ART-PRESENTATION: Takamatsu Jiro

Takamatsu Jiro was an influential artist, theorist, and teacher in ‘60s and ‘70s Japan. His work combined subversive and playful aspects of Dada and Surrealism with an idiosyncratic use of Minimalism’s refined visual language. After finishing studies in oil painting at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1958, Takamatsu worked in a range of mediums, including sculpture, photography, painting, drawing, and performance, and probed the material and metaphysical foundations of artistic practice.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Kayne Griffin Corcoran Archive

The solo exhibition of Takamatsu Jiro at Kayne Griffin Corcoran includes the monumental sculptural work “Rusty Ground”, originally exhibited in Documenta 6 (1977), a selection of paintings from the “Shadow” series, a large number of drawings from categorically different stages in the artist’s career, as well as photographs. Jiro Takamatsu’s career spanned over forty years, during which time his considerable influence extended as an artist, theorist and teacher in Japanese postwar culture. He represented Japan at the 1968 Venice Biennale, winning the Carlo Cardazzo Prize, and he exhibited at the Paris Biennial (1969). São Paulo Biennial (1973), and Documenta 6 in Kassel (1977). Like Japan’s Gutai Bijutsu Kyōkai (1954–72), a group that sought to move away from museums, galleries, and other institutional settings, Takamatsu co-founded with Genpei Akasegawa and Natsuyuki Nakanishi, the Hi Red Center, an experimental art collective that staged guerrilla style happenings in vibrant gestures of anti-art. Taking place during a period of rapid development in Japan, their actions should be seen in tandem with the international Fluxus Movement and as developing from the Japanese Gutai group’s earlier avant-garde manifestos. Takamatsu sought to take art outside of the confines of traditional and institutional settings, collapsing the boundaries between art and life. In the late 1960s. The group carried out actions in Tokyo to call attention to issues faced in the postwar urban climate. It also sought to collapse the boundaries between art and through objects such as one-sided reproductions of a 1.000 yen note (Model 1000-Yen Note, 1963). For this, the artists were charged with counterfeiting. At the high profile trial in August 1966, Hi Red Center restaged some of its most well-known works as evidence. They were found guilty. Jiro Takamatsu’s body of work and its concepts were a major influence to Mono-ha artists, who were the generation proceeding Takamatsu. Linking to Arte Povera and Post-Minimalism, Mono-ha celebrated the use of natural materials and objects, emphasizing the importance of materiality and the environment. The 40-year trajectory of Takamatsu’s career can and has been organized into categorical series. These classifications are not exclusive from one another and have often been considered simultaneously while in the process of development. For example, “Space in Two-Dimensions” (1977–82), a series prominently represented in this exhibition, was born alongside the conclusion of the “Compound” era (1974–77), and mingled in complex mutual relationships with the series “Space” and “Poles and Space” (1977–82). Well before the “Compound” era, Takamatsu began his exploration into the philosophical depths of absence as a state of pure potentiality. In this phase, the artist began his use of the shadow as source material. Early “Shadow” era works began in 1964 and the exploration continued throughout the artist’s life. Inspired by images of shadows in 19th-century Japanese painting and woodcuts as well as by real-life shadows cast on paper sliding-doors in domestic settings, Takamatsu’s “Shadow” series (1964–98) investigated the formal underpinnings of painting through delicate depictions of shadows (of keys or human figures) in enamel and acrylic. Takamatsu’s practice, rooted in vast philosophical origins, shifts across appearance and materials sometimes making it difficult to discern. He worked to create relationships between objects and languages fixed to the real existence and the psychological form of existence. His work, in the end, was a search for his own existence through the medium of his art.

Info: Kayne Griffin Corcoran, 1201 S La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, Duration: 30/1-26/3/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.kaynegriffincorcoran.com