Simon Starling: Artist Talk

Excerpted and adapted from an artist talk by Simon Starling at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, January 22, 2011:


Installation view of Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima) (2010–11) at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. All images: Photo Keiichi Moto (CACTUS), courtesy Simon Starling and the Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow.

I’ve been working on Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima) for almost two years now. The project emerges from a series of works that relate to Henry Moore, who of course has a very particular relationship to the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art (Hiroshima MOCA), as his large arch in a way has become the museum’s logo, and was very important in the planning and formulation of the building, as far as I understand.

Moore was an artist who I hated with a vengeance when I was young, because he was everywhere – he was the “state-endorsed” public sculptor in Britain, and, in fact, everywhere you went in the world, there was a Henry Moore sculpture. I of course reacted against that and it wasn’t until a few years ago that I started to think about his role as the first British artist to have a truly global career, a global reach, and to think about his work in a more political way – to think about how he related to the British establishment, how he became instrumentalized by organizations that were playing out political games, during the Cold War, particularly. He became a kind of surrogate for my own travels, my own activities, because his work was everywhere. He became a useful tool in investigating the ideas that I have about site-specific work, and how a work relates to its context.

When Yukie Kamiya (chief curator, Hiroshima MOCA) contacted me about the idea of making an exhibition here in Hiroshima, it came in a way as a gift, because it tapped into all this research about Moore that I’d been doing. Immediately, I started to focus on the story of a particular Henry Moore work that has this kind of double identity as a monument in Chicago to the first nuclear reactor, produced by Enrico Fermi. It was a commission from the University of Chicago to celebrate the 25th anniversary of that event. They approached Henry Moore in 1963, and came to visit him in his studio in England.


Top: Hand-carved Noh masks for the characters of the Hat Maker’s Wife/Anthony Blunt (left) and the Hat Maker/Henry Moore (right), with partial view of Ushiwaka/Atom Piece & Nuclear Energy in foreground. Bottom: Mask for the character of the Messenger/Enrico Fermi in foreground with Kumasaka/Joseph Hirshhorn, Brigand/Odd Job, and Brigand/Warrior with Shield from left to right in background.

It was a rather strange request for Moore, because originally, in the 1950s, he’d been involved in the formation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). To then be asked to make a monument to mark the beginning of essentially what became the atom bomb project was, I suppose, full of questions for him. But he was also a very shrewd businessman, so he decided to go ahead with the project. When the Chicago commission came to visit him in England, he had a small maquette for a sculpture that he’d made some months before. It was based very clearly on a poster for CND that was made in the same year, 1963, by FHK Henrion, a famous émigré graphic designer who made the extraordinary, famous image of a human skull superimposed onto a mushroom cloud. This led to the evolution of a three-legged, domed sculptural shape, which the Chicago commission found rather interesting. They probably didn’t understand its origins, but they expressed an interest, and Moore then started to work on that as a proposal for a larger public sculpture.

When Moore made the maquette, he referred to it as Atom Piece, and the Chicago commission were nervous about this as a title for the monument, because they thought that “piece” would be confused with “peace,” which of course has interesting connotations in relation to the atom bomb project. And so they asked him to change the name to something much more positive, much more affirmative. They suggested Nuclear Energy, and in the end Moore agreed, of course, that his monument in Chicago would be called Nuclear Energy. But he continued to refer to it throughout his life as Atom Piece, and he made a smaller working model of the larger sculpture that is to this day still called Atom Piece, an edition of which he sold in the 1980s, right at the end of his life, to Hiroshima MOCA, where of course it has a very different connotation. As far as I can understand, when it was purchased by the museum, the connection between the two sculptures wasn’t completely clear, and later created some sort of controversy. That story became the starting point for this rather complex work.

When Moore was working on the large commission for Chicago, he made a series of photographs of himself working on the maquette, which he’d finished a long time ago. He made a kind of “fake” set of photographs of him supposedly making the maquette next to an elephant skull, which of course completely shifted the reading of the work, or “depoliticized” the work by distancing it from its origins in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and somehow made it more “acceptable” to the Chicago commission. This act of facilitating a kind of disguise – as I understood it – for the sculpture led me to the idea of a masquerade.

I started to read some translations of Japanese Noh plays, and I found a play called Eboshi-ori, which seemed to have some sense of resonance in relation to this story of a sculpture gaining a sort of double identity, escaping from its past to make a new life for itself, and I started to think about the idea of populating that play with a cast of characters who are contemporary to Henry Moore, a kind of Cold War cast of characters who would take the roles of the Noh players. Working very closely with a master mask maker from Osaka, Yasuo Miichi, I developed a series of hybrid masks, using some of the language and techniques of Noh mask-making, and collapsing those onto European portraiture or caricature. The result is a strange hybrid set of characters.


Top: Mask for Ushiwaka/Atom Piece in foreground with the Innkeeper/Colonel Sanders, Brigand/Odd Job, and Kumasaka/Joseph Hirshhorn in background. Bottom: Full ensemble of masks with Kichiji the Gold Merchant/James Bond in focus.

The central character in my Cold War version of Eboshi-ori is, of course, played by Atom Piece, the human skull or elephant skull, depending on your politics. It’s a kind of a war-like mask for the young warrior Ushiwaka, who is the son of Yoshitomo, a defeated clan ruler. When his father is killed and the clan is disbanded, Ushiwaka is sent to live in a monastery in the mountains. At the beginning of the play, he escapes from the monastery and heads east to try to make a new life for himself. One of the first characters he meets in the play is a gold merchant with whom he travels across Japan. In my version, the Gold Merchant is played by James Bond, as he appears in the film Goldfinger (1964), an adaptation of the Ian Fleming novel in which Bond goes undercover as a gold dealer to get close to the villain Auric Goldfinger.

While staying at an inn, Ushiwaka discovers that a messenger has arrived to bring him back to the monastery, and he goes to a hat maker. The messenger is played by Enrico Fermi, and the hat maker is played by Henry Moore. Working in the middle of the night, the hat maker fashions a particular type of eboshi hat as a disguise, an encoded kind of hat that would only be worn by somebody from eastern Japan. The young noble Ushikawa gives him a sword in return. The hat maker shows the sword to his wife, who immediately starts to cry. It turns out that she had a secret life; it unfolds that she was an ally of Ushiwaka’s father, and had taken the same sword to Ushiwaka’s mother as a gift. The hat maker’s wife is played by a man, of course, because there are no women players in Noh theater. In my version, she is played by Anthony Blunt, an art historian who was very closely linked to Henry Moore, but who was also famous for being a spy for the Soviets during the Cold War.

The play climaxes when the gold merchant, his brother and Ushiwaka stay at an inn, where the innkeeper warns them that Kumasaka, an opportunistic bandit, is coming to steal the gold with which they are traveling. The innkeeper is played by Colonel Sanders, the fiberglass effigy of who is placed outside Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants in Japan. Specifically, this is a version of Colonel Sanders that now stands outside the Hanshin Tigers’ baseball ground in Osaka, where Yasuo, the mask maker, lives. He was in a river for 25 years because he resembles Randy Bass, the baseball player who came to Osaka in the 1980s to play for the Tigers, and, it is said, single-handedly helped them to win the national championship. To celebrate, some fans stole the colonel from outside a KFC, and threw him in the river. When he was finally pulled out of the river, he had a very patinated, disheveled appearance. The mask for Kumasaka is based on a portrait of the American entrepreneur and collector Joseph Hirshhorn, namesake of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. Making his fortune from uranium mining during the Cold War, he was one of his era’s most prolific collectors of art, including in his collection 50 works by Henry Moore. Hirshhorn used to say, “My name is Opportunity.” He was a rampant capitalist who took all the opportunities he could to make money, and then use that money to buy art.

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Simon Starling: Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima)

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