Yuki Higashino: Perspectives

What is an artist’s relationship to art history? In Yuki Higashino’s case this is a question that traverses almost every level of his production. Indeed, histories of art and architecture, as well as their ideological underpinnings, provide him with an economy of signs and materials in which he digs to perform genealogical excavations. This is a methodology that usually leads to the reconfiguration of the historical phenomena he might choose as a point of departure for a work. Higashino is most often associated with a recent generation of post-conceptual artists marked by such a genealogical urge; yet, neither falling into nostalgic contemplation nor giving in to the necrophilic impulse of certain artists revisiting the past, Higashino’s gestures destabilize their object, always eventually to reassemble it. And to make it weird.

Indeed, in the group of works entitled Reisewolf (2013-ongoing), architectural modernism becomes inhabited by wolves, which serve as metaphors of the artist’s own position in these genealogies of critical and appropriationist art practices, rendered in the form of camera-less photographs dubbed (by Man Ray) Rayographs. In The Poundbury Horror (2014-16), Prince Charles’ reactionary rejection of Modernist architecture as embodied in the town of Poundbury, barely fictionalised, becomes the terrain where Lovecraftian realism unfolds as urban form. For his series Free Enterprise Painting (2015-ongoing) the colours of abstract paintings found on the Internet are sorted according to a colour system (CMYK) and, accordingly, redistributed, “repainted”, on four different plates of Plexiglas. Here, the trope of abstraction as the tension between a heroic painterly gesture and the resistance of the canvas, what once designated the presence of an artistic subjectivity and of materiality – not to mention the market presence of these paintings – is treated as information. And so, for Higashino, ideologically-tinted histories can become kinds of templates of artefacts, signifiers, materials and techniques to be recombined in such a way as to reveal and (re)connect to their dark and horrific side. Whether the artist choses to work with installation, performance, painting or video depends on the artistic figures or situations he investigates, and whose conceptual, formal and socio-political parameters are dissected to be recast with sombre or abject components from which they were alien(ated).

For Higashino’s intervention at Urgent Paradise’s Invisible Pixel series, dedicated to issues of moving image presentation and curation, The Poundbury Horror is screened at fixed hours, following film-theatrical conventions. Extra time or interludes during which the audience is “liberated” from the viewing experience gives way to two pieces from the Free Enterprise Painting, the setting of Perspectives experimenting with different temporal unfoldings. This screening/exhibition situation might point to the black-box/white cube distinction as historical designs which, as in Higashino’s practice, are not merely neutral structures. Rather, they can be recombined and put into new perspectives.

Adeena Mey

Works in the exhibition:
Free Enterprise Painting 4, 2017, Acrylic paint on Plexiglas
Free Enterprise Painting 5, 2017, Acrylic paint on Plexiglas
Linghed, Sweden, 2018, Acrylic paint on OHP Transparency
The Poundbury Horror, 2016, HD video with sound

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