MASATO
TAKASAKA
3 FEBRUARY - 10 MARCH 2012
ALMOST
EVERYTHING
ALL AT ONCE,
TWICE, THrEe
TIMES (IN
FOUR PARTS...)
MASATO TAKASAKA
ALMOST EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE, TWICE, THREE TIMES (IN FOUR
PARTS...) * WORKS AND SELECTED LOANS FROM THE EVERYTHING ALWAYS
ALREADY-MADE WANNABE STUDIO MASATOTECTURES MUSEUM OF FOUND
REFRACTIONS 1994-2012)
WORK IN (PERPETUAL) PROGRESS
Masato Takasaka’s plundering of his earlier works
to form new ones signals his strong commitment
to an investigative art practice, rather than one that
is product-oriented. Indeed, his practice can be
seen as the one, ongoing work, resourced from the
large collection of objects and materials housed
in his studio. Takasaka regularly exhibits selections
from the collection as installation works. After an
exhibition, he returns the parts to the studio, many
of the same elements appearing in successive
exhibitions. Each time, different issues govern the
selection and organisation of elements, although in
general terms Takasaka’s work explores three linked
ideas: the self-formation of artistic identity, the use of
display to elicit conceptual engagement and physical
experience, and the relationship between vanguard
and everyday mass culture.
In the studio, the arrangement of things looks
somewhat random, the sheer extent of stuff seeming
to leave Takasaka little room to work while the
things themselves appear quite prosaic. In the gallery,
however, all is transformed, relating the artist’s work
to the creation of value. Takasaka’s approach to
installation draws on varied repertoires of display,
including museum displays, commercial exhibition
and retail design, and vanguard art. The present
exhibition shares much with Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau.
Like Schwitters, Takasaka has a compulsion to collect
the remnants of material culture. The organization
of objects and materials in his studio and their
appearance in exhibitions suggest a more provisional
and transportable version of the Merzbau. Like
Schwitters, Takasaka’s gathering of elements for his
work reflects his daily life, his act of exhibiting them
constituting a performative autoethnography.
Takasaka has called this major iteration of his work
in four rooms at Gertrude Contemporary Almost
Everything All At Once, Twice, Three Times (In Four
Parts...). The title plainly explains the exhibition’s
relationship to the collection of materials in his
studio, which has its own name, the Everything Always
Already-Made Wannabe Studio Masatotectures Museum
of Found Refractions (1994-2012). The conceptual
styling of Takasaka’s studio as a museum is more
than an ironic reference to art world processes of
collecting and display. Giving a small room of castoff things such a grand title shows his interest in
the nature of emergence. An influence here is the
representation of life as a process of becoming by the
French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, counter
to Western philosophy’s historical fixation with being.
For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘becoming’ emphasizes
interaction, interdependence and synergy—prime
qualities of Takasaka’s work—resisting the ‘processes
of stratification, over-coding and control’ through
which capitalism produces the social order.
A presentation from the studio/museum can
be chaotic or controlled. Takasaka trained as
an architect, but found the field’s investment in
function and reason too limiting. Writers since Walter
Benjamin have noted the tendency of architecture
to operate as a sequence of stage sets, detached
from the materiality of construction. There are clear
references to ‘the architectural’ in this exhibition.
In one room, a field of vertical structures made of
stacked packages and drink containers could be a
contemporary edge-city in miniature, highlighting
the issues of scale and sequestration in urban
forms. In other rooms, large, jagged stacks of objects
and materials dominate the space, stressing the
tactical and tectonic qualities of the built form. One
installation spills through a hole in the wall into the
adjacent room.
The precariousness of most structures and the
way their arrangement forces you up against the
gallery wall stresses that the experience of art is
always embodied and involves a range of affective
and sensory dimensions, not just the visual. The
presence of foam-core mock-ups of the gallery
space at Gertrude Contemporary, which Takasaka
used in planning this exhibition, and a stack of large
boxes used to store and transport the materials to
the gallery, reveals the processes Takasaka uses in
realising his work. For example, he underscores the
repetition at the centre of a set of images of guitar
heroes by lining up both large and small versions of
the works and the original magazine pages on which
they were based around top of the gallery wall. The
use of previous works, exhibition catalogues and
invitations, and magazine articles about Takasaka’s
work as both the form and content of his installations
documents his career as an artist, although such acts
of self-representation build on the sense that any
representation is never wholly true to the original
referent, but rather constitutes a divergence from it.
Takasaka’s interest in a low-fidelity type of art that is
forever repeating itself, but never finished, indicates
that for him, the new is a product of limitation
and reiteration. His practice is well attuned to the
investigation of today’s unpredictable world, which
thrives on flux and complexity. Takasaka’s use of
prosaic materials and iteration at both the macro
and micro levels and in the moment and over time
links the meaning and value of cultural forms to their
cycle through the different levels of the social system.
A practice that is one continuous project, unfolding
across a sequence of times and locations, places
high expectations on the viewer, but Takasaka’s aim
is to provide a challenging space for the exchange
of ideas, for communication and provocation,
establishing a transactional relationship between
artist and viewer.
Carolyn Barnes
MASATO TAKASAKA
ALMOST EVERYTHING ALL AT ONCE, TWICE, THREE TIMES (IN FOUR
PARTS...) * WORKS AND SELECTED LOANS FROM THE EVERYTHING ALWAYS
ALREADY-MADE WANNABE STUDIO MASATOTECTURES MUSEUM OF FOUND
REFRACTIONS 1994-2012)
Gertrude Contemporary
3 February - 10 March 2012
Gertrude Contemporary
200 Gertrude Street
Fitzroy VIC 3065 Australia
Telephone +61 3 9419 3406
Facsimile +61 3 9419 2519
info@gertrude.org.au
www.gertrude.org.au
© artists, author and Gertrude Contemporary
Gertrude Contemporary is supported by the Victorian
Government through Arts Victoria, the Australian
Government through the Australia Council, its arts
funding advisory body, and by the Visual Arts and
Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and
Territory Governments.
Dr Carolyn Barnes is a Senior Research Fellow in
the Faculty of Design at Swinburne University of
Technology.
Image captions:
INSIDE FRONT PAGE
(detail) ANOTHER PROPOSITIONAL MODEL FOR
THE EVERYTHING ALWAYS ALREADYMADE WANNABE
STUDIO MASATOTECTURES MUSEUM OF FOUND
REFRACTIONS 1994-2012 (r)eternal return to
productopia-almost everything all at once, twice, three
times (in four parts…)
2012
Mixed media, foam-core, found objects ,structural pine,
mdf composition board, light box
(installation view) Even more prog-rock sculptures from
the fifth dimension part IV- DUBAI NOW PAY LATER...
TOKYO DRIFT (Endless Masatotems-(R)eternal return
to productopia #1-33), 2002-2012
Found objects, mixed media, dimensions variable
INSIDE SPREAD (LEFT TO RIGHT)
(installation view) ANOTHER PROPOSITIONAL MODEL
FOR THE EVERYTHING ALWAYS ALREADYMADE
WANNABE STUDIO MASATOTECTURES MUSEUM OF
FOUND REFRACTIONS 1994-2012 (r)eternal return to
productopia-almost everything all at once, twice, three
times (in four parts…)
2012
Mixed media, foam-core, found objects ,structural pine,
mdf composition board, light box
(detail) ANOTHER PROPOSITIONAL MODEL FOR
THE EVERYTHING ALWAYS ALREADYMADE WANNABE
STUDIO MASATOTECTURES MUSEUM OF FOUND
REFRACTIONS 1994-2012 (r)eternal return to
productopia-almost everything all at once, twice, three
times (in four parts…)
2012
CLOCKWISE INSIDE BACK PAGE
(on floor) Packaged Sculpture/s
2002/2012
6 parts, vinyl and cardboard containing the artist’s
works from 2002/2012
(on wall) Untitled (Zero to the max)
2012
Found objects
(on floor) Untitled (M.T after M.T 1994)
2008
Acrylic on canvas
(installation view) ANOTHER PROPOSITIONAL MODEL
FOR THE EVERYTHING ALWAYS ALREADYMADE
WANNABE STUDIO MASATOTECTURES MUSEUM OF
FOUND REFRACTIONS 1994-2012 (r)eternal return to
productopia-almost everything all at once, twice, three
times (in four parts…)
2012