KNUT EBELING: FORTUNATE PROCES...
Knut Ebeling: fortunate process, unfortunate process / good time, bad timeThe fact that time is the central theme of Takehito Koganezawa’s work, already conjures up a myriad of cultural associations and philosophical problems. He processes time through various media and forms, whereby it is the status of the respective medium that defines the way in which time is treated and vice versa. Koganezawa uses mainly video for these processes, i.e. converting space into a surface, such as the transition from a three-dimensional room to a two-dimensional image on the screen or monitor. This transcription is fascinating, because Koganezawa seems to have found a means of complementing the ways in which "visual modernism“ has been interpreted until now. While the theory of modern painting perceived the movement of the image area to be a monochrome surface that explicitly excludes the moment of time, Koganezawa’s work point us to this theoretical blind spot of despatialisation. The loss of depth, the flattening of a picture is always a temporal event as well, a process, which Koganezawa exposes by choosing video as his medium to depict it. His work deals with the genesis of diachronistic pictures that are synchronised via time.
The diachronicity in this flattening process is demonstrated via different chronologies, which Koganezawa splices together in an image or a room, creating a picture during the time that the video is being played. This is the fundamental principle of his work; in that he allows a current, discontinuous time to play in front of a non-current but continuous time; he marks the different components that are involved in the creation of a picture. The different times run against and with each other and eventuate in a monochrome picture, which perfectly unifies these differing moments in space and time. It is indicative that the culmination of this unification and completion is perfect darkness.
In his current series, the materialness of painting, the visibility of colour as a smudge or fluid substance in relation to time is preserved in its temporality on video. His works allow the spectator to experience the moment where time becomes the medium. It is time that is the vehicle and not the video, which only displays it, allows it to start and documents it by showing paint drip onto a surface, it is the medium, in which paint is able to slowly but surely drip down a wall like a living entity. Time is the medium, which can expose the viscosity and smooth texture of the materials that are used in painting, into the essence of paint, where internal or external no longer exist.
As with Lacan, Koganezawa also believes that it is time which destroys any distinction between the external and internal and reveals any semblance of interiority as mere appearance. Here he turns precisely to the place where "inside“ and "outside“ and space and time are still joined. He makes the temporality of colour visible as ist own process.
The concept of this process enables his video art to bring into play another aspect that is not concerned with the transmission of time via painting, but situations instead. Therefore, in showing themselves in the form of situations these works allow time to become a medium. What is a situation? At first glance a situation is a sequence of specific events that take place in a concrete time frame, it is about the process of an un-mistakeable event in an un-changed moment. It is time, which allows an event to become a situation. A closer look at particular situations reveals that here also we are dealing with a meeting of various diachronistic time-threads: a situation only becomes a situation when one point in time encroaches on another: when, for instance, not just one person is at a place but by chance also another one, when not just one arm moves from one place to another, but when it hits a vase, which also happens to be in the trajectory of this movement. This is an unfortunate process (Bad time).
There are also situations, which distinguish themselves by the fact that each one is in the same synchronous time frame, such as a football game. By giving a concrete event a precise time frame, Koganezawa constructs and satirizes such a situation. For instance, different couples equipped with two spindles are asked to unroll a tape on one spindle and to wind it up on the other one. The difficulty lies in the fact that the tape is not directly connected to the second spindle, but runs across a third intermediary spindle. The third spindle, which can easily be described as representing time itself (and which has since the beginning of time been portrayed as a spindle and metaphorised as such) synchronises both movements with each other. Time thus becomes precisely the medium, just as the two partners communicate with each other via the transmission of this instance, the temporal medium of the spindle.
The key to Koganezawa’s work lies in the fact that the rather absurd occupation of monotonously winding and unwinding the tape, which is already being synchronised via the spindle, is synchronised a second time. In this second time the already temporally defined situation almost simultaneously underlines and covers up the metaphor of the spindle in order to dub it via the medium of time. Every unwinding and winding motion, no matter how long it actually takes is speeded up or lengthened in the video image.
Thus two times meet each other again: the actual time it takes for the event, and the imposed timeframe of the video clip, the "artificial time" as Koganezawa calls it. The actions that Koganezawa directs the actors or the colour to perform, organise themselves according to the pace of time and not vice versa. It is this
which in Kant’s "transcendental aesthetics“, gives the person or colour subject status and regulates its development. Fortunate process (Good time).
Knut Ebeling