Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 38

A Restatement: The Art of ‘Ground Zero’ (Part 15)
The decontamination of land and art II


Shuji Akagi – 20130106 Fukushima City Concert Hall (2013)

Shuji Akagi is a former painter. Actually, he is still an artist, although he no longer paints. Instead he takes a vast quantity of photographs. Except I’m not actually sure if these are “instead” of the paintings he once made. The direct cause of Akagi’s ceasing painting was the nuclear accident triggered by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and the radioactive contamination that occurred in the city of Fukushima in its aftermath. One day, the place where he was leading a (presumably) carefree existence was transformed into a “contaminated zone,” with no one sure whether it was safe to continue living there or not. It was from this moment that Akagi began to relentlessly photograph his immediate surroundings.

Recently, I visited Akagi at his home in Fukushima city, where I was also doing some preparation work for the “Art/Domestic: Temperature of the Future after Takashi Azumaya” exhibition, and was taken aback at the paintings from before the disaster that he showed me. This was because despite the dramatic changes both physical and emotional in his day-to-day life, Akagi’s paintings and the photographs he has taken since the nuclear accident have an incredibly similar feeling about them. These paintings were on panels and depicted streetscapes viewed through windows, vegetation on the roadside and so on, all devoid of people (or with people viewed from behind). Based on their appearance, one would be forgiven for thinking that Akagi’s photographs, which have attracted considerable attention in the wake of the nuclear accident, depicted “everyday life in Fukushima” contaminated by radiation after the accident. In fact, his earlier “landscapes” were recreations of scenes in Fukushima he photographed on a day-to-day basis, including scenes in parts of the city he would later photograph as part of his documentation of contaminated everyday life. The absence of people and the manner in which the faces of those that do appear are concealed are also reminiscent of Akagi’s paintings. What, then, has changed inside Akagi, and what has not changed? With the disaster serving as a turning point, I sense in Akagi’s art practice continuity and change that are fundamentally different from becoming more serious to an unnatural degree or simply carrying on as if “nothing had happened.”


Shuji Akagi – Roadside (2010)


Shuji Akagi – Left: Moriaicho, Window View (2008). Right: Crosswalk (2005)

The greatest change, of course, has been the shift from painting to photography. It is unlikely, however, that this shift occurred because photography is less complicated than painting. On the contrary, since making the shift to photography, Akagi is spending a lot more time on the actual work, to say nothing of the preparation, planning and thinking. Even his original method of making paintings was nowhere near as “uncomplicated” as the ordinariness of their appearance suggests. After comparing multiple photographs of the same location he would carefully choose one before trimming it so that it was just right and faithfully copying it onto a large panel. Success first came when Akagi was selected for a Tokyo open-call show (Shinseisaku) he submitted to in 2008, three years before the disaster, and while he missed out the following year he was again selected in 2010. According to Akagi, if all had gone well he intended to submit work as usual again in 2011. But then the disaster struck.

It was at this moment that Akagi abruptly gave up painting altogether. Naturally, he also gave up submitting work to open exhibitions. This was because he felt extremely uncomfortable about exhibitions continuing to be held as usual despite such an event having occurred. And so from the process of “walking the streets → taking photos → making paintings → preserve the results,” the item “making paintings,” which is the most crucial one for painters, came to be left out completely. Conversely, however, one could also say that the other items all survived.

Although I wrote “preserve the results” above, since the nuclear accident Akagi has thrown away a considerable number of the paintings he had kept. According to Akagi, this was based on the belief that the presence of these paintings and other things he was halfheartedly hanging on to was keeping him from leaving his now contaminated hometown of Fukushima. Even so, it is an extraordinary thing for an artist to throw away his own paintings as if he were throwing away trash. One can imagine the strain of the situation he was in at the time. Nevertheless, paradoxically, this “throwing away” of paintings brought to Akagi a certain “convenience.” In the case of the “preserving” mentioned above, for example, because the results being preserved are digital photography data, storing them doesn’t take up room in a physical location like a studio. All that is required is to archive them on a computer, and by taking advantage of the cloud, even the need for a specific location like one’s own house disappears. In terms of “preserving” the vast quantity of photographs he has continued to take after the disaster, this has provided Akagi with a more than suitable resource. Accordingly, it would seem that Akagi’s adherence to preserving his work has if anything strengthened following the disaster.


Shuji Akagi – 20130426 Fukushima City Hall (2013)


Shuji Akagi – 20130509 Soil on the roadside (2013)

Also gaining strength along with this has been Akagi’s adherence to “records” capturing scenes in the city of Fukushima after the nuclear accident. These days, Akagi, who has always been adept not only at using a camera but also at using various other tools to keep “records of the shooting itself” (time, place), also carries with him a handheld Geiger counter as he renders massive realistic images – indistinguishable as either three-dimensional or two-dimensional – of the city of Fukushima after the nuclear accident from everyday scenes and radiation readings. For Akagi, who used to enjoy running in the city on a more or less daily basis, the fact that walking everywhere was no problem from a physical standpoint was a small mercy. The Akagi I meet is dressed entirely in black (so as to remain inconspicuous?) and has a dosimeter and a camera attached to either side of his waist so that he can grab either with one hand at any time and use it, like a samurai with two swords. I also saw his car equipped with a dosimeter that records fluctuations in radioactivity in real time, and learned that he was recording events in his own garden, which is contaminated, using a stationary camera that takes photos automatically. Akagi has gone as far as adding to this sound recordings that reveal events unfolding on the street.

It is clear from this that Akagi’s “art practice” – though I’m still not sure if this is the right word to describe his activities – is in fact not at all confined within the framework of “photography.” Its modality, while limited to the sphere of his daily life, has already reached the realm of a peculiar performance that continues endlessly both spatially and temporally.

Nevertheless, this does not mean that the contamination in the city of Fukushima where Akagi lives will disappear. It is for this reason that certain divisions that were not the least bit apparent in his paintings have come to haunt Akagi’s new art practice – for this, after all, is how we must describe it – as if it had been predestined. For a start, there is the contradiction that the more attached Akagi becomes to recording the state of contamination in Fukushima, a city he really ought to leave, the more sharply this throws into relief the attributes of “Shuji Akagi” and the more firmly it ties Akagi himself to the land on which he now lives. As well, there is the problem of just who will discover the vast records (ie, art practice) that Akagi will eventually leave behind. There are no easy answers to either of these problems.

And yet, precisely because of these difficulties, Akagi’s actions and photographs are fundamentally different from the so-called “disaster area art” photographs taken by so-called “outsiders” who merely set foot in the area temporarily. Moreover, the city of Fukushima in which Akagi lives is at the vortex of a situation without precedent in the history of civilization in the form of contamination caused by radioactive material being scattered over a densely populated area (of which the contamination of art museums I mentioned last time is also a part). No doubt, the real significance of this will be seen not from the viewpoint of Akagi and the rest of us who live in the present, but from the viewpoint of complete strangers far into the future. In this sense, inherent in Akagi’s actions and records from the outset – irrespective of the fact of that his practice prevents him from leaving “Fukushima” – is a gap that can never be filled, in the sense that as someone “tied to the present” as a single mortal being, Akagi is “sending to some unknown person” what for him is limited space-time. When he was a painter, Akagi’s goal for the time being was for his work to be accepted for an upcoming open exhibition. But this goal is no longer relevant. In a sense his art practice has become like a message in a bottle thrown into the distance to be picked up by someone whose face he cannot see. But when we think about it, is not this the very raison d’être of art, the thing that only art can achieve and that distinguishes it from the likes of design and illustration and entertainment? Akagi wasn’t awakened to art in the wake of the disaster. Rather, it was art that possessed Akagi.

Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 1-6

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