Simon Fujiwara is the archaeologist of his own prehistory, unearthing the bones of his contemporary identity from real and imagined relics of his own past. His new show at Tate St Ives revisits the geographical and art-historical landscape of his hometown, and prompts questions on whether retrospection is the truest guide to the now (clue: it isn’t). By Hili Perlson
In the dialectical model of nature vs. nurture, there’s little arguing that culture and experience shape our identities. But to what extent? Identity is clearly as much a question of “Where do I come from?” as “What have I experienced?” But can the memory of these experiences be trusted? Dissecting the past shouldn’t be a search for a singular, objective truth, since the past doesn’t really exist – it’s a concept, an idea. Kant said it, Schopenhauer rephrased it: the “now” is the only true aspect of temporal existence, while the past and the future are mere phantasms.
Sounds esoteric? Simon Fujiwara will walk you through it. The British-Japanese artist bases his work on the fluidity unknowability of the past. Excavating his own experiences, he is well aware of the fact that the past is a concept that only through a chosen perspective can be moulded into a linear narrative – that is, into a history. We write sagas, fables and tales, create myths and legends in an attempt to understand the meaning of things. We depend on narratives – but we also want to be seduced and entertained by them. Simon Fujiwara tells them better than most.
His work draws on the story he can tell best, namely his own. Or rather on disparate moments from his life, which he chooses to highlight and connect to others in order to reconstruct his own history. To this effect, he blends fact and fiction, autobiographical elements with spectacular drama, and builds a grand narrative, one in which he plays both the good old omniscient narrator, as well as a post-modern, nouveau-roman-style author who ponders the faultiness and deceptiveness of his own memory.
Fujiwara is constantly digging out his past, but the findings may change according to what he feels himself to be at the moment.
In one of his best-known pieces, the performance “Welcome to the Hotel Munber” (2008-10), he looks at the history of his family before he was born. In Franco’s Spain of the Seventies, Fujiawara’s parents owned a bar, were pretty successful and lead happy, comfortable lives. “But what if I had lived under the Franco Regime, as a homosexual?” he once challenged them. “My parents are as much a product of me as I am of them. So I took their history and tried to bring out the things that happened around them which they’ve missed.” He did that by writing a story, of course: an erotic one about his father. In the piece, he performs as himself trying to write the erotic novel. The performance is set in an immaculately reconstructed model of the Fujiwaras’ bar. Little clues about it being a secretly gay joint are planted everywhere. “They’re very slapstick, kind of Fawlty Towers” he laughs. “The hams are made of vintage gay porn, the dart is an asshole and the olive oil is extra virgin.”
The appeal of Fujiwara’s constructed histories often lies in their outrageous humour. Works like “The Museum of Incest”(2008), “Frozen”(2010) or “Phallusies (An Arabian Mystery)”(2010) present ersatz archaeological excavations with deadpan accounts of their discoveries, and pseudo-scientific research on the prehistoric societies that bequeathed them.
“Phallusies”, for example, constructs the story of the discovery of a giant, ancient stone phallus beneath the foundations of a new museum building, somewhere in the Arabian Desert. Since no records of the phallus exist, four British construction workers who were employed on the museum’s site are the only ones who can preserve it for future generations. However, when Fujiwara commissions them to re-fabricate the phallus as they remember it, arguments ensue: one witness remembers testicles, another claims it was simply a column. And was it three meters long, or eight? Fujiwara plays with the aesthetics of the ancient, the antiquated and the obsolete. Not only memory, but also institutional conventions of scientific authority are brought into question here as providers of Truth. Museums and art galleries in particular.
Currently installed at Tate St Ives (where Fujiwara grew up), “Since 1982” is the artist’s largest survey exhibition to date, and it is a retrospective – in more ways than one. “A show about looking back, and it’s in my home town,” he says. “It does capture almost of all my work, but then again I’ve only been doing stuff for about five years, so it’s also a play on that.”
The project started when Fujiwara contacted the Tate with a request to lend the painting “Horizontal Stripes” by Patrick Heron for a performance called “The Mirror Stage”. The painting, he claimed, which he saw at Tate St Ives at the age of 11, made him realise two things about himself: one, that he wanted to become an artist, and two, that he was gay. “But how can an artwork, and especially a macho, abstract expressionist one turn someone gay?” he asks – and the question leads straight into his one of the constructed narrations that define his work.
“So in ‘The Mirror Stage’, I cast a child to play a reenactment of that moment, and in the script he asks me ‘but how can a painting turn you gay?’ And I explain to young Simon that, ‘well, there’s a theory that Lacan posited, that when you’re in your teens and going through puberty you’re looking for sexual mirrors in other people, other objects, and maybe this picture acted like a mirror to me, because it was the first time I saw an abstract, modern art work. It was just pure emotion and formlessness and atmosphere and that could have unlocked my urge to both become and artist and realise I was homosexual.” The human mind, needy of explanation, has the ability to force a narrative onto any random string of events, and in “The Mirror Stage” Fujiwara plays with the impulse to put logic into illogical connections.
“Since 1982” treats the entire Tate building as an artefact, to serve the myth-building around Fujiwara’s life, where, in hindsight, even the year of his birth is given a seemingly prophetic position on an imaginary timeline. So too are the wall texts accompanying each work written by the artist to add another layer to the myth-making – the sense that excavated history may be useful, if not necessarily reliable – while causing deliberate confusion. “It’s my first big institutional show and I didn’t want it to be the death of me,” he says. “ I mean the wall texts, especially with the Tate, are usually very didactic and explain everything. They tell you what is true and what isn’t. But that’s not really what my work is about. It’s about how I don’t believe there’s a boundary between truth and fiction.”
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