Seeing / Hearing / Speaking

by Takahiko Iimura.
Published by Takahiko Iimura Media Art Institute in cooperation with The Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University, Euphonic Inc., and the Tokyo Instutute of Polytechnics, Tokyo & New York, 2002.
DVD-ROM. Trade, $200.00.
Distribution: Heure Exquise!, France.

Reviewed by Fred Andersson
Department of Art History and Musicology, Lund University
HS 59, Box 117, 221 00 Lund, Sweden

konstfred@hotmail.com

This DVD is basically a presentation of the idea, structure and different realizations of Takahiko Iimura’s video- and performance piece Talking to myself. The title Seeing / Hearing / Speaking refer to the two general sections of the DVD. In the one section, called Hearing / Speaking, a 2001 revision of the original piece is presented and performed. The other section, Seeing, is a shorter piece in which the act of talking to oneself is replaced by the one of seeing oneself. The visual system used in Seeing, including two video cameras and two monitors, is taken from Iimura’s earlier Observer/Observed pieces. The DVD also contains the video recording of the original talking piece from 1978, and a documentation of how a section of the piece was conceived as a video installation in 1985. This material sheds some light on Iimuras method of reworking ideas over long spans of time. One more video of earlier date is included, namely Talking in New York. This is a dreamlike documentary in which Iimura repeatedly, in both English and Japanese, utters the circular phrase "I hear myself at the same time that I speak to myself at the same time that…". This performance was done at various locations in New York. There are also some short texts on the DVD. Simplicity and clarity characterizes this excellent presentation, and it surely reveals some of the most essential ideas of Iimura’s work.

If I was to write a monograph on Iimura, I could well use as a heading a quote from his film-script Talking Picture from 1981: "I have nothing to show". Still, this nothingness is, to borrow a metaphor from another of Iimura's texts, comparable to the stillness of a wave, or to a film strip showing immobile objects. Even if nothing seem to move in that kind of film, there is of course a constant movement – 24 frames per second! Iimura’s dryly rigorous investigations of the space/time of film and video viewing give the patient spectator and listener a rewarding experience of losing ground. What’s at stake here is the ontological status of seeing, hearing and speaking. The talking piece is an instructive example of this. When it was first realized in the late Seventies, Iimura had read David B. Allison's English translation of Derrida's La Voix et le phenomène (misleadingly titled Speech and Phenomena). Despite the limitations of any translation of French into English, Iimura must immediately have recognized a close affinity between his own work and one major theme of Derrida’s critique. That very theme is contained in the following sentence taken from Allison's translation: "When I speak, it belongs to the phenomenological essence of this operation that I hear myself at the same time that I speak".

By simply isolating the phrase "I hear myself at the same time that I speak" and adding the words "to myself", Iimura had the basic material for his talking piece. In order to create what he terms a "phenomenological operation", he turned the phrase into the loop mentioned above. An inversion of the original statement then appeared: "I speak to myself at the same time that I hear". By exhausting the logical alternatives of interchanging singular pronouns within the original phrase and its inversion, he ended up with a number of variations such as: "I hear myself at the same time that you speak…", "He speaks to himself at the same time that I hear…" etc. This minimal poetry opens up a vista of unresolved questions already present in Derrida’s text.

What if the hearing and speaking is all in my head? What if I hear my thinking and think my hearing (to turn it all around in Iimura’s own manner). Can I hear myself, or any person, if I don’t hear myself think what I hear? Is the other really another? Is the same time really the same? When the variations were systematized as a video script for the original talking piece, a visual dimension was added. The footage shows Iimura reading the text lines, but there are frequent and systematic contradictions between sound and image – lip movements and voice being out of sync, superposition of identical recordings that are out of sync, lip movements without voice, and voice without lip movements. There are also more subtle contradictions. In tape nr 5, in which only Iimura’s mouth and ear are shown, the statements beginning with "I hear myself…" and "I speak to myself…" are first accompanied by the images of ear and mouth respectively. Later on, however, the relations are reversed. What all these contradictions suggest is the purely subjective character of hearing in relation to speech and sight (you can see that someone speaks, but you can’t see if he/she really listens).

Without getting too much into detail here, the following observations could be made (and I think they’re essential): the image of the ear has nothing to do with the validity of the statement "I hear". All we see is an ear. We can’t see the hearing. The ear is nothing but an outer, conventional symbol of the inner activity that we call hearing. In this context, which also involves Iimura’s bilingual sensitivity, it’s interesting that "I hear" rhymes with "I ear" or "my ear". How do we know, then, that what we see is really Iimura’s own ear? When dismembered, the parts of a body or an image lose the identity given by the whole. And when the ear image is replaced by a mouth image, the combination of the statement "I hear myself…" and a mouth could be seen as an ideogram of the idea of hearing as inner speech.

At this point it’s difficult, at least for a Scandinavian, not to think of Bergman’s film Persona. The leading characters in Persona are a nurse and her patient – an actress called Elisabet, who has suddenly ceased to speak. In one of the episodes in the film, the nurse isn’t sure if she has just heard Elisabet’s voice or if it’s been an inner experience only. At the end, when the nurse cracks up and begins to confuse herself with her patient, a speaking mouth is zoomed in as she screams: "Jag ar inte Elisabet Vogel!" (I am not Elisabet Vogel). The strangeness of seeing a mouth speak without seeing the rest of the face has to do with the loss of identity in fragmentation. Self identity or self perception is constantly at stake in works in which Iimura insistently repeats phrases like "I am Takahiko Iimura", "This is not Takahiko Iimura", etc. In the end, memory and consciousness might well be thought of as the circle/spiral of "…I hear myself at the same time that I speak to myself at the same time that I hear myself at the same time that…", or the infinite tunnel produced when the camera films the connected video screen in the work Seeing on the DVD.

This would remind us of the old paradox that we tend to think of the mind as a small figure sitting inside of our heads – a figure who would then of course have to carry an even smaller figure within its own head, and so on for infinity. There is no final, essential person or identity, and the idea that there is one is absurd. Instead, it must be the dialogue between me and myself, and between ego and alter, that breaks the infinite regression. It seems that what Takahiko Iimura basically does is to show that there is a spatial logic that makes it possible to define this dialogue/separation in terms of both vision and language(s). This has nothing to do with the peculiar qualities of visual and aural sensations as such, even if it might be easy to experience poetic and aesthetic dimensions in even the most matter-of-fact works of Iimura.