ART-TRIBUTE:Dumb Type-Extra Sensory Odissey,Part II

Dumb Type is a Japanese multi-media performance art collective founded in 1984, and called Dumb Type because artists associated with the movement do not use language in their work. The collective was founded by students from Kyoto Art University. Inspired by New York performance artists Laurie Anderson and Robert Wilson Dumb Type created performances that examined the effects of globalisation, technology and identity on Japanese society (Part I)

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Centre Pompidou-Metz Archive

Dumb Type became internationally recognised for their ambitious site-specific performances that combined video, music, lighting, digital technology and dance. Their most ambitious perhaps being “Pleasure Life”, a dystopian vision of a future Japanese society inspired by the pleasure gardens of the Japanese Heira period. The exhibition “Extra-Sensory Odissey” is the first monographic exhibition in France dedicated to Dumb Type, presenting five major installations, including a new installation produced for the occasion. Some of these works are the respective productions of three of the very first members of the collective: Teiji Furuhashi, Ryoji Ikeda and Shiro Takatani. Teiji Furuhashi, who died from AIDS in 1995, the central figure of the group, explained in an interview the critical approach suggested by the name “Openness to the West and the economic bubble that culminated in the 1980s made Japan an increasingly superficial society, devoted to the media, consumerism and technology, in which every individual is overwhelmed with information, without being aware of anything, and where desires stand side by side with despair”. In reaction to this era and to the multiplication of theatricality and gimmicks, Dumb Type has created an experimental theatre in which the performers’ bodies serve to support the images, sounds, sets. The first political gesture of Dumb Type lies in choosing to work as a collective; the desire for several people to work together was aiming for a total interdisciplinary approach, abandoning categories and academic hierarchies. This system is clearly visible in the hybrid nature of the group’s projects, where live performance installation produced for the occasion. Archives and testimonies are also presented in the exhibition and retrace the genealogy of the group, before and after the death of Teiji Furuhashi in 1995. This understanding, both physical and documentary, of a selection of works from Dumb Type allows these creations to be considered in a new context, while placing them in perspective within the current context of a society still dominated by an excess of information and consumption. A new installation designed for the exhibition and presented for the first time brings together the recreations of three Dumb Type performances produced before the death of Teiji Furuhashi: “PleasureLife” (1988), “pH” (1990) and “S/N” (1994). “Lovers”  (1994) is an interactive installation by Teiji Furuhashi, tackling the theme of love in a ghostly and romantic fashion. On the walls of a square room are projected the naked bodies, life-size, of nine performers, men and women, who meet. The silhouette of the artist also comes to meet the visitor, before disappearing at the moment of embrace. “Data.tron” (2007) is an audiovisual installation by Ryoji from the “datamatics” series he began in 2006. A member of the Dumb Type collective, Ikeda is also a key figure in music and Electronic art. The artist explains that for “Data.tron” each pixel of the image is strictly calculated according to mathematical principles, composed from a combination of pure mathematics and the vast ocean of data present in the world. “Toposcan” (2013 & 2016) is an audiovisual installation by Shiro Takatani  responsible for the visual and technical aspects of Dumb Type projects. Composed of eight 16/9 monitors in a line, the work offers a panoramic view of a landscape, on which is revealed the digital structure of the medium chosen by the artist: high definition video “Nature”, filmed at 360°, which is gradually swept away by a filter, the video decomposing gradually into the multitude of lines of pixels that make up the image. Lastly, “MOV” (2004) is a choral installation, which brings together, on a 16 metre long screen, the images and sounds of three previous shows, all made after the death of Teiji Furuhashi: “Memorandum” (1999), “[OR]” (1997) and “Voyage” (2002) summarising in a new work the memory of the collective.

Info: Curator:  Yuko Hasegawa Hélène Meisel, Centre Pompidou-Metz, 1 Parvis des Droits de l’Homme, Metz, Duration: 20/1-14/5/18, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-Sun 10:00-18:00,  www.centrepompidou-metz.fr