SAKIKO YAMAOKA
FARCICAL MATERIAL
Preparing and serving our tea time

Body is the material which is very close to our consciousness and which we always concern with. If I cut my body, I feel pain.  Hurting my body harder, it may result my death.  My body seems to be tided with my consciosness, but it sometimes act out of control.  It is so troublesome material.
On the case of other’s body the situation is not also simple.  The other’s body is not comfortable in general.  I think we manage to harmonize with the other’s body by using a concept, society, humanism or family.  On the other hands, we sometimes have an earnest emotion to be close to some body.  This occurs on a love affair.  And we sometimes have ambivalent feeling between unifying and leaving apart to other’s body.  We call it longing and defication.  These emotion is based on two sides of feeling, hatred and love.  I think this phenomena on body is complicated, illogical,immoral and barbarous.
The basis of performance art has more troublesome element in comparision with other genre art.  If we make a performance art without paying attention to such characteristic, even though we do in deep conceptual work, the result come to farce.  Then I want to put a question the reason why performance art come to farce mostly.  We have neglected this situation in the history of art. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t mean they are excellent.
Now the 20th century which is decorated with bloody episode is passing, then what kind of ideal do we have for art?  Can we put, a period on this farce history on near future?    So when we answer this question, the performance art might take active part for, because the performance art also inevitably come to farce.
(I am an Asian and a woman.  When I use this body for art, People may evalite with double preconceptions. My body is the subject on my work but people may regard it as only material.  The point of view to observe my work might be limited by its attribute.    Then many may not notice the deep theme behind the material.  I would like to evade such cheep mistake, if possible.  But I half think it is less important problem.  Because performance art.)
In addition the Japanese word “chaban” (farce, in English) originally meant a role to prepare and serve tea and a kind of comedy genre, it was the traditional plays in the old times.
I am very interested with how to flow time.  One day I and the other performer made performance this composed by only two action, standing and lying.  When the one stands, the other must lie.If the lying stands, the standing have to lie down.  We go forword little by little in keeping this rule.  The lying have the authority to deside the tempo to go forword, this authority changes, when the role changes.  At first we tried this kind of work around a clock tower, we depended on the timing of tinishing to the clock.  This performance was easier, but I found it was mistake.    The clock controled our bodies, so we acted in inertia as our experiences of wage worker.  We discussed about difference between performace and labor.  Then we decided to depend on timing of finishing performance to the site . We make our performance only through our nonverbal dialogue, not under the control of some big system (like clock) or somebody’s temporal feeling.  Then the other performer worried we might bore our action.  So we discussed about this idea, boring and about not boring again.   At last I asserted we never bore.  When we did, as I expected, we relaxed and enjoyed our performance, only standing and lying. Our performance was not easy.  But I cirtified to make it interest.  If we recognize time passing not as flow but mass, we feel boring.  In either case whole or some part, a character of performance depends on what controls the sequence of it. ( The other day when I met a Chinese artist, he asked me what public issue is popular in Japan now.  I replied it was monotonus, a basic tone of Japan society is monotonous. We Japanese restain ourselves each other not to be different.  And the Japanese is so stoick as to expression to control laugh and angry if possible, this is our national culture and character.  However we sometimes feel boring ourselves and try to break such monotonous, for all that we come to laugh and angry together.  It seems to have economical effect.  We laugh and angry not at risk.  And for such behaveiour we turn to more monotonous.  Most of people misunderstands our monotonous comes from less excitements.  This is different matter to the boring I mentioned formerly.)

20/09/1999.