In Retrospect

THE BRAND NEW RETRO

In Retrospect Simon Fujiwara is the archaeologist of his own prehistory, unearthing the bones of a contemporary identity from the real and imagined relics of his own past. His new show at Tate St Ives revisits the geographical and art-historical landscape of his hometown, and prompts questions on whether retrospection is the truest guide to the now (clue: it isn’t). By Hili Perlson

Simon Fujiwara, Phallusies (An Arabian Mystery), 2010. Video 15:16 min. Mixed Media, dimensions variable. Manifesta 8, Murcia Spain 2010. Courtesy of Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt am Main and Gió Marconi, Milan.

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In the dialectical model of nature versus nurture, there’s little arguing that culture and experience shape our identities. But to what extent? Identity is clearly as much a question of “Where do I come from?” as “What have I experienced?” But can the memory of these experiences be trusted?

Dissecting the past shouldn’t be a search for a singular, objective truth, since the past doesn’t really exist – it’s a concept, an idea. Kant said it, Schopenhauer rephrased it: the “now” is the only true aspect of temporal existence, while the past and the future are mere phantasms.

Sounds esoteric? Simon Fujiwara will walk you through it.

The British-Japanese artist bases his work on the unknowability of the past. Excavating his own experiences, he is well aware of the fact that the past is a concept that only through a chosen perspective can be moulded into a linear narrative – that is, into a history. We write sagas, fables and tales, and create myths and legends in an attempt to understand the meaning of things. We depend on narratives – but we also want to be seduced and entertained by them. Simon Fujiwara tells them better than most.

His work draws on the story he can tell best, namely his own. Or rather on disparate moments from his life, which he chooses to highlight and connect to others in order to reconstruct his own history. To this effect, he blends fact and fiction,

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autobiographical elements with spectacular drama, and builds a grand narrative, one in which he plays both the good old omniscient narrator, as well as a post-modern, nouveau roman-style author who ponders the faultiness and deceptions of his own memory.

Fujiwara is constantly digging up his past, but the findings may change according to what he feels himself to be at the moment.

In one of his best-known pieces, the performance “Welcome to the Hotel Munber” (2008-10), he looks at the history of his family before he was born. In Franco’s Spain of the Seventies, Fujiawara’s parents owned a bar, were pretty successful and lead happy, comfortable lives.

“But what if I had lived under the Franco Regime, as a homosexual?” he once challenged them.

“My parents are as much a product of me as I am of them. So I took their history and tried to bring out the things that happened around them which they’ve missed.” He did that by writing a story, of course: an erotic one about his father. In the piece, he performs as himself trying to write the erotic novel. The performance is set in an immaculately reconstructed model of the Fujiwaras’ bar. Little clues about it being a secretly gay joint are planted everywhere. “They’re very slapstick, kind of ‘Fawlty Towers’” he laughs. “The hams are made of vintage gay porn, the dartboard is an asshole and the olive oil is extra virgin.”

Above: Phallusies (An Arabian Myster y), 2010. Video 15:16 min. Mixed Media, dimensions variable.

Manifesta 8, Murcia Spain 2010. Cour tesy of Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfur t am Main and Gió Marconi, Milan.

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The appeal of Fujiwara’s constructed histories often lies in their outrageous humour. Works like “The Museum of Incest” (2008), “The Frozen City” (2010) or “Phallusies (An Arabian Mystery)” (2010) present ersatz archaeological excavations with deadpan accounts of their discoveries, and pseudo-scientific research on the prehistoric societies that bequeathed them.

“Phallusies”, for example, constructs the story of the discovery of a giant, ancient stone phallus beneath the foundations of a new museum building, somewhere in the Arabian Desert. Since no records of the phallus exist, the four British construction workers who were employed on the museum’s site are the only ones who can preserve it for future generations. However, when Fujiwara commissions them to re-fabricate the phallus as they remember it, arguments ensue: one witness remembers testicles, another claims it was simply a column. And was it three meters long, or eight? Fujiwara plays with the aesthetics of the ancient, the antiquated and the obsolete.

Not only memory, but also institutional conventions of scientific authority are brought into question as providers of Truth. Museums and art galleries in particular…

Currently installed at Tate St Ives (where Fujiwara grew up), “Since 1982” is the artist’s largest survey exhibition to date, and it is a retrospective – in more ways than one. “A show about looking back, and it’s in my home town,” he says. “It does capture almost all of my work, but then again I’ve only been doing stuff for about five years, so it’s also a play on that.”

The project started when Fujiwara contacted the Tate with a request to borrow the painting “Horizontal Stripes” by Patrick Heron for a performance called “The Mirror Stage”. The painting, he claimed, which he saw at Tate St Ives at the age of 11, made him realise two things about himself: one, that he wanted to become an artist, and two, that he was gay. “But how can an artwork, and especially a macho, abstract expressionist one, turn someone gay?” he asks – and the question leads straight into one of the constructed narrations that define his work.

“So in ‘The Mirror Stage’, I cast a child to play a reenactment of that moment, and in the script he asks me, ‘but how can a painting turn you gay?’ And I explain to young Simon that, ‘well, there’s a theory that Lacan posited, that when you’re in your teens and going through puberty you’re looking for sexual mirrors in other people, other objects, and maybe this picture acted like a mirror to me, because it was the first time I saw an abstract, modern art work. It was just pure emotion and formlessness and atmosphere and that could have unlocked my urge to both become and artist and realise I was homosexual.”

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This page: Selective Memor y, 2012. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Cour tesy the ar tist.

Installation view at Tate St Ives, Januar y 2012. Photo © Tate.

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The human mind, needy of explanation, has the ability to force a narrative onto any random string of events, and in “The Mirror Stage” Fujiwara plays with the impulse to put logic into illogical connections.

“Since 1982” treats the entire Tate building as an artefact, to serve the myth-building around Fujiwara’s life, where, in hindsight, even the year of his birth is given a seemingly prophetic position on an imaginary timeline. So too are the wall texts accompanying each work written by the artist to add another layer to the mythmaking – the sense that excavated history may be useful, if not necessarily reliable – while causing deliberate confusion. “It’s my first big institutional show and I didn’t want it to be the death of me,” he says.

“I mean the wall texts, especially with the Tate, are usually very didactic and explain everything.

They tell you what is true and what isn’t. But that’s not really what my work is about. It’s about how I don’t believe there’s a boundary between truth and fiction.” ***

Clockwise from top: The Mirror Stage, 2009 – 2012. Mixed media and performance.

Courtesy the artist. Installation view, Tate St Ives, featuring Patrick Heron Horizontal Stripe Painting: November 1957 – January 1958. © Estate of Patrick Heron. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2012. And Francis Bacon Reclining Woman, 1961, Tate © Estate of Francis Bacon. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2012. Photo © Tate. Sam Drake and Lucy Dawkins.

Saint Simon, 2012. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist.

Installation view at Tate St Ives, January 2012. Photo © Tate.

Mothers, Of Invention (detail), 2012. Mixed media, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist. Featuring Barbara Hepworth’s Oval Sculpture (No. 2), 1943, and Image II, 1960 © Bowness, Hepworth Estate.

Letters from Mexico, 2012. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Private collection, New York. Installation view at Tate St Ives, January 2012. Photo © Tate.

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Part of the magic of Simon Fujiwara’s work is that it touches on a particularly occupying human impulse: the way we constantly represent ourselves within a historical context, and in particular today with the advent of social media. What’s the difference between Fujiwara’s collaged identity constructs and, say, the Facebook Timeline?

Taking points in the user’s life, the timeline funnels random events that have been constructed using images and texts into a retrospective narrative.

“People often ask me about my work ‘but how much of it is true?’ But why is that important? No one asks you if the funny anecdote you posted on your wall is true or not. They just ‘like’ it.”

In fact, the experience of the “now” – the only true aspect of temporal existence – has never been so amplified. We instantaneously comment on how we feel via social media, and have generally become more apt at describing our emotions.

Reality TV delivers participants’ testimonials, commenting on what went through their heads as one spectacular emotional moment after another is prompted. How much of our inner lives is already scripted before it happens – or after it? And how often do we hone down our emotional states into catchy comments just as we experience them? Fujiwara’s work tackles those complexities, and many more besides.

While constructing the myth of Fujiwara as a St Ives artist, he ties his own biography to that of his hometown. In addition to his personal relation to the Heron painting, Fujiwara works with this particular piece because of its link to the history of St Ives as an important locus of British art.

“When the Tate first opened here people were 199

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furious, especially about this painting. ‘They spent millions on this museum to put this in it? My child could have painted it!’ But it has this whole intellectual background; it was Heron’s reply to Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and the American Ab-Ex, which made St Ives super avant-garde in the late Fifties.”

The art legacy of St Ives is something that Fujiwara was raised on, but it’s the treatment of the local artists that has shaped some of the ideas he works with today. “Like everyone else, I grew up knowing not so much about the art, but about the biographies of the artists. The fire officer would come to school to tell us, ‘Kids, don’t smoke, because sculptor Barbara Hepworth died smoking in bed.’ Then we’d be taken to her studio to see the bed she smoked in and died. Can you imagine a German school trip to the bar where Kippenberger had one drink too many?”

When given carte blanche to install a show in the entire museum, it was clear to Fujiwara that he would play on the notion of a retrospective for a “local” artist (Fujiwara now lives in Berlin). He mounted the show in the fashion of a neat regional museum, where any object the local hero artist has ever come into contact with has a plaque with an explanation, and becomes full of meaning.

The first room shows an installation entitled “Selective Memory” which deals with the artist’s early childhood. The space is filled with gigantic, rather phallic lighthouses, fashioned after paintings by Alfred Wallis. Wallis’ charmingly primitive art, consisting mostly of maritime motifs, drew the attention of artists including Ben Nicholson and Kit Wood who settled in Cornwall. Wallis is thus considered the father of the St Ives school of art. Fujiwara weaves a partly autobiographical story using a wall text in the third person, which explains how his family came to St Ives in search for the idyll and naivety that they saw in Wallis’ work. The text claims that his earliest memory is of seeing the beam of the lighthouse on his bedroom ceiling, a sublime experience that had inspired him to become an artist.

In addition, the Tate produced a brochure for the show that contains some facts about the artist to help viewers navigate through the challenging experience of “Since 1982.” In a weird twist of life imitating art, the brochure does precisely what Fujiwara’s work seeks to demonstrate, pouring a narrative into a random point in his life: “They found a picture of me as a child doing finger paintings and ran it in the brochure, saying something about showing early signs of artistic inclination.” And so, the myth is set forth, becomes institutional, and blurs the boundaries between fact and wishfully constructed narrative.

The show continues with each room representing formative stages in Fujiwara’s development,

with the installations “The Mirror Stage” and “Hotel Munber” reflecting his life up to puberty. Working out his relationships with his parents as an adult is the focus of the installations in the two main galleries, and the last room is, inevitably, a dramatic account of the artist’s death.

Looking at the morgue-like room, with its perfectly romantic artefacts of an imagined death, any remaining doubt or suspense of disbelief is shattered as it becomes very clear that the artist, who is alive and well and, when this interview was conducted, was sitting in front of me, has taken you by the hand on a tour of his own history. In the end, whether or not all or any of it happened seems quite beside the point.

Since 1982, until May 7 2012 at the Tate St Ives, Cornwall. www.tate.org.uk/stives

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These pages: Welcome To The Hotel Munber, 2008-2010. Mixed media installation and per formance, dimensions variable. Ardalan Collection, London. Installation views Tate St Ives Januar y 2012, Photo Š Tate.

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