The Possible in a Zanzou
Interview by Andrew Maerkle
Andrew Maerkle [M]:To begin, I’m curious to know how you think about reproduction in relation to yourartistic practice. Mass-produced images and printed matter form the basic materialof your works, and sometimes the same image will be used multiple times within thesame work, or will reappear across several works. But the act of cutting somethingout and pasting it onto another surface transforms that thing from being multiple
into being unique. In this sense, in terms of photographic media, the Polaroid seems
to be a readymade collage – already cut out, and waiting to be pasted – so I wonder
whether this might have been part of the attraction when you began work on theoriginal Retina series.
Shinro Ohtake [O]:First let me explain how the Retina series got started. In 1988, shortly after I
moved to Uwajima from Tokyo, I had set up a temporary studio and was havingsome works photographed there. It was common practice then to do test shots on
Polaroid, in order to check things like exposure settings and shutter speed, before
proceeding to the final shoot with film. Once everything had been tested, both thephotos and the negatives would be thrown out, but I was collecting the thrown-out
Polaroids as material for my Scrapbooks. On that day, one of the Polaroids that
happened to be in the bin was a bad exposure, but I was surprised at how precisely
it realized an image I had been vaguely conceiving at the time, and I felt its
painterly potential.
Thanks partly to the influence of my father I had been interested in photographysince childhood, but in developing Retina I had no particular intent of investigating“the medium of photography.” It was just a coincidence that the Polaroid revealed
to me its painterly potential. It gave me the idea of layering a transparent “plasticresin” on top of a completely flat photographic surface. In oil painting the picture
plane is necessarily the combination of both color and material, but I wasinterested in the process of how, when viewing the “planar colors” of thedeveloped photographs through the “transparent material” of the plastic resin, thepicture plane must be blended optically before it can be perceived as a single
image, because the color and material are separate. I had in mind the Pointillist
paintings by artists like Seurat and Signac.

[M]Could you explain more about how you understand the relations between unique andmultiple?
[O]
As you say, the moment I paste something into a Scrapbook it becomes unique,regardless of whether it is mass-produced or not. But the relations between uniqueand multiple are currently undergoing dramatic transformation. In the past there
was a clear distinction between the idea of something that is original being uniqueand something that is reproduced being multiple – the difference between painting
and prints, for example. But entering the digital era, those distinctions havecollapsed. With analog printing, at least the plate was a real thing, but with digitalprinting the plate itself has no substance, because it’s just data, and you can keep
making copies indefinitely as long as you have the data. Strictly speaking, in analog
printing the plate deteriorates with each print, and there are slight differences in
how the ink is applied, so even in an edition of, say, 20 prints, each print could beconsidered unique in a sense. The exact basis for whether something is considered
to be unique or multiple has always been ambiguous, but all the more so now. I
think digital technology has brought us to a point where, above all, subjective
perception is what drives art.
What I think is really interesting in this context is money. The form of paper moneyis basically that of a print. The same could also be said in a sense for coins, which
are cast from a mold. But whereas a print loses its value if it gets damaged or dirty,
with paper money and coins it doesn't matter whether it’s brand new or in tatters– the money always has the same value, and people treat it the same way. So I
think the idea of paper money already anticipates digital technology. Obviously
there are fluctuations in value, so it's not quite the same, but everybody sees ahundred dollar bill as a hundred dollar bill. I think this is a really interesting issue
for our current situation, because money is so primitive in a way – it’s just a
printed piece of paper – but everyone uses it as a tool and it continues circulatingwith a relatively constant value.
[M]
Are you familiar with Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the inframince (infra-thin)?
[O]Duchamp’s idea of the inframince has always fascinated me. He came up with allthese examples for it, like the warmth of a seat that has just been left, or thewhistling sound of velvet trousers.
[M]
If we try to define what an artist does, usually we would say that the artist uses his or
her hands to transform some material. But with the introduction of the inframince,
the action of using the hand to transform something itself becomes ambiguous. In
your case, for example, when you take a supermarket sales insert from a newspaper
and paste it without other alterations into a Scrapbook, the transformation thatoccurs there is almost imperceptible.
[O]
You often hear about old movie posters selling for a million yen at auctions andsuch, right? The thing about printed matter is that when something is first printed
in a run of, say, one million copies, each copy has no particular value. But 100 years
later, any existing copy of that same thing is treated as a rarity, almost like anoriginal, and is valued accordingly. The sales insert from the newspaper is thesame. If I didn’t paste it somewhere, it would just vanish. People throw thesethings away without a second thought. But that’s exactly why they are interesting.
There probably are collectors who save movie posters with posterity in mind, but
how much more interesting would it be if there were a person who collects
newspaper sales inserts?

[M]
In your writing on the Zyapanorama series, you use the word kehai (sign,atmosphere) to describe what led you to the visual elements of the works. Is the kehai
something like the inframince for you?
[O]
I think it does have that aspect. In the case of Zyapanorama, when I found abillboard that caught my eye, I would do my best to “transfer” it to the workwithout any formal interpretation. The problem was that the billboard by itself is
too graphical. So what I had to do was create a bodily memory of the place where
the billboard was standing, and the atmosphere of that place, and apply that to thework. You wouldn’t be able to capture that atmosphere through a high-resolution

digital photograph. And because the experience of that atmosphere is different foreach person, the only thing you can do is to capture it through your own
impressions.
[M]
Getting back to Retina, although it doesn’t seem to have been a priority for you at thetime, do you find any meaning now in the way you combined painting andphotographic media in the works?
[O]
It was around the time of the 150th anniversary of the invention of photography,
and photography was being featured all across the art world, but I don’t think that
influenced me. And since my student days I had been aware of Man Ray’s
rayographs, made by directly exposing objects against photosensitive paper, so I
certainly was aware of working with photography in different ways. But prior tothe incident during the photo shoot in my studio I had never thought of connecting“painting” and “photography.”
As I said, in the case of Retina I was thinking more of Pointillism. By covering thefilm with an essentially flat color and then overlaying that with transparent
material, the material and the color would form a single picture plane while still
remaining separate, and it would create an image with a kind of Pointillist
structure. In Pointillism, each of the colors remains distinct, but depending on thedistance and angle from which one views them they will be perceived in the brain
as new blends of color. Similarly, with the early Retina works the emphasis was on
this idea of separating the raised surface and the underlying colors so that theywould only be integrated optically in the mind as a kind of illusion.
[M]
What you describe actually reminds me of film. A film has a material support, butonce projected it is turned into an immaterial medium, or rather something thatmoves between the material and immaterial.
[O]
In a normal painting the material and the colors overlap, and we perceive them assuch, but in Pointillism, as in the Retina series, because they are separated, weperceive something that has no actual physical substance. And the degree to whichthose separate elements get blended varies greatly upon how people perceivethem – far more so than in a normal painting. That was what really interested meat the start, and I suppose you could say there is an aspect of film there as well, inthe sense that when we watch a film, we are not looking at the film itself, burrather at the light that has been projected through the film.
[M]
So what does the support mean for you, whether it's the canvas of a painting or oneof the pages of your Scrapbooks?
[O]
I have always felt that the basis for art is “painting.” I work on the assumption thatwhat I make will result in a “material” form. But neither is it my intent to makesomething that is material as such, so if my interest turns to something immaterial,
then I will make it into a work. This is something I’ve written about previously, butwhen we see neon signs on the street, we are not looking at the material of theneon tubing itself but rather the light discharged by the luminous gas inside thetube. It may be a jump in logic, but in the same way you could say that it is possible
to collect sound and light from the street, not just material things as such. You canturn all these things into a work, whether light or even smells. They don’t reallyrequire a support in that sense.
[M]
You also often work with chance processes. For example, it’s my understanding thatthe visual elements of the Retina works are all determined by the chemical reactionsof the development process.
[O]
Right, I don’t manipulate them. The colors and the patterns they create are theresult of chance interactions. The interesting thing is that with the new prints, all
the original exposures have been sitting around for 25 years now. Over that time,
the chemicals in the film have reacted and new colors that were not there before
have emerged. That was a big discovery. The chemicals have continued changing
the entire time. It was just by chance that I waited as long as I did, but all the same
I feel the new works would not have been possible without having them sit for allthat time.
[M]Movement is another theme in your work. The Scrapbooks give me a strong sense of“circulation,” for example. There all these printed materials circulating around theworld, and then you come across them, pick them up and paste them in. What are
your thoughts about the relations between “circulation” and “production”?
[O]
When I come across printed materials from all over the world here in Japan, it
really is a powerful “encounter.” In that sense the Scrapbooks are like theaccumulations of these encounters, and it is the combination of these encountersthat creates the Scrapbooks.
[M]
But it’s not like the things are just waiting for you by the roadside – which is theimage people might initially have. In a sense they, too, are moving on a trajectory
toward you.
[O]
There are definitely times when I feel that way. Sometimes I hesitate about
whether to pick something up – like when I’m in a rush somewhere. For instance,
one time in New York I was riding a taxi on my way to the airport when we passed
a photo shop that had just been shuttered, and there were all these large-format
color portraits that had been piled up and thrown out in front. I immediately
thought it would be great to use for the Scrapbooks and was overcome by a strong
desire to grab them. I ended up continuing on to the airport without stopping, but I
still have a vivid memory of that sight, which is tinged with regret. I feel that
actually it is the things I don’t pick up which leave the strongest impressions, andultimately feed into my later practice in some form.
[M]
The other day I was reading an old interview with the American novelist William
Faulkner, and something he said seems apt for your work: “Life is motion…The aim ofevery artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed sothat a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.”[O]
The way we perceive language changes over time, and the images that words
evoke for us also change. The word “arrest” strongly evokes for me something like

a haiku, where you try to capture or convert an “atmosphere” with as few words aspossible. You convert the atmosphere at its most simple, basic level, and then whenpeople see it several generations down the line, they are inspired to imagine allkinds of other things. I really relate to that.
This might be a bit off topic, but in thinking about the inframince, I justremembered that when I develop and expose the Polaroids, I project some kind ofmeditation or psychic transference onto the film. It’s like this occult sense of using
psychic photography to capture the dark side of the moon. More than just doing
something unthinkingly, it is when you put your spirit into it that you get the mostinteresting results. So with Retina, I’m not actually doing anything to “paint” theworks but I think that in this sense of meditating on them I have an effect on them.
It’s hard to explain, but I think there is this approach to the work. In that sense,
although I’m not physically involved, and can’t control things once I do theexposure, I’m not simply leaving everything up to the development process. Thereis still some kind of painterly mentality that informs the work.