Tatsuo Majima: Selected Works

Overview

An exposition of Tatsuo Majima's works to date. There are his famous fried sculptures for which he gained the recognition of older critics: the half-sized statue of the Venus de Milo in batter; battered rams crashing their horns against one another and presented on a sacrificial altar of piled up paper napkins; the clocks whose arms are ball point pens in which ink runs over male and female nudes; and other knowing trivia.

His videos are Til Cheerful Country and Dinner Party, playing imaginary conversations scripted by Majima, in which four Japanese and British "artists," impersonated by actors, discuss art, food and toilet and water systems in Japan and the West, frequently mixing metaphors and jumping from philosophical to trivial, or even scatological argumentations over a lunch table.

Majima's clownish minimalism presents glamour and luxury from the other end of the spectrum, demonstrating a deliberate confusion of values and desirability of the objects through punning. Fried up Venus de Milo is supposed to incite the viewer's diverse appetites, while the freeze-dried noodles coagulated and drenched in International Klein Blue celebrate and desecrate the memory of the implicit macho activity of splashing the canvas with a female nude drenched in blue.

Majima's video works testify to his serious commitment to art as a 'Gay Science', demonstrating how banal, local specifics can turn into profound questions about art and time, indicating their inseparability from basic human instincts.

MM