GUSH!

Summary

Music　　　　　　Tatsuro Kondo

Performance　Kaname Oda

Filming and Editing Support　Kawasaki City Museum

“Cinematic Cubism” after David Hockney
GUSH! is an important work from Naoko Tosa’s early video art practice, sharply engaging with the relationship between the body, time, and viewpoint.
The work was created by filming a Butoh dancer in real time from six different angles using six cameras. Each video image was then fragmented through digital frame memory and collaged/reconstructed along the temporal axis.
This work can be seen as a response to David Hockney’s photographic collage works.
Hockney combined multiple photographs to construct, within a single image, the overlapping of time and space that cannot be captured from a single viewpoint.
GUSH! transfers this method from still photography to moving image, and further, to the movement of the body.
In other words, GUSH! reinvents Hockney’s collage of multiple viewpoints within the temporality of video.
What is important here is that the dancer’s body is not simply being filmed.
The body is not treated as an object to be grasped from a single viewpoint. Rather, it is dismantled and reassembled through multiple cameras, fragmented frames, and temporal shifts.
If Hockney broke the unity of vision through photography, Tosa breaks the unity of the body through video.
In this respect, GUSH! is not merely a video effect.
It is a work that refuses to see the body as “a single form,” and instead treats the body as an event generated through viewpoint, time, and media.
From an art-historical perspective, the work occupies a position that connects Cubism, Hockney’s photographic collage, and video art after the 1980s.
Tosa’s originality, however, lies in the fact that she does not simply arrange multiple viewpoints on the screen. Through bodily movement and real-time video processing, she turns into a work of art the very process by which form emerges within time.
Therefore, GUSH! is not a documentary record of Butoh.
Nor is it simply an expression of the body.
It is a work that addresses the conditions under which the body is generated within the image.
If ECSTASY is a work that gives rise to the inner sensations of the body as image, then GUSH! is a work that dismantles and regenerates the body’s outer form through fragments of viewpoint and time.
Here, we can clearly see a prehistory leading to the later Sound of Ikebana.
In Sound of Ikebana, sound acts upon fluid, generating fleeting forms invisible to the naked eye.
In GUSH!, multiple viewpoints and fragments of time act upon the body, generating the body’s form as image.
Thus, GUSH! is a work that anticipates the problem of “generation” in Naoko Tosa’s practice, not in the realm of natural phenomena, but in the realm of the body and the moving image.
Put most sharply:
whereas Hockney spatialized time through photography,
Naoko Tosa attempted to generate the body through video.  

Award

Reference

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Exhibition

Collection

富山県立近代美術館