[Note on titles:
Only a few of the paintings were formally given titles at the time of
their creation. Some titles developed during or soon after
the painting, but many have been created recently, as part of the
project of organizing the photos.]
1. Eleven years ago. When I
had legs but didn’t know.
You used to rub my legs when they ached.
You did.
My legs moved me and you.
But now one’s gone.
No more.
And you don’t see me or it.
No more.
But the leg still moves.
Moves me anyway.
Touching nothing but me and me.
This phantom leg still moves me
Through undergrounds, but not with you.
In Shinjuku now there’s sidewalks
Walkways walking people through
Millions.
Two, two, two, two, two.
But where are you?
Or where were you?
Eleven years now.
Eleven years and where were you?
I have no legs you have no eyes.
Was I there for you?
Now you walk those stones
Not me.
No more.
Walk past.
Over, under through.
And who carries the phantom?
Me? On me?
You knew.
Then.
You knew.
But not now.
No more.
You see through
All this space that for me still aches.
But not for you.
But not for you.
2. Cardboard walls
“Sweet Home (スウィート・ホーム)”
by Take Junichirō, Yamane
Yasuhiro, Yamazaki Takeo. Detail.
There’s no good picture of this painting. It was a pretty big one,
painted on the wall of a shelter that didn’t belong to anyone but was
used as a communal space, a kind of tea room. In it, a group of a dozen
or so people are massed together on a verge, each body coalescing out
of the dark. The focal point is the woman looking right at you, hand
laid out to write the words, “Sweet Home.” For a while I was
entertaining the idea of a cardboard mirror, because just as this
woman’s hand paints these words, the painter’s brush is painting them
too. So two hands meet one from either side of the cardboard, each
writing the same words. But there’s a problem. One hand is painting the
other, and the words are all those of the artist. And also the light’s
all wrong so it can’t be a mirror. But this itself means something.
It’s a wall not a mirror, and doesn’t stand up without at least two
hands to meet and hold it up, and as it turns out no one was on the
inside of this cardboard wall.
That night in February 1996, the Metropolitan Government decided to
clear out all the shelters built in this tunnel leading from the west
exit of Shinjuku station to the Metropolitan Government office
building. The Metro Government did this kind of clearing periodically,
throwing houses and personal belongings into dump trucks and taking
them away to collection areas. Opposing the Metro Government were not
only the homeless and activists working for them, but also the Shinjuku
Ward Government and the National Ministry of Health and Welfare, who
objected that it was counterproductive to clear people out without
giving them a place to go.
On this night the cleaners started at both ends of the tunnel and
worked inwards, garbage trucks, sanitation workers, and police. Most of
the people had already moved as the cleanup had been rumored for a few
weeks and that’s why most of the shelters were empty. “Sweet Home” was
being painted on the night of the clean-up, a three person
collaboration between Take, Yamazaki, and Yamane. The shelter was
located in the middle of the tunnel which meant it was the last to be
removed. The artists worked to bring these figures out of the shadows
as the cleanup crews worked towards them. It wasn’t until the trucks
were on top of them that they finally stepped away from it and took the
whole thing in. It stood as a mural only a few minutes, until the wall
itself was removed.
But was the cardboard wall ever quite there? The people in it were
saying it was, and the art was saying it was. But on this night the
people who had used it had already left, and the witnessing work of art
was gone in the very breath that carried it. The figures in the
painting move in something unsure like they’re lit by candles. They
come into a chiaroscuro to write words that in the end are at best
whispers in a flicker of gaslight. This didn’t last against the
fluorescents of the tunnel or the cleanup men and their noisy work. The
cardboard walls are held only from the one side because no hand from
the outside meets them. Even when there’s people in them they fall
apart and melt away in the wet. But when there’s no one left inside
they’re gone in a flash and then the painting means nothing either.
It’s important to be careful looking back – it’s too easy to see it all
as one thing to make meaning from: people abandoned by the city when
they couldn’t work anymore, the cardboard falling away and being
re-hung, the painting having to be re-done. It’s too easy to make it a
whole. But even so there is some necessary relationship here – this
painting had to be on cardboard, and had to be in this place. No matter
how I try, I can’t think of any other places the artists could have
done this much painting. Painting this volume on canvasses would cost a
fortune. And where else could you do it? Try painting like that on any
hard wall in Shinjuku, or anywhere else in Tokyo and see how long you’d
last. Maybe beach stones or tree trunks? Even these are probably being
watched by someone. In a strange sense the only place to paint like
this, on a large scale, publicly, is in a place designated as
invisible. Painting is orphaned too, either wandering the street or
institutionalized. And why aren’t there any murals down Michigan or on
Fifth Avenue? To some extent this place and the work are indivisible: a
ghetto at the foot of a glass government tower, painting along a wavy
boundary between worlds within touching distance, but out of sight.
3. Being watched.
The woman looking out of “Sweet Home” is not the only one. Eyes are
everywhere.
“Person Holding an Eye (目を持つ人)” by Take Junichirō.
“Face (顔)” by Take Junichirō and Yamazaki
Takeo.
“String Man (ひも男)” by Take Junichirō,
Yamane Yasuhiro, and Yamazaki Takeo.
“Peeking Eye
(覗き見る目)” by Take Junichirō, Yamazaki Takeo.
“Salaryman (サラリーマン)”
by Take Junichirō, Yamane Yasuhiro, and Yamazaki Takeo.
Take has written in his own commentary that these eyes were meant to
throw a gaze back at the people walking through the station, to show
that there were real people living here: real people looking back,
looking out at the world that either ignored them completely or avoided
their eyes.
The passageway is a place where private people, adults, employed, full
bodied members of society, can pass places without having to leave
their private spaces. They’re freeways or air routes connecting
departures with destinations, and a lot of people move along the
passageways of Shinjuku station.
The west plaza of Shinjuku station has a history as a battleground
between passageway and place. In the late 1960s it was occupied by folk
singers and other performers, and their audiences filled up the entire
exit area with songs of unspecified duration. In response the city
resolved to enforce the area as a passageway, and there is still some
funny documentary footage of policeman with the difficult job of making
the recalcitrant move through it (can you walk in circles in a
passageway? how about walking very slowly?). In the 1990s also, the
area’s status as a passageway was used as part of the justification for
clearing it.
But now the passage is looking back. People are living and paintings
are staring. Can this make people stop? Will this arrest you? Eyes on
you to put you in place, accuse you to the spot. Where are you going,
and where are you from? Is that the question? No, no. It’s where are
you right now. Gazes pull away from the rails between near future and
past, to the here and now where people are living. Aren’t you here?
Can’t this tangle of gazes curling around you pull you to a stop, root
you to the spot?
To the tangle we can add two more eyes. One is “Eye of Shinjuku (新宿の目)”
a glowing sculpture by Miyashita Yoshiko, finished in 1969, that looks
over the rotary and plaza from the right hand side if you’re standing
facing out from the station. The other “Left Eye of Shinjuku (新宿の左目), a
cardboard mural that completes a pair with Miyashita’s sculpture as the
right eye. “Left Eye of Shinjuku” is more of an eyeball than an eye –
it has eyelashes and volume. It teems with a life full of bodies
swirling inside its pupil.
“Eye of Shinjuku (新宿の目)” by Miyashita Yoshiko.
“Left Eye of Shinjuku (新宿の左目)” by Take Junichirō,
Yamane Yasuhiro, and Yamazaki Takeo.
But more than either one, it’s between the two eyes I find interesting:
the whole plaza area becomes a field between these two gazes, neither
of them human. The two eyes look out at each other over the plaza,
where tens of thousands pass everyday. They look out at all the people
passing, vendors, city workers, salarymen, police, bus drivers, office
ladies and the homeless. But they don’t really see anything. They make
everyone looked at, but don’t look and don’t write anything down. So
just maybe they’ll make you more likely to stop and look back at what
it is looking at you. And if you do. Have you been stopped by a
policeman calling out to you? Or by someone asking for change? By
someone’s eyes looking you up and down? No. There’s a sculpture looking
at you, a painting looking at you. There’s a present between you that
calls out, but what is that, what is that that it’s asking you to do?
Can art find a place here as a witness with no subject and no object,
as only an eternal place beckoning you out, calling you out, yelling
you out into this present around you?
4. Place of patterns and
moving plates.
The paintings are very dense. Between pattern and color there’s
something happening everywhere and not much space left open. Pattern
and rhythm seem so basic in every aspect of human sense. The patterns
uncurl over the cardboard, covering them with repetition until maybe
the walls can support themselves so full they are of life. Patterns
cocoon and weave walls until the hands holding them up can fall away
and rest in the motion they’ve written in around them. They give the
walls a side to side against the gravity they already know too well.
Maybe this side to side, following lines to places not on the map
brings more density to the web of painted eyes looking back and forth
across the plaza. Patterns take what you can see and make it heavy.
They take your eyes and pull them in and around this new density,
slowing the air down until you see that there’re other people around,
living their own patterns through the same space you’re walking.
“Scarlet (くれない)” by
Yoshizaki Takeo.
“The Sun and Music (お日さまと音楽)” by Take Junichirō.
“Itohisa Two (イトヒサの絵(２))” by Takano Itohisa.
“Life is Real (LIFE IS REAL)” by Take Junichirō.
Life is real. LIFE IS REAL. But not because it has a future. The people
and the paintings here weren’t on their way somewhere. There wasn’t
another place for them though they couldn’t last long where they were
either. They were moving, changing and shifting, people entering and
leaving and dying, paintings breaking up, falling apart, being painted
over. A couple of photographs attest to the movement.
“Colored Wink (色目)” by Take Junichirō.
“Painting Cut Away (切り取られた絵)” by Take Junichirō and house occupant.
“Line Painting (線による絵画)” by Take Junichirō and Yoshizaki Takeo.
As pieces of cardboard weakened they’d be replaced a piece at a time
with new pieces. The walls are more like congregations having to be
built and rebuilt, kept together constantly with work, and so it is
with the patterns in the pictures. They shift past each other like
plateaus meeting briefly to make a landscape, then moving on and
disappearing. They have to keep painting. This is probably the way it
always is, though harder surfaces try to mask it.
I really like this painting:
“Tokyo Kuramubon
(東京クラムボン)” by Take Junichirō and Yoshizaki Takeo.
The ghost seems so shocked to find itself giving birth. Maybe we’d all
just rather be ghosts.
5. Murals
One of my favorite things about murals is the way different elements
flow into each other. I’m dreaming one up where there’s a face, then
the hair dissolves into a school of fish that become the organelles of
a cell, then the nucleus expands to become the sun and tongues of flame
become grain, or something like that. Where exactly does the hair
become the fish? A mural covers a large space and requires the artist
to bring a lot of things together and imagine how they can be
connected.
The cardboard artists were doing this on walls that were moving and
constantly falling away. The “Dog and Pig” stay with me, and not just
them but the house they’ve been painted on. The painting comes out from
under the cooler and tarp, and by this it’s both diminished and warmed.
It’s a sad story the painting tells, from behind the everyday stuff of
everyday life. But there’s humor in the sadness too. The photo shows so
much more than just a mural, but something lived and lived in.
“Dog and Pig (犬とブタ)” by Take Junichirō, Yamane Yasuhiro, and Yamazaki
Takeo.
“Child out of Flower (はなから子ども)” by Take Junichirō and Take Yōko.
“Yoshinoya (吉野屋)” by Take
Junichirō, Yamane Yasuhiro, and Yamazaki Takeo.
 “Edo House (江戸家)”
by Take Junichirō and Yamazaki Takeo.
“Doting (まめ)” by Take Junichirō, Yamane Yasuhiro, and Yamazaki Takeo.
Though none of the cardboard art is as big as a wall mural, the artists
faced living and lived walls. Irregular spaces and little use of
perspectival depth result in throngs of figures pressed up against one
another in one or two planes. A flower is connected to a baby by an
umbilical cord, the back of someone’s head elongates and becomes a fish
tail, small characters dangle from the edges. While the biological
interconnection of everyone might seem a little abstract in the face of
homelessness, I want to believe that in the space of the underground
tunnels and the west plaza, spaces that the city government was trying
to monopolize as places to pass, portraying life as a stubborn tangled
mass that makes its marks everywhere, does have some value. And the
precariousness of these people and their village is a mortality we all
share.
I see we’re all together in this place, or that one eleven years ago.
People and things coming and going, rising and fading, moving around.
This large messy work tries not only to show this, but is this, living
and dying on these walls that were all the more fragile for not being
recognized. In a place with such a steep barrier to sympathy, a huge
invisible differential over such a small space, the small tendrils
these murals sent out across the plaza were like anguished yells made
whispers in an airless atmosphere turned down. Tendrils in danger of
dying, just like everyone, walls in danger of falling, just like they
all are, voices fragile just like everyone’s, these things deigned to
reach out into the glass house of ghost promises of things yet to come
to catch a leg. Or at least an eye. And pull them into relation. And
invite people to be with those next to them.
In addition to the artists and photographers mentioned on the first
page, a special thanks must be given to Fukase Eichirō who organized
the 2005 study group to talk about and think through these works and
their surroundings. Far fewer people would know about Shinjuku’s
cardboard art if it was not for his curatorial skill. [ Visit Fukase
Eichirō's study group website ]
I would
also like to thank Ikegami Yoshihiko,
who introduced me to the study group, and to so much else as well.
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