December 3-12, 2021
Norio Imai: Eizō as Intermedial Practice
Online Screening
Circle / 円 (En)｜1967, 4 min, 16mm, sound, b&w
Sobyō/Eizō / 素描・映像｜1973/2021, 20:19 min, digital video, sound, color [2021 documentation of performance]
The Braun Tube｜1974, 18:21 min, sound, b&w
The Heart Beat｜1975, 10 min, sound, b&w
Video Performance 1978-1983 / ビデオ・パフォーマンス 1978-1983｜1978-1983, 15:35 min, sound, color
6/8 Time / 八分の六拍子｜1981, 6:11 min, sound, b&w
Self Portrait｜1982, 21:18 min, sound, color
A Daily Portrait of a Quarter-century 1979-2004 / ときの重奏:デイリーポートレイト 1979-2004｜2005, 11:11 min, sound, color
CCJ is pleased to present an online screening of works by artist Norio Imai, organized by scholar Haeyun Park. This program is part of Interrogating Ecology: 1970s Media and Art in Japan project. In conjunction with this project, Park conducted an interview with Imai, which will be available for viewing on December 3rd.
Each program will be available for viewing on CCJ’s viewing platform. The access to the program is $12 for non-members, $6 for members.
The year-long Interrogating Ecology project is led by scholar Nina Horisaki-Christens, and supported by CCJ. It is made possible, in part, with a grant from the Asian Cultural Council. The project concludes in December with this online screening, a workshop event, accompanying academic panel event, a video interview publication between Haeyun Park and Norio Imai, as well as new digitizations and preservation projects including works by Fujiko Nakaya, Norio Imai, and Takehisa Kosugi.
Norio Imai: Eizō as Intermedial Practice
Organized by Haeyun Park
Norio Imai began his career as the youngest member of the Gutai Art Association (1954-1972), the postwar artist collective based in the Kansai region known for their experimental artistic practices. While Imai’s relief-like white paintings from the early to mid-1960s are well known through his solo and group exhibitions both at home and abroad, this screening series aims to demonstrate the expansive breadth of his oeuvre by focusing on his intermedial engagement with eizō across a diverse range of mediums such as film, photography, television, and video. Eizō [映像], a term that refers to “a class of images produced and mediated by a technological apparatus,”[1] encompasses both the still image media such as photography and slide projections, as well as the moving image media such as film, television, and video. While the discourse on eizō was initially developed by film theorists who sought to expand film beyond the limitations of cinematic conventions, such as the frame of the rectangular screen and the fixed position of the spectators, Imai’s experimentations with the projected and moving image must be understood within the context of contemporary art history.
Imai’s approach to eizō developed through his participation in the exhibitions of moving image organized by visual artists. In Eizō wa hatsugen suru! [Eizō Speaks!] held in January 1969, multiple film projectors were used to project images on a dome-shaped tent installed inside the gallery, while spectators were encouraged to move around or lie down to view the moving images from different angles. Visual artists, including Imai, who submitted their works in film and video at the exhibition titled Eizō hyōgen [Expression in Eizō] – Thing, Site, Time, Space – Equivalent Cinema held in October 1972, demonstrated a clear objective to establish “moving image as fine art [bijutsu to shite no eizō],”[2] distinct from the history and tradition of cinema. What emerged from these exhibitions was a distinct understanding of moving image as a medium that consists of the relation between the immaterial projected image and the materiality of the film celluloid, demonstrated in Imai’s first film work En (1967).
In the 1970s, Imai began to create works which intervene in the rapidly changing media environment of Japanese cities inundated by images from mass media which promoted a consumerist lifestyle. Using a polaroid camera, Imai captured images from popular magazines and television, and further fragmented and dissected the unity of the image by tracing the outlines of projected images, in works such as Sobyō/Eizō [素描・映像] (1973). In his video performances, Imai emphasized the tactility and materiality of the black video tape, which he pulled out from the open-reel VTR (videotape player) with his hands and wrapped around a human body (Time Clothing, 1978), a TV monitor broadcasting live television (On Air, 1980), and the walls of a gallery (Time in Rectangle, 1980).
Another major theme that runs throughout Imai’s works is the visualization of time and sound. In works such as Self-Portrait (1982) and A Daily Portrait of a Quarter-Century (1979-2004), polaroid photos of Imai’s own face were stapled on the videotape that spools from the open-reel VTR and were hung on the wall or turned into a moving image that visualizes the duration of time as his face ages through the years. The Heart Beat (1975) and 6/8 Time (1981) demonstrates the interactive relation between sound and image, as the recorded sound of the artist’s heartbeat emitted from a paper cone speaker makes a small piece of white paper jump up and down, while the intermittent flash of strobe lights synchronized to the rhythm of the metronome provokes a set of reactions from the spectators.
Through his intermedial engagement with eizō, Imai slows down the relentless speed in which we passively consume images from mass media that circulate within the structure of the capitalist economy and reroutes our attention to contemplate the temporal duration and physical materiality embedded in film, photography, and video. In today’s digitized world, in which the projected and moving image is considered as an immaterial entity free-floating in the Internet and SNS, Imai’s works remind us of the importance of reconnecting eizō with the touch of the hand and the warmth of the body.
[1] Yuriko Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 14.
[2] Miwa Kenjin, “Re: Re: play 1972/2015,” in Re: play 1972/2015 (Tokyo: The National Museum of Modern Art, 2015), exhibition catalogue, volume 2, book 4, pp. 44-45.
Circle / 円 (En)｜1967, 4 min, 16mm, sound, b&w
Rapidly flickering circles flash and flutter across the screen, accompanied by various sound effects produced by Yamamoto Satoshi. The movement of the circles was produced as a result of Imai’s action of directly punching a hole in each frame of the film strip and projecting it at the spend of twenty-four frames a second. As each hole was punched randomly without exact measurement, the circles appear and disappear in different parts of the screen, which creates the sensation of a flicker film. This work was screened at the first Sōgetsu Experimental Film Festival in 1967 held at the Sōgetsu Art Center in Tokyo. En demonstrates Imai’s interest in foregrounding the materiality of the film celluloid as the source for moving image, as well as the impact of various sounds on the viewer’s perception of the images.
Sobyō/Eizō / 素描・映像｜1973/2021, 20:19 min, digital video, sound, color [2021 documentation of performance]
In this performance, Imai remediates photographic images appropriated from popular magazines into a series of line drawings superimposed on each other. Photographs that Imai took with his camera from female fashion magazines and weekly photography magazines are projected one by one on a large white paper attached to the wall using a 35mm color slide projector which displays each image for fifteen seconds. During the fifteen seconds, Imai traces the contour of selected parts of the projected image with a marker pen. Repeating this process for about twenty minutes results in an accumulation of line drawings overlaid on top of each other. Through the process of fragmenting and taking apart each image, Imai seeks to objectify the information environment shaped by today’s mass media.
The Braun Tube｜1974, 18:21 min, sound, b&w
In this work, the television monitor is turned into a mirror-like screen which reflects the activities that occur in the actual space in which it is placed. Braun Tube was recorded at a studio and salesroom operated by Toshiba, one of the largest companies that produce electronic consumer goods in Japan. Imai dims down the scale of brightness of one of the television monitors on display to the point that it begins to reflect the viewers standing in front of the TV. Imai, seated on a chair, chats with the Toshiba salesmen in suits and tie, and their reflection on the monitor is superimposed with the moving images broadcast from live television.
The Heart Beat｜1975, 10 min, sound, b&w
A piece of white paper with “IMAI” typed on its surface is placed on top of a paper cone speaker, which emits the recorded sound of Imai’s heartbeat. As the iron coil fixed to the inner part of the speaker vibrates back and forth, the piece of white paper flips up and down, as if it has a life of its own. This work demonstrates Imai’s desire to visualize the sound created by an inner organ that one is usually not conscious of hearing.
Video Performance 1978-1983 / ビデオ・パフォーマンス 1978-1983｜1978-1983, 15:35 min, sound, color
This work contains excerpts from Imai’s video performances from 1978 to 1983: Time Clothing (1978), On Air (1980), Time in Rectangle (1980), Self Portrait (1982), and Pizza Time (1983). On Air and Time in Rectangle emphasizes the materiality of the black video tape, as Imai pulls it out with his hand as it passes through the tape head of the open-reel VTR (videotape player) and wraps it around the TV monitor that is broadcasting live television and the four walls of the gallery space. In Time Clothing, Self Portrait, and Pizza Time, Imai uses a polaroid camera to take photos of a man seated on a chair, his own face, and slices of pizza that he eats. The video records the temporal duration of each photographic image that slowly comes into a focus as it is developed on Polaroid film. In these performances, Imai foregrounds the relation between the materiality of the video tape, the human body, and the space of the gallery.
6/8 Time / 八分の六拍子｜1981, 6:11 min, sound, b&w
In this work performed in 1976 (edited to a video work in 1981), Imai flashes a strobe light directly at the audience seated inside the auditorium in the KBS Laseirum Center in Kyoto and photographs their reaction with his camera. The audience who had expected to see a moving image projected on the surface of a dome-shaped screen on the ceiling is submerged in the dark for the first few minutes. They are left to listen to the recorded sound of a heartbeat and the metronome set to the rhythm of 6/8 time. The sudden eruption of the strobe light as Imai presses the shutter of his camera synchronized to the ringing sound of the metronome brings out diverse reaction from the audience: some cover their eyes with their hands or the pamphlet, while others directly look at the camera and strike some funny poses.
Self Portrait｜1982, 21:18 min, sound, color
In this video performance, Imai takes a snapshot of his own face displayed on a TV monitor using a polaroid camera. While the videotape records his performance, he takes out one end of the open-reel video tape from the tape deck, staples his photograph directly on the videotape, and pins it on the wall until the videotape runs out completely. The still photographs of his face are attached to the loose bundles of videotape, which is a material record of the temporal duration of his performance.
A Daily Portrait of a Quarter-century 1979-2004 / ときの重奏:デイリーポートレイト 1979-2004｜2005, 11:11 min, sound, color
Starting from May 30, 1979, Imai took a Polaroid photograph of himself every day, holding a photograph of himself taken a day before in his hand. Initially began as a simple action to replace the practice of writing a diary (which he found difficult to continue), Imai has been able to continue this daily action to this day and plans to continue it until the end of his life. In this work, Imai’s daily photographs that he had taken from 1979 to 2004 are sped up to appear like a moving image, akin to an animation.
HAEYUN PARK
Haeyun Park is an art historian and art critic, who currently teaches in the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University. She received her PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY) with a dissertation on the trans-Pacific development of postwar video art in Japan, Korea, and the U.S. Her recent publications include “From ‘Production’ to ‘Practice’: Bikyōtō REVOLUTION Committee’s Moving Image Works in the 1970s” (Korean Journal of Art History and Visual Culture No. 27, 2021), “Water, Stone, Body: The Feedback between Matter, Man, and Moving Image in Park Hyunki’s Work” (Gallery Hyundai, 2021), and “Reality is Like Amateur Baseball: VIC’s Activities from Information to Communication” (Keio University Art Center, 2018), among others. She has also worked in the exhibition departments at MoMA, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the International Center of Photography. She holds a B.A. from Yale University and an M.A. from Columbia University.