Tetsuya Yamada: Commuter
Accent Gallery
February 4 – April 22, 2012
Gallery talk: Thursday, March 8, 7 pm
Documenting the natural world and our landscape is the concern of two exhibitions currently on view at the Rochester Art Center. In the case of Jochen Lempert, we are presented with images and an overall aesthetic reminiscent of scientific classification and categorization, but also utilizing subjects that may be interpreted as romantic and ephemeral—waves, birds, clouds, etc. These images exist in the realms of both the controlled and the uncontrolled, from the technical conditions of a laboratory to the unrestrained possibilities of the natural landscape. While Lempert focuses mainly on the plant and animal world, Yamada seeks to document our surroundings via a mechanical understanding of space, movement, and vision. In his installation Commuter, Yamada presents us with two distinct components. In one gallery space, the audience is confronted by a slowly revolving wheel, it’s black vertical lines creating patterns and motion suggestive of the views the artist encountered while commuting by train in his native Tokyo. Passing regular and irregular vertical structures at speed created a visual melding and blurring of space, highlighting the principles of perception both mechanically and physically. Trained on the wheel are two video cameras, focusing on the upper and lower rows of black vertical lines. These cameras provide the signals that generate two video projections installed in an adjacent gallery space. The vertical bars shift back and forth rhythmically, providing a fixed and specific gaze that is isolated physically from its point of origin. This provides a unique perspective, and as John Archer states in his essay on Yamada’s work, “affords a challenging and energizing encounter with the speed, blur, rhythm, vertigo, and indeed the mesmerism of mechanized modern life”.
Commuting is a condition of modern life. As Western society has industrialized over the past two centuries, the workplace and place of residence have separated. Large-scale manufacturing plants and urban centers housing administrative and retail enterprises have bred complementary tracts devoted entirely to housing. And so people commute. Motorized transportation systems, including trains, buses, and freeways, have evolved to make it all possible. Day in and day out, those systems both facilitate and regulate our lives, framing and defining our experience for substantial blocks of time.
In densely built metropolitan areas such as Tokyo, where Tetsuya Yamada grew up, a vast portion of the population relies on trains for commuting to and from work and school. For Yamada, each school day for sixteen years began and ended with a train ride. He spent much of that commuting time looking out the train door or window, watching as objects seemed to flash by: rails, track bed, curbs, wires, and other trains. As these objects blurred and merged into one another, patterns emerged—rhythms, striations, interruptions, repetitions—creating images and experiences of a new and different order. Unlike the experience of standing in place, or of unpowered movement (such as walking or running), experience of mechanized speed creates a quintessentially modern aesthetic dimension. It is the essence of this experience that Yamada’s Commuter distills and refines.
Yamada approaches this subject through his longstanding artistic engagement with modern processes of industrial production and reproduction, which, like commuting, profoundly shape who we are and how we live. The fruits of a consumer society are possible because standardized products can be produced in endless quantities. And just like consumer products, works of art can be mechanically produced in multiples. For generations, critics have raised profound questions about the authenticity, and even the efficacy, of works of art so produced. Does the work of art lose a certain “aura” when it is no longer a unique object hand-fashioned by the artist, but instead is just one of countless identical objects produced by machine? Such was the focus of cultural critic Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935). On one hand, he noted, reproduction severed the work of art from its history and from tradition; on the other hand, reproduction allowed the work of art to engage viewers in new ways, in their own time, place, and context. In either case, reproduction irreversibly changed the terms of the artistic product and the aesthetic encounter.
Social critics, from the 1920s to the present day, have similarly questioned the effect of mechanical reproduction on the quality of modern life. If the only materials we have for shaping our lives are mass-produced according to standardized designs, will we be crippled in our efforts to shape what we do and who we are? Or to achieve political awareness, and effect social change?
Standardization and mass production are nevertheless here to stay and, as Benjamin indicated, the consequences are not necessarily bad. Indeed they afford stimulating new dimensions of artistic expression and aesthetic experience. Such was the case with Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), a standard, industrially produced urinal that the artist reoriented horizontally, signed, and declared to be a work of art. Duchamp not only asked the viewer to transcend the limitations imposed by viewing the object only for its utility, but also questioned the very nature of aesthetics. Other artists, who have pursued degrees of perfection and finish possible only through industrial processes (such as the work of Minimalist sculptors like Donald Judd), likewise In Morice, and his earlier installation, Chant: Beyond the Ready-made (2005), Yamada explored this new aesthetic register by using some of the most banal of industrial products, the forms from which plumbing fixtures are produced. Making multiple sets of new objects based on these forms, and arranging them in orderly, repetitive series, he precipitated a sort of “meta-aura.” The individual objects, as Benjamin might have argued, have no intrinsic auras. But in Yamada’s work, the scale, patterns, and rhythms of the assemblage achieve an aesthetic of repetition and counter-utility that engages both the process and the product of industrial production.
In Commuter, Yamada continues to engage mechanization and repetition, but turns the focus around. When riding on a train, what we see through the window or the door is not a mechanically produced object; rather, it is we riders who are the mechanized products. From the very earliest days of railroad passenger travel, riders recognized that, sitting in rows and conducted along a prescribed route, they were the goods being produced and transported. As
John Ruskin noted as early as 1849, the railway journey “transmutes a man from a traveler into a living parcel.”*
Yamada engages this changed relationship, working from the perspective of the traveler who, as mechanized product, experiences a new kind of travel, through mechanized space. The seemingly passing environment that the passenger experiences is not itself in motion, but because of the train’s motion it appears to move (even as the passenger sits or stands still). It produces an experience of a very different order: landscape, tracks, rail bed, wires, all transform into a richly articulated blur, with its own pronounced rhythms, striations, interruptions, and repetitions, affording an experience that can be mesmerizing, meditative, energizing, soothing, or even transcendent, challenge and expand the aesthetic experience. Yamada’s recent work, such as Morice (2007), extends this line of inquiry, transforming objects that explicitly emulate industrial production and prefabrication into a new aesthetic register of tactility, tectonics, and erotica depending on the rider and circumstances. When he looks out of a train, Yamada says, “My mind goes somewhere else,” detached from real time and from the public realm, engaged instead by the intense and complex aesthetic of the kinetic space outside.To explore the aesthetic of this space, Yamada has created an installation with two linked parts. The first is an instrument that physically, and in real time, generates visual rhythms and patterns equivalent to those experienced during mechanized travel. As the large mechanical wheel rotates, different patterns of regularly spaced vertical black lines pass in front of the video cameras, which—because of the frame rate at which the cameras record—end up capturing rhythmic patterns of vertical bars moving forward or backward at varying speeds. The second part is a projection of these images at large scale for the viewer to experience in isolation—in effect recreating the isolation of mind the train rider experiences when transfixed by the seemingly passing space outside. Counterparts to the seemingly passing railroad ties, support frames for overhead electric wires, or other railside structures, the projected video images are a distillation of the rhythmic and patterned spatial aesthetic that the train rider experiences. For the viewer, this affords a challenging and energizing encounter with the speed, blur, rhythm, vertigo, and indeed the mesmerism of mechanized modern life.
By John Archer, for the Minneapolis Institute of Arts Minnesota Artist Exhibition Series
John Archer is professor and chair of the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota
*John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London: Smith, Elder, and Co.), 111. Also see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the 19th Century, translated by Anselm Hollo (New York: Urizen Books, 1979), 59, 195, 203–4.More at tetsuyayamada.com.
Image: Commuter, 2008
Installation using aluminum motorized wheel (45”x80”x80”), video camera, light, tripod, projector.