Cultivating a way for egoless art

Perhaps the strangest experience I've had at an exhibition this year was being led into a small room by a polite museum attendant, shown to a desk with a sheet of paper and some colored pencils, and being asked to draw — just as soon as the lights were switched off!

Seeds of art: "Sprouting from Sleep" (2009) © TATSUO KAWAGUCHI, COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, TOKYO

Faced with total darkness and a quickly fading memory of which colored pencils lay where, I was forced to rely on my sense of touch and flailing imagination to get by. In the cold, harsh light of day, the explosive piece of chromatically illiterate abstract expressionism I generated now seems like a childish attempt to conjure up light by moving the pencils quickly. This experience, designed to make us think afresh about the light-dependent nature of color, is part of "Language, Time, Life," an unusual, enjoyable, and, at times, exasperating retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art Tokyo that looks at over four decades of work by Tatsuo Kawaguchi.

Like other established Japanese conceptual artists — secure enough in their reputations and old enough to be a little stubborn — Kawaguchi strikes the same note of gnostic perversity that typifies the best Zen masters and their paradoxical koans, although when I make this flattering remark, he shows his trademark humility.

"I do not mind if you compare me with any koan," he responds, "as I would like to respect the words and texts made by spectators."

This lack of artistic ego is a strand that runs throughout Kawaguchi's career, starting from Group "i," the collective of nine Kobe-based artists that aimed to escape from egocentric art by engaging in projects that were entirely without personal reward, like "Hole," the digging and filling in of a large hole at the 1965 Gifu Independent Art Festival. This "artwork" was physically grueling, lacked originality and aesthetic content, and could not be sold, but, as a final irony, rewarded its participants with a degree of notoriety.

The lack of ego symbolized by "Hole" may also explain Kawaguchi's interest in random processes. For "Relation — Quality," a series begun in 1976, iron and copper plates were wrapped in cotton and then exposed to water or an alkaline solution to create rust patterns. But is this distrust of the artistic ego simply a reformulation of a lack of confidence in the artist's own creative and aesthetic judgment?

"I believe in my aesthetic sense," he replies. "I devise the structure of expression that can realize the aesthetic sense. It is my aesthetic sense that chooses and fixes the most beautiful state of rust. While it is wet, the rust spreads, but, when I dry the cloth, the rust is fixed. I do not think ego is bad, because it is a part of being human. But if I take a look at the world in an egoistic way when I make works of art, I think I can only see a limited part of the world or misunderstand that the world is an extension of the ego."

Drawing by visitor to "Language, Time, Life"

True transcendence of the ego comes when our minds move beyond the purely here and now, and, like the exhibition of Hitoshi Nomura, held earlier this year at the National Art Center, Tokyo, much of Kawaguchi's art tries to move our minds in this direction by making us aware of the eternal and the infinite. "Relation — Frottage of Time 560,000,000 years" (2009) shows rubbings made from fossils, reminding us that fossils themselves are a kind of frottage of once living creatures made by the strata of the Earth.

Kawaguchi's "Cosmos" series (1970s) presents photographs of various constellations — Cygnus, Hercules, etc. — and adds dates to each star, signifying how long the light has been traveling across space to reach us. The great variety in the dates reminds us that the constellations only make sense when seen from our particular vantage point in cosmic time and space.

The implication of Kawaguchi's viewpoint is that much of what we think of as important is actually irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. "Blackboard Globe" (2000) shows a globe made from the same material as a school blackboard; thereby suggesting that national borders are as trivial and erasable as lines on a blackboard.

This attitude may have something to do with Kawaguchi's experience as a child in wartime Japan, then growing up as part of a generation disillusioned with nationalism. So, then, what does he place his faith in?

Clues lie in the many works made using seeds, the repetitiveness of which I found slightly annoying. The seeds are sometimes encased in lead, supposedly for protection against the evils of nuclear war, and sometimes covered in beeswax and set on the end of long wires that resemble acupuncture needles. The seeds represent the tremendous regenerative power of life, something that clearly resonates intensely strongly with Kawaguchi.

In the exhibition catalog, the artist recalls the severe food shortages he faced as a child in 1945 and how his family coped with this crisis.

"My parents plowed the seared soil, planted seeds there, and continued to water it," he writes. "And a miraculous thing happened. It was an event that, being a child, I could only conceive of as a miracle. Red tomatoes and watermelons with bright red centers sprang up from the damaged earth."

It is paradoxical that the outlook of this artist, whose work seeks to transcend the ego, seems to have been so strongly shaped by his own personal experiences.

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