DAMn° magazine # 29!" MAI YAMASHITA & NAOTO KOBAYASHI‘Ordinary People’
The Art of Simple Living
Living simply is not for the lazy, as to do it
well is every bit as energy expending andtime consuming as the sinister option of
selling one’s time for money. The difference
is found in the joy from which the former
method derives and the satisfaction that
it ultimately brings. This artist duo has
managed to tap into the essence of
their beings and produce works ofart that are at once labour intensiveand ephemeral, based entirely on theconcept of ordinariness, albeit at ahigher magnitude than the sort whichtends to be lived in everyday life.

text SILVIA ANNA BARRILÀimages MAI YAMASHITA & NAOTO KOBAYASHI“Time is money!” Since Benjamin Franklin pronounced
that sentence in the 18th century, this has been one of
the leading principles of Western society. Japanese artist duo Mai Yamashita & Naoto Kobayashi decided torefuse this dictate. “Having seen our parents work sohard,” Yamashita and Kobayashi said, “we always haddoubts at the back of our minds as to whether we wereliving to work or working to live.”
Yamashita and Kobayashi’s explorations stem from theassumption that for human beings, time is life itself,
and that everybody can choose how to spend this time,
but that in a capitalist world people sell their time andconvert it into money. “Starting there,” they say, “wemade a conscious decision to deliberately dedicate ourtime to something small and ordinary. By doing so, we
thought that perhaps we could give value even to small,normally meaningless things.”
From that moment on, Yamashita and Kobayashi started realising long-term performances recorded on videoin which they take a long time and invest huge amounts
of work into carrying out actions that are apparently
minimal and ephemeral. In ‘Waiting for sprouting’

58(2002), for instance, the duo devoted their attention toobserving the sprouting of a seed for nine days. Having
held the sprouting seed in their hands for the entire
duration of the process, the action reached an intense
emotional pitch. In ‘Present (for a giraffe)’ (2004), they
took time to knit a sweater for a four-metre tall giraffe.
Another six months of their lives were spent licking a
giant candy the size of a football. They kept licking thecandy day after day until they reduced it to the size ofan ordinary candy. For the work ‘1000 Waves’ (2007),
they travelled to the Baltic Sea in order to count andnumber 1000 waves.
Nurture versus nature

Essentially, knitting is a warmhearted activity with the aimof transmitting love to family
members or lovers. The artists
completed the knitting of a super,life-sized sweater for a 4 metretall giraffe in a zoo, miniaturemodel (scale 1:30)
Facing page:
Yamashita and Kobayashi stickto the simple, basic principle ofcreating artwork, that is: “Lookand Make”. They went to theSwiss Alps, gathered pieces offirewood from around their house,and created a mountain sculpturein front of the mountain

Nature is often the protagonist in their work: “Take animals, or a stone, or a tree, or the ocean,” they explain,“these exist in a world in which the ordinary is entirely
different from ours. They are a third party to our world.
Naturally, they exist completely independently fromsuch things as depression, war, or the information society. When we start comparing our world to theirs, itallows us to easily breakaway from the norm or commonsense. It makes us appreciate the commonsense realitythat there is no such thing as normal or common sense.”59

DAMn° magazine # 29!" MAI YAMASHITA & NAOTO KOBAYASHI

On a snowy day at the Treptower park in Berlin, 23 radiocontrolled toy cars dressed in fake fur, pulled Yamashita ona sled with wheels, like a dogsled, until the batteries ran out(right)
The project began on the day that Yamashita and Kobayashi
created a giant candy the size of a football (18cm indiameter). From that day onwards they licked the candy day
after day for about six months, with the aim of creating an
ordinary candy, the kind you can buy at the shop. The video
work, shot with the artists in profile, records this process.
While they were licking, the landscape in the backgroundchanged from snowy winter to summer (below, both images)
Rubbing a Camel, 2010, video installation: bronze, HD video,
57 x 18 x 24 cm, 6’56’’ (bottom, left)This project was made on the shoreline in Germany, fronting
the Baltic Sea. In the work, Yamashita and Kobayashi
counted and numbered the waves in writing, until theyreached 1000 (bottom, right)

This attitude towards nature is evident in the work
‘Release of mineral water’ (2004). In this case, Yamashita and Kobayashi travelled from Japan to Germany tobring two bottles of German water bought in a shop in
Japan back to its original source. Through this action
they ‘rescued’ the bottles, and criticised the absurdity of
the current global trade.
After this first journey to Germany, Yamashita andKobayashi lived many years in Berlin. Here they kept
on dedicating themselves to apparently meaninglesstasks, like rubbing a bronze sculpture representing
a camel (‘Rubbing a camel’, 2010). Referring to the
popular belief that touching a sculpture or object in a
special location will bring good fortune, the two artists
rubbed the camel’s humps everyday for five months tomake it brilliantly golden.

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Also in Berlin, Yamashita and Kobayashi took part in
the exhibition ‘Re-imagining Asia’ at Haus der Kulturen
der Welt, with the work ‘Infinity’ (2008). They started
from the motto ‘Paths are made by walking’ and, in order to determine whether the phrase was actually true,
they kept running in the garden in front of the Berlin
institution for five days straight. The path they created
had the shape of the infinity symbol.

‘Paths are made by walking’In order to determine whether theabove phrase was actually true,
Yamashita and Kobayashi kept
running in a park for 5 days. In
the time-lapse movie compiled
from digital photographs, a paththe shape of(infinity) graduallyemerged as they moved at highspeed (above)

Eliminating the object

Crane and Acorn, 2008,
10 C-prints, 40 x 50 cm(bottom)

At the beginning of May, Yamashita and Kobayashi
moved to New York to participate in the artist-in-residence program at ISCP. “Having come to New York,the new environment may give us new inspiration. Our
activities so far have been largely focused on producing
an object out of something, but that was due to theeffect of materialism within ourselves. (…) Recently,

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DAMn° magazine # 29!" MAI YAMASHITA & NAOTO KOBAYASHI

After 17 years of living andworking together, Yamashita
and Kobayashi attempted tohave a dialogue without words.
They had a thousand telepathic
exchanges with one another. And
they edited a video by collecting
10 miraculous (or accidental)
scenes among countless failures,and showed the video with thedrawings (above, all images)‘Release of mineral water’is a documentary in which
the artists and mineral water
made a journey Yamashita andKobayashi ‘rescue’ two bottles of
Tönissteiner mineral water from a
convenience store in Japan andcarry the water to its source, theEifel region of Germany, in orderto ‘release’ it (right)
Forest Dishes, 2010: ceramic,
DVD (slide show) diameter 17- 26
cm, 3’30’’ (far right)

we are thinking of focusing on things like spirit or conscience as well, i.e. on aspects that are ‘soft’ rather than
‘hard’ facts.” This kind of approach is already suggested
in the work ‘Telepathy’ (2009). After 17 years of living
and working together, Yamashita and Kobayashi have
tried to have a dialogue without words. They sent/received info telepathically, in turns, a thousand times, butachieved only 10 miraculous (or accidental) successes.
“We are ordinary people,” they conclude, “and therefore we feel that it suits us most to try to do something

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a little bit different within our ordinary lives. It is almost like a daily chore. In a way, it may be similar to
the Buddhist training. We are not particularly religious,
but we feel the way our activities develop side-by-side
with our lives is just about right.” #www.yamashita-kobayashi.com

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