Ken Okiishi: Pt II

II.


gesture/data (feedback) (2015), oil paint on flat-screen television,
mp4 file (color, silent) and feedback mp4 file (color, sound). All
images
: Unless otherwise specified, © Ken Okiishi; courtesy the
artist and Take Ninagawa, Tokyo.

ART iT: The “gesture/data” paintings are gestural, which implies that they were done quickly, but considering the paint marks in relation to the shifting images and patterns on the monitors behind them, you could also imagine that each stroke is the result of long and deliberate contemplation. There is an elasticity in the work between the instant and the durational. How long does it take when you actually make the works?

KO: That’s a gap I would prefer to leave open, but the truth is that it happens over a long period of time. The footage is on in the studio everyday. I play it back at different levels of zooming, but where there are discernible images, you start to internalize where different features and things will appear on the screen. For example, someone’s face appears, and one of her eyes is covered by the paint, which then flattens her face. So the paintings develop slowly over the course of working with the footage–for I guess two or three years now, or even longer, if you think about the piano performance piece. A lot of times it’s about –almost in a classical way–thinking and looking at the work for weeks, looking at the existing relationships, and then one day more marks happen. But describing the process of working is always an inadequate shorthand; even as I am saying this, it feels severely reduced as a description of what actually happens in the process of working.

ART iT: To me there’s also a cliché aspect to the work, winking back at the era of macho artists trying to push the possibilities for art to further and further extremes, a bit like the characters in Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers.

KO: I think that comes out of performance. It’s like when you watch an actor and you can’t tell whether the character is supposed to be sympathetic or not–there’s that edge. I think it’s an amazing thing when someone can ride that edge without resolving it, and I hope that these works do that, so they can go into really disgusting contexts while simultaneously riding into yet another context. This is another way of saying that as an artist working in your studio, your attitude toward the work changes almost every day until you ultimately decide that something is done. It could be seen almost like a parody of an Abstract-Expressionist approach, of knowing when the work is “done”; but at the same time, I feel the process completely, and often without distance. I think this is why some critics have had difficulty placing the work in terms of “painting.” I’m playing with multiple levels of ambivalence toward historical and contemporary rhetorics of abstraction and gesture–but also simultaneously approaching the act of painting in the studio with all of its contradictions and “painting” problems. I don’t think the work is, for example, “sarcastic,” as one critic put it as she struggled to form words for what she was seeing.


Installation view of “gestures, data, feedback” at Take Ninagawa, Tokyo, 2015. Photo Kei Okano.

ART iT: The work also reads provocatively in the context of “Zen.” Not the Chinese or Japanese philosophical tradition but–

KO: This over-processed, new-agey Zen–which was actually quite influential on the thinking of many of the Abstract-Expressionist artists–

ART iT: And then came back to Japan in the form of Gutai, among other things. Cliché is another indeterminate field that occupies the space between binaries. At some point a cliché starts off as a unique idea or expression, but then it gets over-processed and loses its originality, even as the over-processing is itself an index of that originality.

KO: And the subtext is amplified through repetition. Even if you’re laughing at yourself while you’re doing the action, you still believe in it. With “gesture/data,” there was an initial shorthand that has metamorphosed through the ideas other people have developed about the work into a literalness equating the paintings with the gestures we make on touch-screen panels, like, Oh, it’s the swipe! That was always intended to be abstracted, to open up another gap for thinking about these things simultaneously. For me, the rupture happens between, as you mention, the American reprocessing of Zen and the swipe and the gesture, or the slippage of the “gesture” into these different contexts. It’s all of those things at the same time, and they don’t necessarily match up or relate. I think abstraction can function without the need to process it through language. A lot of times when I watch people look at the work, these recognitions seem to happen automatically or unknowingly.

ART iT: Painting on the screen focuses attention on the paint in a way that differs from a big, gestural painting. In some places the application of paint is so minimal that, without the light from the screen, you would almost think it’s not there, but then, depending on what’s playing across the screen, you realize there are all these miniscule traces that are as equally important as the thickest accretions of marks. Through the interaction of the paint and the screen, you pick up all this additional information that might be obscured by the texture of the canvas.

KO: Exactly. And for the work in this show, I actually tried to lighten the touch even more in comparison with the past work. I wanted to see how light I could go and still have it work. When it’s done really lightly, you don’t necessarily realize there’s paint on the surface of the screen. You think it must be coming from inside the video, or that it’s the monitor or something. You don’t know whether the paint is inside or outside.
In some works I use interference paint, so depending on the light from the screen, it will either stay the same color, or when the white comes through the paint, it goes from fuchsia/magenta into green, and then flickers between colors. That was interesting to me, because when you describe the work through language it sounds like a gimmick, but when you experience it in person, it isn’t. So many artworks circulate now as texts. The text can sound really amazing, but once you see the artwork you realize you didn’t really need to see it. I like that every description of these works can even sound a bit off-putting, but once you see the actual thing, it’s a different experience–one that is difficult to put into words.

ART iT: In your most recent works, “gesture/data (feedback),” you also videotape the screen itself.

KO: With the first works it was a direct experiment to see what would happen visually, and then also to see what the response would be. Actually, the very first “gesture/data” work didn’t even use TV footage. It was just a live blue “no signal” screen, painted with the green paint for working with green-screen technique. I was mainly curious to see how the paint would adhere to the screen and visually interact with it. But there were these two abstract voids next to each other, and somehow the objectness of the screen and all these different media histories that could be encapsulated there disappeared a little bit into the void, so I decided to try it out with TV footage–the pre-existing footage from the piano performance.
I noticed with one of the works that it seemed like the paint was going inside and outside of the screen at the same time, and that’s when I started to think about fusing the two sides, the video image and the paint, and seeing what could happen. Also, when you film certain colors, like white, they turn gray, and then the gray light shines back through the white paint when you play it on the screen. There’s also a clear paint that I mix into the works, which produces that extra RGB light that gets refracted through the brush strokes of the paint on the surface of the screen–where the RGB breaks down, and you see them as individual colors hovering on the surface.
But then in the section that has the feedback, the gray light starts to confuse the inside and outside relationship because the gray light feels like a different paint that’s somehow in front or behind depending on the level of transparency of the stroke. All these things sound very formal or even obtuse when they are described; if you actually just sit with the work, your eye registers them, and the questions emerge quite naturally.


Installation view of “gestures, data, feedback” at Take Ninagawa, Tokyo, 2015. Photo Kei Okano.

ART iT: Does your relationship with music continue to inform the work? Not being a piano player myself, I tend to associate the skill of piano playing with reading. You have the sheet music and you interpret it. There’s something telling you what to input into the instrument, and that results in a corresponding output. It’s like reading and writing at the same time.

KO: Music and language are really tied together for me, but I actually learned Suzuki method, so I didn’t start from reading notation. I first learned the notes by ear. The way I experienced it was similar to native language acquisition. You listen and then you try to find the notes, and you learn by listening. My sight-reading ability is often contingent on listening to a piece before hand. I have to have the sound in my ear. But because I was educated that way, there’s actually a lot of back-and-forth or feedback between the score and the interpretation and the notes. Also, when you formally perform a musical score, there’s always the riding of a line of agreement and disagreement with the composer’s markings. And, of course, depending on the composer and the time-period, so much is often left open. So interpretation is often about finding a way to make the piece your own, as an authentic expression of that piece.

ART iT: Do you ever bring music into your work as a kind of methodology? Do you find there’s an interpretive aspect to how you make works?

KO: Yes. For me the main thing is the concept of the score. The score is not so strange in the category of music, but when you translate it to visual art, it sounds a bit strange. In music, you talk about certain musicians playing a certain composer, and the “work” is the two of those coming together. So I like to play other artworks or kinds of practices as if they are scores–but in the total sense as a musician, not as a simplification or translation of the concept into an art context, where the score can often be seen as a simple diagram. For musicians, the score is a highly complex and contested diagram.
For example, you could say that with (Goodbye to) Manhattan, I ran Woody Allen’s movie through 10 different systems to produce a different work, but then you film it live and there are people enacting this fractured language–all these different things are happening at the same time. Another thing is that I was really young when I started studying musical composition, so I had a strange misunderstanding of 12-tone composition. If you’re barely a teenager and you’re doing 12-tone composition, you’re going to develop your own relationship to it. Those kind of fractured systems interest me.

I | II| III

Ken Okiishi: Ab/Ex/In/Amb/Om

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