Jiro Takamatsu

From 1988 to 1989 he worked on a series of screen prints entitled Andromeda.

Takamatsu's chosen work for Documenta 6 in 1977 was one of his last sculptural works. Rusty Ground was a combination of three plans Takamatsu had provided curator Manfred Schneckenburger, all based on previous Compoundworks. Originally conceived as a combination of works installed both inside a gallery and outdoors, Takamatsu had to adapt his plan when the exhibition planners included more artists who only had works suitable for indoor showing.

In 1972 Takamatsu received the Grand International Prize for The Story at the eighth Tokyo Kokusai Hanga Biennāre[Tokyo International Biennial of Prints].

During Takamatsu's tenure at Tama Art University, there were resurgences of student protests over the impending renewal of the Anpo US-Japan security treaty in 1970. Artists in Japan were critical of the Japanese establishment for their handling of the student protests and the unrest caused some art schools to become closed temporarily and in some cases, permanently. During partial closures, Takamatsu would review student's work and hold free classes outside the university. Interestingly enough, Takamatsu would go on to show at many international exhibitions that were situated within similar anti-government protests, both at the Venice Biennale and Expo '70.

Takamatsu designed Sunday Plaza (1970) for Expo '70, considering Suita's landscape in his preparatory sketches. It is one of the few more architecturally-scaled works in his Perspective series.

Takamatsu decided to show Oneness (16 Oneness) (1970) and Oneness (30 Oneness) (1970), the former consisting of partially carved Japanese cedar trunks, and the later being made out of paper. Takamatsu had originally envisaged the Oneness (16 Oneness) installation as a 3x3 grid (9 Oneness), but adapted the installation to fit the dimensions of the gallery space he was allocated. Takamatsu insisted upon carving the cedar blocks in the space itself, after they were placed within their 4x4 grid formation. Takamatsu deliberately chipped away at these blocks with varied levels of resultant exposure, producing a range of how much each block was carved out.

Between 1968 and 1972, Takamatsu taught at Tama Art University, Tokyo, and was a key figure in the development of the Mono-ha movement. Takamatsu's deep knowledge of topological geometry and principles of absence/emptiness were particularly influential on his students, such as Nobuo Sekine and other Mono-ha artists.

Takamatsu was included in the Japanese Pavilion for the 33th Venice Biennale (1968) by art critic Hariu Ichirō, alongside Miki Tomio, Sugai Kumi, and Yamaguchi Katsuhiro. Takamatsu was awarded the Carlo Cardazzo Prize, which was an award intended for an outstanding Italian or foreign artist (only for the 34th Venice Biennale).

When Takamatsu was around 30 years old (1966), he received a number of prizes including the Shell Art Award and the Nagaoka Museum of Contemporary Art Award. He was also awarded the Grand International Prize at the Tokyo Print Biennial (1972).

Takamatsu also held his first solo exhibition in 1966 at Tokyo Gallery, entitled Identification. It featured the early works in his Shadows series.

In November of 1966, Takamatsu participated in From Space to Environment, a landmark two-part exhibition and event program in Tokyo that greatly influenced architecture, design, visual art, and music in Japan. Namely, the Environment Society (Enbairamento no Kai] (which held the event) put forth the notion of kanyko geijutsu [environment art], which considered the chaotic site as a locus for artists and viewers to consider the limitations of medium conventions and institutional spaces—which naturally related to Takamatsu's practice. While kankyo referred specifically to the location of such artistic activity, the practices of the 38 participating artists reflected a vested interested in intermedia art, envisage and enacted in the spatial dimensions of kankyo. Many of these artists, including Takamatsu, would go on to participate in Expo '70, conflating the terms intermedia, kankyo and technology in art discourse.

Takamatsu's entry to this exhibition was Chairs and the Table in Perspective (1966), a sculpture-installation work from his Perspective series. He would later continue presenting works from this series at Venice Biennale and Expo '70. Chairs and the Table in Perspectively perspectivally distorted a dining set rendered with a grid-line veneer, the slanted base of the installation demonstrating linear perspective for the viewer. However, manifesting perspective meant the chair and tables were effectively unusable. Tōno Yoshiaki suggested that Takamatsu's work assaulted the normative human perception of single-point perspective as well as the assumption that everyday objects should always look the same.

Art critic Tōno Yoshiaki characterized artists participating in Yomiuri Indépendant as developing Anti-Art practices, departing from the conventional notion of art. Takamatsu and his peers became increasingly interested in moving beyond figural representation and into the mediation of performance and environments, causing the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum to institute rules banning obtrusive materials and installation arrangements for the 14th edition. Some artists continued their subversive strategy, leading to the suspension of the exhibition in January 1964. Thus, artists like Takamatsu relocated their practice from the exhibition space into the urban environments of Tokyo. This transition is best exemplified by Takamatsu's submissions to the final edition of the Yomiuri Indépendant in 1963,  On the Anti-Existence of the Curtain (Kāten ni kansuru hanjitsuzaisei ni tsuite) and Cord (Himo), a single piece of black string against a white cloth background and a 1000 meter long string extending out of the museum space to the Ueno Station respectively.

Although the group's inaugural exhibition, Fifth Mixer Plan (Dai goji mikisā keikaku, May 1963), featured artworks the three artists had created independently, such as Takamatsu's busy entanglements of strings, Akasegawa's objects wrapped in printed 1000-yen notes, and Nakanishi's Konpakuto obuje ("Compact Objets"), egg-shaped translucent resign sculptures that embalmed everyday items, the emphasis on collaborative "direct action" came to the fore in the group's later activities, which featured a variety of "events," "plans," and "happenings." For example in Dropping Event (October 10, 1964), the group heaved various objects from the roof of Ikenobo Kaikan hall. After dropping the objects they collected and packed them all into a suitcase, placing it in a public locker and sending the key to the locker to someone chosen at random from a phone book. For Shelter Plan (1964), they booked a room at the Imperial Hotel and invited guests to have themselves custom-fitted for a personal nuclear fallout shelter. Participants included Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik, and were photographed from six sides to create a quasi-medical document ostensibly meant for the outfitting of personal fallout shelters. The group carried out its final happening, The Movement for the Promotion for a Clean and Organized Metropolitan Area (abbreviated as Cleaning Event) on October 16, 1964. The artists and their assistants dressed in goggles and lab coats, roped off small areas of public sidewalk and meticulously cleaned them to mock the efforts to beautify the streets ahead of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.

In 1964, Takamatsu began his signature Shadows (影, kage) series of paintings (which he continued until the end of his life). With Shadows, Takamatsu launched a critical inquiry into the nature of painting by realistically painting images of people's shadows cast on white walls, uneven surfaces, or wooden planks to create a trompe l’oeil effect. This series of works recalls Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" as well as Pliny the Elder's account of the origins of painting, in which the daughter of the famed Greek potter Dibutades creates the first painting by tracing the silhouette of her lover.

In 1963, Takamatsu co-founded the art collective Hi-Red Center along with Natsuyuki Nakanishi and Akasegawa Genpei. This brief-lived but influential group executed a variety of performance art events that sought to eliminate the boundaries between daily life and art. The group's name was formed from the first kanji characters of the three artists' surnames: "high" (the "Taka" in Takamatsu), "red" (the "Aka" in Akasegawa), and "center" (the "Naka" in Nakanishi). The foundation for Hi-Red Center might be located in the roundtable discussion, sponsored by the art magazine Keishо̄ in November 1962, on the relationship between art and political action (as reflected the recent Yamanote Line Incident happening) titled Signs of Discourse on Direct Action, in which all three members had participated. All three artists had begun as painters but had turned to methods of “direct action” through Hi-Red Center, a term taken from prewar socialist agitators. With “direct action,” the artists meant to raise to consciousness the absurdities and contradictions of Japanese society. This interest in Art as direct action has been contextualised as rooted in the atmosphere following massive Anpo protests against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in 1960.

String plays on the extension and contraction of length, challenging the unit of measure as a stable mode of cognition dependent upon subdivision. Takamatsu was not primarily interested with the figural or aesthetic (thick/thin/color) properties of string, but rath er understood it as length itself. Takamatsu saw string as a form of minimal materiality that could be abstracted and contrasted against the concept of volume, when string is placed within different containers such as a bottle. This led to his The String in the Bottle series (1963-85), each edition of the work demonstrating the string-line contracted (within the bottle) and expanded (leading out of the bottle), irrespective of the form of the bottle. One of the most noted editions is no. 1125, featuring the iconographically infamous Coca-cola bottle; yet the appearance and branding of the bottle was insignificant to Takamatsu in relation to his conception of string. In some editions, such as with no. 1133, Takamatsu used two strings, again illustrating that the form of the string was not of priority to him. Beyond the abstracted length exemplified by string, Takamatsu also used to series to worlds—prompting things enter into unexpected associations by attaching everyday objects to his ropes and cords.

On October 18, 1962, Takamatsu along with future Hi-Red Center collaborator Natsuyuki Nakanishi and others, carried out an artistic happening they titled the "Yamanote Line Incident" (山手線事件, Yamanote-sen jiken), in which they boarded a Yamanote loop line train heading counter-clockwise on its route, disrupting the normalcy of passenger's commutes with a series of bizarre performative actions. Takamatsu served as the main photographer documenting the event.

Takamatsu began his series of bent-wire works entitled Point series with Point (No. 1) (1961). Point was Takamatsu's Exploration of "a single centripetal unit that cannot be divided any further", not simply a geometric term, however, but a singular moving entity that straddled the space-time of reality and emptiness.

Hariu was a proponent that Japan's pavilion should be conceived as providing a platform for “international contemporaneity” [kokusaiteki dōjisei], where Japanese artists could appear in dialogue with their peers overseas. Hariu did not envisage this as mere assimilation, but rather recognised that the difference of Japanese experimental practices would have to be pronounced. His vision was consistent with the leading art critics in the 1960s, Sano Takahiko noting that the Biennale was shifting to prioritising experimental practices, and should be seen as a form of cultural diplomacy. Their commentaries led to the International Art Association supporting and restructuring the planning for the Japanese pavilion, namely allowing commissioners to serve two consecutive terms. This was intended to enable continuity across editions, as well as allowing for additional lead time in preparing the latter pavilion. The first three commissioners selected in this period (1968–78) were the progressive critics Hariu Ichirō, Tōno Yoshiaki, and Nakahara Yūsuke, also known in Japan as the “Big Three” [go-sanke].

From 1958 to 1961, Takamatsu submitted works to the painting section, but re-conceived his practice as sculptural from 1961 to 1963. Takamatsu has attributed this shift to "sculptural" to the Point series of works he submitted in 1961, which consisted of masses of wire in varying states of being pulled from two dimensions to three dimensions. This evolved into the series String: Black, which Takamatsu showed at the 14th Yomiuri Indépendant in 1962, and which marked the beginning of a long series of artworks making use of string as an eminently portable medium which could be used to infiltrated and cordon off artistic space even beyond and outside the art gallery itself. One of these works was interactive, allowing viewers to don gloves and unravel a ball of black string along sheets of cloth.

After graduation, Takamatsu began showing paintings at the raucous and unjuried Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition. Sponsored by the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper between 1949 and 1963 and held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, this annual exhibition was modeled after the French Salon des Artistes Indépendants. Takamatsu formed his network of anti-establishment artists at the Yomiuri Indépendant, which became a site of exploration and experimentation for many avant-garde-minded younger artists, especially from 1958 onward.

Jirō Takamatsu (高松 次郎, Takamatsu Jirō, 20 February 1936 – 25 June 1998) was one of the most important postwar Japanese artists. Takamatsu used photography, sculpture, painting, drawing, and performance to fundamentally investigate the philosophical and material conditions of art. Takamatsu's practice was dedicated to the critique of cognition and perception, through the rendering and variation of morphological devices, such as shadow, tautology, appropriation, perceptual and perspective distortion and representation. Takamatsu's conceptual work can be understood through his notions of the Zero Dimension, which renders an object or form to observe its fundamental geometrical components. Takamatsu isolated these smallest constituent elements, asserting that these elements produce reality, or existence. For Takamatsu the elementary particle represents “the ultimate of division” and also “emptiness itself,” like the a line within a painting—there appears to be nothing more beyond the line itself. Yet, Takamatsu's end goal was not to just prove the presence or object-ness of these elements, but rather used them as a way to challenge and prove the limits of human perception, leading to his fixation on “absence” or the things that are unobservable.

Takamatsu was born in Tokyo in 1936. From 1954 to 1958, he attended Tokyo University of the Arts, where he majored in oil painting and was a classmate of his future Hi-Red Center member Natsuyuki Nakanishi. As part of his coursework, Takamatsu studied the beginnings of pictorial modernities spanning Sesshū Tōyō to Paul Cézanne (as noted in his writings). Duncan Wooldridge has argued that Takamtsu's interest in both modern Western and Japanese art histories allows us to understand his work as a crucial meeting point between culturally coded conventions, as well as his later success as a Japanese artists at the forefront of the movement towards international contemporaneity.