Surely the most narcissistic of all mediums, video art since its rise to fame in the 1960s has been closely associated with explorations of the self and, more broadly, the nature of identity. At the forefront of the rise of video art was Takahiko Iimura, an artist whose explorations of selfhood delved deeper than many of his contemporaries and successors have.
His first film, On Eye Rape, was a collaboration with Natsuyuki Nakanishi and was essentially an assertion of the Japanese public’s right to see pubic hair. It was 1962, a time of strict censorship in Japan, and the artists ‘rescued’ an American sex ed. film from a bin in Tokyo before splicing pornographic imagery throughout it and punching holes in most of the frames.
Having spent most of the ‘60s in New York mingling and collaborating with the likes of Yayoi Kusama, Andy Warhol and Yoko Ono, Iimura went back to Japan in the early ‘70s and has continued his work in many parts of the world. His later films and videos became less focused on social criticism and more involved with abstract ideas of language, spectatorship, time and space. While he has remained radically experimental he was always deeply connected with Zen spirituality and traditional Japanese aesthetics; in two films he looked at the Japanese idea of ‘ma’, a unique concept of space and time, which he explored through the famous Zen garden of Ryoan-ji.
Below is a video still from his work AIUEONN Six Features (1993), which comprises distorted faces that visually animate the six vowels of the Japanese language. If you want to see the original (assuming such a thing exists in the land of new media art) The Collected Films of Takahiko Iimura No 1 features AIUEONN along with his Filmmakers documentary (a portrait of his favourite avant-garde filmmakers including Stan Brakhage, Stan Vanderbeek, Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, and of course, himself), as well as several other seminal works.
