People's hearts are not open books. When we open them up - if that action does not completely destroy them - there are only further mysteries.
‘I don’t know why I just had to’ Installation. Tenjinyama Art Studio, Sapporo, Japan (October, 2023.)
'I don't know why, I just had to' refers to the compulsion to create as well as destroy. The exhibition consisting of two installations created using the artist’s old university textbooks (Japanese language.) One installation was presented in the small library-gallery situated at the ground floor of Tenjinyama Art Studio, open to the public, the other was in the artist’s guest apartment, complete with electric fans and unwashed glasses, open to visitors for a private viewing once a day during the exhibit.
Apart from the artist’s uncontrollable compulsion to destroy school books (and the complimentary compulsion to make something beautiful out of that violence), ‘I don’t know I just had to’ was originally born out of meditating on the idea of “use value” (commodification) of both art and higher education as art becomes increasingly professionalised. Vallorized somewhat by art critic’s Claire Bishop’s viral article ‘Information Overload’ (2023) which analyses research based art and the phenomenon of art that forces audiences to wrestle with oceans of data. Using textbooks ‘I don’t know I just had to’ plays with these ideas. Displaying the academic as aesthetic, rendering all the “data” incomprehensible, the research behind the work: pointless. *While still “drowning the audience in text.”
'I don't know why, I just had to' is my art practice summed up. Art is as far from the professional as it can get. Though not anti-intellectual, not academic. Art is a necessity, a sanity-restoring survival strategy. An irrational impulse, a compulsion to both wreck things and make things. Chaotic and not just in a quirky way - the process is both violent and gorgeous . The idea - the word -"recycling" too clean, the work is just as much about destroying things as it is making something beautiful. Potential futures, other people's work, thrown away. Like how being an artists is throwing away certain futures - stable futures with "real jobs."
Messy.
Thanks to the staff at Tenjinyama Art Studio for the support and to Reneé (@vomitodeartista on Instagram.) for documenting the work.