Tatsumi Orimoto

It's No Wonder

The New York Times

"Tatsumi Orimoto created “Bread Man, Tokyo, October 7, 2024" exclusively for T and had the work documented and photographed by his longtime assistant, Noritoshi Motoda. “Orimoto had been influenced by the Fluxus artists and daily life and objects in late 1960s and 1970s New York City … and, since his youth in 1960s Japan, he’s loved bread," says Motoda, noting that Orimoto has done about 200 similar performances since 1991.." - Ella Quittner - New York Times Magazine

Sachiko Abe

Cut

Chapter 1

Tokyo in Springtime, outside the temples are surrounded by flowers

of Jasmine and pieces of cut papers that move gently in the breeze,

maybe they are there to catch spirits accumulated in the stories of a

city?

Chapter 2

Before Sachiko Abe became an artist she was part of the Self-

Defence Forces of Japan, this story did not begun here, but starts

again in another time with an exposure. When sitting in a

presentation by Bernd Behr that included a reference to Hiroshima,

I remembered Paul Virilio in his book War And Cinema had

articulated the idea of exposure, that is the exposure I refer to: a

shock in history where ideas were released like stumbling prisoners

onto a future world. In the measurement of time for an image to

reveal itself we must always attend to the decay of meaning. To

allow this memory to pass after 911 would be a cruel forgetting,

New York City was still in shock when I first encountered Sachiko

Abe at PS1 in 2004, in cutting the time between one story and

another, we could ask whose story is a work of art anyway?

Chapter 3

Sachiko Abe stopped being a soldier because of the dislike of

simulated violence and could no longer push the bayonet of

a gun into a dummy. “The life of an artist seemed so free”,

becoming inspired by Gallery Soap and meeting artists,

Sachiko Abe had decided on a new career.

The first artwork, Elevator Girlfriend, the uniform referenced

elevator attendants who worked the department stores in the boom

time of the Yen economy. Many aspired to this dream job and the

performance reflected such ambition with a noticeable twist: the

constant imaginings that detoured the hostess of their mechanised

journey perhaps questioned the expectations and perhaps even

the relational ethics of a surprised audience.It was Brion Gyson who showed William Burroughs the technique of the cut up, to take the thing apart is when something is revealed as an absence, as in measurement this equates to the production of

time. The reading of data streamed in the dead of night when other

theories are half asleep, in this cut between scenes can an image

remain?.

Chapter 4

After the success of Elevator Girlfriend, Sachiko Abe’s next

performance invited an audience to participate in a staged act of

transgression. In Jub Jub people were asked to force blades into

the body of a doll and in so doing perhaps reveal the feelings they

have learnt to repress. One might be tempted to see in this a

prediction of the new gothic that dominates mainstream media,

Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Women Of The Dunes remixed by the half

forgotten shadows of a post apocalypse. In 1948 Tatsumi Hijikata

played the recorded scream of Antonin Artaud to Kazuo Ohno and

the dance begun. In this Theatre Of Cruelty where The Ring can

become a deadly feedback loop between fiction and fact, she cuts

as if in a dream, the scissors begin at the periphery of a white sheet

of paper and spiral towards the angled centre.

Chapter 5

Stop, rewind and play that again, about the time in the Self-Defence

Forces, the artist speaks to neutralise the stereotype, to joke about the

misconceptions of the and what it means. The artist knows about

the Yayoi Kasuma, so many have compared them, she

laughs because for Sachiko Abe creativity is not about beauty but instead a

resistance to the will of others. In order to contemplate taking a life

one begins a self abstraction and begins to understand that is an

appropriate lesson for our world. It is a discipline of thought she

explores as an artist, although having not formally attended an

institution until later. I hear Sachiko Abe speak and it is concise,

playfully reminding us of the cultural tropes that are the norm like

the restrictions within objectivity placed on a woman's body or the

precision needed to identify a military target.

Chapter 6

The story of a name Sachiko: a name that translates into English as

smiling child, a name given to a baby found by a roadside in early

Spring and raised by a family of Shamans. A disappeared story of a

previous name, a world turned upside down in penance for the

incapacity of this story to bear words. This is the reduction of a page

to a line, a series of lines that turn the medium of communication

into threads. The rhythm of the work seeks eternity in the echo that

recedes to a place that can always be elsewhere: the exposure

outside of time and the rupture of birth and death.

The artist defines a work through persistence, the critical texts

sliced together between quotation marks are the noisy debris of a

discourse. The work of art cuts up a world and then leaves the relics

of significance in it’s place. With the history of performance these

issues become complex, the artist creates possibilities for an

audience to loose the artwork in an effort to perceive it, there is

nowhere to go expect within the experience. This concept of course

has multiplicities and lingers in questions of perception, division and

synthesis.

Chapter 7

There is a hospital room where a patient is waiting for bandages to

be removed, a pink bow holds a white tag in place, it has a name

and a date of birth. These are the endless whispers that pulls

everything together in stories, on a bed that, bound for her

own safety where this artist used blades to free arms from the ties.

Now when performing the sound of the cutting scissors reminds her

of the mask worn, that pumped oxygen into the lungs. A flight

from hospital in a nightdress and took to the city where the artist

wondered looking for signs of life, instead finding a collage of

memories that were not hers, we can only ask what had happened

since training as a soldier? It was here that developed the

interest in telling stories, or rather in the performance of stories

that precede the plume of incense, before it is all over and the dead

become names that disappear into time.

Chapter 8

The white paper on a wall with the artist name and date of birth,.

all stories are complicated, they are fiction, this one starts with

scissors cutting into the page.

Eric Lesdema Fortunes of War (Book) Photography in Alter Space

An extended edit of Eric Lesdema’s photographic series of the same name, with 83 colour photographs and essays from leading academics which analyse how this work provides an alternative approach to documentary photography. Twenty-first-century interpretations and applications of photography are questioned, as are warfare and its cultural framework.

Eric Lesdema’s photographic series Fortunes of War was awarded the UN Nikon World Prize in 1997. Originally a series of fifteen images, this extended edit includes 83 colour photos, accompanied by a series of essays by leading academics in the field. The essays explore ideas raised by the prescient nature of the work, offering a highly original and engaging debate about its alternative approach to documentary photography, which views images as an alternate space with the potential to project events rather than record them.

In exploring an approach that cuts against the traditional concept central to documentary photography since its inception, the book thus raises important questions about twenty-first century interpretations and applications of photography and media. With thought-provoking research and a diverse array of essay contributions, Fortunes of War proposes new lines of interdisciplinary investigation, reflection and inquiry.

Available

• ISBN 9781783209040

• Hardback

• 220 x 220 mm

• www.intellectbooks.com/fortunes-of-war