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拍品专文
‘We [in Japan] may have no English skills at all, but we really embrace this music. Language is something I’m sure you know that English-speaking people in Western countries really take for granted; that they could actually connect with [the lyrics] without that hurdle… So imagine that kind of environment and having so little info and all you have is the music itself and you have the album cover, twelve inches square. I would just sit there, listen to the music, look at the art on the cover and I think I really developed my imagination through that’ (Y. Nara, quoted in N. Hegert, ‘Interview with Yoshitomo Nara’, https://www.artslant.com/ny/articles/show/18927 [accessed 18 September 2014]).
With supreme insouciance, a little girl wields a pair of drumsticks with all the unconcern of a beatific, if self-assured, innocence. Instantly recognizable as one of Yoshitomo Nara’s iconic motifs, the child, pigtailed, eyes closed in concentration, jaw set in determination, strikes the tiny drum, utterly absorbed in her task. Executed in 2007, Banging the Drum is among Nara’s most significant large-scale billboard paintings. Rendered on repurposed wood cut into uneven, elongated rectangular grids, an expansive field of yellow green features an indeterminate space lacking both geographic and temporal specificity. A work of universal appeal, as accessible as it is emotionally charged, Banging the Drum reflects the child’s capacity for total immersion in a task. She is rendered schematically in dark contours, reduced geometric shapes, and washed in variations of white hue. With the simplest means, Nara evokes the ‘real reality: the first experience of heat, the first experience of sweetness, the first experience of sadness, and the first experience of being bullied or bullying’ (Y. Nara, ‘Expressions that Open a Window to the World: Yoshitomo Nara X Takaaki Yoshimoto In-depth Discussion’, Eureka, October 2001, p. 182). Executed on a grand scale, Banging the Drum is situated at the intersection between high and low art, between individual identification and mass culture. A compelling example of the ‘cute’ or kawii, Nara invokes the ‘do-it-yourself’ refusal of mainstream corporate culture. This ambitious work proclaims in a single, powerful, image Nara’s animating motto, ‘never forget your beginner’s spirit’. This represents the essence of his aesthetic program, which is emblematic of his appeal to a collective international humanity, and his embrace of minshu, ‘the people’.
Punk rock music is the medium through which Nara is linked to the neo-pop culture of the young and experimental, the rebellious and disaffected. Nara’s passion for rock music and his own punk sensibility led him to amass an enormous collection of albums, which inspired his own imaginary album cover art as early as the 1970s. By the 1990s, Nara was receiving commissions from bands such as R. E. M., The Star Club, and Shonen Knife. The present work from 2007, Banging the Drum, carries the same title as an earlier work of album art, Banging the Drum, created in 2005 for the Japanese neo-punk band Bloodthirsty Butchers and features not only a fragment of the title lyric, but also an earlier version of the little girl Nara would use for the present work. Like the later billboard, Nara portrays a child fully absorbed in the act of making music – eyes closed, the upper lid describing half-moons, the lashes traced as darkened downward-pointing triangular shards over an ovoid partially opened mouth, a drum stick raised overhead in the act of beating time.
The intense absorption in both instances speaks to Nara’s attachment not only to the punk aesthetic of the title lyric but also to the rallying cry of individual self-definition. His is an empathic viewing experience. Indeed, Nara’s own story is one of absorption: as a child in Japan, Nara collected rock albums voraciously, engaging with album cover art even as the lyrics surpassed his understanding. ‘We [in Japan] may have no English skills at all, but we really embrace this music. Language is something I’m sure you know that English-speaking people in Western countries really take for granted; that they could actually connect with [the lyrics] without that hurdle… So imagine that kind of environment and having so little info and all you have is the music itself and you have the album cover, twelve inches square. I would just sit there, listen to the music, look at the art on the cover and I think I really developed my imagination through that’ (Y. Nara, quoted in N. Hegert, ‘Interview with Yoshitomo Nara’, https://www.artslant.com/ny/articles/show/18927 [accessed 18 September 2014]).
From a twelve-inch square album cover, so cathartic for the young Nara, the mature artist has created an all-embracing, tightly interwoven synergy between music and visual art in the billboard-size Banging the Drum. As the artist has claimed, ‘Intrinsically, record jackets play an important role as visual art that adds to the sound itself: album art is the result of the collaboration between auditory sensation and visual perception. And, speaking of looking at art, there’s no doubt that any picture would look better large rather than small’ (Y. Nara, in ‘Nara Voice: Selections from the Artist’s Blog, 11/08/ 2008’, in Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool, exh. cat, Asia Society Museum, New York,2010, p. 256).
With supreme insouciance, a little girl wields a pair of drumsticks with all the unconcern of a beatific, if self-assured, innocence. Instantly recognizable as one of Yoshitomo Nara’s iconic motifs, the child, pigtailed, eyes closed in concentration, jaw set in determination, strikes the tiny drum, utterly absorbed in her task. Executed in 2007, Banging the Drum is among Nara’s most significant large-scale billboard paintings. Rendered on repurposed wood cut into uneven, elongated rectangular grids, an expansive field of yellow green features an indeterminate space lacking both geographic and temporal specificity. A work of universal appeal, as accessible as it is emotionally charged, Banging the Drum reflects the child’s capacity for total immersion in a task. She is rendered schematically in dark contours, reduced geometric shapes, and washed in variations of white hue. With the simplest means, Nara evokes the ‘real reality: the first experience of heat, the first experience of sweetness, the first experience of sadness, and the first experience of being bullied or bullying’ (Y. Nara, ‘Expressions that Open a Window to the World: Yoshitomo Nara X Takaaki Yoshimoto In-depth Discussion’, Eureka, October 2001, p. 182). Executed on a grand scale, Banging the Drum is situated at the intersection between high and low art, between individual identification and mass culture. A compelling example of the ‘cute’ or kawii, Nara invokes the ‘do-it-yourself’ refusal of mainstream corporate culture. This ambitious work proclaims in a single, powerful, image Nara’s animating motto, ‘never forget your beginner’s spirit’. This represents the essence of his aesthetic program, which is emblematic of his appeal to a collective international humanity, and his embrace of minshu, ‘the people’.
Punk rock music is the medium through which Nara is linked to the neo-pop culture of the young and experimental, the rebellious and disaffected. Nara’s passion for rock music and his own punk sensibility led him to amass an enormous collection of albums, which inspired his own imaginary album cover art as early as the 1970s. By the 1990s, Nara was receiving commissions from bands such as R. E. M., The Star Club, and Shonen Knife. The present work from 2007, Banging the Drum, carries the same title as an earlier work of album art, Banging the Drum, created in 2005 for the Japanese neo-punk band Bloodthirsty Butchers and features not only a fragment of the title lyric, but also an earlier version of the little girl Nara would use for the present work. Like the later billboard, Nara portrays a child fully absorbed in the act of making music – eyes closed, the upper lid describing half-moons, the lashes traced as darkened downward-pointing triangular shards over an ovoid partially opened mouth, a drum stick raised overhead in the act of beating time.
The intense absorption in both instances speaks to Nara’s attachment not only to the punk aesthetic of the title lyric but also to the rallying cry of individual self-definition. His is an empathic viewing experience. Indeed, Nara’s own story is one of absorption: as a child in Japan, Nara collected rock albums voraciously, engaging with album cover art even as the lyrics surpassed his understanding. ‘We [in Japan] may have no English skills at all, but we really embrace this music. Language is something I’m sure you know that English-speaking people in Western countries really take for granted; that they could actually connect with [the lyrics] without that hurdle… So imagine that kind of environment and having so little info and all you have is the music itself and you have the album cover, twelve inches square. I would just sit there, listen to the music, look at the art on the cover and I think I really developed my imagination through that’ (Y. Nara, quoted in N. Hegert, ‘Interview with Yoshitomo Nara’, https://www.artslant.com/ny/articles/show/18927 [accessed 18 September 2014]).
From a twelve-inch square album cover, so cathartic for the young Nara, the mature artist has created an all-embracing, tightly interwoven synergy between music and visual art in the billboard-size Banging the Drum. As the artist has claimed, ‘Intrinsically, record jackets play an important role as visual art that adds to the sound itself: album art is the result of the collaboration between auditory sensation and visual perception. And, speaking of looking at art, there’s no doubt that any picture would look better large rather than small’ (Y. Nara, in ‘Nara Voice: Selections from the Artist’s Blog, 11/08/ 2008’, in Yoshitomo Nara: Nobody’s Fool, exh. cat, Asia Society Museum, New York,2010, p. 256).