“Waiting emerged from the daily experience during the Stay Home Order in the Spring of 2020 due to the pandemic. Gathering people was not a good idea for safety, and arts venues had to close. 

How to watch a live performance in a crowd of people became a challenging idea, the motivation of the piece.

How to provide an experience of watching a performance in the viewer’s own time.

How could the idea of Waiting be proactive rather than passive? If so, what is the meaning of waiting?”

from Tetsuya Yamada, Note for Waiting

OCTOBER 10, 2020 — JUNE 9, 2021

HMONG TOWN MARKETPLACE  St. Paul, MN 55103

Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis

WAITING 2023 by Rosanna Albertini

When he thinks, Tetsuya thinks through his whole body. He holds the body in distant company with the crowd of humans sharing with him, most likely, one deep feeling: waiting for the pandemic to end. As today we wait for the wars to end, and the piling of corpses and rubble to become flattened underground to the point that passers by, on the same soil, ignore what’s underneath. Thousand years of violence, revenge, eye for an eye. Human nature never changed. Periodically, it seems to need a primordial clash. 

That’s why today I bring up Tetsuya Yamada’s Sculpture/Still Performance. WAITING 2020. In this blog, in my mind, it becomes WAITING 2023. 

The artist, born in Tokyo, works and lives in Minneapolis with his American wife and two young daughters. He recently placed  his TEMPORARY works in “short term interventions in abandoned or derelict sites around the Twin Cities like gas stations, laundromats, and empty storefronts. The TEMPORARY series evinces a longstanding investment in the power of surprise, and the ability of beautiful objects to pierce the fabric of everyday experience.” Meghan Clare Considine in SIXTY, Nov. 13, 2022.

FRONT AND BACK BACK AND FRONT 2018 is one of the TEMPORARY installations to whom I dedicated a post in Sept. 2019: “the man in the closet.” 

“It’s possible that Yamada explored the inner emptiness of the store like a man in the closet. The black and white poster works as a guardian in uniform waiting outside. Inside, the store becomes the inside of a body with two hearts. Two beating engines meeting for the first time and learning how to beat together: the artist’s and the fifty year old store’s, two distinct lives. Their acquaintance is three days long.  They are the same age, the artist and the midwestern space, now dreaming of voices and people and big tables and shelves all gone. Wood or metal scraped from the floor left their shape, wounds in the middle of room’s and corridor’s floors painted gray. Under the neons’ light, they might be small rivers, or a pond for the many ghosts filling the air, working. They never abandoned the store. Myriads of traces on the floor and on the wall panels tell their story.” RA

This time the artist introduces an elegant, simple sort of station in the middle of a popular farmers market. A hole of emptiness among busy humans rushing home charged with food. If somebody sat on the bench and stayed even only a little while, they let for sure their hearts go nowhere, just feeling the flow of their small stream during a moment of waiting. A touch of the romantic? 

Sure, because the romantic, like imagination, “can never effectively touch the same thing twice in the same way.” (Wallace Stevens) The experience happens, in the viewers’ present, every time unique, each time locked in their chest. An old Japanese poem in his mind, the artist perfected what another poet (American) has suggested: a new kind of aesthetic, deprived of grandiose, untouchable ideals. The difference? “An intenser humanity.” (Wallace Stevens) 

Tetsuya added one drawing every week. Some on the wall, the others piled on the bench for the visitors to bring home. One day, he found a mandarine on the bench. Hard to tell if accidentally or intentionally left. Not relevant at all. The Japanese poem recites: “A good poem is one in which the form of the verse, and the joining of its two parts, seem light as a shallow river flowing over its sandy bed.” (Basho, 17th Century)

The two parts in Tetsuya’s art piece seem incongruous if one stops on the physical construction and the drawings and words on the vertical wall. Yet, in their immaculate conception, let’s call it an abstract existence, the two parts work well together if the artist’s imaginary performance – his inner voice which is his personal style, something he has no choice about –  the voice that gave form to the open building – merges with the visitors’ unseen and contained flux of feelings: the sandy bed of the life we visit for a certain time -temporarily- hovered by the art’s shallow river, in silence, with no pressure whatsoever. 

Photos: Tetsuya Yamada – Courtesy of the artist and Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis

Bibliography

WALLACE STEVENS, Collected Poetry and Prose, Literary Classic of the United Sates, Inc., New York, NY, 1997