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Performance / Myself (Or Video Identity)

Takahiko iimura

1995 00:28:15 Japan, United StatesEnglishB&WMono4:3BetacamSP video
Tags:
Asian-American, Film or Videomaking, Language, Performance

Description

This compilation is produced with "myself" as the sole object, as well as the material of the performance (except two videos with Akiko iimura).  The videos are not just documents of the performances, but works of video-art made specifically for utilizing the video system, including the camera and monitor, as part of the performances.  The collection also questions the identity of oneself in video, having tense relationships between words and images, and asks who is "I" and what "I" means.

DVD includes:

Self Identity, 1972, 1:00 excerpted

Double Identity, 1979, 2:00 excerpted

Double Portrait, 1973-1987, 5:00

I Love You, 1973-1987, 5:00

This is a Camera Which Shoots This, 1982-1995, 5:00

As I See You You See Me, 1990-1995, 7:00

I Am a Viewer, You Are a Viewer, 1981, 4:00

"iimura compares the dialectics of images and language, live video image and the viewer, as well as the "subject" and the "object" to the complex Yin/Yang principle."

-- Slava Kacunko, ZKM

"In a distinctly post-modern turn immura places his theoretical procedures through the self of the artist and the viewer in a dialectic of linguistic discovery."

-- John G. Hanhardt, Whitney Museum

"The aptly titled Performance / Myself, a seven part series of epistemologically complex excerpts and stand alone experiments,is fashioned from deceptively simple concepts: iimura simultaneously "lives" on screen and inside a television monitor pronouncing… The videos This Is a Camera which Shoots This and As I See You You See Me complicate, rather than mitigate, questions about knowing through seeing as they document and also comprise an original live performance."

-- Michael Joshua Rowin, City Arts, New York's Review of Culture, April 6, 2010

About Takahiko iimura

A pioneering figure in the New York and Japanese film and video undergounds, Taka iimura has had a tremendous impact upon the development of experimental cinema in both the U.S. and Japan. iimura's work in video has concentrated on deconstructing the language of video, especially video's power to obscure the author of the image, through the audience's immediate acceptance of what is shown on screen as true. iimura establishes a relation between the self-reflexive nature of language and the simultaneous feedback characteristic of video, exploiting this relation to investigate the shifting position of video's subject (who is behind the camera) and object (who is in front of the camera). Through his videos, which read like elaborate semiotic riddles, iimura has educated audiences to the structure of video in a way that has profoundly changed the way the medium is viewed.

He is a widely established international artist, having had numerous solo exhibitions in major museums such as the Musem of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, Anthology Film Archives, Centre Georges Pompidou, the National Gallery Jeu de Paume, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Reina Sofia National Museum, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, in addition to artist residencies at the German Academy of Arts and Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation Study Center.

Recently he has been involved in using computers, publishing more than 20 DVDs/CD-ROMs, and writing several books on film, video, and multimedia, including a book published in English, "The Collected Writings of Takahiko iimura".

"I am concerned with the whole system of video, not just what you see on the screen, but including the camera, monitor, the whole system."
—Takahiko iimura