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
She 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, she speaks to neutralise the stereotype, to joke about the
misconceptions of her and what her work means. She knows about
the artists Yayoi Kasuma, so many have compared them, she
laughs because for her 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 the artist 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 their 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 she was bound for her
own safety where she used blades to free her arms from the ties.
Now when performing the sound of the cutting scissors reminds her
of the mask she wore that pumped oxygen into her lungs. A flight
from hospital in a nightdress took her to the city where she
wondered looking for signs of a life, instead she found a collage of
memories that were not hers, we can only ask what had happened
since her training as a soldier? It was here that she then became
interested 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