Part of the magic of Simon Fujiwara’s works is that it touches on a particularly occupying human impulse: the way we constantly represent ourselves within a historical context, and in particular today with the advent of social media. What’s the difference between Fujiwara’s collaged identity constructs and, say, the Facebook Timeline? Taking points in the user’s life, the timeline funnels random events that have been constructed using images and texts into a retrospective narrative. “People often ask me about my work ‘but how much of it is true?’ But why is that important? No one asks you if the funny anecdote you posted on your wall is true or not. They just ‘like’ it.”
In fact, the experience of the “now” – the only the only true aspect of temporal existence – has never been so amplified. We instantaneously comment on how we feel via social media, and have generally become more apt at describing our emotions. Reality TV delivers participants’ testimonials, commenting on what went through their heads as one spectacular emotional moment after another is prompted. How much of our inner lives is already scripted before it happens – or after it? And how often do we hone down our emotional states into catchy comments just as we experience them? Fujiwara’s work tackles those complexities, and many more besides.
While constructing the myth of Fujiwara as a St Ives artist, he ties his own biography with that of his hometown. In addition to his personal relation to the Heron painting, Fujiwara works with this particular piece because of its link to the history of St Ives as an important locus of British art. “When the Tate first opened here people were furious, especially about this painting. ‘They spent millions on this museum to put diese in it? My child could have painted it!’ But it has this whole intellectual background; it was Heron’s reply to Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and the American Ab-Ex, which made St Ives super avant-garde in the late fifties.”
The art legacy of St Ives is something that Fujiwara was raised on, but it’s the treatment of the local artists that has shaped some of the ideas he works with today. “Like everyone else, I grew up knowing not so much about the art, but about the biographies of the artists. The fire officer would come to school to tell us ‘Kids, don’t smoke, because sculptor Baraba Hepworth died smoking in bed.’ Then we’d be taken to her studio to see the bed she smoked in and died. Can you imagine a German school trip to the bar where Kippenberger had one drink too many?”
When given carte blanche to install a show in the entire museum, it was clear to Fujiwara that he would play on the notion of a retrospective for a “local” artist (Fujiwara now lives in Berlin). He mounted the show in the fashion of a neat regional museum, where any object the local hero artist has ever come into contact with has a plaque with an explanation, and becomes full of meaning.
The first room shows an installation entitled “Selective Memory” that deals with the artist’s early childhood. The space is filled with gigantic, rather phallic lighthouses, fashioned after paintings by Alfred Wallis. Wallis’ charming primitive, naïve art, mostly consisting of maritime motifs, drew the attention of artists including Ben Nicholson and Kit Wood who settled in Cornwall and Wallis is thus considered the father of the St Ives School of art. Fujiwara weaves a partly autobiographical story using a wall text in the third person, which explains how Fujiwara’s family came to St Ives in search for the idyll and naïveté that they saw in Wallis’ work. The text claims that his earliest memory is of seeing the light of the lighthouse on his bedroom ceiling, a sublime experience that had inspired him to become an artist.
In addition, the Tate produced a brochure for the show that contains some facts about the artist to help viewers navigate through the challenging experience of “Since 1982.” In a weird twist of life imitating art, the brochure does precisely what Fujiwara’s work seeks to demonstrate, pouring a narrative into a random point in his life: “They found a picture of me as a child doing finger paintings and ran it in the brochure, saying something about showing early signs of artistic inclination.” And so, the myth is set forth, becomes institutional, and blurs the boundaries between fact and wishfully constructed narrative.
The show continues with each room representing formative stages in Fujiwara’s development, with the installations “The Mirror Stage” and “Hotel Munber” reflecting his life up to puberty. Working out his relationships with his parents as an adult is the focus of the installations in the two main galleries, and the last room is, inevitably, a dramatic account of the artist’s death.
Looking at the morgue-like room, with its perfectly romantic artefacts of an imagined death, any remaining doubt or suspense of disbelief is shattered as it becomes very clear that the artist, who is alive and well and, when this interview was conducted, was sitting in front of me, has taken you by the hand on a tour of his own history. In the end, whether or not any or all of it happened seems quite beside the point.
From Sleek 33, The Brand New Retro