Minimalism, Non-Objective Abstraction and Identity. Like in many of the works set out by the abstractionists and minimalists, artists attempted to deconstruct, abstract and delete more and more unnecessary elements from the artwork, until the work was the bare sum of its parts. Simultaneously through this process the artists seemed to erase more and more of their identity from the work, as if all traces of the artists’ personality was extinguished. From Kasimir Malevich’s ‘White on White’(1918), to Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Erased De Kooning Drawing’ (1953) and notably Yves Klien’s The Void (1958), artists negotiated identity and authorship whilst simultaneously questioning the meaning of art. As discussed above, in the work of On Kawara, although figurative elements of the self and the touch of the artist's hand is concealed through seemingly mechanical processes, in actuality the works are self-referential artifacts based on the artist's existence. In Yuki Okumura’s work however, the self is superimposed by other artists who become his medium and whose histories become the basis for research and investigation which results in accumulations of form.

Language is an important part of the artistic medium for Okumura who as a Research based Conceptual Artist approaches the question of ‘I’ as subject through highly distinctive processes and radical actions. Okumura, through various acts of translation rather than contextualizing, decontextualizes this ‘I’ in the complex social network of connections both in and outside of the artworld. Following Yuki Okumura's Solo exhibition at Hermes Art space in Ginza Tokyo – in – September, 2016, Curator Reiko Setsuda wrote a unique and critical articulation of the artist's conceptual and strategic process. The essay Titled', "Untitled" explains the complex layers of identity structures that Okumura plays with in his multi-complex art practice. Both constructions and deconstructions of the artists’ identity and authorship are rendered through a variety of works and series of projects. Setsuda writes, ‘Okumura ... In wrestling away authorship – also creates countless possibilities for the whereabouts of the ‘I’ and enables us, only for a moment, to seize control of the ‘I’ and open a trajectory between artist and work and the interstices of history. Criticism of a single, specific “author” is performed by the chain of subjectivities we call the “I”, which also includes the viewer’. ^[1]

Interestingly, Okumura has been adopting these multiple identities in a number of his projects. Through multiple ‘heteronymous’ authorship, the issues of authorship and the ‘I’ as subject leads us back to the question of ‘presence’ in the contextual frame. Who is the artists? Okumura himself or the subject of translation? Including a monika for conceptual writing (Lei Yamabe) largely concerned with the Life work of On Kawara, there are several other ‘Heteronymous Authors’.  Several of Okumura’s Heteronyms: include Lei Yamabe who deals with the invisible history of On Kawara, Hisachika Takahashi (1940) - a re-enactment of the artists past exhibitions and life with other artists, and more recently Gordon Matta-Clark (GMC) (1943 - 1978) which began through a point of connection Okumura discovered in Belgium, where Matta-Clark’s history and his own personal and artistic experiences intersected. ^[2]

It is important to begin this analysis of Okumura’s works that deal with identity and reproduction looking at his references and intuitive research of On Kawara’s existence through his own theoretical writings as the Heteronym Lei Yamabe. Lei Yamabe is a fictional writer created as an artistic project by Yuki Okumura, inspired by On Kawara’s work, for essays that explore the uncertainty of our bodily existence. This exploration most clearly came to form in the work On Kawara's ‘Pure Consciousness, or Many Worlds (and) Interpretation’, 2012. A 30 minute performance piece enacted by 9 simultaneous interpreters at National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. In an interview I conducted with Okumura at Tokyo University of the arts in 2018, Okumura explains, ‘I had pre-recorded the lecture, but in present tense of the pronoun ‘I’ (Yuki Okumura) as if I was speaking about On Kawara in the present’. In the live performance lecture, the The 9 interpreters then simultaneously presented the lecture from English, also under the pronoun ‘I’ but interpreted in Japanese language. This technique meant that the individual identity of the singular ‘I’ was simultaneously multiplied in to 9 identities inhabiting the museum space as one identity’. ^[3]

In direct connection with Kawara On’s complex identity and the splitting of himself by altering his name as a human being and the name used to represent his artistic project. In his Texts, Lei Yamabe indicates, where his bodily presence is absent, the entity known as On Kawara transcends time and death. It is exactly in this death that the artist's project is critically geared to survive. As Derrida claims ‘The survival of our legacy is only possible post Death’. Derrida focuses on the question of "survival," both in the sense of physical survival and legacy. For Derrida language could - had to - be an open territory where traces of all manner of suppressed things could be released.

Again adopting multiple presence through the instrumentation of other people Okumura establishes multiple vehicles to represent the artist known as Yuki Okumura. This multiplicity we could say multiplies the artist from one into many. In her essay Setsuda  included a phrase by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, which states, “be multiple, like the universe”.^[4] Pessoa also authored several works under a series of fictitious authors he called ‘heteronyms’, which had not only different names but also distinctive personalities. Does this come out of a need to expand oneself beyond the confines of a singular identity? Or does this come out of a tactic to expand art practice?

The task Okumura takes upon himself to interpret the work of other artists ~ Resuscitates a body of work that was previously lost to art history →　But also to re-stage the exhibition for a present-day audience, effectively transporting the work through time + space. Here Okumura’s works raise issues of authorship & identity, of representation, and issues regarding other artists legacies and Art History itself. Other than the Institution and galleries, who guards another artist's history? We could also ask, is this process fueled by gravitating towards other artists based on a strategic method or based on homage and admiration? Okumura explains;

“I have chosen other artists’ works and activities which contain elements that overlap with my artistic areas of concern, regardless of time. Surrogating the artist, I extract such an element and develop it into a totally or slightly different form. The reason why I am particularly fascinated by working on practices from the recent past as a departure point to realize a “future that was possible,” is that I find it meaningful to perform, in the framework of contemporary art, exploration into the potential of the essential supernatural effects of “translation,” namely not only alternating identities but also connecting different spaces and times’. ^[5]

In 2015, Okumura cleverly played with conceptual issues of authorship, reference and Institutional Critique in his VOCA Artist Award submission titled ‘現代美術の展望はどこにある？Where is the Vision of Contemporary Art?’, 2015. Okumura’s original proposal to the award exhibition, was to submit a work that would fall in the category of collaboration, in which Okumura would direct and Makoto Aida would paint the painting. The proposal was rejected by VOCA on the grounds that the artwork was not painted by Okumura himself and was therefore not truly his artwork. In the spirit of Gustave Courbet (Salon de Refuse) and Marcel Duchamp’s (Independent Artists Society ‘Fountain’) Okumura then withdrew his entry and re-submitted a new work. This time he submitted a large piece of Polycarbonate Glass, 194cm x 259cm the same dimensions as the first collaborative painting planned with Makoto Aida only this time the work was invisible.^[6] By using the title ‘Where is the Vision of Contemporary Art? Which references directly the association's VOCA exhibition itself Okumura plays with the conceptual tradition of self-criticality and self-reflexivity. The piece asks both the viewer and the Association the critical self-reflective question ‘Where is the Vision of Contemporary Art? If it is not here then where is it? Okumura employs this kind of Linguistic game play reminiscent of the works by Lawrence Weiner and Sol LeWitt.  It questions both authorship and the limits of collaboration on 2 levels. One between Okumura and Aida, who then is the rightful author? And secondly in a tradition of conceptual art. Did Okumura come up with this kind of strategy himself or does the work just attempt to follow the kind of strategic games laid out by Yoko Ono, Weiner and LeWitt some 40 years earlier?

One of his most revered projects in recent years has been his ongoing references and re-making of the work and exhibitions of Hisachika Takahashi. As with Okumura’s ongoing works, re-visiting and the temporal and spatial re-contextualization, such as that of Hisachika Takahashi, provides us with a source of ideas and material to expand Okumura’s practice. The rich intertextual layers of historical reference propel the project into levels of relevance that could not be achieved in a work without such interconnected references into modernist art history. Okumura discovered materials on Takahashi’s 1967 solo show at Wide White Space, the legendary gallery in Antwerp, Belgium, and began investigating it out of curiosity. After gaining cooperation from the gallery owner at the time, assembling fragmentary information from the Internet, and interacting with a curator who shared an interest in Takahashi, Okumura eventually succeeded in meeting Takahashi himself. This led to a reconstruction of the exhibition in Brussels (WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, 2013), which then traveled to Liverpool (Exhibition Research Centre, 2013). Also, Okumura has facilitated another restating of the Brussels exhibition in a different form in Tokyo (Mori Art Museum, 2013). The most recent Hisachika exhibition project “Hisachika Takahashi by Yuki Okumura / 奥村 雄樹による高橋尚愛” at Maison Hermes Le Forum, 2016 ~ explores one side of art history in the present progressive tense, through a body of works unearthed and newly created through interaction between the two artists.

In this exhibition all the divergent links, networks and connections that led from Hisachika to the artworld are brought back into a complete referential loop. Firstly, Hisachika was an assistant for Lucio Fontana and then spent a many number of years assisting Robert Rauschenberg. From here the web of interconnected artworks begins.
The walls open onto a semi enclosed chamber with some works by Hisachika, Memory of No Memory (1973) and Leftover from Yves Klien and Me (1982). This uncanny inclusion of this artifact from Klien deepens the web of connections and relations in this project. Encased in a plexiglass box, the latter work is a sculpture Hisachika made by cutting open a can of leftover International Klien Blue pigment that he inherited from the Belgian artist Jef Verheyen, who set up his exhibition at Wide White Space in Antwerp in 1967. It’s quite funny: a squashed disc with two rectilinear metal flaps extending from its side, a kind of rusting Petri dish with an encrustation of mesmerizing blue spores proliferating from it. This happenstance inclusion of this relic has an incredible conceptual link in a discourse of works to other works which enter this historical re-referencing of Hisachika by Okumura. For instance, It was Klien with his historic work The Void 1957, and with his patent registration of his IKB International Klien Blue, that set a precedent for a new conceptual attitude to the void and nothingness in art. The challenges Klien made to the invisible, absence, and transience in the object or work of art in his monochromes, installations and performative transactions have an undeniable and important link to other works produced by 3 significant figures in Hisachika Takahashi by Yuki Okumura / 奥村 雄樹による高橋尚愛 .

1. Firstly, That Hisachika was Bob’s (Robert Rauschenberg) assistant is for the record impressive. A young Japanese artist in the 1960’s moving between Europe and America able to attain the position of assistant to firstly Lucio Fontana (1899 - 1968)and then Rauschenberg.  But not only this, The link here comes between the simultaneous similarity and synchronicity of Klien’s ‘The Void’ Installation and Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning drawing (1953). Both artworks, established a new set of parameters for the creation of a modern artwork, both essentially conceptual gestures which re-negotiated new meanings of the monochrome, the meaning / significance of authorship, and used publication through the media (newspapers and art journals) to disseminate the event of the works into critical circles of the artworld. 

2. A second uncanny link then comes into focus in the work Hisachika Takahashi in Israel (2016), a sleek white display table set in the semi-enclosed space. Under the glass there is a grid of 24 images cut from the photobook Robert Rauschenberg in Israel published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Israel Museum in 1975. Hisachika was there with Bob and he appears in a number of the published photographs. As a strategic but intuitive manner Okumura has gone through and erased all the details of the photo’s except for Hisachika’s image, in turn creating a new narrative and reference to the Erased do Kooning Drawing and to Hisachika’s historical connections to both Klien and Rauschenberg. This process of erasure, and in considering ‘The Void’, in this case creating a void of documentation, memory and identity, uniquely re-orders and re-enters these connected works both into Okumura’s own practice and into a dialogue on art discourse. Set deeper in the installation as the museum façade walls open into the permanent architecture of the Le Forum Gallery space. There:

3. The next important work that further builds on this series of links, connections and references in the “Hisachika Takahashi by Yuki Okumura / 奥村 雄樹による高橋尚愛”  project is the work occupied two rooms of the Le Forum space, The Notable FROM MEMORY DRAW A MAP OF THE UNITED STATES (1971-72).  An intriguing work in which Takahashi got 22 artists to perform what the title describes,.. This is not only a masterwork of collaborative conceptual art, it also offers a fascinating window in the New York art scene and community in the 1970s, including some major names as Mel Bochner, Joseph Kosuth, Susan Weil, Gordon Matta-Clark, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Lawrence Weiner, (Shusaku) Arakawa and Cy Twombly.^[7] In this work the Hisachika’s skill of interpersonal networking with other artists, and his imaginative conceptualizations are clearly demonstrated. Through his connection with Rauschenberg and his participation in Conceptual and Pop art circles at the time, enabled him to gather this selection of artists, many of whom have become canonical figures of historic conceptual art. The actual possibilities of these works coming together to display two artists practices, that of Hisachika and Okumura duplicated by the works existing in multiple times lines and contexts and then multiplied again by the number of very famous and important historical figures of art creates a kind of a super reference for Okumura’s project. The symbolic capital of the connections and collaborations on Hisachika’s  behalf and the symbolic capital of the re-production of its contents on Okumura’s behalf may have some of us believe that it is all an elaborate creation. Too unreal to be 100% true.

To be able to make a personal connection to all these works and layers of history combined with the conceptual values that these works carry is of paramount value to Okumura’s project and to his own identifying as a collaborative concept-based research artist. The multiple layers and registers of this work which slide across the individual, collaborative, personal, meta-historical, past and present, and between memory and projection. 

When I asked Okumura in interview, about his process and intentions in referencing and making collaborative connections he said;

“It is not so strategic. The most important thing for me is whether or not I have some link with him – with Hisachika himself. Because without this I couldn’t make it into my project. So, for me his link to Rauschenberg or the artist league was not so important, the important thing was, he was incorporating their work into his practice; or his practice was collaborative, Hisachika. Especially it was obvious in this project called, ‘FROM MEMORY DRAW A MAP OF THE UNITED STATES’. ... he was using other artists' work as a material for his works.  I thought that was a link for me. I had been doing the same thing. Even his paintings were, ‘he would say, ‘It’s a collaboration between himself and the roller – the roller he used. However, now I think that he, ‘Hisachika’ is not a strategic person at all ... maybe he is but from my view he is not. I think spontaneously and intuitively he would’ve thought, ... well, this can happen ... (laughs). There is a big red book about the maps project he was talking about. He needed to relate himself to the maps, to the United States in a way because he had just moved in. Also, perhaps the MAPS project was a way for him to get to know those other artists^[8] – In respect of his experience in those days,  I also feel this kind of sympathy with him. Like the way he does things,  he just did it. do it & do it”.^[9]

Okumura’s ongoing works re-visiting the temporal and spatial re-contextualization of On Kawara, Hisachika Takahashi, & Gordon Matta- Clark, etc. provides a source of ideas and material to expand in the artist's practice. The rich intertextual layers of historical reference propel the project into levels of relevance that perhaps could not be achieved in a work without such interconnected references into modernist art history. It is not only interest in these artists, artworks and histories that justifies them as source material for artwork, for Okumura as for others it becomes the material as an outcome and circumstance of the research process. After the initial discoveries made about Hisachika, Okumura decided to exercise this re-entry in Discourse not only because of his links and connections to other important artistic identities (which was understood would carry weight in a re-examination of Hisachika, and fuel wider interest into Okumura’s own work), it was out of a sense of personal association and an intuition to bring his practice forward for contemporary conversations, to share Hisachika’s legacy with new generations / to re-enter Hisachika into current discourse.

Through the re-presentations of Hisachika’s life and works, Okumura was able to draw connections between his practice and the practices of some very important historical figures of Conceptual Art. The project value is doubled by the relics that made connections with Yves Klien, Rauschenberg, and the extended circles of conceptual art. This also linked and looped back around to Okumura’s own personal fascination and research into On Kawara’s life and conceptual project. Hisachika had also made connections with Gordon Matta-Clark, fueling new discoveries into Okumura’s most recent re-investigations about Gordon Matta-Clark (GMC) in which a series of circumstances and events of the two artists' lives are overlapped.  Was it the connections that Hisachika Takahashi had with Gordon Matta-Clark that motivated Okumura to re-work his methodology to explore his new work through GMC?

The work ‘Welcome Back, Gordon Matta-Clark’, 2017 is a half interview, half reminiscent talk conducted with Flor Bex, resulting in a video work which has been screened in various gallery contexts. “In this film, which is at the same time an art-historical and a semi-autobiographical inquiry, Okumura traces and incorporates memories of late American artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943–1978) in his visitation to Flor Bex, who, as the then director of the International Cultural Center in Antwerp (ICC), invited Matta-Clark in 1977 for a large-scale building intervention titled Office Baroque. Revisiting the trajectory of Matta-Clark’s journey that year from Paris to Kassel to Antwerp in the aftermath of his twin brother’s suicide, which echoes with Okumura’s own personal recollection, the work revolves around the realization of Office Baroque, it’s unfortunate destruction after the artist’s premature passing, and its eventual “reincarnation” into MuHKA thanks to the endless efforts of Bex and other friends”.^[10] The other aspect of this work is a publication replica of the catalogue produced for GMC’s Office Baroque project, only Okumura has replaced and inserted the original titles and text with his own.^[11]

 PARALLEL WORLDS / SYNCHRONICITY

If we analyze these works as a kind of institutional critique, what are some of the limitations of the art system and institutional conventions that become questioned or uncertain in some of these projects? In Okumura’s own words, he is Engaging,  “notions of  identity, individuality, and authorship, Yuki Okumura explores new forms of self-portraiture and auto-biography through his artistic and personal overlaps with the works and lives of other artists, both from the 60s-70s conceptual generation and his contemporaries. In doing so, his gestures at once poetically narrate parallel art histories and playfully challenge the institutional system of exhibition formulation and artwork attribution”. ^[12]

Contradiction

I started this discussion talking about connections to minimalism and Non-Objective Abstraction and identity. It’s something that is not usually connected to ideas of abstraction and minimalism, and it's rarely discussed. But as I’ve been going through this journey and research, I’ve realized more and more that they are very connected. In this whole series after considering On Kawara, we can trace from Malevich, through Yves Klien, and on to many others who explored Invisibility, the void and deconstruction of identity. It connects to De Kooning’s erasure by Rauschenberg and then to the works made with Hisachika.  This idea of the self being deleted from the work. All the layers, between what I’ve been talking about and what I’ve been looking at and what Okumura has done -  all connect. These layers become really intertextual, ‘Layers’ which all begin to overlap.

‍

Reduction & Identity

I gave Okumura the chance to be able to talk about these layers and overlaps regarding this idea and this question. When you’re building the layers of identity but at the same time there is a reduction of self, Is there some deconstructive elements?

YO: ‘When asked So, I think people, many people say; ‘You are really kind of ‘Invisible’ or behind the work, on the side lines, you're always not in the center of action’. But, I think through my work what people look at is actually the gesture.  A kind of gesture of deleting, trying to delete myself, or erase myself and this is in a way, ‘how can you say’, it’s more narcissistic than just showing yourself. The gesture itself is a declaration; ‘Hey I’m deleting myself, look at how I delete it’.

JH (I respond): Perhaps this absence can be stronger than presence?

YO: ‘Yes, you know it’s like still you have your own manner, you have your methodology – and with this gesture you make – it's unique, I don't know… as you said, I think I am in a way trying to multiply myself’.

^[1] “Hisachika Takahashi by Yuki Okumura” at Maison Hermes Le Forum, 2016. Curation & Essay: Rieko Setsuda / 説田 礼子, Curator Maison Hermes Tokyo, Ginza. Published by Le Maison Hermes, 2016

^[2] Interview conducted at Tokyo University of the Arts, Yuki Okumura Interview, by Jesse Hogan. Wed, Jan 31, 2018

& http://www.yukiokumura.com/CV/e.html.

^[3] ‘I had pre-recorded the lecture in English. Listening to the sound file, the 9 interpreters simultaneously translated live, what I had said into Japanese. As an interpreter, each repeated my words as-is, including the first person singular ‘I,’ and therefore, linguistically, it seemed as if I myself was giving a lecture about On Kawara in the present progressive tense right there, in Japanese. This technique means that my single identity was multiplied with the 9 different bodies inhabiting the museum space.’ Interview conducted at Tokyo University of the Arts, Yuki Okumura Interview, by Jesse Hogan. Wed, Jan 31, 2018

^[4] “Hisachika Takahashi by Yuki Okumura” at Maison Hermes Le Forum, 2016. Curation & Essay: Rieko Setsuda / 説田 礼子, Curator Maison Hermes Tokyo, Ginza. Published by Le Maison Hermes, 2016

^[5] Out of Doubt, Mori Art Museum, catalogue of Roppongi Crossing, 2013, p. 127

^[6] http://www.yukiokumura.com/CV/e.html. VOCA, 現代美術の展望はどこに, 2015. Where is the Vision of Contemporary Art?

^[7] Artists represented in Hisachika Takahashi’s work FROM MEMORY DRAW A MAP OF THE UNITED STATES (1971-72) include:  Juan Downey, Mel Bochner, Joseph Kosuth, Susan Weil, Gordon Matta-Clark, Alex Hay, Keith Sonnier, Brice Marden, James Rosenquist, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Robert Whitmain, Lawrence Weiner, Don Wyman, Richaed Nonas, Robert Petersen, Jeffrey Lew, Jed Bark, Jane Logemann, Dorothea Rockburne, (Shusaku) Arakawa

^[8] In this book (https://www.hatjecantz.de/hisachika-takahashi-6406-1.html, he says something like it was a way for him to relate himself to the US.

^[9] Interview conducted at Tokyo University of the Arts, Yuki Okumura Interview, by Jesse Hogan. Wed, Jan 31, 2018

^[10] https://www.muhka.be/programme/detail/1109-yuki-okumura-welcome-back-gordon-matta-clark

^[11] Yuki Okumura’s book repeats the original design, layout, and contents, but all the elements to do with GMC are replaced with elements to do with himself. This includes reproductions (illustrations). It was a catalogue of his mini-retrospective show at ICC, taking place at the same time as Office Baroque. He showed one photo per one project of his from the past – which Okumura repeated in his solo show at M&R (http://misakoandrosen.jp/en/exhibitions/17/03/). “My book is a catalogue of this “mini-retrospective” show of mine”. Yuki Okumura

^[12] https://www.instagram.com/p/BXaVsCXFWbh/  Retrieved; 7^th December 2019