“You are still thinking in terms of a life with a real face. The mask does not deceive and is not deceived. How about putting on a new mask, turning over a new leaf, and starting another life?”

(The Face of Another, Kōbō Abe)

This is my fifth post in a row on the world famous architect Arata Isozaki, and I’m still avoiding saying anything at all about his actual architecture. Reproduced here are stills from the The Face of Another (1966), the third in a series of excellent films by Hiroshi Teshigahara (after Pitfall and The Woman in the Dunes) that were based on novels by Kōbō Abe and scored by the avant-garde composer Toru Takemitsu. Isozaki designed the absurdist sets …

The Japanese spatio-temporal concept of ma suggests a gap, opening, delay or silence. It can be understood as a demarcated in-betweenness in space or time. A room, being the space formed inside walls, is ma. A pause in music, as the gap delineated between audible notes, is also ma. The ideogram for ma (間) comprises the character for ‘gate’ or ‘door’ (門) enveloping the character of ‘sun’ (日) – in this sense it refers to the interval between things, from which light can shine through. Whether the gate is formed by objects in space or sounds in music or actions in the Noh theatre, its opening is the interval that allows the experience of ma, whereby the intangibility of light reveals itself from the nothingness framed between two tangible points.

In 1979 Arata Isozaki curated an exhibition at Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York called MA: Space-Time in Japan. Earlier that decade, the New-York-based Japanese video artist Takahiko Iimura had created several abstract films exploring ma (namely his Models series of 1972, and MA (Intervals) of 1975-77). The two would later collaborate on MA: Space/Time in the Garden of Ryoan-Ji (1989), a meditative video work that transfers the carefully choreographed experience of time and space at the ryōan-ji temple’s 15th century dry garden, into cinematic space-time.

The sixteen-minute film is framed at the beginning and end by fixed shots of the garden – these being the tangible brackets (the gate) within which the interval of ma will be given form. The rest is comprised entirely of slow tracking and zooming shots of the immovable stones and the negative spaces created where they aren’t. As the camera’s eye slowly and steadily scans the breadth of the rectangular garden, and penetrates its depth, we are made aware of how temporal progression relies on space and spatial progression relies on time. The mechanically standardised temporality (computer-controlled tracking and zooming) means that solid objects aren’t privileged over the space that contains them or the space that is created by them. According to Isozaki’s reading of ma in pre-modern Japan, “space was perceived as identical with the events or phenomena occurring in it; that is space was recognised only in relation to time-flow” (MA: Space-Time in Japan, exhibition catalogue).

Photographs I recently took at ryōan-ji in Kyoto:

Before he laughed himself to death after painting a funny old woman, Zeuxis is said to have lost a competition with his fellow painter Parrhasius to see who the greater artist was. While he unveiled a painting of grapes so lifelike that birds flew down from the sky to peck at them, Parrhasius won when he fooled Zeuxis about the very existence of his painting: he portrayed a curtain so realistically that Zeuxis tried to push it aside. Exclaiming that he himself had managed merely to deceive the birds while Parrhasius had deceived the artist, Zeuxis conceded defeat.

That was in 5BC, but images still have the capacity to outwit the eye as a critical organ. The Yokohama-based sister/brother duo Yuka and Kentaro Shimura, aka SHIMURABROS., are driven by a desire to get behind and beyond the illusory two-dimensional surfaces of images. Their recent solo show at Taka Ishii Gallery in Kyoto, Film Without Film, presented four examples from their diverse ten-year collaborative practice, including their acclaimed X-ray Train (2008) (below). With a series of computer-controlled medical CT scans and special liquid crystal film depicting a locomotive engine in transit, the work is self-consciously entwined with the history of the moving image and carries with it essential questions regarding the relationship between image and reality.

The most obvious historical reference here is of course the popular legend about the group of Parisians being struck by panic in 1895 during the world’s first film screening – the Lumière brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un Train en Gare de La Ciotat (‘The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station’) – when they believed the steam locomotive on the screen was actually coming right at them. Unaccustomed to the amazingly realistic illusions created by the new motion pictures, the audience perceived the image as existing in space and were suitably incredulous and terrified.

Whether or not this actually happened, it is interesting that it was also in 1895 that the German physicist William Roentgens would stumble upon his breakthrough discovery of the X-ray and publish his paper Über eine neue Art von Strahlen, outlining the New Kind Of Ray that would allow us to see through opaque surfaces. A hundred and fifteen years down the track (so to speak), SHIMURABROS. have traced these two instances with their X-ray Train where the film’s projected light probes a series of screens and achieves the appearance of mass, inviting viewers to navigate their way around a moving image and experience it as a form with not just width and breadth but also depth.

The blurring of two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality is also the basis of the duo’s new photographic sculpture works on show, Roppongi and Nihombashi (2010) (above). Here the artists scanned the roads of select districts in Tokyo on Google Maps Street View and located several gaps ­– blurred lines that can be located on Street View all around the world, wherever the computer-generated photograph is partially incomplete. They then cast these sections of the road in fibre-reinforced plastic and mounted them so the digital images, including their erroneous creases, become materialised as something that straddles the image/object divide.

Part of the ongoing project to stretch images beyond the limitations of the screen’s flat surface, an earlier video installation, SEKILALA – uncovered family (2006-2008) (above), was also included in the exhibition. Here, a family drama is played out with multiple vantage points as figures appear on three screens in close proximity, facing each other but unable to touch each other. Things seem to them to be within reach, yet as with the grapes and curtains of our antiquity painters, any attempt to grasp hold of them is in vain. This work extends not only the conventional spacial limitations of film, but also the temporal ones. As with the automated, authorless images of Google Maps, the editing of the images here is not conscious, and thus the stories that emerge cannot be predicted. With 26 scenes of varying durations played out randomly, an infinite narrative unfolds of its own accord, and this strategy of indifference raises the question of whether editing without intentionality can still be considered editing.

The rendering of film as form takes a different manifestation in Film Without Film (2010) (above), the exhibition’s titular work. Presented as a response to Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov and his pioneering theories of montage and creative geography, the work gives volume to cinematic images with the application of 3D printer technology. According to the Kuleshov Effect, the assemblage of the images in a film carries more meaning than their content, and while the original found footage used for his Film Without Film experiment is lost, SHIMURABROS. used the surviving text to re-enact it with fragmentary scenes borrowed from notable historical films that were set in Kyoto and are available on public domain. With the light from these films transformed into steel figures and mounted on a clear acrylic base representing a reel, this is evidently film without film but also film about film, a metacinema that has its own layered history wound through it and foregrounded as its raison d’être.

PHOTOS OF X-RAY TRAIN AT THE 2010 BIG IN JAPAN EVENT …

Top images courtesy Taka Ishii Gallery. Big In Japan installation photos by Amelia Groom.

The prolific director / actor / film editor / stand-up comedian / TV presenter / author / poet / painter / sculptor / videogame designer / general no good layabout Beat Takeshi Kitano has taken over the Fondation Cartier in Paris. Described as a “series of dreams”, the show comprises games, inventions, alternative scientific theories, a puppet theatre, paintings, objects and videos in a temporary space designed for the young and young at heart.

In Australia there is currently a retrospective of Kitano’s films for APT6 at GOMA in Brisbane, and his biggest blockbuster Zatôichi is featured at the AGNSW’s current program of Japanese films.

Images courtesy Fondation Cartier

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.