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| James Lingwood : | What motivated your first works as an artist in Tokyo in the late 70s? |
| Tatsuo Miyajima : | When I was young, I had occasional bouts of depression, and during these periods, I used to watch movies and visit galleries. Afterwards I found I was able to face life honestly and to find a direction, a straightness in my life. I thought of the medium of art as having a natural energy, an energy which I could feel through my body. My purpose in becoming an artist was to communicate some of this energy, this cultural power to others. I became an artist to communicate to people. |
| L : | But one of your first works was a performance you made in a street in Tokyo, when you were amongst a large crowd of people, and you started shouting. Didn't this action express n alienation from the mass of humanity, and a frustration about the possibilities of communication? Was it not essentially a pessimistic action? |
| M : |
Some people might have responded it in a negative way, some might have interpreted it as a
cry or a scream in an indifferent society, but I did not consider it that way. I am positive, I
am trying to experiment. One important theme in my works is the question of nature and
artificiality. When I made performances for the first time, I decided that art is nature, and
that human beings create to act naturally, freely. It became possible to change my condition
through performance. The first video tape I made concerned the throwing of a stone, the artistic act, into very tranquil water. The spreading ripples were the result in society. The intention was to cause an effect people emotionally through the performance. The ripples are the communication. |
| L : | How were such works related to an awareness of recent developments in the United States or in Europe, in Fluxus for example? |
| M : | I hadn't seen any performances by European artists at that time, but I had seen photographs of performances in magazines. I was interested in Joseph Beuys, in the happenings conceived by Allan Kaprow, and in Christ. I was thinking of performance not just through he medium of the body, but in a more extended way, as an action for society. |
| L : | Why did you move away form performance as a medium? |
| M : | Performance is ephemeral, it is a temporary expression, and I wanted to create a more enduring experience. |
| L : | Also in performances, the self is often a subject. Although Beuys conceived his actions within an extended social context, he remained nonetheless a charismatic central figure. In your installations there is no central figure or ego, indeed no center. |
| M : | All people can be artists, said Beuys, but artists can also become gods. This is a very western idea based in a concept of the absolute. Like the use of perspective in drawing, people focus only on one point. I am thinking in a completely different way. |
| L : | You are more interested in the relationships between things than in the things themselves? |
| M : | Absolutely, in the relationships. |
| L : | So the change from performance to installation was motivated b6y the need to have no single fixed point of perception? |
| M : | The concept has not changed, it is the same for performance and installation. There is no focal point in either, in both I am like an anonymous stone in the street. I am natural, not wishing attract attention. |
| L : | So the change from performance to installation was motivated b6y the need to have no single fixed point of perception? |
| M : | The concept has not changed, it is the same for performance and installation. There is no focal point in either, in both I am like an anonymous stone in the street. I am natural, not wishing attract attention. |
| L : | You have talked about this work resisting a process of homogenization in mass urban culture and yet paradoxically you use a material, the electric digital counter, which represents the process of homogenization. It is the same everywhere••• |
| M : | When we look at European and Asian people, they immediately appear to be different, but the more we understand they are the same. And then, as we get to know them further, we identify them as separate individuals. That is why I use similar materials but from within that material I want to extract as much individuality as possible. |
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