A grand endeavor in the age of the little narrative
Tetsuya Ozaki Arts Journalist

Although there have been many notable pairings between musicians and visual artists throughout history, few have been as long and prolific as the partnership between Ryuichi Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani. The two men first collaborated over two decades ago, when Takatani provided the visual direction for Sakamoto’s opera Life in 1999. Yet their friendship stretches back a decade further, when they were introduced backstage at a Sakamoto concert by the critic Akira Asada circa 1990.^＊1

Takatani studied environmental design at the Kyoto City University of Arts with aspirations of becoming an architect. In 1984, he co-founded the artist collective Dumb Type with classmates from different departments at the university.^＊2Their covalent talents coalesced to create innovative, multidisciplinary work that engages diverse genres and themes.

In 1995, AIDS-related illness claimed Teiji Furuhashi, a founding member of Dumb Type and mentor-like figure to Takatani. However, the group carried on over the intervening years and in 2022 was selected to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale, the oldest and arguably most prestigious forum for contemporary art of its kind^＊3 Sakamoto joined Dumb Type’s fluid roster of collaborators for an installation at the Biennale’s Japan Pavilion with 16 records’ worth of field recordings, originally created for Playback 2022 and contained in this box set.

Alongside his activities with Dumb Type, Takatani has produced a wide body of work under his own name, spanning photography, film, installations, and performances.^＊4Broadly speaking, we can identify two overarching motivation（Motivation） behind his artistic practice. First, his work is directly informed by an exploration of medium（Medium） and perception, which naturally takes vision as its primary locus. For example, in his Topograph (2013) and Toposcan (2013–2020) series, Takatani created video imagery depicting the world as seen through a line-scan camera.^＊5 The resulting beguiling images reveal a curious and unfamiliar world（image）, otherwise invisible outside the human experience of one-point perspective.

This exploration of medium and perception could perhaps also be identified as a throughline in Sakamoto’s musical oeuvre. Takatani’s interest in visuals (i.e., light) dovetails with Sakamoto’s métier in the aural (i.e., sound), as at a fundamental level, both sensory experiences relate to “waves” (i.e., light waves and sound waves).

However, Takatani and Sakamoto share a second, even more pivotal motivation: a reckoning with time and space, seen in nearly all of their collaborations. This was readily apparent in Installation Music (2017) ^＊6and Installation Music 2:Is Your Time (2017–2018), ^＊7 two exhibitions coinciding with the release of Sakamoto’s album, async ^＊8 True to the album title, these exhibitions featured asynchronously mixed 5.1 channel surround sound. Naturally, Sakamoto provided the audio, while Takatani handled the visual and spatial design of the respective exhibition venues. However, such a prima facie division of roles belies the deeply cross-disciplinary interests of both artists. Sakamoto is intimately versed in the visual arts and was tapped to serve as guest director of the Sapporo International Art Festival 2014. Meanwhile, Takatani has collaborated on performance pieces with an illustrious array of musicians including Toru Yamanaka, Ryoji Ikeda, Rei Harakami, Simon Fisher Turner, and Marihiko Hara. Whereas music is conventionally regarded as a temporal art and installations typically focus exclusively on spatial arts, the Installation Music exhibitions deftly transposed music into the lexicon of the installation and vice versa in a singular blending of time and space.

Another remarkable feature of the collaborations between Sakamoto and Takatani is their almost universal engagement with vast themes. Life draws on the sweeping breadth of 20th century history, or what Sakamoto has succinctly summed up as “a century of war and slaughter.” ^＊9Looking at the titles of their subsequent works, we find many examples limning other large themes, such as Forest and Water. ^＊10 In 2021, Sakamoto and Takatani collaborated with the dancer Min Tanaka for 『TIME』^＊11Debuted at the Holland Festival, this “wordless opera” questioned the nature of time, or more precisely, time’s alleged existence. History, the environment, life, time. All are big themes on a scale rarely seen among other artists in recent years.

In 1979, the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard wrote, “In contemporary society and culture—postindustrial society, post-modern culture—the question of the legitimation of knowledge is formulated in different terms. The grand narrative has lost its credibility.”^＊12 Ergo, people nowadays only trust the “little narrative.”

Sakamoto has been called a “postmodern musician.” Lyotard himself referred to John Cage as a “postmodern artist.”^＊13, As Sakamoto’s encyclopedic knowledge of music history extends before and beyond Cage, the postmodern epithet is not inapt. Dumb Type has often similarly been contextualized within the pantheon of so-called “postmodern performance,” influenced by the likes of Pina Bausch, Robert Wilson, Meredith Monk, and Laurie Anderson.

However, “postmodern” is a deceptively empty term with no inherent substance of its own. It is merely a line in the sand, delineating some nebulous break from modernity. Offering his own definition of postmodernity, Sakamoto once said: “When it seems like everything [original] has already been done, it then becomes a question of how to transcend individual eras and recombine a variety of styles. That’s postmodernity.”^＊14 The sentiment resonates with the stylish turntables Takatani designed for Playback 2022, in which we might find traces of his decades-long fascination with the Bauhaus.^＊15

Personally, I think ultramodern would be a more fitting adjective for Sakamoto and Takatani. At any rate, even amidst this Lyotardian loss of faith, they have continued to engage with vast themes. The loftiness of their ambitions and dogged spirit places them in the company of the ultimate modernists such as Marcel Duchamp, who attempted to elucidate the workings （Reluctantly） of the world in The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-1923); or Samuel Beckett, who explored themes of life, death, and existence with plays such as Waiting for Godot (1952) and his “trilogy” of novels published between 1951 and 1953. As examples from the latter half of the 20th century, Alighiero Boetti wove a grand narrative in his tapestries, particularly the Mappa series (1971-1994) of embroidered maps that took on the large themes of geopolitics and world history. Karlheinz Stockhausen spent decades composing his epic opera cycle Licht (Light) between 1977 and 2003, and Jean-Luc Godard examined world and film history in his eight-part Histoire(s) du cinema (1988-1998). Of course, add to this list Dumb Type’s S/N (first performed in 1994). Conceived and directed by Teiji Furuhashi (Takatani also participated as a supporting project member), the work probed themes of life, death, identity, and bio-power. Yet beyond this handful, few other examples come to mind. While there is something to be said for the importance of the little narrative à la Lyotard, one can’t help but feel that something is lacking in our era awash in all-too-miniscule works.

With Lyotard in mind, I think an important distinction is that Sakamoto and Takatani’s stance is more scientific and technological than literary or ideological.^＊16Even Time, which quotes from dreamlike passages by Natsume Soseki and Shen Jiji, （Shinkisei）unfolds on a stage metaphorically set by the cutting-edge research of theoretical physicists such asCarlo Rovelli.^＊17Moreover, both Takatani and Sakamoto have participated in Cape Farewell, ^＊18a project that brings scientists and artists together to think about climate change—a testament to their shared interest and aptitude for matters of the left brain.

This box set comprises 17 recordings made in a total of 16 cities (Tokyo was represented twice). Naturally, the recordings contain many sounds unique to each locale. But as we listen through the collection, we also notice many overlapping elements. We hear the familiar call of insects, birdsong, dogs, and other wildlife. We hear the rhythms of nature in the form of rain, wind, and thunder. We hear the bustle of city streets, markets, footsteps, and human voices in conversation. We also hear music, both instrumental and vocal, all accompanied by the omnipresent mechanical hum of cars, planes, and machines. Nature features most prominently in the field recordings made in Chiang Mai by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. But still, they all inevitably contain the same trio of nature, man, and machine.

There is a certain narrative quality to these recordings, which makes it easy to read a story into their sounds. Even so, I still think Playback 2022 is more appropriately appraised as the product of a scientific/technological worldview. The transparent vinyl records in this set are engraved with a map indicating where each recording was made. ^＊19I think this collection is a marvelously ambitious work; a sonic snapshot of this moment in the Anthropocene, etched into vinyl.

The philosopher Kojin Karatani incisively wrote: “The aim of [Takatani’s photography] is not self-expression. [He] is not as narcissistic as others […] a rare quality among artists because most artists are obsessed with ‘self-expression’ […] Takatani’s photographs do not aim at self-expression. What he aims instead is to treat his photographic subjects as things.”^＊20 Here once again, this objectivity—treating subjects as “things”—resonates with the best practices of scientists and researchers. I think the same applies to musicians armed with recording devices in the field.Indeed, upon listening to Playback 2022, I was reminded how Sakamoto and Takatani are two artists with a truly scientific and technological voice.^＊21

Annotation：

＊1

Akira Asada, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Shiro Takatani. Talk event, Dumb Type | Actions ＋ Reflections,
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, December 21, 2019.

https://www.mot-art-museum.jp/blog/staff/2020/06/20200608101315/

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＊2

Shiro Takatani, alumni interview by Kana Watanabe, Kyoto City University of Arts, October 19, 2016.

https://www.kcua.ac.jp/profile/interview/arts/art_20_takatani_1/

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＊3

Held April 23 through November 27, 2022.

https://venezia-biennale-japan.jpf.go.jp/e/participants/dumb-type

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＊4

http://shiro.dumbtype.com/

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＊5

http://www.kodamagallery.com/gallery/takatani2019works.html

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＊6

http://www.watarium.co.jp/exhibition/1704sakamoto/index.html

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＊7

https://www.ntticc.or.jp/ja/exhibitions/2017/sakamoto-ryuichi-with-takatani-shiro-installation-music-2-is-your-time/

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＊8

https://www.skmtcommmons.com/quest/

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＊9

Ryuichi Sakamoto, Sampled Life, 1999.

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＊10

For example, water state 1 (2013–2021) and Forest Symphony (2013).

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＊11

http://www.epidemic.net/en/art/sakamoto-takatani/proj/time.html

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＊12

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester University Press, 1984).

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＊13

Ibid.

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＊14

commmons: schola

https://www.commmons.com/schola/interview2.html

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＊15

Shiro Takatani, alumni interview.

https://www.kcua.ac.jp/profile/interview/arts/art_20_takatani_1/

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＊16

Lyotard shrewdly added the following sentence to the above-mentioned paragraph:
“The decline of narrative can be seen as an effect of the blossoming of techniques and technologies since the Second World War.”

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＊17

See Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, trans. Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (New York: Riverhead Books, 2016); and The Order of Time, trans. Erica Segre and Simon Carnell (New York: Riverhead Books, 2018).

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＊18

Takatani participated in 2007 and Sakamoto in 2008.

https://www.capefarewell.com/

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＊19

Produced by Autora Factory Plate using their proprietary Vinyl Cutting Graphics technique.

https://www.autora-factory-plate.com/

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＊20

Kojin Karatani, “Takatani Shiro and the Photographic Apparatus,” in Takatani Shiro Camera Lucida (Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 2013), 113.

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＊21

Of course, this is not to suggest Sakamoto and Takatani are aliterary.
On the contrary, Life and Time, to name just two examples, are peppered with literary allusions, redolent of the work of Andrei Tarkovsky.
Sakamoto and Takatani are both avowed admirers of Tarkovsky, another artist who grappled with outsized themes throughout his career.

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