![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/Simon-Fujiwara-Mothers-of-Invention-2012.jpg\" "\\"Simon")
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Simon Fujiwara is the archaeologist of his own prehistory, unearthing the bones of his contemporary identity from real and imagined\u00a0relics 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\u2019t). By Hili Perlson<\/em><\/p>\n In the dialectical model of nature vs. nurture, there\u2019s little arguing that culture and experience shape our identities. But to what extent? Identity is clearly as much a question of \u201cWhere do I come from?\u201d as \u201cWhat have I experienced?\u201d But can the memory of these experiences be trusted? Dissecting the past shouldn\u2019t be a search for a singular, objective truth, since the past doesn\u2019t really exist \u2013 it\u2019s a concept, an idea. Kant said it, Schopenhauer rephrased it: the \u201cnow\u201d is the only true aspect of temporal existence, while the past and the future are mere phantasms.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 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 \u2013 but we also want to be seduced and entertained by them. Simon Fujiwara tells them better than most.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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. In one of his best-known pieces, the performance \u201cWelcome to the Hotel Munber\u201d (2008-10), he looks at the history of his family before he was born. In Franco\u2019s Spain of the Seventies, Fujiawara\u2019s parents owned a bar, were pretty successful and lead happy, comfortable lives. \u201cBut what if I had lived under the Franco Regime, as a homosexual?\u201d he once challenged them. \u201cMy 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\u2019ve missed.\u201d 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\u2019 bar. Little clues about it being a secretly gay joint are planted everywhere. \u201cThey\u2019re very slapstick, kind of Fawlty Towers\u201d he laughs. \u201cThe hams are made of vintage gay porn, the dart is an asshole and the olive oil is extra virgin.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n The appeal of Fujiwara\u2019s constructed histories often lies in their outrageous humour. Works like \u201cThe Museum of Incest\u201d(2008), \u201cFrozen\u201d(2010) or \u201cPhallusies (An Arabian Mystery)\u201d(2010) present ersatz archaeological excavations with deadpan accounts of their discoveries, and pseudo-scientific research on the prehistoric societies that bequeathed them.<\/p>\n \u201cPhallusies\u201d, 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Currently installed at Tate St Ives (where Fujiwara grew up), \u201cSince 1982\u201d is the artist\u2019s largest survey exhibition to date, and it is a retrospective \u2013 in more ways than one. \u201cA show about looking back, and it\u2019s in my home town,\u201d he says. \u201cIt does capture almost of all my work, but then again I\u2019ve only been doing stuff for about five years, so it\u2019s also a play on that.\u201d<\/p>\n The project started when Fujiwara contacted the Tate with a request to lend the painting \u201cHorizontal Stripes\u201d by Patrick Heron for a performance called \u201cThe Mirror Stage\u201d. 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. \u201cBut how can an artwork, and especially a macho, abstract expressionist one turn someone gay?\u201d he asks \u2013 and the question leads straight into his one of the constructed narrations that define his work.<\/p>\n \u201cSo in \u2018The Mirror Stage\u2019, I cast a child to play a reenactment of that moment, and in the script he asks me \u2018but how can a painting turn you gay?\u2019 And I explain to young Simon that, \u2018well, there\u2019s a theory that Lacan posited, that when you\u2019re in your teens and going through puberty you\u2019re 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.\u201d The human mind, needy of explanation, has the ability to force a narrative onto any random string of events, and in \u201cThe Mirror Stage\u201d Fujiwara plays with the impulse to put logic into illogical connections.<\/p>\n \u201cSince 1982\u201d treats the entire Tate building as an artefact, to serve the myth-building around Fujiwara\u2019s 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 \u2013 the sense that excavated history may be useful, if not necessarily reliable \u2013 while causing deliberate confusion. \u201cIt\u2019s my first big institutional show and I didn\u2019t want it to be the death of me,\u201d he says. \u201c I mean the wall texts, especially with the Tate, are usually very didactic and explain alles<\/em>. They tell you what is true and what isn\u2019t. But that\u2019s not really what my work is about. It\u2019s about how I don\u2019t believe there\u2019s a boundary between truth and fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n Continue on next page<\/strong><\/p>\n Part of the magic of Simon Fujiwara\u2019s 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\u2019s the difference between Fujiwara\u2019s collaged identity constructs and, say, the Facebook Timeline? Taking points in the user\u2019s life, the timeline funnels random events that have been constructed using images and texts into a retrospective narrative. \u201cPeople often ask me about my work \u2018but how much of it is true?\u2019 But why is that important? No one asks you if the funny anecdote you posted on your wall is true or not. They just \u2018like\u2019 it.\u201d<\/p>\n In fact, the experience of the \u201cnow\u201d \u2013 the only the only true aspect of temporal existence \u2013 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\u2019 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 \u2013 or after it? And how often do we hone down our emotional states into catchy comments just as we experience them? Fujiwara\u2019s work tackles those complexities, and many more besides.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cWhen the Tate first opened here people were furious, especially about this painting. \u2018They spent millions on this museum to put diese<\/em> in it? My child could have painted it!\u2019 But it has this whole intellectual background; it was Heron\u2019s reply to Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko and the American Ab-Ex, which made St Ives super avant-garde in the late fifties.\u201d<\/p>\n The art legacy of St Ives is something that Fujiwara was raised on, but it\u2019s the treatment of the local artists that has shaped some of the ideas he works with today. \u201cLike 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 \u2018Kids, don\u2019t smoke, because sculptor Baraba Hepworth died smoking in bed.\u2019 Then we\u2019d 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?\u201d<\/p>\n 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 \u201clocal\u201d 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.<\/p>\n The first room shows an installation entitled \u201cSelective Memory\u201d that deals with the artist\u2019s early childhood. The space is filled with gigantic, rather phallic lighthouses, fashioned after paintings by Alfred Wallis. Wallis\u2019 charming primitive, na\u00efve 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\u2019s family came to St Ives in search for the idyll and na\u00efvet\u00e9 that they saw in Wallis\u2019 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cSince 1982.\u201d In a weird twist of life imitating art, the brochure does precisely what Fujiwara\u2019s work seeks to demonstrate, pouring a narrative into a random point in his life: \u201cThey 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.\u201d And so, the myth is set forth, becomes institutional, and blurs the boundaries between fact and wishfully constructed narrative.<\/p>\n The show continues with each room representing formative stages in Fujiwara\u2019s development, with the installations \u201cThe Mirror Stage\u201d and \u201cHotel Munber\u201d 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\u2019s death.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n
Fujiwara is constantly digging out his past, but the findings may change according to what he feels himself to be at the moment.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/Simon-Fujiwara-Hotel-Munbar-2008-2010.jpg\" "\\"Simon")
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<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/Simon-Fujiwara-Selective-Memory-2012.jpg\" "\\"Simon")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sleek-mag.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/07\/Simon-Fujiwara-Letters-from-Mexico-2012.jpg\" "\\"Simon")
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