The Japanese artist Yukihiro Taguchi works with the common features
of the everyday life : breath, plastic, and passers-by. Oriented to action
art, his work opens a new focus on the conditions of interpersonal relationships
and Berlin. His current works are simply entitled "work 2006".
A year after he arrived in berlin, Yukihiro Taguchi born in 1980 in Osaka
couldn't know how the Görlitzer Park, also called Görli, smells like.
In the meantime he made a performance there and found it out: he put a
specific handmade plastic bag on his head and fixed two plastic tubes on
it. He consolidated the borders with tape. In that outfit, the Japanese
had a walk in the Görlitzer Park and let strangers blow some air through
the plastic tubes. Thank continuous gifts he could relaxedly persevere
inside of the bag for five minutes. And learned by the way about the Berliner
consumer buying habits. Now he knows how the Görli smells like: like hash,
bubble gum and garlic.
Taguchi's performance with the ambivalent English-German title "gift" took
place during last April and its documentation has to be seen again at the
gallery Tornado am Ostkreuz.
With the plastic bags, some photographs and drawings, the documentation
exhibition also presents impressions of half dozen of other actions of
the artist, who chose to stay in Berlin because of its low cost and was
present in 5 shows around the city for the only year 2006.
The exhibition at Ostkreuz shows the mercilessly efficiency of the work
of the Japanese: once he lifted the fitted carpeting of an exhibition space
so that it worked as a canopy above the viewers' heads. Once he packed
himself inside a vacuum-packaged plastic bag for lunch. "I want to make
people aware of the familiar" explains the artist. The familiar is often
the air that surrounds him. Like the action the artist performed in April
2006 at the gallery Zekuschex: his head in a plastic bag he gave himself
fresh air through two bellows under his feet. For a reproduction during
the opening at the Tornado gallery Taguchi walked around frighteningly
out of breath with the bellows. For a short moment he brought in front
of our eyes the precarious state of living of the artist, that is to say
he made us aware of it.
The demonstration of the physical limits is a beloved principal of the
action art. Contrary to Marina Abramovic and her partner Ulay, who alternatively
breathed until exhaustion in their video performance "breathe in/breathe
out" in 1977, Taguchi is interested in the interpersonal relationships.
"gift" is like a self-experiment of Abramovic, extended to social aspects:
for the isolation of the artist is lethal in the length of time, Taguchi
has to let non representative Berliner mouths blow him some air as a price
for his social integration.
"No, it's no irony" says the artist. He explicitly expresses the seriousness
of his social criticism. If the viewer of Taguchi's tragicomic test arrangement
thinks he found out a subtle kind of sense of humour, it means that he's
formatted to western European perceptions.
In making people aware of the banality of the everyday life, Taguchi unmasks
the lifestyle of his fellow human beings through vain attempts of self-exposure.
The viewer who gets caught has just to keep smiling. Also Taguchi's most
beautiful work, the "field work: Pumpen" series, is based on a simple principle
of action –and works then terrifically comic. The artist blew up enormous
plastic bags and filled the "empty spaces" of his environment with it:
the white "O" of a toilet bowl, the air between two cars parked or an empty
seat in the subway.
Gorgeously packaged, the nothingness made his territorial claim meaningful.
Let's admit that is a bit reminiscent of Rachel Whiteread's negative castings
of mattresses and stairways. But where the sculptures of the British artist
irradiate a heavy symbolical meaning, Taguchi's actions work wonderfully
light and fresh. As light and fresh as the bubblegum breathe of the kids
of Kreuzberg.
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