Takahiko Imura, the artist and film director whose early experiences with video during the 1970s made him one of the first to use the medium, has died at the age of 85. A representative at the Microscope Show in New York, which he represents, confirmed his death.
Imura’s experimental films in the 1960s earned him a following on the New York subway, with early admirers of director Jonas Mekas among his early admirers. These early works contemplated the materialism of cinema as a medium, and explored concepts such as the nature of time and projection. He later applied this approach to video when he started using the Portapak camera starting in 1970.
Born in 1937 in Tokyo, Imura was one of the few filmmakers to operate outside the Japanese commercial system during the 1960s, and so his first works were shown in art galleries. Even when he came to the United States in 1966, his work continued to appear in both theater and exhibition venues, due in part to the fact that some of his video and film work are installations.
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Among the early works that gained Iimura fame in 1962 Aye (Love), a film of a couple having sex, footage of their bodies was intentionally stripped to distort the act and to avoid Japanese censorship laws. Actress Yoko Ono provided the film’s soundtrack.
When Imura exhibited the work at the Yale University Museum in 1966, Yale Daily News She reported that an “excited and undisciplined mob” of about 1,000 people descended on the space, demanding to see what they called a “skin flick”. The police eventually prevented entry to the opening. That same year, a summer program at Harvard University brought him to the United States, and he moved to New York after it finished. Imura lived in New York until 2018, when he returned to Tokyo.
Imura’s work from that era – and the rest of his career – derives from the understanding of film that guided his upbringing in Japan. Noting that the word for “movie” in Japanese is 映 画 (IgAor “reflected image”), wrote that his film industry sought to initiate an experience very different from traditional cinema.
He once wrote: “A ‘reflected image’ emphasizes a state – not movement – a state in which an image is reflected by light – not a moving image.” In the same article, he noted that the first movie he ever saw was a lamp at a village festival in Japan.
The artist’s initial experiences with video by today’s standards were plain looking and simple, but for their era, it was in keeping with the drive to harness the immediacy of the medium towards highly conceptual means. They’ve included audio and video splitting, using live broadcasts, time delays, and more to make his videos look out of sync. in self identity (1972-1974), for example, Imura recorded himself speaking in phrases such as “I’m not Takahiko Imura”; At some points, phrases such as “I am Takahiko Imura” are heard but not uttered, and Imura remains silent.
TV for TV (1983), one of Imura’s most famous works, shows two television sets facing each other. They broadcast two separate channels playing live, although their images were often out of sight for those looking at the statue, short-circuiting the explosion of televised information that many felt at the time.
Uemura’s art has been widely exhibited in museums throughout his career, among them Jeu de Paume in Paris, who held a retrospective of his work in 1999. The Whitney Museum had a two-person show of his art with Shigeko Kubota in 1979, and his work appeared in a 1983 survey which Conducted by the Museum of Modern Art for video art. TV for TV It was included in the 2018 survey “Before the Show: Video Sculpting 1974-1995,” which appeared at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at the SculptureCenter in New York.
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