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Ujino Muneteru
Conceptual Framework: Artist
Ujino Muneteru is a contemporary Tokyo-based Japanese artist born in 1964.
He is one of a diverse new generation of neo-Pop artists whose work is characterized
by visual imagination and subversiveness. His artmaking has a taste and
sensibility derived from popular culture from both Japan and the west so
that his sense of national identity has undergone a subtle shift away from
being strictly Japanese towards an international identity. His style is
one of colourful, surreal narratives, radical anti-heroic visions of the
artist himself as “rock god” rather than merely an artist and
he does this with a dark and sardonic humour.
Conceptual Framework: World
Ujino Muneteru’s world is that of Japan’s thriving artistic
underground and the world of international neo-pop artists. This is an urban
post-industrial world that is influenced by the west but also by traditional
Japanese artmaking and has developed a hybridised form of ideas and actions
deriving from both. These influences include Manga, loosely translated in
English as ‘comic books’, and related products of Japanese popular
culture, like street fashion and sport, have been dispersed and transformed
throughout the West (particularly in America) through the mechanics of global
distribution. Ujino Muneteru is influenced in turn by American Hip-Hop culture
and the concept of the DJ as well as the technologies associated with these.
He is also a sports fanatic especially of Japanese baseball.
Conceptual Framework: Artworks
Love Arm 2 2004
Love Arm 4 2005
These artworks resist simple categorization and interpretation. They are
an amalgamation of several artforms and move into the arena of theatre and
music. They take the form of assemblage sculpture, installation and performance.
The artist constructs hand-held structures that seem to function as hybrid
‘machines’. The 'Love Arm' series consists of five models, but
within each model there are several sub- series and special editions. Five
is apparently the maximum number of objects that the human eye can visibly
register at once. The 'machines' operate electrically as instruments and
as lights, made up of different parts taken from a variety of other disparate
objects.
Love Arm 4 is a simple wooden baseball bat that has been adapted
to become a cross-over guitar feedback tool. Over a wooden bat, Ujino Muneteru
has attached a black metal frame that contains pick-ups and electrics. When
plugged in and swung in different directions, the bat becomes a feedback
machine.
Love Arm 2 is a very different looking machine. Resembling something
akin to a motorbike without wheels, it consists of a ridiculously large
mechanical contraption embedded with various lights, fake fur, disco spots
and two motorcycle handlebars. Ujino talks about this in terms of older
machines which were more human sized and which could be repaired, compared
to micro-chip technologies which are almost invisible and once broken must
be replaced totally. The handlebars act as the control panel for the instrument,
with buttons that are pressed to make electronic noises and operate the
different coloured lights. The machine is strapped tightly to Ujino's front
with a harness system so that, when played, he resembles a biker. In this
piece too, Ujino references iconic elements of American culture that have
been imported into Japan e.g. the Harley Davidson motorbike, symbol of the
American free spirit epitomised by Dennis Hopper's film 'Easy Rider'. This
is an icon from the 1960s and the rough lifestyle of the pioneer cowboy.
Ujino merges this symbol with perhaps its opposite, the disco and house
music of black American culture. One represents a predominantly white, patriotic
America, the other a more culturally diverse and immigrant one. He also
references another important Japanese culture machine references, the tradition
by Japanese truckers of decorating their trucks with many different lights
and shiny metallic parts.
Conceptual Framework: Audience
Ujino is aware that his audiences are both informed and uninformed about
art. He intends to trigger sensory and sensational reactions from his audience
jolting or transporting them out of their contemporary experiences of numbness
and cynicism.
The audience does not function as a traditional audience but is closer to
an audience at a pop concert than an art exhibition. The “Love Arms”
tend not to lend themselves too well for static exhibitions or cool, distanced
viewing, but rather are most powerful when played by Ujino within the situation
of a live performance. The “Love Arms” are meant to make the
audience stare in awe and lose themselves in a wash of noise and lights,
like at festivals or raves, where one's identity is seemingly blurred and
forgotten in a common experience.
Artmaking Practice: Ideas
In the hands of a batter, the baseball bat assumes the status of a tool
for winning games, for home runs. The baseball bat is held high and aloft,
the maximum position for exerting maximum energy with a swing action. It
has also been adopted as a weapon by gangsters and street gangs throughout
the twentieth century in America. Like the bat, the guitar also symbolises
other forms of violence. One of the fathers of electric guitars in America
is Fender Company. Its guitars were played by guitar heroes such as Jimi
Hendirx and bands such as The Who (who were British) in the 1960s also began
to destroy their guitars and instruments on stage as part of their performance,
often swinging them around their heads like baseball bats.
Both of these tools are iconic American inventions, symbols of the dominance
of American popular culture in the modern age. They have entered the popular
Japanese culture too, almost to the point where they have lost their American-ness.
The machine obviously also has sexual connotations and his performances
particularly play freely with different ideas of masculinity. The various
icons he uses tend to be strongly related to masculine activities, but Ujino's
performances manage to show these as hollow gestures and as facades. But,
like the baseball bat, the machines tend also to operate on a more metaphorical
level. During a performance, the machine visibly weighs Ujino down, forcing
him to adjust his body and constantly shift positions. Perhaps this is like
American culture in Japan, a force that is desirable and enticing (flashing
and masculine) but which also somehow cannot fit into the Japanese situation
fully or correctly. Ujino shows us this as he tries to 'play' his instruments.
There is thus also a psychological aspect to Ujino's performances that is
transmitted via the 'machines'. The Love Arms are complex tools that probe
specific Japanese issues about identity, sexuality and cultural domination,
but always within the wider arena of pleasure and the visual.
Artmaking Practice: Actions
Ujino Muneteru is working across an eclectic range of media that includes
wood, molded plastic, found appliances, chopped up motorcycles, and video.
At a live performance, the artist produces sounds from his “Love Arm”
contraption, a musical instrument-conglomerate consisting of guitars, a
turntable, power drill, blender, and found records. Ujino performs with
the “Love Arm”, surrounded by a cacophany of noise, Ujino swings
the bat around in a simultaneous homage to the bat and the guitar and its
various images of violence. The two most influential American icons which
have entered Japanese modern culture are simultaneously merged and destroyed.
He frees himself, if only for a moment, from those two great symbols of
American culture in which he lives. The transformed bat/guitar truly becomes
a 'Love Arm', an expression of his undeniable respect for these icons, and
a weapon (arm) against them, using feedback and noise to make the two indistinguishable.
Indeed, Ujino says of his works that they represent his philosophy towards
the Unites States.
Frames: the Postmodern
Ujino’s work is postmodern in that it challenges accepted notions
of what is art? It moves eclectically from one form and one field to another
dissolving the barriers between them. He borrows the iconography of popular
culture, the guitar, the motor cycle, the baseball bat, hip hop music, etc.
and merges it all into his statements on art and culture in the contemporary
world. He parodies art, music and theatre. He displays a voraciously transgressive
creativity that examines issues of self-doubt, social disillusionment, and
a pervasive anxiety about the future in contemporary Japan. He plays with
notions of identity for contemporary young Japanese people which he sees
possesses a hybrid amalgamation of east and west but with an element of
commonality revolving around anime, manga, popular music and digital technology.
These have become viable forms of cultural production that are continually
shaping contemporary art and ideas in both the east and the west.
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