時憶Moving in TimeInterview by Andrew Maerkle
My understanding is that in Time Memory you work with scraps of unsolicited bulk
mail and packaging materials as “fragments of time.” How do you think about the roleof time in your overall practice? Do you think that time is already implicit in thepractice of collage and assemblage? If so, do you ever think of yourself as directly
manipulating time?
The production of Time Memory is a time-intensive process, so in making the works
I have an awareness of the passing and accumulation of time that I don’t get fromtypical approaches to painting. People understand “time” differently, but I
personally think of it as the combination of “time and memory.” I think about “time”
as a flow that continuously penetrates the infinite “layers” of memories of the past.
That flow is not necessarily linear. It repeatedly moves forward, backward and in all
directions within the layers of memory, even as it leads back to the present. With
Time Memory, I view the “fragments of time” of the paper scraps as the “layers ofmemory,” and the drawn-in lines as the “flow of time.” Although I don’t think ofmyself as manipulating time, I do have the sense of having been thrown into time.
You have a strong interest in film, which emerges in all aspects of your works. In thatsense, as an artist who is known for working with “collage,” do you actually feel closer
to “montage,” as a kind of collage that occurs in time, or the collage of time itself?
More than film itself I would say I am interested in the nature of moving images – if
we accept the idea of “collaging time itself” as one definition of montage. The word
collage has strong connotations in Western art history, and, more than with simple“pasting,” I feel in it the constraint of seeking “meaning” from the content andcomposition of the material itself. For me, collage entails the act of sticking together
images mentally rather than physically combining matter. I feel that the process invideo editing of cutting and pasting the immaterial images that have been burned
into the material of the film approximates the “manipulation of memory” that occurs
when we try to recall past events.
Among your older works are two that particularly interest me. One, Pink Box (1980),comprises scraps that have been cut out from magazines, newspapers and otherprinted matter and individually pasted onto index-card-like mounts, which are then
filed in a pink plastic box. The other, Hari-kei / Page 1 and Hari-kei / Page 2 (2004),
shown in your first exhibition at Take Ninagawa in 2008, involved ripping out all thepages of English paperback books, and then pasting them back together again, one ontop of the next. I feel that it is precisely because these works are so simple in their
execution that they reveal something about your broader practice. And in this sense I
also think that on a fundamental level they share something with Time Memory. Could
you talk about these works?
One basis for the Hari-kei works comes from when I was in London in the late 1970s,
and saw people wheatpasting posters on the streets. That was an amazing sight. The
workers would stick these big, mop-like brushes into the paste and then slap it rightonto the surface onto which they were pasting, and over time they kept pasting theposters one on top of the next, so all these layers would accumulate. I was fascinatedwhen I first saw that. I even ripped out bits of the posters to turn into my own works.
That is something that has stayed with me ever since I first encountered it. So with
the Hari-kei works, I’m interested in making layers out of the parts that do not havecontent, rather than the contents itself. And in that sense it connects to Time
Memory, because one of the key aspects of Time Memory is the making of the layered
compositions. It’s similar to painting. As you apply more and more layers of paint tothe canvas, the under layers disappear, but they still exude some kind of presence.
For me it’s the presence of the under layers that is critical.
But in Pink Box you cut out the images and pasted them one by one onto individual
cards, as if they were specimens.
Specimen is a good way of putting it. The pink box is something I picked up from thephoto lab where I was working at the time in London. There was an empty box for
Kodak film that had been thrown out, and the box really spoke to me. It was like anempty box of memories into which I added things I collected, one by one.
Comparing Hari-kei and Pink Box, in one everything is stuck together as a single
accumulation, while in the other all the parts are kept separate. Does that reflect
anything about your overall practice?
With Pink Box I was working in a miniscule apartment in London, so I think it relates
more to the conditions of the city. I didn’t have the luxury of buying whatever art
supplies I wanted, and it was essential to get the things that I wanted or needed forfree if possible. That empty box that I found in the developing lab was a reallyprecious material for me. And, as I said just now, there were also works that I madeby ripping out parts of the posters that were pasted up around the city. I was pasting
the sections from the posters without otherwise altering them.
The Hari-kei works suggest something of Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the inframince(infra-thin), as we have discussed it in relation to your Retina series.
You know, thinking about the inframince I realize that one thing that distinguishesmy practice is the idea of “doing nothing.” It’s like maybe I’ve been subconsciously
searching for a way to make works by “simply selecting something.”
In this sense another work that seems to anticipate Time Memory is Memphis Board(1989), the assemblage made with strips of paper that have numbers written all overthem.
I went to the flea market in New Orleans and found an old restaurant accounts bookthat I bought for a dollar. The wood that became the support was from a table that
had been thrown out. I didn’t alter it at all. All I did was to cut the parts with thenumbers out from the accounts book and paste them on. Everything else is the way I
found it.
In Memphis Board as well as in works like Japanese Comics (2000), you use the same“weaving” pattern that later appears in Time Memory, which differs from how you
make your Scrapbook compositions.
Yes. Someone pointed this out to me a long time ago, and I thought it was quite
perceptive, but I’m really particular about the horizontal and vertical axes. I don't
paste things in crooked. As a rule I tend to paste them in straight.
Is it like you are weaving together memories?
Sure. It's not a conceptual decision, but maybe weaving together horizontal andvertical lines is the simplest way to express what I want.
But it doesn’t come up so often in other works.
But even in a work like Japanese Comics, the things that I’m pasting with arerectilinear. Even when I’ve ripped something out by hand and it’s a bit irregulararound the edges, the image itself is oriented along its horizontal and vertical axes.
It bothers me when it’s not that way.
In his essay for the catalogue of your exhibition in 2014 at Parasol Unit in London,
Marco Livingstone compared you to Mondrian. How do you feel about thatcomparison?
I’m not sure. I guess Marco’s idea is that, with all these strips of material pasted invertically and horizontally, my work evokes something like Broadway Boogie
Woogie. I remember what always surprised me about Victory Boogie Woogie, whichof course is one of his last works, is that Mondrian was using tape, and not paint.

That was a shock. I imagine Mondrian felt that instead of just using tape as a tool fordefining the outlines of his painting, the tape itself was the best expression of thehard edge, and that’s why he chose it. But more than the later abstract works, what
always interested me were Mondrian’s early figurative paintings of flowers and stilllifes, which were made before he developed his own style.
In the Scrapbooks all kinds of images, photographs and representational elements arepasted into the compositions. You say that working unconsciously is a big part of yourpractice, but surely the representational elements must have some effect on thecomposition. What happens with Time Memory, where there are almost norepresentational elements?
Actually, I realize in retrospect that as I was making Scrapbook #65 (2005-10), there
was a page that seemed to anticipate Time Memory. I had pasted all kinds of
cardboard on it, and there were almost no images at all. Time Memory is like a
subconscious continuation of that imageless page. Certainly, it was still fresh in mymind, if not altogether a template for what I was doing. In the case of Time Memory,
though, as I worked with all these different kinds of papers, if I found any otherprinted matter stuck to them I would rip it off so that I was working only with theplain paper. What ties everything together is that once the composition is done, I
coat it with oil varnish, which has a nice thickness to it. That action is whatcompletes the work, almost like the development of a photograph. It is the varnish
and the way it soaks into the material that transforms the ripped surfaces of thepaper to produce interesting variations. It brings out the differences in the texture
all at once.
Of course, in the Scrapbooks it seems like you treat the figurative elements almost as if
they were abstract – you are not trying to create figurative compositions. So is there adifference between image and texture?
Right. With the Scrapbooks, the components are figurative, but the whole is abstract.
With an image, the margins for interpretation are narrower. For example, if you
have the image of an elephant, it immediately evokes the word elephant, and thatprescribes how the viewer relates to the image. It is only when you combine that
one element with other elements that the possibilities for engagement broaden.
With texture, I think it’s broader to begin with. There are these signs or hints thatjump out at the viewer. It’s very open to interpretation.
What relationship do you see between your practice and language?
I’m really interested in language, as well as the nature of Chinese characters. In
relation to Time Memory, I’m interested in how we make words. Words containsigns that go beyond meaning and can be perceived differently by each person, andancient words all the more so. In Japanese we have many such words – words with a
lot of breadth. Obviously, I’m not as familiar with it as I am with Japanese, but in thecase of English there are also things like anagrams, for example, where new words
can be made by rearranging the order of the letters of a starting word, which I findinspiring.
Language also appears directly in your works – for example, the names andinformation on the packaging and newsprint that you paste into the Scrapbooks.
Some of the text is in Japanese, or English, Arabic and other languages, and all of it
continues to function as text, while also expressing new ideas through its integrationinto the compositions.
Yes, text has an even stronger effect on people than images. As soon as you see aword, you start to think about its meaning. For example, your brain automaticallybegins to process whether or not it’s a word you already know. That’s fascinating.
These elements of conditioned reflex are stronger with text than with images.
In the case of Time Memory, would you say there is any “grammar” that informs thecomposition of the work?
Well, I try to avoid that kind of thing as much as possible, but in making work afterwork, I guess it’s inevitable that something like a grammar would eventually emerge.
But it’s not my intent to follow a grammar. The brain is constantly learning, evenwhen we’re not conscious of it. Whether I like it or not, there is an accretion ofknowledge that develops about what will happen if I paste something one way, forexample, or what effect it might have if I move the brush in another way. That’s ok
to a certain extent, but if such “learning” takes control of the work, then it can only
lead to a dead end.
In looking at the Scrapbooks, there is so much visual and intellectual stimulation thatcomes from the arrangements of the images, words, colors and lines covering theirpages, page after page. What’s impressive is that this sense of stimulation is sustainedin Time Memory, too, even though there are almost no words or images.
I think what connects the two is the way that I paste things in layers. Whether there
is an image there or not, the layering creates the effect of producing some kind ofsign. Differences in the height and depth of the layers emerge, or, depending on thepart of the composition, there might also be differences in the number of layers Ipaste. In Time Memory, I think that excitement also comes from the lines that I add
to the compositions. I have the strong sense that the lines represent the flow of time
moving among the layers. There is continual time and truncated time and time that
ends in a specific point. In drawing the lines it’s like adding time that flows acrossthe time that has accreted in the layers to create different intersections in time.

In a statement you wrote on Time Memory when you started the project, you describe
pasting together “fragmentary materials carrying ‘time’ that was produced indifferent periods in different places.” I’m interested in this idea of producing time thatyou reference here. Time and labor and production are closely linked. How do you
understand the relations between them? For example, if each material is a fragment oftime, then could it also be considered a fragment of labor, and a fragment ofproduction?
It was not my intent to try to create new time through the Time Memory series,
although in the end you could say that’s what the work does on some level. Certainly,
all the paper goods that I use are the result of labor produced at various times indifferent countries. But I don’t choose to work with them on that basis. I work moresensually. When I touch the paper I get a powerful sense of the differences between
the countries. Each country has its own quality of paper. That touch or texture itself
could also be a result of the labor of each country, I suppose. But neither is it myintent to mix these materials together as an expression of the differences between
countries. It really boils down to how the paper feels upon my fingertips.
As a final question, how do you understand the “frame”? What is it for you that makes
scraps of paper function as art?
There’s the idea of recycling, right? You take something that is no longer useful andturn it into something useful. That doesn’t interest me. I’m interested in things that
prompt conceptual questions. I think something becomes a work when it can shift
the frame or create a new frame that stands on its own. One of the roles of art is tomake people think. Art is a field into which we can toss the question mark ofpotential. Artworks have the potential to challenge fixed concepts and ideas about
how things should be in the world, without resorting to verbalization.