CCJ is pleased to share four works by video artist Morihiro Wada over March and April, introduced by scholar Nina Horisaki-Christens.
Each program will be available for viewing on CCJ’s viewing platform for CCJ members.
March & April Members’ Viewing: Morihiro Wada
Introduction by Nina Horisaki-Christens
Morihiro Wada was one of the youngest artists to participate in the first wave of 1970s video pioneers. Having entered Tama Art University in 1969, the start of his artistic training coincided with a campus shutdown due to the waves of student protests sweeping Japanese universities. This was also the height of Mono-ha's influence in the art academy and the era in which the seminal art critic, Dada-specialist, and media theory proponent Tōno Yoshiaki ran a seminar at Tama Art University. Wada's own interests veered toward the intersection of cognition, image, language, and material. Influenced by books including Takaaki Yoshimoto's Kyōdo gensōron, Wataru Hiromatsu's Kyōdo shukanteki sonzai kōzō, the writings of J. M. G Le Clézio and Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Wittgenstein's version of phenomenology, he was particularly concerned with processes of perception and disjunctures between the individual and the collective. Upon meeting Canadian artist Michael Goldberg in 1971 and being introduced to the video camera, he eagerly took up the medium as a tool for exploring the act of seeing as a means of exploring perception and intersubjective relations. As Wada wrote in 2005, "the closed-circuit structure in which the world, perceived through the eye of the video camera, was recorded on tape then returned via feedback was, itself, reminiscent of human thought patterns." As a video artist, Wada participated in exhibitions and screenings organized by the 1970s collective Video Hiroba, maintained a friendship with Mako Idemitsu, and taught video classes at the Yokohama alternative art school B-Zemi.
Still, Morihiro Wada's works are rarely confined to a single medium. Within the works included in the March and April screenings, we see Wada using photography, film, video, and video synthesizers, but Wada also worked with sound, painting, installation, and sculpture, often in combination with each other. Through this multi-media approach, Wada placed the materiality of different media in juxtaposition, experimenting with how the physical properties of a given material affected the subjects mediated by these media. He played with the materiality of language as both text and sound, the limits of perception by naming objects presented as images re-mediated several times over, and conventions of moving image composition including singular vanishing points, slow pans, zooms, and layering of picture-in-picture inserts. This combination of conceptual and material interests drew critics such as Arata Tani to Wada's work and earned him a place in shows at the Centre Pompidou, New York's Museum of Modern Art, and The Kassel International Art Exhibition in the 1980s and '90s.
Situation / 状況｜1974, 20:10 min, video, b&w, sound
A static image of a rock next to a curb is overlaid with the deformed reflection of light and shadows from pedestrian and vehicular traffic. An alternatively whispy and shrill, irregular slide whistle soundtrack is occasionally punctuated by a male voice saying "this is," culminating in an insistent string of "this is, this is, this is." Once the soundtrack falls silent, the camera begins to haltingly zoom out, revealing the reflection to have been caused by the slick surface of the glossy photo of the curb, and the picture itself to have been one of a series of photos of urban details placed in a grid in an exhibition space. Shot as a ½ open reel video during Wada's 1974 exhibition Application No. IV From the State of Use and Looks...(Dynamic Sorites or Static Base) at Tokiwa Gallery, this work was included in the seminal 1975 touring exhibition Video Art, organized by the Institution of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.
The Recognition Construction №Ⅳ: Recognition Construction in Film / フィルムによる認知構造№Ⅳ ｜1975, 16 min, 16mm, color, silent
Originally shot on 16mm film and presented at Maki Gallery, this work primarily focuses on traffic traveling up and down the major traffic artery Omotesandō in Tokyo. Prefaced by the Wittgenstein quotation included below, the image focuses on the vanishing point—aligning it with the top of the frame in wide shots—and movements of vehicles up and down the boulevard. While the film's first half presents a stationary shot, the second half follows individual cars and motorbikes, zooming in to frame them at a consistent size even as they advance toward and recede from the camera.
Excerpt from Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (translation by C. K. Ogden):
The total reality is the world.
We make to ourselves pictures of facts.
The picture presents the facts in logical space, the existence and non-existence of atomic facts.
The picture is a model of reality.
To the objects correspond in the picture the elements of the picture.
The elements of the picture stand, in the picture, for the objects.
The picture consists in the fact that its elements are combined with one another in a definite way.
The picture is a fact.
That the elements of the picture are combined with one another in a definite way, represents that the things are so combined with one another.
This connexion of the elements of the picture is called its structure, and the possibility of this structure is called the form of representation of the picture.
The form of representation is the possibility that the things are combined with one another as are the elements of the picture.
Thus the picture is linked with reality; it reaches up to it.
Nina Horisaki-Christens
Dr. Horisaki-Christens is a sculptor, an art historian, and a freelance curator with PhD in Art History from Columbia University. Her research focuses on the 1970s Tokyo-based collective Video Hiroba and histories of media and art in Asia and the Asian diaspora. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for her dissertation research, completed the Whitney Independent Study Program, and has taught at both Columbia and Fordham Universities.