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About My "Fieldwork"
It was in 1980 that I started to use the word "Fieldwork" for the title of my art works. Few years before that year, when I was a university student, I started to look at my real living space carefully rather than a false space expressed on canvas, and make art works based on the actual feeling I had. Without going through this examination of actual space, I could not feel my own existence as a reliable artist. So I began to walk around my neighborhoods and various parts of Tokyo, making marks on maps and taking Photographs of the ground or street scenes.
I could see various impressive sights that still remain in my brain. But what interested me the most was the activity itself of "framing" scenery as I photographed. When the visual world is framed, sectioned and fragmentized in a certain artistic method, I think, we can perceive the visual richness of our world more than ever. I suppose one of the original functions of painting is also "framing". It slices the spatiotemporal world and records the world, too. These ideas and experiences have helped my Fieldworks. And my art of framing of the world has been developed, taking various forms such as painting, installation, performance, etc.
The early series of my works are titled "Hyokai" (signs of scope). First I collected objects around the exhibit site -- such as twigs and wasted matters, and then I placed some of them inside the exhibit space, inconspicuously others outside the building. Those objects were placed in the attempt to focus viewers' eyes onto the detail part of the fragment centripetally, and also to tempt their eyes to wonder about outdoors centrifugally.
In the next series I tried to juxtapose two different qualities of landscape into one art space. One of them was a false landscape that was sectioned and analyzed into a lot of dots. The first one was composed of photographs and drawings with mud. On the contrary, the second landscape was the actual scenery through a perforated panel. It was in the same period (around 1984), that I started to work making frequent Fieldworks in the reclaimed lands in Tokyo Bay, the symbolic places of the metropolitan system.
The recent series titled "Tochi no kei" (Relation of the Earth) were the trial to section the continuous flow of time. I symbolized flowerpots and drum cans as ambiguous materials of the initial and the end. Each framed world was tied with the big system which belonged to the world (for instance, various phenomena of society or weather) and rather small system (for instance, metamorphosis of the materials or germination of plants). So they are dealt as the passing materials of vacant containers.
As I went through these various changes of work, I have located a lot of environments ("field"), walked there, collected various objects and images ("work"), and tried to search for invisible flow of energy in there environments. Gradually I realized that we humans also had this invisible energy as one of the integral elements of a living existence in the society. Also I sensed the energy flows between humans and our environments like a network stretched all over the society.
Through this speculation, I arrogantly started to use the word “Fieldwork” which was originally the word of cultural anthropology. The acts of walking, collecting and searching are the resources of my inspiration. These very activities can be expression of art, too.
(1988)
From comments on "MARUYAMA Tokio Field Work 1989-90"
