to the theater installation is "Cloud (pillow/ raised-floor storehouse)” (2020). In the title we can find “pillow” that supports our sleep, a state of waiting that is necessary for humans to continue to live, and “warehouse” that continues to preserve the preparatory stages before things happen (*The work inspired by the ancient mice-like mammal described later could also allude to the raised-floor warehouse as a typical ancient building structure in Japan).
This gigantic installation, 14m wide x 5m high x 2.3m deep, is located in the center of the exhibition hall. It has a number of holes on the front surface. Some are covered with white plates and some are not. On each surface of the covering plates, a small metal plate with numbers and alphabet is screwed. These letters indicate the seat numbers of the theaters where one of the recordings actually took place.
If you look inside the installation through the holes, you will notice an enormous image of the audience seats in a huge theater pasted on the wall of this structure like a theater background. In front of this image, there are four small wooden stages lined up that are made of waste wood found at the abandoned factory. Four monitors are put on each stage, showing videos of a packaged beef, green pepper, tomatoes etc. that were kept in the refrigerator and filmed in a special way during my stay in Basel.
A stuffed fox is impressively placed on a shelf attached to the wall inside the installation. This stuffed fox was found in the warehouse/ workshop where I worked in Basel. It had been prepared as an element to someone else's work, but then lay dormant for years. (There is an old legend about the “Ishibutai Kofun, literally means a stone stage tomb in my hometown, Nara Prefecture. It is said that foxes used the flat roof of the stone tomb as their stage for dancing. Coffins and burial accessories inside the tomb have been lost over the decades, but only the structures made of stones as outer frames of the tomb have remained like a vessel.)
《Cloud (pillow/ raised-floor storehouse)》(2020) ©Taro Izumi Photo: Franz Wamhof
Each element consisting of this work has one thing in common: They indicate a mode of "waiting/standby,” and are materials that have experienced such a mode.
Thinking about this mode of “waiting” and doing experiments with it has been one of the key themes that I have continuously explored. Affected in many ways by the covid-19 pandemics, the current circumstance we are facing may be an opportunity to think about such an idea and explore it further. We may also need to take a fresh look at the systems generating cultures, which are based on the civilized modern society that humans have established.
For example, if we take the state of a painting displayed in a museum and seen by the public as an “operation mode,” then the state of a painting stored in storage and not seen by the audience can be said a “standby mode.” If we extend this hypothesis to the situation of theaters, we can say that a theater in an operation mode is when an event is being held and the audience fills the seats. Conversely, the rest of the time, a theater can be said being in a “standby mode,” like a vessel.
凹 (hollow) and 凸 (protrusion) are Chinese characters that are mutually complementing as a pair. An architectural space of a theater can be considered to play a role of 凹 . Although the shapes of these characters ( 凹 and 凸 ) foreshadow their complementary nature, the protruding one ( 凸 ) is more easily noticeable in our world. In this sense, the stage programs are more visible and eye-catching and the theater space itself becomes unconsciously a background. Namely, the space is formed from the surroundings, like this character ( 凹 ) indicates.
If the background does not exist, the foreground cannot be recognized. However, those lay as a background is hard to catch our consciousness because it is difficult to distinguish between a “standby mode” and an “operation mode.” For example, we take a mountain as something motionless and huge, representing a long “standby mode,” however, each tree, insect, and animal on the mountain is always active and is changing at a furious pace, which we can easily imagine.
Installation view, Taro Izumi. ex, Museum Tinguely, 2020. ©Taro Izumi Photo: Franz Wamhof
Moreover, even if something is in a “standby mode” and unseen, it doesn’t mean its existence disappears. In today's society where the Internet is omnipresent, the number of visible things is far more than ever before. The invisible (not showing) is considered to be absent from existing. For example, in a video production, which is based on the premise of editing, people tend to accept the contents of the video as if they were a living copy of the reality despite of the fact that there are always things that are invisible between the scenes and that are cut out during editing.
For this theater piece, it was also significant to have the process of having actual staff members of the theaters record a sound in their real theater space. Even if the recorded sound doesn't reflect something clearly indicating human presence, the person who recorded was there, and so was the theater. In other words, what can be proven or visible is not always the most essential thing. There is always something that humans cannot recognize. Thus, it is necessary to take such unrecognizable things as something potential, rather than ignoring it because it is not perceivable.
This way of thinking leads to the topic of our cultural activities: Cultural activities are not only valuable at the moment they prove their existence, but they are much more precious since they are always underlying like a background or 凹 that has formed the existence of humanities, even if they are not readily apparent to the general public. It is the "mass of silence" you have recorded for us that represents this fact.
《Cloud (pillow/ raised-floor storehouse)》(2020) ©Taro Izumi Photo: Franz Wamhof
Now I would like to move on the other essential element to this work.
In front of the huge theater installation, five sets of chair-like objects are lined up respectively in two rows. A chair in the second row is equipped with a large number of lamps like those in a make-up room and a smartphone that is fixed on top of the tripod standing out from the hole in the middle of the seat. A chair in the first row is occupied by an object with clothes in a metal frame, which is inspired by the back of the theater audience sitting in the row in front of the one. By making a reservation through the online booking form, anyone can watch the part of the work and listen to the sound through the smartphones as if they were sitting in the chair in the second row.
However, the sight may be blocked by the brightly colored surfaces of the aforementioned objects inspired by the back of other audience like an obstacle, making it impossible to view the entire installation.
A number of digital contents and virtual systems that allow online visitors to experience the exhibition through cyber spaces and video broadcasts has been released for those who cannot come to see exhibitions at museums due to the pandemic. Here, on the contrary, by deliberately blocking the sight of the viewers, the situation has been developed where the system is designed to show things in front of the camera but not everything is visible.
Generally at the theater, heads and backs of the audience in the front rows, lighting system, and walls of the space are all within the sight of the audience, however, the spacial presentation prevents them from being aware of those presence. In this way, the audience "experiences" the work “Cloud (pillow/ raised-floor storehouse)” through a kind of inconvenient way of foregrounding what is usually turned into a background.