2002

Awarded the Monbukagakusho Research Scholarship to Japan in order to learn calligraphy. These studies are under the guidance of Nagano Sensei in the Tokyo Gakugei Daigaku university. After one year of intensive Japanese language, proceeded to learn "kanji" and "kana" in both 楷書、行書、草書、隷書、and 経書, the classical form of writings. Entering the Master course in Japanese calligraphy pedagogy department may be regarded as a practical objective. But writing with another language and reaching the essence of kanji is the true purpose.

Big size 書写 calligraphy intallation in a Techno Dance Club, seeking a balance of ironies : the white paper and the multi-colored spotlights, the "seriousness" of traditional Asian calligraphy and the "willing-to-rest" postmodern sentiment, the silence of unfathomable ancient Chinese kanji and the straight techno-trance music, etc... Also during the same day, using a big screen, projector and computer, 5 hours live "relecture" of William Blake`s English poetry "Auguries of Innocence" using ancient Japanese characters. A chalk logogram was also performed on the ground of the club : people danced upon it, and erased everything along their journey to the end of evening.

With Kinya "ZULU" Tsuruyama, DAKEI, FURU, and the MORIO Experiment Music Crew. Following the conceptions of Blaise Cendrars and Apollinaire, which advocated the suppression of punctuation in modern poetry, I wrote one sentence in three languages lasting for an hour, finishing with a question mark (as far as I can remember).
Both walls and ground became covered, as the feet of the dancers erased words and part of the writings began to appear on their clothes.
I don't remember having heard the music at all. Some noise at the begining, but that is all.

Boredom emanates a newly-refurbished and sterilized dance club.
I started at the same time as DJ Mochizuki (deep techno), to write on the ground the first sentences of the open letter that Antonin Artaud (book : Folio : "Messages Revolutionaires") addressed to the Mexican States' Governors on the 19th of May 1936, by replacing systematicaly the word "Europe" with "Japan", "European" with "Japanese", etc...
Book in hand, I translated to English sentence after sentence.
After twenty minutes, two women came and asked me in Japanese if they could write too : I gave them each a piece of white chalk. After them, a lot of other people did the same, and all started to write in their mother language on the ground. Everything became amalgamated, one dancing on the expression of the other, one writing to this woman, this woman reading the mother tongue of another before going for a drink...
The club security guards intervened in order for our expression not to "skid"...I'm smiling.

I then wrote some ancient Japanese Calligraphy from the "Heian" period in the toilets of the club.
The smell of urine helps one to read poetry: about this Michelet would have fully agreed.

For the project using portable telephones :

The "keitai" or portable telephone is a new element in modern society that has become ubiquitous in Japan.

I take no risk in stating that 80% of Tokyo`s population (in which you may include all children from the age of 10) carries a phone in its pocket.
In the present day, not having one entails hermitage. Not having one is like choosing not to answer: suspect. And everybody knows that within society being suspect is dangerous.
Humans once again are to be identified by numbers; and may be contacted at any time (which of course one should understand as deprivation of freedom).

Even if perceived by many as a significant advance in terms of communication, it is still true that most conversations occuring therein start generally with "where are you?". The great question.

I have already realized a live writing project requesting the participation of public via use of an accessible keyboard.
This former project achieved minimal success because of a general unwillingness among participants to reveal their private selves in a public sphere. And this is especially a problem in a Japanese environment.
Clearly, with the computer keyboard located in a public sphere, one cannot reach the private self.
That is where Keitai appears : It naturally occured to me that keitai could be used for this purpose, as its keyboard is situated within the private locus (its owner`s pocket or hand).

More than that: using a Japanese keitai, one can potentially produce text in many languages (using Latin script, or Chinese characters, etc., even Real-time photos may be shot and sent). And I assert the idea of multi-linguistic poetry as fascinating.
Hence, the concept of this project: producing real-time poetry on a large, public screen in interaction with electronic music and actively "chatting" participants. Writing meaning and ambient sounds.

Hence, poetry is not forced to be "live", but is forced to be of life.


Electronic music and poetry, a concept in five steps :


• As a result of the late-industrial era, the human relation to objects has changed.
• As a result, human consumption has evolved toward gluttony and waste.
• As consumption has changed, the human relation to time has been modified.
• And since time is the basis of rhythm, cyclic repetitions emerge in music.
• Consequently, electronic music was spawned at the edge of modernity: The Present.
  
  
The act of poetry writing today, through media and archives, is part of the same edge.

Collaging of real-time images (e.g. photos sent by keitai) may be regarded as a secondary objective of this project.
If this succeeds, it will be used in future projects.

The concept of this project (use of Keitai for this kind of event) is Copyright © Eric Van Hove.


Dogs and Demons : Tales from the Dark Side of Japan d'Alex Kerr :

"In an ancient tale, a Chinese emperor asks his court painter about the easiest and most difficult subjects to paint. The painter replies, "Dogs are difficult, demons are easy".
Dogs and Demons offers tales from the dark side of Japan's well-known modern accomplishments. For Japan's problems go far beyond its dire economic plight, beyond the failures of its banks and pension founds.

Installation of calligraphy (書写) in the basement of the embassy of Sweden used as screen for projections. The work was 7 meters long and 4 meters high.
It is a reproduction of a work (李太白憶旧遊詩巻) of Koteiken (黄庭堅), a Chinese poet and official during the Song dynasty (宋) who was so devoted to his mother that he even did her washing up.

More seriously, as Japanese uses their Kanji' pronunciation to spell names, his Chinese name is Huang Tingjian (1045-1105) and he was born in Fenning, Jiangxi province. He studied under Su Shi, and was adept at both poetry and calligraphy. Huang, who had the sobriquets Shangu Daoren (Taoist of a Mountain Valley) and Fuweng (Old Man Fu), is known as the founder of the Jiangxi school of poetry, and in calligraphy, he is considered one of the Four Great Brushes of the Song, along with Mi Fu, Cai Xiang, and Su Shi. Huang's calligraphy style is known for its severe forms and power, seen particularly in the horizontal strokes and slashes diagonally down to right and left.

This temporary installation was part of the "Swedish Style In Tokyo" art event.

Collaboration with four Japanese videasts : Nobu, Takada(sal), Takashi Ogata, Hayashi Hiromi.
The calligraphy used for projecting their works was 8 meters long and 7 meters high. It proposed a retrospective of the main steps of the evolution of the Kanji "孫", witch means "grandson, posterity, descendants...", from the ancient Chinese to nowadays. The choice of this particular Kanji's history seemed relevant to me as the use of traditional art as calligraphy for a dialogue with modern works was part of my interrest in this exhibition, it is the filliation between ancient and modern expression(' reasons) that I proposed myself to highlighted.
It's the possibilities for modern "visual art", witch is (except for some rare cases) all about speed and therefore has oblivion as an aim (Kundera, Slowness, Ed. HarperCollins, May 1997), to deal with one of the oldest known language' writting (Chinese Kanji) that I attempt to shown.

Of course this took place in a dance club in the middle of Shibuya, kingdom of fashion and disappearance, witch is in the middle of Tokyo, megapole of time and virtual ; we better dance.

poerformance is a neologism based on the contraction of the words "poetry" and "performance".
The word "performance" sounds generally to my ear as far too "sport-related", which I believe does not match what my attempt is about.
One engages in poerformance without a clear purpose : getting to some crowded place and walking among these unknown people, feeling all this emptiness between each of them, as well as this willingness to grab, to detain, to stifle.
Then, following your intuition, trying to open your third ear on the vanishing instant, you write down what you feel dicted to.

Eimi Ishikawa is a street butoh dancer ; she doesn't mind bashing herself against the ground until bleeding if the surface is cumbersome to her expression. We found her dancing in the same place some weeks before, following the crackling and astonished sounds of a small tape-recorder. Here, we proposed that she follow David's trumpet instead : each note like a blow.

Two Butoh dancers. On one, who is deaf, I wrote poetry in French, on the other, I wrote poetry in Japanese.
I stopped each in turn to write on his body while the other danced. I went from one to another, writing with a black make-up pencil on their nude, freshly-shaven skin, which, with movement after movement became increasingly covered with perspiration and started to smear the writings into illegibility.

On the ear of the deaf dancer, I happened to wrote some words ; he looked at me.
I came again to both bodies, trying to rewrite with the pencil melting down more and more by warm sweat. As my words disappeared into their gestures, palimpsest on their exhaustion.

Just across the Sumida River from the Nihonbashi/Kayabacho district, has been one of Tokyo's most important centers of contemporary art.
The 75-year-old former rice market that houses three of the city's most innovative contemporary art galleries is to be demolished by the end of 2002. The developers' plans for the 1927 Shokuryo building, which is located in an unfashionable pocket of east Tokyo, were confirmed in the summer. The building, which housed Kazuko Koike's influential Sagacho Exhibit Space for 17 years until December 2000, was one of Tokyo most atmospheric art venues.

In tribute to the illustrious building before its demise, four galleries (Taka Ishii, Tomio Koyama, Rice Gallery, Taro Nasu) that have been residents over its all-too-brief contemporary art period decided to display some new and old works by 36 Japanese and international artists in a huge, nine-day group exhibition known as “Emotional Site.”

I decided to go there on the last day. I walked through the exhibition and reached the square shaped roof of the Sagacho under a begining rain in the evening.
I had this "Tenjin hakuboku" box of 200 white chalk in my bag.

Installation of meaning under footsteps :

I wrote beneath them. Beveled. Through their trampling. Frenetic. A word always disapeared after some lines. That is it's promise.
Smoothly as the rythmes unbelted its diction, I lost the line. Heart beat.
Andre Cadere, in the seventies, was putting, as an installation, a round-shaped wodden stick in other artists' exhibitions.

The act of installing itself engulfed within the entranced crowd, sculpture that is not a hard object, a Phallus' replica (phallos in Latin is said fascinus).
Some, artists or spectators, would like art to be impressive (printed), to be fascinating. I guess the question isn't to come again on this ancestral neurosis, however.
It's pedestal reconsidered around the start of the last century ; Those sculptures that were crushed suddenly like 10 x 10 Altstadt Copper Square or Fall of Carl Andre, Richard Long's Sea Lava Circles, Donald Judd's 15 untitled works in concrete, these earthworks of Robert Smithson or even 7000 Oaks of Joseph Beuys (Documenta 7) or more recently 2,146 stones Monument Against Racism by Jochen Gerz in Sarrebrück (1990-93); one could trip on them : a detumescent modernity?

Ovid, in his Art of love wrote: Acrior est nostra libidine plusque furoris habet (The desire of women is more vivid than ours and is made of much more violence and displacedness).
This had been the theme of this anachorese.


"Because there are immediately two bodies in one which starts too speak and become
language : a sublime body put "orthographicaly" on an obscene body."
Pascal Quignard, in Le sexe et l'effroi, Folio, 1994.

A calligraphy titled "弓耳火音弋人為 " (12 meters on 4 meters - Black ink on Japanese paper) with 太鼓 group GOCOO(Taiko - Japanese traditional drums) :

I wished for this work to be an allegory on sound, language, the crowd, the artificiality, the target, and death.

The first two and last two kanji are (followed by their respective meanings) :
- 弓 [キュウ, ゆみ, こ, ゆ, = bow (archery, violin)]
- 耳 [みみ = ear]
- 人 [じん, ひと, と, にん = (n) man; person; human being; mankind; people; character; personality; true man; man of talent; adult; other people; messenger; visitor]
- 為 [ ため, な.る, な.す, す.る, たり つく.る, なり びい = do; change; make; benefit; welfare; be of use; reach to; try; practice; cost; serve as; good; advantage; as a result of]

And the three following kanji in the middle are respectively :
- 火 [か,ひ = fire]
- 音 [おと, おん, ね = sound ; note]
- 弋

Each kanij can be read (as a word on his own) with the kanji that surrounds it as following :
- 弓+耳 = 弭 [ ビ ミ や.める や.む ゆは.ず = stop; cease; notches where drawstring is attached to the bow]
- 耳+火 = 耿 [ひかり = light]
- 火+音+弋 = 熾 [おこす = light a fire]
- 弋+人 = 弋人 [よくじん = hunter; archer]
- 人+為 = 人為 [じんい = (n) human work; art; artificiality]


"(...)So he spoke in prayer, and Phoebus Apollo heard him. Down from the peaks of Olympus he strode, angered at heart, bearing on his shoulders his bow and covered quiver. The arrows rattled on the shoulders of the angry god as he moved, and his coming was like the night. Then he sat down apart from the ships and let fly an arrow: terrible was the twang of the silver bow. The mules he assailed first and the swift dogs, but then on the men themselves he let fly his stinging shafts, and struck; and constantly the pyres of the dead burned thick.
For nine days the missiles of the god ranged among the host,(...)" Homer, The Iliad, first book, line 43.
(Homer. The Iliad, English Translation by A.T. Murray, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1924.)

"So spoke the wooers, but Odysseus of many wiles, as soon as he had lifted the great bow and scanned it on every side--even as when a man well-skilled in the lyre and in song easily stretches the string about a new peg, making fast at either end the twisted sheep-gut--so without effort did Odysseus string the great bow. [410] And he held it in his right hand, and tried the string, which sang sweetly beneath his touch, like to a swallow in tone. " Homer, The Odyssey, song XXI, line 401.
(Homer. The Odyssey, English Translation by A.T. Murray, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1924.)


The instrument of sounds, made from the bowel or from nerves stretched over the cow's skin, was the cithare (kithara) of Hermes who offered it to Apollo. Apollo used it to release the arrows from his quiver "among the host" in the Iliad. For the ancient Romans, the cithare and the lyre were as weapons -- the strings were the bows, the arrow the perfect pitch that hit its mark and killed the prey, but only if the sound of the released string sang "like to a swallow in tone"(Pascal Quignard, in La haine de la musique, Folio, 1996).

Symbolically, musicians are archers, and music, a hunt. Drums, cors(corns), throw the listener into a panic, and are used to scare off the animals before the hunt, a call to death.

I was only half surprised to learn that the kanji 弓 means usualy "bow", but can also mean "violin".
Isn't special that in English, this same tool made of horse's hair and used to played violin is called a bow?

Participants could, using their portable telephones (in Tokyo, 90% of the population aged 10 and above posesses a cellular phone), send me messages in all the languages that their phone could handle (Japanese + latin scripts (without accent) and greek). Assisted by a computer program specially programmed for this purpose, their messages subsequently appeared on a big screen following the name of the author.
New messages appeared on top, and older ones disappeared down the screen.

The project lasted for 5 hours. Around 1500 peoples were there and messages were received in 7 differents languages. I was also writing from my own phone.