dumb type

image from the Walker Art Museum website

I've been thinking about boundaries and borders lately, which reminds me of one of my favorite performance pieces I've ever seen... "OR" by the Japanese group Dumb Type. Here is their writing about the piece, excerpted from their website.

"OR - binary system.
OR - alternative A or B.
OR - 0(zero) radius - invisible circle - point / dot.
OR - operation room.

It is about the state of "white out", like in the blizzard,
where you are deprived of ability to see,
where you can't recognize anything,
where you don't know where you stand any more,
where you may not know whether you are alive OR dead.
But what distinguishes one from the other?
Where is border?
What is death?
What is it?"

~~

Unfortunately they have now disbanded (I believe) but here's a little history:

Dumb Type's work is as formally complex as it is socially involved. Their most well-known works fall somewhere within the bounds of performance, often accompanied by installations. In many ways, such work fulfills their original declared intent to "develop an art/performance form to fill the gap between static visual art and performance dependent on dialogue." The 'dumb' in Dumb Type thus does not denote a level of intelligence, but rather describes a desire to create without words. "When we first came together," explained Furuhashi in High Performance (Summer 1990), "we just had too many things we wanted to say. We decided not to shout. We try to keep it simple." Although Dumb Type's work spans a much greater range than performance, they are generally perceived as a performance group because touring outside Kyoto forces them to modify works to fit more conventional settings and traditional schemes of venue scheduling. When they work in Kyoto, they are known for spending weeks or, given the opportunity, months just preparing a space for one of their events, often completely restructuring an interior to meet their demands.

The first major work, The Order of the Square (1985), moved from site-specific venue to site-specific venue over the course of a year. They constructed twenty small telephone booth-size buildings, each housing an individual performance to be observed through a peep hole. The first presentation was in a gallery, but later presentations were held on the street, in a department store, in a temple garden of ("There was one crazy monk we knew who let us do it, noted Furuhashi) and other sites. Audience members contracted to see the whole year's performance, receiving a key that opened one of the boxes. Once a month they got an announcement to come see a new work. Other early performance works by Dumb Type include Plan For Sleep (1984-86) and Every Dog Has His Day (1985).

Read more here: http://dumbtype.com/intro/work.html

undercurrent

Translucency, veils, things hidden and revealed… this piece is part of an installation I’m currently working on called “undercurrent.” It’s a site-specific piece in the lobby of a government building.

When thinking about what to do for the installation I was struck by how most of the systems that run the building are hidden from those who use it. That seemed like a poignant metaphor for both our individual bodies and the corporate world…that the bulk of what makes both us and our surroundings function are hidden from our sight. And “corporate” comes from the same latin root as “corporal,” meaning a group of one body…

invisible man

"I turned and stared again at the jumble, no longer looking at what was before my eyes, but inwardly-outwardly, around a corner into the dark, far-away-and-long-ago, not so much of my own memory as of remembered words, of linked verbal echoes, images, heard even when not listening at home. And it was as though I myself was being dispossessed of some painful yet precious thing which I could not bear to lose; something confounding, like a rotted tooth that one would rather suffer indefinitely than endure the short, violent eruption of pain that would mark its removal. And with this sense of dispossession came a pang of vague recognition: this junk, these shabby chairs, these heavy, old-fashioned pressing irons, zinc washtubs with dented bottoms- all throbbed within me with more meaning than there should have been: And why did I, standing in the crowd, see like a vision my mother hanging wash on a cold windy day, so cold that the warm clothes froze even before the vapor thinned and hung stiff on the line, and her hands white and raw in the skirt-swirling wind and her gray head bare to the darkened sky- why were they causing me discomfort so far beyond their intrinsic meaning as objects? And why did I see them now, as behind a veil that threatened to lift, stirred by the cold wind in the narrow street?" - Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

Night/New Year