John Cage
Performs James Joyce
by Takahiko Iimura
Takahiko iimura Media Art Institute, Tokyo,
Japan, 1985/2005
DVD, 15 mins., B&W
Sales, $US100 (personal); $US400 (institutions)
(No ISBN)
Fluxus
Replayed
by Takahiko Iimura
Takahiko iimura Media Art Institute, Tokyo,
Japan, 1991/2005
DVD, 30 mins., B&W
Sales, $US100 (personal); $US400 (institutions)
ISBN 4-901181-24-6.
Distributors website: http://www.takaiimura.com/home.html
Reviewed by Mike Leggett
Creativity & Cognition Studios
University of Technology Sydney
legart@ozemail.com.au
Taka Iimura is a senior figure among contemporary
Japanese artists and has been working
with film, sound and video since the 1960s.
He was one of several Japanese who, coming
from a 20th Century tradition
of avant-garde intervention,1
contributed to the Fluxus group in the
60s. Like many media artists, Iimura made
recordings of contemporaries and their
work. Alongside his film and video artworks,
(the video Observer/Observed reviewed
in Leonardo 35.1), portable video
enabled documentation, (and general note
making), more economically than film.
As the cycle of experimentation moves
through another generation, glimpses of
precursors through archive recordings
of this kind help ground artists
surviving words and artworks.
John Cage (1912-1992) as the senior figure
of Fluxus (NYC), active experimentally
since the late 30s, is the subject of
a video portrait shot by Iimura in 1985,
released in 1991 and made available on
DVD in 2005. Cage had a long-standing
fascination with the work of James Joyce,
in particular Finnegans Wake, the
book becoming the basis of many works,
the best known of which is the Roaratorio
an Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake.
Commissioned by German radio and IRCAM
in Paris the sound recording was completed
in 1979, lasted about an hour and was
a 62 track mix of the sounds referred
to in the text, the text itself as prepared
(using a mesostic system), and read by
Cage, together with music played by the
Irish traditional music players of the
day.
Roaratorio is one of the classics
of Cages oeuvre 2 and
in Iimuras 15-minute recording,
John Cage Performs James Joyce,
Cage presents the core of the spoken part
of the work. Its composition, like many
of his other works, is aided by the I-Ching.
Here he briefly explains that none of
the sentences (sic) in Finnegans Wake
are selected, only words, syllables and
letters, from different pages according
to the chance decisions made by consulting
the I-Ching and its representational
hexagrams. In this way the 624 pages of
the book are compressed into 12 pages
of text, and it is one of these pages
that we see him holding. He reads from
it, sings it, and then, hustling close
to the camera and its microphone, whispers
it. At the bottom of the screen are superimposed
each time, two lines of sub-titling synchronised
with the text he is using.
Iimuras presence is felt but not
seen, though we hear him responding to
Cages explanations at the outset.
Cages voice is not strong; he is
in his seventies, and we strain to hear
him against the noise of New York traffic
coming through the window in the background
of a sunlit room. His demeanour remains
buoyant, at one point making light of
a fumble he makes with a watch he is holding,
an event incorporated into the flow of
the tape. Like so many of his initiatives,
the line between the artwork and its making
is blurred, a statement aided and amplified
by Iimuras collaboration in its
making.
In Fluxus Replayed also released
in 2005, Iimura documents an event in
1991 held to reproduce historical performances
by NYC-based Fluxus artists of the 1960s.
The S.E.M Ensemble together with some
of the Fluxus artists themselves, perform
works by Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Dick
Higgins, George Brecht, Allison Knowles,
Ben Patterson, Jackson Mac Low and Emett
Williams. Iimura has edited together the
sounds and images captured by two cameras
as raw evidence of the goings-on, with
scant regard for the conventions of continuity
editing, thus maintaining the document
in the space between the moment of recording
and that of viewing. Time compression
is only obvious in Onos Sky Piece
for Jesus Christ (1965) as the baroque
instrumental ensemble are wound around
with white paper, accumulating as a series
of jump cuts to the point where their
music is reduced to a series of bumps
and scrapes, before the musicians are
man-handled off the stage, still attached
to their chairs and instruments.
Again, Iimura gives some idea to younger
generations of how these early precursors
to contemporary performance art appeared
to audiences, in a setting typical of
the genre church hall ecclesiastical
architecture, painted walls, wooden floor.
Though much of this work was sound-based,
produced collaboratively for group performance
using chance determinations and framed
with a sense of the aesthetics of noise,
the written scores or instructions for
each piece may well have satisfied many
members of the audience. Glimpsed in the
background, some walking around, others
squirming in their seats, the probably
overlong evening has been bravely foreshortened
into a useful 30-minute document by the
artist with the video camera.
Notes:
1. Two publications on this subject: Into
Performance: Japanese women artists in
New York, by Midori Yoshimoto, Rutgers
University Press, 2005; Dada in Japan:
Japanische avant-garde 1920-1970,
by Stephan von Wiese, Jutta Hulsewig and
Yoshio Shirakawa, Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf,
1983.
2. An extensive discography now exists
for Cage and other sound artists, together
with collected reviews, samples and the
means to buy recordings at http://www.moderecords.com/main.html.