past exhibition

window-scape...-scape / art & river bank

10.11(sat) - 11.1(sat),2008

leaflets : +
review : takeshi hirata @ KALONS.NET

window-scape...-scape

Susumu Harada’s new work in his series “window-scape,” a series in which he has consistently utilized scenes that are photographed from a television monitor, is different from his former works in that it is an installation composed of digital photo frames and a projector. We commonly see a variety of diverse images that surrounds our daily world through TV monitors. We live under the illusion that we have experienced everything that we have seen on television, even though we have not actually looked at those scenes with our own eyes, visited those places, or met those people. Harada has consistently raised this issue of that illusionary state in his works. As we view such scenes reproduced inside his digital photo frames (which can be mistaken for televisions or computer monitors), we become seized by a strange feeling. Just as in the scenes he has continuously gazed at on his own television, Harada’s appeal that he makes through showing such scenes on the digital frames might also only be illusions that lack a sense of entity, due to the transient nature of the scenes that merely rise and vanish inside the monitors. Without us having the awareness to even ascertain the truth of what we are viewing in the photo frames, we end up absent-mindedly staring at the mass of flickering light in the monitors.

We are still confined within the questions Harada has long been raising, such as those concerning wars, disasters, accidents, and economic situations. Are these events that we see conveyed through the scenes shown on news programs actually occurring somewhere in the world? In this exhibition, Harada also uses a projector as an approach to indirectly show the state of a person gazing fixedly into a TV monitor. The questions he raises here are, “Why do we continue to gaze into the television?” and, “Do we watch television because we really want to learn something from it?” The answer, of course, could be that we just surrender ourselves to television out of sheer force of habit. Nowadays, people throughout the world, who have all been given a life in this universe, are consuming the greater part of their precious, limited lifetime in gazing into the light emitted from television. Are we firmly aware of this fact but still continue to be captives to television?

What can be manifested from a “scene” shown in such a nested state? Harada has created a situation in which a viewer is placed in a position to recognize the scene of someone gazing into a television as a ‘scene.’ Inside his space, we gaze at the scenes that surround us via the digital photo frames, while also fixing our eyes on the monitor that shows the state of being obsessed by scenes on television. But objectively viewing these states of affairs probably cannot release us from the present state of our own captivity. What is it that we are trying to do? Perhaps all we can do is give ourselves up to an inescapable inertia, and quietly curse the state of being that is slightly aroused through Harada’s work.(a.s.)