Features | Articles
Takagi Masakatsu's World Is So Beautiful
By Dom Sinacola | 1 June 2007
Here's a DVD that was released seven months ago. The ten pieces that compose it were completed in 2002 and exhibited in a number of Agnes b. boutiques in Japan, a year later shown at the CAI Gallery in Hamburg, Germany. Since then, Takagi Masakatsu, a multimedia artist from Kyoto, has participated in over thirty exhibitions and screenings, eight of which were solo, somewhere around there, all over the world, operating publicly in really only the last five years. He's directed video work for artists like Cornelius and John Cage, has remixed tracks for Sony Epic Records in Japan, and has released a total of five music albums under his own name since 2001, three of which are on the Carpark roster. He's also been an unlikely spokesperson for Mac, advertising the Apple brand while appearing as an amiable genius in one of the company's user/artist profiles.
If I'm only discussing the artist now, it's not at the chiding of an equally amiable computer conglomerate. It's not because of Masakatsu's prolificacy or his commercial and critical glut. Mostly, I have space to fill and time to slaughter, and if I'm normally busy absorbing pop culture detritus or developing educated tastes or exhausting my perspective with noise pollution, then I believe I can be forgiven for not getting to the guy until now. I have so many texts to unlock and cultures to explore already, amiright?
Then again, what have I really been doing these past seven months? This lazy paradox is worth dissecting: World Is So Beautiful -- culled from footage Masakatsu made while traveling through Nepal, Cuba, Germany, France, Turkey, Indonesia, Guatemala, and Japan -- is ostensibly, and cutely, pop art. In brash and digitally corrugated effects, moments of sly hope are made hallucinatory. Confetti and rainbow unicorns and choruses of angelic voices shoot from every crevice. The enervation is immediate, as if the bared honesty of the images can render the audience small, contemplative, feeling weakly moral. What's more, Masakatsu's tactics are purely selfless. Indulgent, sure, but never selfish, which is a strange little trick Masakatsu pulls on God. The guy gets rid of the irony for the most part; Masakatsu is sincere in his efforts, straightforward when he tugs at the heartstrings and wears the rest on his sleeve. The artist makes up for black and white sentiments with Technicolor.
Of course, in contrast, the artifice of the films can be distracting. A plainsclothed digital camera, manically zooming in and out, interrupts the objectivity of each piece's beauty, furthering the sense of manipulation already dripping from many of the computer effects. Masakatsu isn't clumsy, just sappy, and his big notions of happiness and sadness are synced up gaily to a kind of 8-bit innocence. I think it's funny that I can relate to a nostalgia towards childhood, as Masakatsu does, so inextricably woven with Nintendo, with the Mario Bros. theme song or with an eternity until Saturday afternoon, Japan (or America) even further away. As the DVD packaging explains, the collection is a "blessing to the beauty of the world," a naïve purpose for something that swims in the neons and stylized excitement of pop art. Masakatsu's not naturalist, although his wonder is. He openly admits that his work would not be possible without Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, without Apple. Still: is this DVD an opponent of blind consumerism? Or is Takagi Masakatsu taking the nonviolent road, expressing an optimistic teleology for globalism? Does he deal in the mass commerce of beauty?
Maybe Masakatsu would've been an esoteric find without the ceaseless commissions and corporate help, the kind of outsider like Danielson or like the rest of the Sounds Familyre roster that is both celebrated for and preceded by their faith; for Danielson, in the creating power of the holy spirit, and for Masakatsu, in the universality of translating the simple beauty of our planet from the quotidian's speech. Unfortunately, Danielson is usually qualified by his Christianity before he can be criticized. No musician that sincere and bright-eyed could be dropped a peg without inspiring naysayers to suffer a few pangs of remorse at having tarnished some grand, youthful innocence. Masakatsu instead is recognized in many tight critical circles, can basically do what he wants. He's celebrated for detecting the awe hidden all over the world and then making his own awe accessible for people already going ADD numb to that kind of stuff. His childishness is easy. His metaphors are recognizable and inviting, even if they aren't really metaphors at all.
Essentially, Takagi Masakatsu's work follows an equally easy pattern. His videos are mostly improvisatory, bristling with sharp edges and stark outlines. What he adds digitally and musically becomes the amorphous tension of the piece, pulling the filmed images -- too uninteresting or too regionally disparate -- into a pattern. Similarly, World Is So Beautiful plays out like chapters in a meditative pulp novel, using iconography and a sense of director's serendipity to dictate a certain coherence throughout the DVD. At first, Masakatsu approaches a green landscape speckled with unexplainable running figures in much the same way a shopper would pause for an intriguing LED display. He's simply the befuddled gaze, the outsider admiring a strange occurrence and inculcating the moving canvas with personal notions of graciousness and aesthetic balance and, maybe if the planets have aligned, some joy. We mostly watch big toothed children play while their mothers and baby siblings appear peripherally in Virgin Mary postures. Chunky fireworks bounce through a forest against a soundtrack of children laughing and stuttered synth wah, ringing pine trees like Christmas lights. Or in "south beach," opaque swimmers' masculine silhouettes dive into and stand senatorially over a sea more pot of gold than bustling urban dip. The images are simple, handmade, and so, filled up with unbridled warmth. But the images are also kind of dopey, transparent without the context of their installation, without the expensive boutique clothes surrounding the screen.
Sonically, Masakatsu is dedicated to the mood of his visuals, never offering much in the way of structure or catharsis to steer the pace of the affected images. The music that adorns "south beach" matches the water wreathing its figures, jittery but crystalline; bright piano arpeggios and echoed wails rise from the arrangement's hypnosis. The beams of violin and organ playing mournfully over "golden sky and what is beyond" only exacerbate the muddled grandeur of watching hiking bodies march up a slope spliced cheaply over soaring shots of clouds and sunsets (an indiscernible, juvenile recitation emerges overhead, allowing the bodies to seem like dedicated pilgrims heading for some distant shrine). Clouds over clouds over passion, or, in the case of "sorina street", charming rainbows and birds and mythological wisps of creatures over a smiling organ grinder girl over a dour piano suite and the plain sadness of inescapable poverty or child labor. Only in "birdland #2" does Masakatsu find a focus that eludes him in every other chapter. Shino Arima's vocal ululations sift cleanly through a calm, ticking beat. A piano drags smooth jazz calmly behind. Most arresting though are the piece's mutating shapes. Phallic black shapes become phallic black trees, bursting into birds that coalesce into blackwashed pedestrians slo-moing over a pitch white backdrop. "birdland" is a quick favorite, wholly different from what comes before and after it, but its prominence isn't cheap. In fact, its brevity and hypersensitive cadence make the nine other chapters seem pushed too far or imbued with too much bloated meaning. Or just plain too long.
By the time the DVD reaches its title cut, Takagi Masakatsu becomes the main character of World Is So Beautiful. Neither the wash of music nor the garish effects can compensate for the interplay between the stew of rambunctious children and the Japanese man carrying the camera. Masakatsu is no longer the omniscient eye; his editing blinks at the pokes and clustering of young faces. At one point, as the camera bumps along while the characters play soccer, Masakatsu introduces himself to the enraptured children. The cameraman chuckles and a music box tinkles steadily on. If the camera wasn't filling their tiny bodies with sugar, would the children of the world seem so unanimously brimming with happiness and "beauty"? In the same rhetorical vein we must question what we're losing by watching this DVD from a couch or in a theater or living room instead of while clutching a plastic hangar or messing up a precisely folded tee-shirt. I'm sure that "sorina street" carries a pleasant waltz to shop to, at least.
I've never been to an agnes b. boutique and for all the global reach Masakatsu wields, I've never seen any of his work inside the original context or installation for which it was intended. At the fringe of my experience, World Is So Beautiful ends up slight. No, a passing pleasure, a bit manipulative in the human compassion department, but no less buoyant or hopeful for it. Then again, I recognize these pastiches of children and mothers and carnivals, of vines and animals and swimmers, and I have long before I watched Masakatsu's work. In a commercial envronment, I might have felt obliged to consider the moral implications of globalism, to dissect my own ties to human suffering and human joy, to discover how I can create and have traded my own creations for those ties. In my bedroom I become bored and feel taunted. I realize I can't afford a MacBook. I realize I haven't traveled the world, that I don't know how big or gorgeous it is. And in that deprecation I'm led to beg the question: Where do all my blessings go?
If I'm only discussing the artist now, it's not at the chiding of an equally amiable computer conglomerate. It's not because of Masakatsu's prolificacy or his commercial and critical glut. Mostly, I have space to fill and time to slaughter, and if I'm normally busy absorbing pop culture detritus or developing educated tastes or exhausting my perspective with noise pollution, then I believe I can be forgiven for not getting to the guy until now. I have so many texts to unlock and cultures to explore already, amiright?
Then again, what have I really been doing these past seven months? This lazy paradox is worth dissecting: World Is So Beautiful -- culled from footage Masakatsu made while traveling through Nepal, Cuba, Germany, France, Turkey, Indonesia, Guatemala, and Japan -- is ostensibly, and cutely, pop art. In brash and digitally corrugated effects, moments of sly hope are made hallucinatory. Confetti and rainbow unicorns and choruses of angelic voices shoot from every crevice. The enervation is immediate, as if the bared honesty of the images can render the audience small, contemplative, feeling weakly moral. What's more, Masakatsu's tactics are purely selfless. Indulgent, sure, but never selfish, which is a strange little trick Masakatsu pulls on God. The guy gets rid of the irony for the most part; Masakatsu is sincere in his efforts, straightforward when he tugs at the heartstrings and wears the rest on his sleeve. The artist makes up for black and white sentiments with Technicolor.
Of course, in contrast, the artifice of the films can be distracting. A plainsclothed digital camera, manically zooming in and out, interrupts the objectivity of each piece's beauty, furthering the sense of manipulation already dripping from many of the computer effects. Masakatsu isn't clumsy, just sappy, and his big notions of happiness and sadness are synced up gaily to a kind of 8-bit innocence. I think it's funny that I can relate to a nostalgia towards childhood, as Masakatsu does, so inextricably woven with Nintendo, with the Mario Bros. theme song or with an eternity until Saturday afternoon, Japan (or America) even further away. As the DVD packaging explains, the collection is a "blessing to the beauty of the world," a naïve purpose for something that swims in the neons and stylized excitement of pop art. Masakatsu's not naturalist, although his wonder is. He openly admits that his work would not be possible without Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, without Apple. Still: is this DVD an opponent of blind consumerism? Or is Takagi Masakatsu taking the nonviolent road, expressing an optimistic teleology for globalism? Does he deal in the mass commerce of beauty?
Maybe Masakatsu would've been an esoteric find without the ceaseless commissions and corporate help, the kind of outsider like Danielson or like the rest of the Sounds Familyre roster that is both celebrated for and preceded by their faith; for Danielson, in the creating power of the holy spirit, and for Masakatsu, in the universality of translating the simple beauty of our planet from the quotidian's speech. Unfortunately, Danielson is usually qualified by his Christianity before he can be criticized. No musician that sincere and bright-eyed could be dropped a peg without inspiring naysayers to suffer a few pangs of remorse at having tarnished some grand, youthful innocence. Masakatsu instead is recognized in many tight critical circles, can basically do what he wants. He's celebrated for detecting the awe hidden all over the world and then making his own awe accessible for people already going ADD numb to that kind of stuff. His childishness is easy. His metaphors are recognizable and inviting, even if they aren't really metaphors at all.
Essentially, Takagi Masakatsu's work follows an equally easy pattern. His videos are mostly improvisatory, bristling with sharp edges and stark outlines. What he adds digitally and musically becomes the amorphous tension of the piece, pulling the filmed images -- too uninteresting or too regionally disparate -- into a pattern. Similarly, World Is So Beautiful plays out like chapters in a meditative pulp novel, using iconography and a sense of director's serendipity to dictate a certain coherence throughout the DVD. At first, Masakatsu approaches a green landscape speckled with unexplainable running figures in much the same way a shopper would pause for an intriguing LED display. He's simply the befuddled gaze, the outsider admiring a strange occurrence and inculcating the moving canvas with personal notions of graciousness and aesthetic balance and, maybe if the planets have aligned, some joy. We mostly watch big toothed children play while their mothers and baby siblings appear peripherally in Virgin Mary postures. Chunky fireworks bounce through a forest against a soundtrack of children laughing and stuttered synth wah, ringing pine trees like Christmas lights. Or in "south beach," opaque swimmers' masculine silhouettes dive into and stand senatorially over a sea more pot of gold than bustling urban dip. The images are simple, handmade, and so, filled up with unbridled warmth. But the images are also kind of dopey, transparent without the context of their installation, without the expensive boutique clothes surrounding the screen.
Sonically, Masakatsu is dedicated to the mood of his visuals, never offering much in the way of structure or catharsis to steer the pace of the affected images. The music that adorns "south beach" matches the water wreathing its figures, jittery but crystalline; bright piano arpeggios and echoed wails rise from the arrangement's hypnosis. The beams of violin and organ playing mournfully over "golden sky and what is beyond" only exacerbate the muddled grandeur of watching hiking bodies march up a slope spliced cheaply over soaring shots of clouds and sunsets (an indiscernible, juvenile recitation emerges overhead, allowing the bodies to seem like dedicated pilgrims heading for some distant shrine). Clouds over clouds over passion, or, in the case of "sorina street", charming rainbows and birds and mythological wisps of creatures over a smiling organ grinder girl over a dour piano suite and the plain sadness of inescapable poverty or child labor. Only in "birdland #2" does Masakatsu find a focus that eludes him in every other chapter. Shino Arima's vocal ululations sift cleanly through a calm, ticking beat. A piano drags smooth jazz calmly behind. Most arresting though are the piece's mutating shapes. Phallic black shapes become phallic black trees, bursting into birds that coalesce into blackwashed pedestrians slo-moing over a pitch white backdrop. "birdland" is a quick favorite, wholly different from what comes before and after it, but its prominence isn't cheap. In fact, its brevity and hypersensitive cadence make the nine other chapters seem pushed too far or imbued with too much bloated meaning. Or just plain too long.
By the time the DVD reaches its title cut, Takagi Masakatsu becomes the main character of World Is So Beautiful. Neither the wash of music nor the garish effects can compensate for the interplay between the stew of rambunctious children and the Japanese man carrying the camera. Masakatsu is no longer the omniscient eye; his editing blinks at the pokes and clustering of young faces. At one point, as the camera bumps along while the characters play soccer, Masakatsu introduces himself to the enraptured children. The cameraman chuckles and a music box tinkles steadily on. If the camera wasn't filling their tiny bodies with sugar, would the children of the world seem so unanimously brimming with happiness and "beauty"? In the same rhetorical vein we must question what we're losing by watching this DVD from a couch or in a theater or living room instead of while clutching a plastic hangar or messing up a precisely folded tee-shirt. I'm sure that "sorina street" carries a pleasant waltz to shop to, at least.
I've never been to an agnes b. boutique and for all the global reach Masakatsu wields, I've never seen any of his work inside the original context or installation for which it was intended. At the fringe of my experience, World Is So Beautiful ends up slight. No, a passing pleasure, a bit manipulative in the human compassion department, but no less buoyant or hopeful for it. Then again, I recognize these pastiches of children and mothers and carnivals, of vines and animals and swimmers, and I have long before I watched Masakatsu's work. In a commercial envronment, I might have felt obliged to consider the moral implications of globalism, to dissect my own ties to human suffering and human joy, to discover how I can create and have traded my own creations for those ties. In my bedroom I become bored and feel taunted. I realize I can't afford a MacBook. I realize I haven't traveled the world, that I don't know how big or gorgeous it is. And in that deprecation I'm led to beg the question: Where do all my blessings go?