Exhibition review

an sound expand or contract? Can it be placed within space? Can it be rendered visible?Fumihiko Sumitomo ( Director of ARTS MAEBASHI)

Can sound expand or contract? Can it be placed within space? Can it be rendered visible? And can sound be passed from one person to another?
Shuta Hasunuma’s installation art exhibition appears to be an attempt to unearth material characteristics of sound by posing such questions. It also gives the impression of an artist trying somehow to touch something that his body cannot touch, all the while reveling in this immateriality that is so hard to pin down through our bodily senses.
To what extent can humans perceive? When artistic endeavors explore such boundaries, we are made to recognize the experimental nature of artistic expression. However, Hasunuma’s stance does not seem to be one of taking artistic expression to its extreme. His uniqueness as an artist lies precisely in the fact that he arrives at this boundary while employing plain, familiar and accessible sensations. This lightheartedness makes him fit to be though of as “the pop star of experimental music” – an image that accords with Hasunuma’s character that we see in media coverage. But what will we see if we attempt to demythologize the man through a critical viewpoint?

Looking over the exhibition spaces that Hasunuma has produced, and the way they extract materiality from sound, one becomes aware of the lineage to which he belongs: the impressive history of Japanese artists who explored sound, space and what exists in-between. Names such as Takehisa Kosugi, Yukio Fujimoto, Yoshihide Otomo, Ryoji Ikeda spring to mind. What this reveals is that there have in fact been many artists in Japan who have been enchanted by this notion of giving shape to sound, by rendering features of sound – indeterminacy, continuousness, extemporaneity, invisibility, and so on – clearly visible. Perhaps it was inevitable in this sense that Hasunuma did not restrict himself to composition and performance, that he came to create and exhibit art that manifests the materiality of sound.
So what are the characteristics that are distinctly Hasunuma’s? He is not an artist who received a specialized education in music, then went on to compose and perform. He is not someone who decided to start an amateur band, inspired by music he discovered in his early teens. He merely pursued a very personal interest in sound, accumulating inside himself an extensive collection of sounds, including those of experimental music. This seems a significant factor in how Hasunuma accesses and draws out the sounds that he has stored up. To draw an analogy, if you consider the vocabulary and language that you use, there will inevitably be habits and idiosyncracies that run through them. Your language will have some shape to it: the words that you have stockpiled will have formed some order, influenced by family, education, reading and so on. It is not easy task to use language freely without being affected by this order. Fundamentally, the same applies to musicians with their music. However, Hasunuma applies no order to his stock of sounds, and can pluck them out freely according to each co-performer, space and audience. “Classical,” “artistic,” “experimental,” “mainstream,” “traditional,” “natural,” “popular” – such alien adjectives that have been attached to various styles of sound all have equal standings to Hasunuma, and are arranged according to his sensibility alone. The rich collection of sounds that this individual named Shuta Hasunuma has devoted himself to accumulating within himself, is thus free of constraints like education, contemporaneity, or hierarchy of artistic genres, and throbs and thrives between the audience and the space. I would like tentatively to describe this legerdemain that nullifies the disparity between the mainstream and the marginal, as “pop.” That is not to say a style of music that has molded its form to suit the taste of the masses. It is “pop” designed to liberate ourselves from the order that pre-existing values impose.
Another characteristic of Hasunuma’s music stems from the fact that he started off in field recording: not producing sound, but recording and listening to the sounds surrounding him. Before he was a composer or a performer, he was a listener. This goes to explain Hasunuma’s demeanor in situations where a large team of members are playing together, even with his Hasunuma Phil – a gaze somewhat reminiscent of a spectator.

In order to acknowledge this notion of the artist not as a player or creator of sounds but as a listener of sounds, one must deconstruct the creator myth according to which an artist creates art out of nothing. As is commonly known, this lineage too has a wealth of historical precedents from John Cage down to Christian Marclay. These are artists who faced the sounds they heard as utterly unique entities, and invited us to observe the beautiful gleam of the ocean of multiplicity with their supple hands. This suppleness does not crystallize or segment; in fact it conceals a radical overthrow of values, stirring movement across and between what were previously kept separate. Take for an example Félix Guattari, who created countless diagonal, planar links, as opposed to the conventional vertical or linear links, within the social system that humans inhabit. Guattari, in discussing transversality in his criticism of capitalism’s authoritarian control over human sensibility, connected three ecologies: the natural environment, society and subjectivity. He identified the workings of this ecological cycle everywhere, and powerfully called for subjectivity, which had been made to merely conform and be consumed, to be created anew by individuals through their singularities.
In this light, one sees in this exhibition the strategy of a skinny, kindly-looking Japanese sound artist, his attempt to draw such diagonals in response to Guattari’s model – an analysis that, though presented in abstruse and idiosyncratic phraseology, still offers useful insight to our understanding of society today. The essential question here seems to be how an artist might actualize, through creative output, this individual singularity that Guattari advocated. Indeed, Hasunuma may be trying to piece together through songs the scraps of sound that has been fragmented by modernist experimentation and market capitalism. Voices can supply emotions in the world of desiccated, abstract concepts and commodities. Emotion and such workings of the mind may free individual subjectivity from its conformist mold, and turn it into something with multiplicity that resonates between humans and nature.
In this light, one sees in this exhibition the strategy of a skinny, kindly-looking Japanese sound artist, his attempt to draw such diagonals in response to Guattari’s model – an analysis that, though presented in abstruse and idiosyncratic phraseology, still offers useful insight to our understanding of society today. The essential question here seems to be how an artist might actualize, through creative output, this individual singularity that Guattari advocated. Indeed, Hasunuma may be trying to piece together through songs the scraps of sound that has been fragmented by modernist experimentation and market capitalism. Voices can supply emotions in the world of desiccated, abstract concepts and commodities. Emotion and such workings of the mind may free individual subjectivity from its conformist mold, and turn it into something with multiplicity that resonates between humans and nature.
This exhibition of installation art gives shape to sound, which is something ubiquitous and ungraspable due to its invisibility. We walk our way through it, stopping here and there to listen intently to sounds, or standing between different sounds, in an experience that recalls field recording. There too, we will be able to hear songs.
Perhaps we could change the subjects in the questions that open this text from “sound” to “time,” and it would make little difference. Cogitation on sound is a means for us, as finite beings, to ascertain the precise nature of our relationship with the world.

Fumihiko Sumitomo (curator)

Director of Arts Maebashi. Associate professor at Tokyo University of Arts.
He was co-curator Aichi Triennale 2013 Beautiful New World:Contemporary Visual Culture from Japan (“798” Dashanzi Art District and Guangdong Museum of Art, 2007) and Media_City Seoul 2010. He is also co-editor of "From Postwar to Postmodern, Art in Japan 1945-1989: Primary Documents"(Museum of Modern Art New York/ Duke University Press, 2012).