Experimenta - MESH 17: New Media Art in Australia and Asia

PROFILE: TADASU TAKAMINE

: : Alexie Glass

: : printable version

There is no work of recent contemporary art that more thoroughly startles the tradition of claymation into a compellingly visceral realm than the extraordinary time-lapse frenzy of politics, perversion, poetics and performance that is Tadasu Takamine's video installation God Bless America. It is the obsessive dedication of the artist in this scenario that ensures this work is a fourteen-minute joyride into the ribald, audacious and vulnerable.

God Bless America premiered at the Venice Biennale as part of Utopia Station and is a first time animation for Takamine, an artist based in Gifu, Japan, who is well known for his confronting performance work, sculpture and video practice. Open to working across media, Takamine is not adamant about any particular method of expression, saying: "I select the effective method on the spot according to the given conditions and situation." Since 1993, Takamine has been renowned for his endurance-based performances and has collaborated and toured with the internationally recognised group Dumb Type.

Takamine's individual performance and moving image works engage almost masochistic levels of endurance and frequently deploy the use of sexually explicit material on video. Takamine's performance Kimaru-San featured a video of the artist masturbating a friend who is unable to speak or move unaided. In relieving his friend's sexual tension in this way, Takamine extends the boundaries of traditional 'personal care', and confronts social stigmas attached to the equation of disability with asexuality. In a presentation of the work at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England, as the film was projected, Takamine strapped his head into an ergonomic metal cage, smashing panes of glass with his head and grinding the shards with his forehead. The combination of metal and flesh in this brutal spectacle is a recurrent motif in modern Japanese culture and the artist received several media reports following this with headlines that read: "Sex Show of Bad Taste" and "Despicable Exploitation of the Disabled". The artist countered the media by emphasising his collaborative relationship with Kimaru-San, stating that "the singular and most important point of this work lies in whether or not it exploits the disabled."

Again, not avoiding confrontation with popular taboos, God Bless America comments on America after September 11. The execution of the work required Takamine and a female companion, who, in this work, is also his assistant, to spend eighteen days - from the 12th-29th September 2002 - inside a fish factory in Funabashi, Japan. They lived within a set consisting of a bed, a sofa, floor-to-ceiling burgundy carpet and two tons of fat clay positioned front and centre. From within the confines of this environment the pair proceed to "work, sculpt, eat, sleep and fuck" their way through the performance of their everyday lives juxtaposed against - and consumed by - the simultaneous manipulation of a claymation head unleashing an agonisingly high-pitched, organ-grinder-style rendition of God Bless America.

The giant clay head - which bears an uncanny resemblance to George W. Bush - is the centrifugal player in this vignette, and, while the time lapse film rolls, the artist and his assistant apply pieces of clay to the head, discard and transform unnecessary parts, and kick and strike the face with strenuous conviction. In this context 'God Bless America', an anthem of emphatic patriotism, becomes a script that propels the action rather than a didactic political soundtrack.

Takamine’s work unravels the complicated tangle between the side issuing criticism and the side being criticised. As a political gesture, Takamine strategically displaces any viewer assumptions that God Bless America is merely a cynical exercise by humorously acknowledging personal complicity in the constant drive to keep the song going. Or as Takamine states: "The current sense of crisis cannot be solved by criticising America one-sidedly. The longer I face that monster, I get confused which is the slave and which is the master. That monstrous face may be singing off his head, but I too am going off my head having to hit it with a hammer to keep it singing. He may be forced to sing, but I too am rendering myself to that song. The sole purpose lies in singing 'God Bless America'."

Alexie Glass is a Melbourne-based curator and writer. She was a curator on the ACMI & NGV national survey 2004: Australian Culture Now, and is co-curator of I thought I knew but I was wrong: New Video from Australia, an exhibition touring with Asialink 2004-2005. She has contributed to publications including The Sydney Morning Herald, Art Monthly Australia, RES, and Monument and recently completed a monograph for Thames & Hudson Publishers, UK.