Takahiko Iimura. Seeing Double

About

The exhibition takes a look back, concentrating on five seminal installation works made by the artist between 1964 and 1983 exhibited together for the first time. In different ways and with separate concerns, the works in “Seeing Double” each present elements of duality – sculptural, cultural, logical, visual and/or auditory - as a means to achieve unity, made possible through the mediums and apparatus of film and video.
 
Iimura, who arrived in New York in the mid 1960s after the critical success received by his film “AI (Love)” (1962, 16mm, soundtrack by Yoko Ono), foresaw the potentialities of film as an object and in expanded cinema performance – the first of which was presented in Tokyo in 1963 – and later those of analog video, made manifest in his works as early as 1970 and featured throughout the next decade at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), The Kitchen, and Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris, among others.
 
“…While the intensity and the fire of the American avant-garde film movement inspired him [Iimura] and attracted him, his Japanese origins contributed decisively to his uncompromising explorations of cinema’s minimalist and conceptualist possibilities. He has explored this direction of cinema in greater depth than anyone else.” – Jonas Mekas
 
The centerpiece of “Seeing Double” is Iimura’s iconic “This is A Camera Which Shoots This” (1980), a video installation consisting of two video cameras and two monitors arranged in pairs opposite each other with the title sentence centered on the wall between them. In this work first exhibited in 1980 at Toyko’s American Center, Iimura creates a vicious logic cycle by redirecting the signals of the cameras so that each appears to be recording itself, emphasizing the instant playback possibilities of video that allow one to be simultaneously recording, recorded, and to watch the recording as it happens. Additionally, “This is A Camera Which Shoots This” continues and expands upon explorations of the semiotic differences between Japanese and Western cultures through the medium of video that Iimura began in the 70s.
 
“The English word ‘this’ can be both the subject and the object, and this depends on where the word is placed in the sentence and how it is framed. [...] In video you can shoot at the same time as you project, where the camera as a subject simultaneously becomes the object, which correlates with this notion. In this way I showed the double identity of a camera and conveyed the correspondence between words and images.” – TI
 
Similarly, “Dead Movie” (1964) Iimura’s first film installation and the earliest work on view involves two 16mm projectors that are aimed at each other: one threaded with looping opaque black leader, the other film-less. With an interest in revealing what lies behind the projected image, the artist exposes the cinematic apparatus to create a work of contradictions in which the presence of film results in no projection, and its absence, in a full frame of projected light.