body contracT (exceptional case) by yuki okumura with shuzo azuchi gulliver

Dear Visitor,

My name is Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver. In the late ’60s, I experimented on films and slides, and then in the early ’70s, I began working on my own body in various ways. One such work is still ongoing, called Body Contract (1973–), where I divided my body into 80 parts and had people sign contracts for which each is assigned to one body part of mine to carefully preserve after I die. Other works include The metal having the length (1976–78), which consists of rulers uniquely set to the lengths of certain parts of my body, and Weight (Human ball) (1978, ’79, ’80, ’82, ’83, ’85, ’87, ’88, ’90), stain-less steel balls each weighing exactly the same as my body at the time of its production.

In February 2014, Yuki Okumura, whom I had met several years before, emailed me. He wanted me to participate in his project in the form of a public conversation at blanClass, a space for experimental performances in Yokohama. He explained that actually, the true focus of Body Contract, unlike its name, is my consciousness, for it’s the only element that belongs to myself yet is excluded in the project. Informed by this, his aim was to reach a special agreement with me — a contract, or a promise, regarding my consciousness after I die. Ha!

Documented and projected live through the lens of video artist Yu Araki, our dialogue turned out very long and detouring. But eventually, Okumura disclosed what he wanted from me in concrete terms: a promise that I’ll stage what he terms a “posthumous performance” for him — as he thinks that an action certifies the existence of a consciousness that enables it. Okay, I’ll positively think about it, I said. I don’t even know how to perform without a physical body, but thinking about various possibilities will be fun, no matter how long it will take.

While developing my idea, I also began a totally new project, this time dividing my voice into 50 parts based on the Japanese 50-character syllabary. Each time, I gift a person or a group of people with one of the fifty sounds that I pronounce from the time I offer it to my death. In a two-person show Okumura and I realized at Etablissement d’en face, a gallery in Brussels, October 2015, I gave away “shi” to the visitors. “Shi” is the pronunciation for a range of Japanese words: death, poetry, four, C, and even the onomatopoeia of urinating. I’d already worked on this multiplicity through my early performance poem し-C-4 (1968), which we together reenacted at the opening.

This time, in concurrence with the exhibition of my work Cinematic Illumination (1969) at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, which was scheduled in March 2020, I was going to perform this poem at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, and also give a performance and a workshop regarding Body Contract at Haverford College, both in April 2020. But sadly, the MoMA show was postponed and the latter two events were canceled due to the COVID-19 outbreak. After this update was communicated, Okumura said, in our regular email correspondence, that perhaps now is the time to share with people the video documentation of our conversation in 2014. Why not! Maybe it’s just his way to remind me of my “homework” from six years back, but anyway, it’s good to pause and reflect for a moment.

All in all, I believe the continuous dialogue between Okumura and I will create interesting work into the future, no matter how we will all transform by going through the current period of phase transition. Looking very much forward!

All the best, with love,

Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver
(ghostwritten by Yuki Okumura)

Yuki Okumura (b. 1978, Aomori) is an artist with a multilayered practice. As an art academy student, he formed artworks correlating his pubic hair and Romanticism and staged on-the-roof performances of cooking his saliva in New York and Tokyo. Living between Tokyo and other regions of the world in the early-2010s, he began to be attracted by the translator as the medium after having been considered to be a semi-representative figure of the yuppie (neta-kei) physicalism, while getting the pen-name Lei Yamabe, which he continues to keep as his critic name. In 2016, he presented a seriously conceptual and dry-humorous film at the boutique-adjunct Maison Hermès Le Forum in Tokyo. Together with Hisachika Takahashi, he built concatenated frames into a mazy clump, with works such as Hisachika Takahashi in Israel and Memory of No Memory, followed by an evening of ghosts at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo. As a reincarnation of the American artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who dissected an along-a-river joint in Antwerp, 1977, Okumura produced Welcome Back, Gordon Matta-Clark (2017), a work revolving around friendship and suicide, a project that illustrated a reunion after 40-years of non-meeting. The out-of-box project The Man Who (2019) revolved around a nebula of speech balloons from which Okumura proclaimed a coalescence of two persons or a unity of two overlapped practitioners. Hence, he has continued to remain active as an artist working on the folds of rupture, absence and new mediumship with an interest in the body, self and mortality. He has exhibited his work recently at Tokyo’s Ueno Royal Museum and Keio University Art Center.