Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Dumb Type: Voyages

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Dumb Type: Voyages

by John McGee

From the Dumb Type performance "Voyage"
(Photos: Shiro Takatani and Emmanuel Valette, Courtesy ICC)

Dumb Type isn't an experimental clone of a high school dunce. It's a seminal Japanese art collective founded in 1984 mainly by students at the Kyoto City University of Art. Members have come and gone over the years (most tragically Teiji Furuhashi, who died of AIDS in 1995), but Dumb Type continues to merge the expertise of its collaborators—fine art, music, dance, performance, theater, design and architecture—into technology-rich events where electronic music pulses and dancers dash in front of giant video projections. 

This somewhat confusing exhibition, centering on the major new installation Voyages, coincides with the new performance "Voyage," held in Saitama in early September. (Dumb Type usually creates installations with the same name as their performances.) In addition, videos of past Dumb Type performances in three screening rooms help familiarize viewers with the group's previous work and contextualize Voyages. There is also an unrelated installation by Dumb Type music and sound director Ryoji Ikeda. 

From the Dumb Type performance
"Voyage"

Near the entrance to the enormous black room containing Voyages, a series of words related to time—"once," "immediately," "ever after"—are projected on the wall. A horizontal plane of red laser light bifurcates the space, tracing a thin line across the wall and underscoring the words. 

The laser continues inside, slicing across visitors' midsections like a supermarket scanner before striking the black walls. A soundtrack reverberates with deep hums and rumbles. A long, narrow, slightly raised platform—a screen—lies in the center of the room. From overhead, five stationary projectors scroll sequences of landscapes and textures—building facades, fallen leaves, asphalt—from one end of the screen to the other in computer-enhanced dissolves. Two additional overhead projectors creak back and forth along fixed tracks, sliding small round images of maps over the landscapes. 

Ikeda's installation, db, is in two parts. First, visitors enter an anechoic room (a chamber that swallows sound in fiberglass folds) one at a time. They sit, the door closes, the lights go down and a three-minute aural landscape begins. Massive speakers in front and behind belch bone-bruising bass and whumping heartbeats. High-pitched whines, grinding statics and depth-charge pings crash from above. It's very intense, like standing next to a fine-tuned jet exhaust.

Afterwards, visitors walk down a black hallway and open a door into a long, narrow, blinding white space that looks like a tanning booth from "2001: A Space Odyssey." Dozens of 37-watt fluorescent tubes line the low ceiling, bouncing off shiny white laminate walls and floor.

From the Dumb Type performance "Voyage"

In the screening rooms, six roughly hour-long videotapes capture the complicated choreography of music, humans, video, technology and texts in Dumb Type's live performances. For example, pH (1990) pictured the emerging information society as a stylish, synchronized "Guys and Dolls" dance number atop a giant photocopy machine of sliding metal trusses. As none of the videos are straight documentary, it's hard to separate performance from postproduction editing. Lack of sufficient explanatory texts complicates this. 

A 40-minute compilation video documents nine installations, including solo projects of Dumb Type members. It's awkward not to show the installations themselves (some of which are quite simple) considering the attention given to Ikeda's work. Everything in the show builds up to the Japanese premiere of the performance "Voyage." But with no documentation of it here at the ICC, "Voyage" is like Ikeda's anechoic room piece—you can't see it but it sounds pretty good.

The Dumb Type: Voyages exhibition was held Sept-Oct 2002 at NTT/ICC Gallery in Hatsudai, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

©2006-2008 John McGee. All Rights Reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission.