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S:
why or how..
M: any of those? (laugh) Well,
coming from the art world, my background was visual art and performance,
sort of the bridge between art and music, performance arts. But of course
the more I worked with musicians the more l became interesting in making
music for the sake of making music. Even if the thinking behind it might
sometimes be conceptual, the process of making music is very free and
very liberating. It's very different from making art in the studio, making
things like objects and installation takes time to realize. In performance
it happens, you just do it. There it is. The freedom was very liberating
for me. I didn't feel like I was doing something else, It was still, for
me, completely related to what I was doing with art. Because a lot of
my visual works are related to sounds anyway, to that relationship between
sound and image.
So for me it's really a part of the same thinking. Just another form of
my interest in sound and music. It's related.
S:
Not a different thing.
M: It's really part of the same thinking
process. The difference is in the physical results. Sometimes it's CD,
sometimes it's a performance in front of an audience. Sometimes it's a
collaboration with musicians. Sometimes maybe a soundtrack for a film.
Sometimes it's installation, video, sculpture, but it's all under the
same interest with sound and how sound affects our daily lives. We take
sounds for granted a lot. We think images are more important. I found
Tokyo is a very loud city, so many sounds, more than NY. Announcements,
voices, subways melodies, a lot of voice recording, if you walk on the
street, it's very lively.
S:
Do you actually record those sounds?
M: I don't have a recorder with me, I wish
I had one, I don't know. Seems like a very loud environment, very rich
sound.
S:
What you think about it? Interesting? or really annoying?
M: Well, it is interesting, because there
is a cliche that the east is a very quiet and silent environment, (laugh)
but I don't know, this is the way we live now. City environments are getting
louder and louder. That's why people wear Walkman. It doesn't make a quieter
environment but at least it's a kind of filters to the other sounds.
Maybe also the difference in the sound environment in Japan is that the
voices are very important. In NY if you were in a restaurant, for instance,
if you put on music it covers the background. But here, there is not so
much music in living places. But everybody is talking in this kind of
a ritual, screaming orders, thank you for coming and ordering, letting
everybody in the restaurant know what you ordered. It's very vocal. That
becomes a kind of sound environment. If you go on the subway they tell
you where to walk, not to walk, they tell you hello and good bye. A lot
of voices. In NY, there's more a kind of music. The function is more about
isolating elements to keep people separate from one another. I mean, in
Japan, it's more like a communal society. It's more about the group than
about the individual. I think that you can hear that kind of experience,
I think people in the US use music as a curtain to isolate themselves
or to create walls between people so that you can't talk anymore. Now
in the restaurants in NY, the music is so loud, amazing, you can barely
talk to your neighbor.
S:
Have you got any offers of work to remix albums?
M: No. I think people are afraid I would
destroy the music rather than make it more commercial. So I haven't have
any offers, but why not! I love the idea, that's what I do.
S:
One more question is about your piece at Gallery Koyanagi. Before I saw
it I heard that it was a piece related to a real lynching. Which was a
very strong message. But it was very entertaining as well. I felt it's
a bit different in style from your former work, it was more quiet and
with more room for the audiences to see what it's for. What was your idea?
M:
Well, I think that piece is also very open. Unfortunately, very quickly
people put a meaning to all the boxes and then it's full and that's the
only meaning of the piece, but I think I see it as a piece about violence
as much as it's a fun crazy piece. One gets a sort of a guilty pleasure
from the excitement. So it really depends on how you see it. Because if
someone's a guitar player, a rock'n roller breaks his guitar during his
performance, one doesn't necessarily think "oh, he just destroyed
the body!" because you can think of the guitar as a body as it has
body parts, it's natural to say the body has a neck, a body, also a lot
of guitar players give womens names to their guitars, and you can also
talk about the metaphor of screaming, the guitar screams, so all these
thinks change the way you might read this piece. Regardless, I'm destroying
something, so it's always violence in a way. Especially as it's a valuable
guitar, so all these meanings have reference to Nam June Paik, to western
Cowboy rodeos, road movies, car culture, landscapes, all things there.
Especially in the US, it's still very fresh in people's memory, it happened
only two years ago. Where some African American got killed by two white
men like this. They tied him up behind the truck and dragged him around.
So it was a very violent racist act. But once you look at it that and
read it as that, that image stays with you very strongly, then people
could also accuse me of exploiting the situation, so I leave it up to
people to interpret. If you see it as a killing, then that image would
stay with you stronger than if I wrote a text about James Byrd, the man
who got killed. But is it so different from my other works? I am not so
sure. Because if you come to see my performance I destroy works very loudly,
you know. Of course it's not so meditative as the pieces I did for the
Tokyo Opera City. It also comes out of pop culture. The guitar, as a pop
instrument maybe talking about an incident that took place in American
culture. I mean, this is an event that took place in American culture.
So it's not like dealing with completely different elements. Using records,
or using record reviews, performance reviews with mixed review pieces
with another text piece. Those are, for me, things that are really part
of thinking about life, just everyday popular culture. But you know, using
guitars to say something else, using records to say something else.
(Interviewed
March 28, Ginza)
thank
to eyewill http://www.eyewill.co.jp/
Interviewed by Sanematsu Akira
http://www.netlaputa.ne.jp/~yangsane/
Akira Sanematsu is an artist who uses lights and sounds in his
work. His upcomiing exhibition will be at the ICC,
Tokyo in June.
translator Sakaguchi Chiaki
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