西暦のカトマンズの正月はいつもと変わらない日常だと思いますが。如何でしょうか。
先日の私の個展は無事終了しました。会期中、木村さん、畠山さんが来られました。得に畠山さんの
ホームページの不思議さに、眼を見張らせられるものがありました。しかしお二人とも、本当に元気そのもので、「山男」は良いものだと羨ましく思いました。
個展について、二つの新聞社が記事を載せました。
●12/13毎日新聞 夕(末記資料①）
http://www.mainichi-msn.co.jp/shakai/gakugei/news/20051213dde014040002000c.html
●12/15デイリー読売 半ページ分枠のインタビュー(英語)。（末記資料②）
http://www.yomiuri.co.jp/dy/features/arts/20051215TDY18001.htm
今回の展示は大変に反応が良く、毎日の学芸部の方は、ネパールで交流展をやる話をしたら、「是非行ってみたい」といわれました。今年、カトマンズでの交流展をする予定をしています。実現するようにこれから動きます。予定として6月・７月・10月のどれかです。
元旦の夜、白川さんのヒマラヤ上空からの撮影をＴＶで見ました。その一瞬は確かに素晴らしい。しかしもっと素晴らしいのは、そもそものその環境です。その自然の近くで生活をしている人々と、その人々の築いてきた文化も素晴らしいのではないでしょうか。(多田正美）
①資料１
美術：多田正美展 根源の音
身ぶりや所作による身体表現は、世界やそれに包まれた人間存在のありようを感じ取らせる営みといってもいい。中でも木や竹、石、金属などを使った多田正美のそれは、接触する物体の発する独特の音響によって、見る者をいやおうなく世界と人間との根源的な出合いの場に引きずり込む。今回はそれに、電子音と映像によるパフォーマンスも加わって、表現の多彩な展開ぶりを印象づけた。
開幕前日と初日に行われた二つの実演は見逃したが、その記録映像などで構成したインスタレーションの見ごたえも格別だ。二つの壁に振り分けられた映像の一方は、作者が山に登って下る間に撮り続けた揺れ動く樹林に、初日の実演映像を象がん状に小さくはめ込んだもの。他方の壁とその手前の床には、開幕前日のそれが、まばゆい色光と重ねてスローモーションで映し出される。
前者にはいかにも透明な電子音が間断なく流れるのに対し、後者では床に転がした竹筒、落下したお手玉、金属管がこする石、激しく体を揺さぶる作者のかぶったヒモで連結した２５０本の竹筒群、あるいは振り回した木の枝の空気を裂く音などが、行為の手順に沿って断続的に響く。
しかし面白いのは、別々に行われた実演時と違い、それらの音が絶えずシンクロしながら、異なる二つの行為の軌跡を一つの出来事へと縫い合わせてみせることである。一回的なパフォーマンスの事後の作品化を考える上でも、それは示唆に富んだ構成といえよう。１９５３年生まれ。
多田展＝２５日まで東京・小金井市緑町２の１４の３５、双ギャラリー（０４２・３８２・５３３８）
②資料2
Masami Tada moves to a different drumbeat
Robert Reed / Special to The Daily Yomiuri
Masami Tada is a rarity among today's contemporary artists for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that his works speak louder than the man himself. In fact, there are few occasions when you will hear Tada speak directly about his works. Even questions about the technical aspects of his multimedia creations soon get sidetracked into talk about his favorite subject, festivals.
I had a chance to interview Tada just after the opening of his most recent show at the Soh Gallery near JR Higashi Koganei Station on the western outskirts of Tokyo. In many ways this show is a culmination of the artist's work with improvisational sound and video over the last 10 years, while also taking that work one step further into his unique world of sound and image.
The Daily Yomiuri: Your education was in music composition and you first made a name for yourself as an improvisational sound artist. But watching your work over the last ten years, the visual aspect seems to be increasingly prominent.
Tada: You are probably right. When I think back to my music school days, I remember one of my professors saying to me that my approach to music was a very visual one. I didn't really know what he was saying at the time, but now I think that aspect has come to show itself. Sound is vibration and I want to see, and show, the action that creates the vibration. That is why the visual performance is an important part of my sound creation process.
In recent years a lot of your work has involved festivals, especially Nepal's Machendra festival that you have been going to for the last four years. What do festivals mean to you as an artist?
My earliest memories as a child are of festivals. I remember our local festival when my family lived in Isehara. I can still hear the sound of the festival drums coming from the distance, as if floating on the spring breeze. Knowing the location of our house at the time and the distance to the shrine that the sound of those drums was coming from, it is a distance of more than two kilometers. Even with the right winds, there is no way that any other drums I have ever seen can carry for a distance of two kilometers.
So I went to the drum makers and I asked them if there was anything special about their drums. What I found out was that they use a unique drum-making technique that has been passed down for generations and probably doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. They use cowhide from a certain section of the cow and stretch it to the point where it is almost about to burst. This makes a drum skin that produces a sound that is so intense you almost can't stand to be too close to it. They also use a soft cryptomeria wood drumstick, because a harder wood would split the super-taught drum skins.
A couple of years ago I tried to make a video recording of a performance with these drums, but when I replayed the video all I got was a lot of visual noise. I realized that the vibrations of the drums had made the camera itself vibrate to the point that the image was disrupted.
But festivals didn't really appear in your work until after you came back from your year in Europe in 1994-5.
What I discovered while I was staying in Holland seemed to me at the time to be a different concept of what a festival is. To the people in Holland a festival is something you do, not something you go to watch. Then I discovered the Machendra festival in Nepal, which in one sense looks like the origin of Japan's festivals because they build this big festival float and pull it through the streets of the city, just like the dashi in Japanese festivals like the Gion matsuri.
But in Nepal the festival lasts for almost a month, and during that month there is so much going on. The festival has its own music tradition using drum, flute and specially harmonized cymbals that are also fascinating to me as a musician. For me, these traditions, with their incredible depth, be it the drum making in my hometown's festival or the music of the Nepali festivals, seem to be one of the truest forms of art. The foreign festivals I have seen also make me realize that the approach most people have in Japan is one of "protecting our traditions." But, if you are only protecting traditions, those traditions are already dead in one sense. Culture isn't something to simply protect. You have to make culture happen in order to keep it alive. That is something a true festival can do. You don't need a concept of art as long as people are getting together and spontaneously creating music and visual arts and crafts.
Your work today combines your so-called sound encounters, where you create live sound using natural materials like bamboo, stones and twigs, against a visual background--or perhaps you could call it an installation--of photographs and video images projected on the walls of the performance space. Your video works are also "improvisational" like your sound work. What does that involve?
I have been doing these improvisational video works for about 10 years now in the same wooded area on the hill called Koboyama in Kanagawa Prefecture near where I live. I walk for about 40 minutes in the woods looking only at the viewing screen of the video camera and composing as I go. I use the slow-motion mode and sometimes change the color mode, sometimes going black and white or even reversing light for dark. Of course, the sound element, the sound of my footsteps or the wind, is also an important part of the work.
Could you describe the work now showing at Soh Gallery, which seems to add a new dimension to your previous works?
First, I created a soundtrack on a tone generator to serve as a background for my live sound encounter. Then, while I was doing the live sound performance with my natural "instruments" of bamboo, stones, twigs, metal poles and hoops and bean bags in the gallery space, I simultaneously projected one of my Koboyama videos on one wall while projecting real-time images from a camera fixed to my body and another on the ceiling and projecting a prerecorded video of the performance space on the wall behind me.
But, despite all this sound and image development going on at the same time, it does not create an environment that is by any means overwhelming. In fact, it is a very comfortable environment to simply sit and listen and look.
All the equipment I use is electronic, but you see I don't use the latest high-resolution digital video, and the sound effectors I use are basically the same technology that rock musicians were using 30 years ago. So, everything is actually quite analog. If I went to high-definition images it would become distracting, even irritating to watch. When I am making video improvisations in the woods or when I am making sound with bamboo, the purpose is always the same: to achieve a state of openness to the visual and aural natural world around us.
