Three “Paintings” by Tone Yasunao

The three short essays that follow were written in response to works composed and performed by Tone Yasunao as part of the program “Tokyo: Experiments in Music and Performance” presented at The Museum of Modern Art’s Celeste Bartos Theater on January 10, 2013.

I. Smooth Event (1962)

Tone Yasunao performing Smooth Event at The Museum of Modern Art’s Celeste Bartos Theater on January 10, 2013.

Tone Yasunao walks onstage and approaches a table. He takes off his jacket and hangs it on the wall behind him. He unbuttons his shirt, removes it, flips a switch, and then drapes and buttons the shirt over the body of an electric guitar, which is lying on the table. It is soon evident that the switch has activated the guitar’s amplifier. Tone picks up an iron and proceeds to use the guitar as an ironing board.

Tone’s original event-score for the piece read, simply: “Smooth any form of cloth.” According to that simple instruction, Tone did not have to use an electric guitar as an ironing board, and, indeed, he didn’t have to use an ironing board at all. The only thing needed, Tone has said—although this information is not found in the event-score—is an object capable of making sound.1Dasha Dekleva, “In Parallel,” in Yasunao Tone: Noise, Media, Language, ed. Brandon LaBelle (Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press, 2007), p. 44.

But in this performance, the sound-making object was a guitar “dressed” in a button-down shirt. Since the event-score called for neither an electric guitar nor a button-down shirt—for the cloth could take any form—then what of this performance?2In each of Tone’s solo performances of Smooth Event, he has utilized an electric guitar and a dress shirt. However, in two early collaborative performances with Kosugi Takehisa, he used other sound-making devices. For the work’s debut in 1962 at Tokyo Gallery, Tone covered Kosugi with a white sheet and smoothed the resulting wrinkles by hand. Another collaborative performance by Tone and Kosugi involved a radio, a dress shirt, Kosugi’s body, a large cloth bag, and an iron. Tone, email correspondence with the author, November 17, 2013.

In Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Green Box) (La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires même [Boîte verte]) of 1934, we find instructions for a never-realized work of art: “Reciprocal Readymade = Use a Rembrandt as an ironing board—.”3Marcel Duchamp, “The Green Box,” trans. George Heard Hamilton, in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, eds. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo, 1973), p. 32. In the original French: “Readymade réciproque = Se servir d’un Rembrandt comme planche à repasser—” Was this a hypothetical artwork, or perhaps a note by the artist to himself to execute the work at a future date—that is, a proto-event-score?

Duchamp’s term “Reciprocal Readymade” implies the reversibility of the readymade concept: the radical act of transvaluing an everyday object into a work of art holds within it its logical opposite, the de-reification of the autonomous work of art by giving it some unforeseen use. However, the simple binary logic that subtends the “reciprocity” of Duchamp’s proposition suggests that the work of art is distinguished from all other objects through the infusion of an abstract and disembodied surplus value. Though the proposition is parodic in tone, Duchamp’s “Reciprocal Readymade” also suggests a utopian position opened up by the liberating act of refusing the system of values upon which high art rests.

The artists associated with Fluxus and with the Happenings of the 1960s did not retain Duchamp’s opposition of art and everyday life. Instead, they sought to dissolve those categories by blurring the boundaries between them, countering the reification of the art object with the dynamic character of the event.4See, for example, Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993). But the category of high art has proved resistant to the refusal of its premises, and in many cases, these post-Duchampian practices have been institutionalized as art.5See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

In Tone’s performance of Smooth Event, an electric guitar takes the place of Duchamp’s hypothetical Rembrandt painting. Looking back to 1962, we can imagine an “innocent” Smooth Event, in which the terms of music as such were countered by the event. Tone’s future colleagues in Fluxus were using event-scores to this effect at that very moment. But in Tone’s performance on the stage of the Celeste Bartos Theater at MoMA, the amplified sounds emanating from the speakers, and the ambient sounds of the mostly quiet theater itself, met my own ears as manifestly musical. Beyond the staging of Smooth Event on a stage in a museum-sponsored event subtitled “Experiments in Music and Performance,” after Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music (1968) and Sonic Youth, could the humming of the amplified pickups on Tone’s guitar-cum-ironing board sound anything but musical?

Inherent in the body of Tone’s guitar is a capacity to make music, even as he proposed it to be an ironing board. One wonders whether Tone could have foreseen in 1962 the ease with which art would eventually assimilate anti-art strategies, but more than fifty years later, his canniness is beyond question. Rather than accept Duchamp’s opposition of art and the everyday, Tone explores the process by which an object passes between these categories.

Tone first heard about Fluxus events from Ichiyanagi Toshi:

Ichiyanagi told me, “In the U.S. there are guys who do nothing but events.” I thought, “Doing only events sounds all very well, but seeing as how I’ve been doing music thus far, I’d like to compose music and then place it within the context of the event.”6Miki Kaneda, “The ‘John Cage Shock’ is a Fiction! Interview with Yasunao Tone, pt. 1,” in post: Notes on Modern & Contemporary Art Around the Globe (March 8, 2013). http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/178-the-john-cage-shock-is-a-fiction-interview-with-tone-yasunao-1

In Smooth Event, we rarely hear the guitar strings vibrate, but we often hear percussive sounds ringing through the body of the guitar. When Tone flips the instrument in order to iron the back of his shirt, or when the iron strikes the guitar’s body, it is audibly clear that the shirt covers a sonorous object. That this sonorous object is a surrogate for the human body is also clear: the body of the guitar becomes an ironing board; utilized as such, the instrument’s rigid surface substitutes for Tone’s supple body; and, indeed, the flat “board” serves as an ideal, planar body. What we hear issues from the guitar’s own body, a vessel through which sound travels and reverberates. Far from canceling the guitar’s function as a musical instrument, Smooth Event foregrounds the guitar-as-instrument-as-sonic tool.

In 2005 Tone stated of Smooth Event that the instruction to wrap cloth around “anything [that] is able to make sound” leaves open the possibility for “even an instrumental player” to fill the role of the sound-making object.7Dekleva, p. 44. In Smooth Event, when an object is substituted for a human body, a metonymic displacement occurs whereby the reverberation of sound through the body of a guitar is experienced as a substitute for the physical experience of sound by (and through) the listener’s own body. Furthermore, the everyday action of ironing a shirt is not meant to serve as an example of an everyday listening practice: listeners are not urged to go home and pay close attention to the sounds of their own ironing. Rather, a process of identification takes place as the listener projects his or her own body onto Tone’s performing body, and then onto the guitar-as-ironing board, which is clothed in Tone’s shirt and, therefore, acts as a surrogate for his body. This projection is constitutive of music as a performance-based art: the listener conventionally identifies with the performer’s interpretations of musical works, usually mediated by written scores.

Within the program’s theatrical setting, the listener experiences a sense of music-listening-as-disembodiment. The so-called autonomy of concert music arises from a tradition of aesthetic experience that abstracts what the ear hears from the plenitude of the full human sensorium; consequently, listening has become a specialized aesthetic activity abstracted from the soundscape of everyday life. Performed onstage in a museum, Smooth Event reminds us that anti-art’s promise to pass the aesthetic from art to life can always be recuperated as art.

In invoking Duchamp’s own invocation of the Rembrandt easel painting, Tone proposes the history of modern art as a series of passages between mediums and categories of experience that have entailed surrogacies of the body. In doing so, he also reveals a limit in the promise of the everyday that subtended Fluxus events. The everyday calls out to a body, not just to a pair of newly opened eyes or ears. This is why Tone could not foresake music when Ichiyanagi first told him about Fluxus events. It had to be through the very structure of musical experience and its staging in performance contexts that the experience of the everyday could be imagined.

II. Music for a Painting (1962)

Tone Yasunao performing Music for a Painting at The Museum of Modern Art’s Celeste Bartos Theater on January 10, 2013.

Tone Yasunao’s Music for a Painting featured a painting wrapped in butcher paper.8Music for a Painting is alternately titled Music for Every Painting in the World and Music for Every Tableaux. Tone, along with four guest musicians and the program’s two organizers, took turns holding musical instruments in front of the wrapped painting while other participants used scissors to cut out the silhouettes of the shadows cast on the paper by the instruments.

Tone’s instructions, or event-score, for the 1962 piece read:

Cover the surface of tableaux (one or more), with a sheet of white paper. Performer(s) (one or more), may take any instrument, tear white paper once, but area of what one tears must not amount to the area of the instrument’s surface. Performance continues until the sheets are torn up.

Aftermath of Music for a Painting. Photo by Paula Court.

What ensued was a provocation of the audience’s viewing of the painting. At the beginning of the performance, when bits of brightly colored, seemingly abstract and brushy swirls of paint came into view, those present could be heard murmuring speculations on the authorship of the still mostly obscured painting. Hans Hofmann? Willem de Kooning? William Baziotes? Early Jackson Pollock? These artists are, of course, pillars of the American modernism famously represented in The Museum of Modern Art’s collection. The performers waited until most of the paper had been cut away before casting a shadow on the lower right-hand corner—the place where the artist’s signature and sometimes a date are usually inscribed—heightening the audience’s desire not only to view the work in its entirety but also to identify it.

Bit by bit, more of the painting was revealed: on the far right, a recognizable shape appeared that turned out to be the depiction of a bone. Well, strike an Ab-Ex artist off the list of possible attributions. Later, an interstitial cut left the paper covering the bottom right corner of the picture dangling, partially obscuring the figure of a camel and the area where a signature was presumed to be hidden. Tone pulled the dangling flap back into place and held it there. Most of the paper had been removed by the time the bottom right corner of the picture was finally revealed (the iron from Smooth Event was used to cut away this crucial portion). There was no signature. I was later told that the painting was made by three of Tone’s guest musicians: Matthew Mottel, Kevin Shea, and Sam Kulik.

In this iteration of Music for a Painting, the “making”—that is, revealing—of the painting by the performers both directs the audience’s perception of the work and also mimics the part-by-part examination of the image that viewers might be expected to conduct upon first encounter with a particular painting. Here, there is an obvious disjunction between the visual life of the painting and its circulation (both the visual circulation of the painting as a displayed image slowly “revealed” to us and its physical circulation as figured by the butcher paper, which would protect its surface during transit between sites of exhibition and exchange), and the event character of the performance as a sonic phenomenon.

The audience’s expectations and anticipation, along with its incredulity at the apparent riskiness of the proceedings—MoMA wouldn’t really let these performers use scissors so close to the surface of an Abstract Expressionist painting, right?—places it in a social relationship with what is happening onstage.9Yoko Ono’s later Cut Piece (1964) is perhaps the most obvious reference point here, but Cut Piece and Music for a Painting share a common antecedent: Tanaka Atsuko’s performance Stage Clothes (1956–57), in which Tanaka strips off layers of costume until she is left wearing nothing but a black leotard and tights. Analyzing the work in relation to Tanaka’s 1955 triptych Work: Yellow Cloth, which consisted of three lengths of unstretched, store-bought cloth, Ming Tiampo describes Stage Clothes as a performance in which “the artist’s body became the ‘canvas’ and the site of visual production.” Ming Tiampo, “Electrifying Painting,” in Electrifying Art: Atsuko Tanaka 1954–1968 (Vancouver and New York: Belkin Art Gallery and Grey Art Gallery, 2004), p. 71. However, the musicality of the “cut” that we hear in the performance suggests that the event is about more than the visual manipulation of desire, that it proposes something beyond directing the eye, which, in its effort to identify the image, exchanges the sensation of viewing the painting for the knowledge gained by reading the artist’s signature.

One of the consequences of—and perhaps the reason behind—the ascendancy of the transportable easel painting was to effect a splitting of the painting as image from the painting as object. This, too, is an operation of exchange. In Music for a Painting, our visual and aural experiences are motivated by the painted image, but Tone adds to this motivation the physical bodies of the instruments, in the same way that he used the body of the guitar in Smooth Event for the extra-musical purpose of ironing. We might think of Music for a Painting as mobilizing tracings of the physical contours of musical instruments to problematize the abstraction of the image from the physical “body” of the painting. Furthermore, in incorporating the protecting wrapping of the painting, the work might also shine a light on the production of this abstraction by the transportability of conventional easel painting. And while it may be too simplistic to posit the aural experience here as merely a figure for that which exceeds the visual—as a figure for the embodiment of the audience and, therefore, as the ungraspable referent of scopic desire—these examples of Tone’s work from the early 1960s presage the anti-exchange impulses in his digital works from the 1980s to the present.

III. MP3 Deviation (Improvisation with Sam Kulik, Matthew Mottel, Lary 7, and Kevin Shea, 2013)

Tone Yasunao performing Improvisation with MP3 Deviation at The Museum of Modern Art’s Celeste Bartos Theater on January 10, 2013. Matt Mottel, Sam Kulik, Lary 7, and Kevin Shea improvise, joining the performance.

In collaboration with four experimental New York musicians, Tone performed an improvisational version of his most recent project, MP3 Deviation (released on LP, compact disc, and MP3 by the Austrian label Mego). This project involves the corruption of MP3 data while the file is decoded during playback.10A more technologically precise description of the project reads: “a Max/MSP external was written to read an MP3 file into a buffer, decode it as a stream (using the MAD library) frame by frame, and output the resulting audio. Data corruption was applied by sporadically offsetting individual bytes. This was done before decoding, such that the decoder’s attempts to play the corrupted data would be heard.” Thom Blake, et al., “Yasunao Tone and MP3 Deviation,” in International Computer Music Conference Proceedings (2010), pp. 235–236. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/yasunao-tone-and-mp3-deviation.pdf?c=icmc;idno=bbp2372.2010.046

In the early sixties Tone participated in musical experiments presented by Group Ongaku at the Sogetsu Art Center. Described by Tone as musique concrète combined with Surrealist automatism, these improvisations with everyday objects serving as musical instruments aimed to pursue a reciprocity between listening experience and improvised musical performance.11See Tone Yasunao, “On Improvised Music as Automatism” (1960), trans. Colin Smith, in post: Notes on Modern & Contemporary Art Around the Globe (February 15, 2013). http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/94-on-improvised-music-as-automatism By the late 1970s, Tone, working as a solo artist and composer, began to investigate the commingling of artistic media and visual and aural sensory experience. For his 1976 performance Voice and Phenomenon at New York’s Experimental Intermedia Foundation, he presented slides in which written characters from eighth-century Chinese poems had been superimposed on photographic images corresponding to those characters’ origins in pictographs.

In 1985 he performed Music for 2 CD Players, in which he manipulated the playing surfaces of compact discs and presented the reading of those altered discs’ digital information as a musical work. The first recorded version of Tone’s “prepared” CDs was Solo for Wounded CD (1997), in which he recorded a “prepared” version of his earlier CD Musica Iconologos (1993). Musica Iconologos was itself an intermedial project. Beginning with two poems from the Classic of Poetry (Shijing, 詩經), the earliest known anthology of Chinese poetry and purportedly compiled by Confucius, Tone substituted found images corresponding to the pictographic origins of the poems’ characters, and then scanned those images digitally. The musical work was Tone’s conversion of the binary code of those scanned images into sound files.

Tone’s technological collaborators at the Music Research Center at the University of York, in England, described the MP3 Deviation project as a “transfer [of] the Wounded CD concept to the MP3 format using data corruption in software.”12Blake, et al., p. 235. The character of this “transfer” from one technological medium to another echoes the commingling of media in Voice and Phenomenon, but here we have not only several media in play but also a collaboration between artist and technician and, metonymically, between artist and technological media. From Music for 2 CD Players to the MP3 Deviations, Tone engages in a reckoning with the digital: by introducing (or foregrounding) error, he destabilizes the digital metanarrative that promises the seamless transfer of information and culture across disparate technological platforms. This is particularly clear as it pertains to the MP3 medium, whose encoding process and technical raison d’être are based on the deletion of digital information for the file’s ease of transfer and storage.

We see in the MP3 Deviations a type of intermedial exchange that began not with the itinerancy of the digital or the coining and first theorization of the term “intermedia” by Tone’s Fluxus colleague Dick Higgins in 1966, but rather with the origins of art itself. Classical Chinese painting of the sort seen on scrolls and album leaves was characterized as manifesting the “three perfections” (sanjue, 三絶): painting, poetry, and calligraphy. Prior to becoming “autonomous” in the centuries after they were anthologized in the first century, the poems that Tone used as source material for his Musica Iconologos were accompanied by music and dance when they were recited.13My thanks to Yu-Chieh Li for pointing out that some literary scholars believe the original Classic of Poetry anthology may have included scores for music and dance and that these were dropped from later versions of the volume.

Of course, ancient Chinese poems cannot be considered autonomous in the modernist sense that Tone himself has characterized as “a purification of genres—namely the separation of individual genres through sensory purification,” and, while he is a committed student of classical Chinese poetry and calligraphy, Tone is not seeking to retrieve from modernism a lost, integrated art.14Yasunao Tone, “A Tectonic Shift in Art: From the Expo to the Hippie Movement” (1967), trans. Christopher Stephens, in From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan, 1945–1989, ed. Doryun Chong, et al. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012), p. 243. But classical Chinese poetry and painting, especially in the hanging and hand scrolls of the late Song dynasty, display a promiscuous commingling of media that can be posited neither teleologically nor according to a lapsarian narrative. Tone describes the intermedia moment of the 1960s and early seventies as a “tectonic shift,” which can be thought of as an aimless shifting of ground—one that he explicitly poses as a-teleological.

The meta-interface of the digital, in which information exists as infinitely circulating binary code, purports to integrate culture totally. By foregrounding the distressing of the sound file during the conversion of more robust sound recordings into the MP3 format, Tone reinvigorates digital culture with the promise of intermedia that he encountered in the 1960s.

Tone characterized the random alterations to the prepared or “wounded” CD as the results of a process of “decontrolling” the telos of a given medium.15See Roc Jiménez de Cisneros, “Blackout Representation, Transformation and Decontrol in the Sound Work of Yasunao Tone,” in Quaderns d’Àudio 01 (March 29, 2009), p. 10, www.rwm.macba.cat/en/quaderns-audio/qa_yasunao_tone/capsula; and Christian Marclay and Yasunao Tone, “Record, CD, Analog, Digital,” in Audio Culture, eds. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2010), p. 344. The instability and neo-Cagean chance operation of digital playback error in Music for 2 CD Players and the MP3 Deviations can be seen as analogous to the open character of the Fluxus event-score. On the event-score, Liz Kotz writes: “. . . the relationship between a notational system and a realization is not one of representation or reproduction but of specification: the template, the schema, or score is usually not considered the locus of the ‘work,’ but merely a tool to produce it; and while the ‘work’ must conform to certain specifications and configurations, its production necessarily differs in each realization.”16Liz Kotz, “Language Between Performance and Photography,” in October 111 (Winter, 2005), pp. 14–15. This openness to chance, which is at the very heart of Fluxus production, underpins all of Tone’s work from the 1960s to the present. Fluxus principles also lie behind Tone’s suspicion toward the musical score as information to be coalesced in performance, and toward the digital sound file as encoded binary information to be coalesced by audio playback software.

In Smooth Event, the guitar’s body is revealed to be a sonorous object. The figuring of the guitar as a surrogate body is repeated in Music for a Painting, in which the physical painting is presented as a clothed body to be disrobed and visually objectified. The painting’s “clothing” here also metonymically refers to its circulation—as a disembodied image—between sites. The ultimate immateriality—or perhaps, again, disembodiment—of the digital file is reembodied in the MP3 Deviations; the usually inaudible compression of the sound file is altered so that it can be heard. Combining the MP3 Deviation with improvised live music at this performance reveals the decontrolled MP3 medium to be aloof from the telos of both technological media and music in the traditional sense.

The musicians in the MP3 Deviation improvisation seem to emit aimless signals, a-rhythmic despite the free-jazz drumming that might have sounded like Rashied Ali if any of the other players had been playing with him in the conventional sense. Instead, they adopted the practice of Group Ongaku, recalled here by Tone: “We made a conscious decision that each member would produce his or her own sound without being affected by the surrounding sounds. That is, each of us listens to the others, but we don’t react to each other directly. If you react, then the music becomes indistinguishable from jazz.”17Kaneda, “Interview with Yasunao Tone.”

At the center of the a-musical improvisation of MP3 Deviation is Tone’s concern not with signals themselves but with the media through which they travel. The format of the MP3 file as an immaterial container for information is given bodily form. What we hear in the piece is the irrationality of the network, removed from the motivations of its functionality and re-motivated by an a-poetic form in which language is senselessly converted into image and finally into sound.

Tone has criticized Marshall McLuhan’s theorization (in The Gutenberg Galaxy) of movable type as a meta-interface. He himself describes the afterlife of the printing press as an abstract detachment of culture “not only from language but from anything that cannot be changed into movable type.”18Tone, “A Tectonic Shift in Art,” p. 243. If the telos of the digital is one of intermedial circulation, then another sense of “intermedia” is employed by Tone to recover the promiscuity behind the exquisite tectonic collisions of media—and, subtending them, the bodily sensations of music and dance subtracted from calligraphic poetry—that produced China’s most famous paintings. Or, rather, Tone resists the technical telos of the MP3’s sound conversion but retains the arbitrariness of the digital collectivization of cultural forms under the master interface of code. In doing so, he has also recovered in imperfect form the intertwining of classical Chinese painting’s three perfections.

In 1967 Tone imagined what he called an “intermediate space,” which we might think of as a phenomenological counter-figure to the disembodying digital void that we once called the “Netscape”: “The word ‘intermedia,’ meaning the space where two mediums intersect, has nothing to do with the problem of an already realized art but instead with its foundation—our own bodies and perceptions.”19Ibid., p. 242.

  • 1
    Dasha Dekleva, “In Parallel,” in Yasunao Tone: Noise, Media, Language, ed. Brandon LaBelle (Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press, 2007), p. 44.
  • 2
    In each of Tone’s solo performances of Smooth Event, he has utilized an electric guitar and a dress shirt. However, in two early collaborative performances with Kosugi Takehisa, he used other sound-making devices. For the work’s debut in 1962 at Tokyo Gallery, Tone covered Kosugi with a white sheet and smoothed the resulting wrinkles by hand. Another collaborative performance by Tone and Kosugi involved a radio, a dress shirt, Kosugi’s body, a large cloth bag, and an iron. Tone, email correspondence with the author, November 17, 2013.
  • 3
    Marcel Duchamp, “The Green Box,” trans. George Heard Hamilton, in The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, eds. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo, 1973), p. 32. In the original French: “Readymade réciproque = Se servir d’un Rembrandt comme planche à repasser—”
  • 4
    See, for example, Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993).
  • 5
    See Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
  • 6
    Miki Kaneda, “The ‘John Cage Shock’ is a Fiction! Interview with Yasunao Tone, pt. 1,” in post: Notes on Modern & Contemporary Art Around the Globe (March 8, 2013). http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/178-the-john-cage-shock-is-a-fiction-interview-with-tone-yasunao-1
  • 7
    Dekleva, p. 44.
  • 8
    Music for a Painting is alternately titled Music for Every Painting in the World and Music for Every Tableaux.
  • 9
    Yoko Ono’s later Cut Piece (1964) is perhaps the most obvious reference point here, but Cut Piece and Music for a Painting share a common antecedent: Tanaka Atsuko’s performance Stage Clothes (1956–57), in which Tanaka strips off layers of costume until she is left wearing nothing but a black leotard and tights. Analyzing the work in relation to Tanaka’s 1955 triptych Work: Yellow Cloth, which consisted of three lengths of unstretched, store-bought cloth, Ming Tiampo describes Stage Clothes as a performance in which “the artist’s body became the ‘canvas’ and the site of visual production.” Ming Tiampo, “Electrifying Painting,” in Electrifying Art: Atsuko Tanaka 1954–1968 (Vancouver and New York: Belkin Art Gallery and Grey Art Gallery, 2004), p. 71.
  • 10
    A more technologically precise description of the project reads: “a Max/MSP external was written to read an MP3 file into a buffer, decode it as a stream (using the MAD library) frame by frame, and output the resulting audio. Data corruption was applied by sporadically offsetting individual bytes. This was done before decoding, such that the decoder’s attempts to play the corrupted data would be heard.” Thom Blake, et al., “Yasunao Tone and MP3 Deviation,” in International Computer Music Conference Proceedings (2010), pp. 235–236. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/yasunao-tone-and-mp3-deviation.pdf?c=icmc;idno=bbp2372.2010.046
  • 11
    See Tone Yasunao, “On Improvised Music as Automatism” (1960), trans. Colin Smith, in post: Notes on Modern & Contemporary Art Around the Globe (February 15, 2013). http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/94-on-improvised-music-as-automatism
  • 12
    Blake, et al., p. 235.
  • 13
    My thanks to Yu-Chieh Li for pointing out that some literary scholars believe the original Classic of Poetry anthology may have included scores for music and dance and that these were dropped from later versions of the volume.
  • 14
    Yasunao Tone, “A Tectonic Shift in Art: From the Expo to the Hippie Movement” (1967), trans. Christopher Stephens, in From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan, 1945–1989, ed. Doryun Chong, et al. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012), p. 243.
  • 15
    See Roc Jiménez de Cisneros, “Blackout Representation, Transformation and Decontrol in the Sound Work of Yasunao Tone,” in Quaderns d’Àudio 01 (March 29, 2009), p. 10, www.rwm.macba.cat/en/quaderns-audio/qa_yasunao_tone/capsula; and Christian Marclay and Yasunao Tone, “Record, CD, Analog, Digital,” in Audio Culture, eds. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2010), p. 344.
  • 16
    Liz Kotz, “Language Between Performance and Photography,” in October 111 (Winter, 2005), pp. 14–15.
  • 17
    Kaneda, “Interview with Yasunao Tone.”
  • 18
    Tone, “A Tectonic Shift in Art,” p. 243.
  • 19
    Ibid., p. 242.

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吉増剛造インタビュー

一九六四年の第一詩集『出発』刊行以来、吉増剛造氏はたゆまぬ創作活動を続け、戦後の日本の詩の世界においてもっとも特異なアートフォームのひとつを創り上げてしまった。あまりにも風変わりで、時には活字化することすら難しく、時には声とともにパフォーマンスという形態を取らざるえなかった。それゆえに、吉増さんは異端児と看做されてきた節もあるが、詩というものの本質を探求する姿勢においては至極まっとうな道を歩んだともいえるだろう。60年代末からの現代美術やフリージャズとのコラボレーションをはじめ、80年代からは銅版に言葉を刻んだオブジェの制作、近年は写真作品や「gozoCiné」と名づけたビデオ作品も多数発表するなど、違ったメディアにも積極的に取り組んできた。現在七四歳にして、どん欲な制作意欲は一向に衰える気配がない。このインタビューは、二〇一二年一〇月一日、ある秋晴れの日、ニューヨークのダウンタウンのカフェ「ピンク・ポニー」にて行われた。吉増さんがギタリスト、ターンテブル奏者の大友良英氏と組んで北米五都市をパフォーマンスして回ったツアーを前日に終えたばかりだった。 2012年10月1日 吉増剛造インタビュー ニューヨーク、ダウンタウンのカフェ、ピンク・ポニーにて 恩田: 今日は六〇-七〇年代の日本の文化状況と吉増さんとの関わりについてお話しを伺おうと思います。吉増さんが処女詩集『出発』を刊行されたのは六四年ですね。ちょうど慶應義塾大学を卒業された頃でした。どんなことが日本では起こっていましたか?  六〇年安保闘争と学生生活 吉増: 六〇年安保闘争があって、その洗礼を受けながら学生生活を送っていました。ご存知のように六〇年代はアメリカニゼーションの時代といって間違いないと思いますけれども、その新鮮な波動が、文学としてはビート・ジェネレーション、歌声としてはボブ・ディラン、ジョーン・バエズらの歌声として響いてきて、しばらく遅れてビートルズが聞こえてきた。思い出しながらお話ししますけれど、僕の学生時代にビートの最もすぐれた紹介者だった諏訪優さんという人がいて…、詩人で、翻訳家で、優しい人だったのね。ギンズバーグの『Howl』や『Kaddish』を聴く会を頻繁に企画していました。東京で『Doin’』という雑誌を出し始めて、白石かずこさん、奥成達さん、草森紳一さん、岡田隆彦さん、沢渡朔さんたちが関わって、音楽、写真、詩が交じりあっていました。だから、その当時の先駆的な詩の状況はまずアメリカの最先端を紹介する諏訪優さんのまわりから始まっていました。詩と同時にジャズが入ってきた。ソニー・ロリンズ、ジョン・コルトレーン…。六〇年代の初めというのは同時多発的でしたね。もう一つの大きな流れは美術だった。その最先端には瀧口修造さんがいた。日本でのシュールレアリズム研究における中心人物だったけれども、人柄があの国の人と思えないくらい稀な人だった。元々は西脇順三郎先生のお弟子さんだったけれど、アナーキーというか、細心で、繊細で、深い…。磯崎新さん、荒川修作さん、武満徹さん、東野芳明さん、大岡信さんらがそのまわりに集まっていまいした。それから舞踏の土方巽さんもいた。寺山修司さんもいた。だから、そのころの最も大きな文化の中心を形成したのは瀧口修造星雲です。もちろん、美術を芯に据えての話しですが…。で、その次ぎの世代の人たちが、ハイレッド・センターの赤瀬川原平さん、中西夏之さん、高松次郎さん。さらに写真家の高梨豊さん、中平卓馬さん、森山大道さん、多木浩二さん。この人たちが一九七〇年に『プロヴォーグ』を創刊して写真史に足跡を残すことになります。それこそ“星雲”のようにして、日本の戦後の芸術運動を形成していた。生け花作家の中川幸夫さんや舞踏の大野一雄さんでさえ、この“星雲”のただ中にいたといえる。場所としては南画廊、東京画廊、新宿の椿近代画廊などがありました。そういった場所で美術の運動、文学の運動が重なっていた。 “アンダーグラウンド”のさらに底流のような流れ 恩田: なるほど。諏訪優もひとつの“星雲”だったんでしょうか? 吉増: いや、“星雲”というようないい方では捉えられないのね。むしろ、異端児ですね。英米文学の仲間からは随分と白い目で見られていたし、敵が多かったはずです。茨の道を歩んで早死にしたけども、この諏訪優さんという人を逃しちゃいけない。『Howl』と『Kaddish』を翻訳し、それからグレゴリー・コーソも翻訳したかな。練馬に住んでいて、英文学者の仲間は“練馬ビート”って悪口をいっていたけど、彼の果たした役割はとても大きかった。「詩の朗読運動」と「リトル・マガジン」を出していこうとする運動の中心人物で、 白石かずこさんがそこにいました。“アンダーグラウンド”のさらに底流のような流れでしたね。 恩田: 諏訪優と吉増さんの関わりあいはどういうものでしたか? 吉増: 六四年、処女詩集『出発』を出してすぐに、諏訪さんが僕の詩を読まれて、 『Subterraneans』の第二号に書かせてくれた。その雑誌は今でも大切に持っています。非常にインティメイトな、垣根をすーっと超えるような精神がその頃はあった。 恩田: ビートにせよ、安保にせよ、時代の雰囲気と合致したんでしょうか? 吉増: その頃だったと思いますが、ケネス・レクスロスも日本にやって来た。ビートの親代わりみたいな人でね。一世代前の野性的で大きなアメリカの詩人でした。それにつられて、まだ若かったギンズバーグや、ゲーリー・スナイダーも京都の南禅寺に来ていたかな。京都がいつも熱くて…。 恩田: そういうアメリカのビート詩人たちと接する機会があったんですね。 吉増: そう。それに、六四年にロバート・ラウシェンバーグがやって来て、草月会館ホールで「ボブ・ラウシェンバーグへの20の質問」というパフォーマンスをやりました。その結果が『金本位制 』 Gold Standardの作品です。その頃、東野芳明さんとか、飯島耕一さんとか、いわゆる東大の仏文科出の秀才たちがシュールレアリズムの研究会をつくっていたんだけど、その人たちの美術批評が東京の文化をひっぱり始めた。みんな瀧口星雲に属していました。 恩田: なるほど。面白いのは瀧口修造はもともとフランス文化とつながりがあって、その星雲のなかにアメリカ文化が入ってきたと。 吉増: ひとつの大きな道はね、マルセル・デュシャンだった筈です。デュシャンという人はフランスから亡命するようにしてニューヨークに来たじゃない。マックス・エルンストもそうだね。だからアメリカの一番先端的なものとフランスのそいうものの接点も無視できない。荒川修作さんもニューヨークに活動の拠点を置くようになったし。フランスの知識人たちがニューヨークへ動いて、フランス一辺倒ではなくなった。クロード・レヴィ=ストロースだってそう。そういう流れが瀧口さんとシュールレアリズムを中心とする日本の六〇年代の文化運動と連動していた。ただ、僕がその場で見ていたようにいっているけれど、ほとんどが雑誌からの知識や伝え聞きですけどね。こういうの苦手だなあ…。 恩田: 日本の知識人はフランス文化から学ぶうちに、その流れをフォローするうちにアメリカ文化というものを発見し、それを日本に輸入し始めたということでしょうか? 吉増: そういういい方で正しいと思います。 そんな古典的な土壌の中から、最も先端的な流れが生まれてきて、それが草月会館ホールだった 恩田: 草月会館ホールはどういう場所だったんですか? 吉増: 生け花の流派で保守的な池坊とか古流というのがあるじゃないですか。草月流は池坊から出てきたのかな。勅使河原蒼風さんという途方もない天才が流派を作って、その息子が勅使河原宏さんという映画作家だった。そんな古典的な土壌の中から、最も先端的な流れが生まれてきて、それが草月会館ホールだった。勅使河原さんのところは、資金もあるし、場所もあるから、一種の文化的な拠点になっていった。それから、当時は読売アンデパンダン展という大きな展覧会を読売新聞が運営していた。読売の文化部長だった海藤日出男さんが中心人物だったのね。そこからたくさんの才能のあるアーティストが出てきた。それが草月の運動とリンクして、瀧口さんのサークルもかぶってきていますね。 恩田: なるほど。その当時は美術も、文学も、舞踏も、他の分野も、何の垣根もなかったように聞こえるんですが…。 吉増: 今から考えると恐ろしいぐらい垣根がなかった。一九六八年頃のいい方の「解放区」です。詩の場合は、六〇年代初期の『凶区』の活動が画期的でした。天沢退二郎さん、鈴木志郎康さんたちのね。それに蠢くようにして、政治運動、歌謡曲、盛り場、美術批評、暗黒舞踏、ジャズのトポス、それから寺山修司さんと唐十郎さんの演劇運動。寺山さんも、唐さんも、土方さんを介して瀧口修造とつながっています。瀧口さんというのはね、温和で静かだったけど必ず現場に姿を見せていた。どんなにつまらいものでも、ちゃんと片隅で座って見てました。これは頭でっかちの批評家には真似できない。瀧口さんの一番弟子が武満徹さんでした。普通だったら自分の師匠に作曲家をまず第一に挙げるけれども、武満徹は瀧口さんを挙げる。それでわかるじゃない。荒川修作だって瀧口さんを挙げる。磯崎さんだってそうでしょうね。そういう芸術共同体の真ん中にいたのが瀧口さん。私製のパスポートを作って若い友人に差し上げるとか、遊びの精神のある人だったし、反骨の人でもあった…。 恩田: だからこそ違うジャンルの人を集められたんでしょうね。瀧口さん自身の仕事というのはどいうものでした? 吉増: 瀧口さんの代表的な書物は『近代芸術』ですけれど、シュールレアリストとしての存在というか立ち居振る舞いが実に根源的かつ全身的でした。ただ、瀧口さんは周囲から見れば美術評論家として神話的な人だったけれど、学問の世界やサークルの外からは胡散臭い人に見えたに違いないと思います。晩年にはデカマルコニーの制作に打ち込まれていましたね。 恩田: ちなみに瀧口さんのサークルと草月会館ホールの関わりあいはどういうものでしたか? 吉増:…

Interview with Yoshimasu Gozo

Yoshimasu Gozo’s creative endeavors have spanned half a century since the publication of his first book of poetry, Shuppatsu (Departure), in 1964. During this time he has cultivated a singular art form without parallel in postwar Japanese poetry. Some of his work is so unorthodox that it defies the print medium and can be delivered…

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