Mika Tajima: Energetics

MIKA TAJIMA

Energetics

Energetics

Matilde Guidelli-Guidi

At first glance, Mika Tajima’s Energetics stages lifestyle. It comprises coded objects that might accent a home and that, by reason of the dynamic process they facilitate, exist at the intersection of autonomous sculpture, functional decor, and holistic well-being. An incense vaporizer eases mindfulness, an ikebana arrangement mirrors the order of the cosmos, patterned textiles sculpt acoustics, bronze massage nozzles puncture rose quartz at pressure points, and the emotions of a nation are stored on a clear disc. Precisely designed and executed, Tajima’s works, however, are also letting go—wilting, radiating, vaping, transmuting, or otherwise releasing energies. Such intangible undercurrents or riotous tension between integrity and expenditure at play in Energetics is revelatory of the artist’s incisive criticism and creative refunctioning of those contemporary forms, tropes, and systems that manipulate desires, decisions, and daily life.

These are long-standing concerns that Tajima has addressed in her multidisciplinary practice for the past two decades. From an early training in sculpture and printmaking, she became attuned to serial production and technologies of image-making inherent in those traditional practices. Her expanded approach to objects—whether to study, make, or stage them—has since

considered the structures within which they are produced and operate, how they constitute daily habits, and, in turn, what potentially exceeds those proscriptions.

Tajima’s early work consisted of dispersed installations that often took over the entire gallery space, confusing boundaries between object, performer, and viewer as if to allude to the collapse of distinction between space of production and space of consumption in contemporary economies. While her recent work distills structural complexities into singular forms, the concepts animating her practice can be grasped in those early projects, which already intended to demonstrate the object beyond its mere decorative or commodity status. For Disassociate, an exhibition held in New York in 2007, Tajima realized a suite of paintings as moveable partitions, their polyvalent surfaces accommodating geometric decor and peer-to-peer messaging. To make these works, she screen-printed and roller-painted diagrams culled from High modernism on sound-buffered

Fig. 1

Mika Tajima, White Out/Disunite, 2007 silkscreen, acrylic paint, canvas, wood, silver leaf, paper, wheels 48 × 48 × 36"

wheeled supports that also served as bulletin boards (see fig. 1). The modular units were deployed in the gallery space in ways variously reminiscent of the setup of open office spaces, studio apartment living, or recording studios alike (see fig. 2).

Disassociate centered on the understanding that the revolutionary structure of corporate office culture of the 1960s returned as the common denominator of life in late 2000s urban economies, carrying with it a renewed promise of flexibility, lightness, transparency, and efficiency across white-collar work, creative expression, and domesticity. The moveable partition, as a form that purports to facilitate collaboration while subsuming all time and space to effortless productivity, was put to the test during the run of the exhibition by Tajima’s staged surfeits: destructive actions, New Humans’ noise shows, and classic spoken pieces performed by Vito Acconci.¹ Ultimately in Disassociate, expenditure, entropy, and prying exceeded the productive order proffered by the system that contained them.

Fig. 2

Installation view: Mika Tajima, Disassociate, 2007, New York

Just as she has redeployed the forms of architecture and design, so, too, has Tajima borrowed the tropes and structures of production from industries outside visual arts, including music and film. The operational logic and material culture of film production notably shaped Today is Not a Dress Rehearsal, her 2010 exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (see figs. 3–5). She invited artist Charles Atlas and philosopher Judith Butler to collaborate on the exhibition. Their respective, radical contributions to filmed performance and theory of performativity informed the ideas that she was testing there: the unruly discrepancy between final cut and outtakes and between essentialism and subjectivities. The basic components of a film set, including Tajima’s moveable panels posing as scenery flats, alongside light, sound, and filming equipment and personnel, were displayed in the gallery for the public to peruse, becoming the main event when at rest.

Figs. 3–4

Installation view: Mika Tajima/ New Humans and Charles Atlas, Today is Not a Dress Rehearsal (feat. Judith Butler), 2010, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Over the course of three days, the stage turned into an active set for filmed performances by Toastmasters, Butler, and New Humans. With Tajima as the director, Atlas conducted live editing sessions. Her request to interrupt and restate a speech act or revise a note, pose, or gesture, in addition to Atlas’s editing process of deciding what stays in and stays out, enacted the mismatch between performance and end product—in the case of commercial cinematography, literally reducing hours of filming to minutes of film. In Today is Not a Dress Rehearsal, deconstruction was mise-en-scène as mise-en-abyme, exposing at once the apparatus of representation, its disorderly excesses, and those personalities—Atlas and Butler—whose creative theoryas-practice questions the dead end of continental philosophy’s constituted subject.

Tajima’s early method enters into dialogue with previous generations of institutional critique artists. The paradigmatic work that Michael Asher (a stated influence on Tajima) presented at the San Francisco Institute of Art in 1969 recast sculpture as the reorganization of the gallery’s preexisting architectural elements.² There, Asher used the museum’s system of modular walls to construct a single thirty-six-foot-long wall that divided the gallery into two spaces. Structurally, Tajima extends Asher’s analysis outside the sphere of art institutions onto twenty-first-

Fig. 5

Installation view: Mika Tajima/ New Humans and Charles Atlas, Today is Not a Dress Rehearsal (feat. Judith Butler), 2010, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

century conditions of production. Also working in the lineage of Asher is Rirkrit Tiravanija, with whom Tajima studied and whose work puts to the test social dynamics and the architectures that condition them—such as the café, the home, or the gallery. While Tiravanija operates on the edge between alienation and togetherness, Tajima’s early projects distinctly probe what eludes capture in contemporary life, when all distinction between material and immaterial spheres of sociality is dissolved. That line of inquiry returns, distilled, in the artworks that comprise Energetics.

Placed on a low pedestal at the gallery entrance, an incense vaporizer, black and sleek and pyramidal, dispenses a scent that aids in reaching a meditative state. Immediately referencing the adjacent sculptural vase containing flowers, an original design from the regarded Sogetsu school of ikebana, Vipassana (2024; p. 62) alternately calls to mind the polygonal painted bronzes of Tony Smith and a certain style of mood-modulating decor encountered on-screen, in retro-lit renderings of domestic places.³ The rapprochement is funny and accurate given the historical crossings of Japanese aesthetics, Western Minimalism, and interior design. Named after an ancient meditation technique of Buddhism, Vipassana has auratic mystery in spite of its familiar looks. What the object reveals and what it hides is of interest. The dimensions of the shell exceed many times those of the dab of material burning inside it, as if to aggrandize the dynamic processes of transubstantiation and mindfulness that the sculpture performs and facilitates. The heating of the incense happens out of view but is sensed as an aroma that flows out a narrow hole topping the otherwise hermetic shell.

The “ordered body of air” that Asher contributed as part of AntiIllusion: Procedures/ Materials—the exhibition that canonized

process art, held at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1969—offers a precursor to Tajima, the artist has noted.⁴ Asher’s air-curtain installation was discreetly encased in the architecture, the airflow reduced to the minimum, and its noise muffled. Barely perceptible, the laminar flow continuously altered the air in the gallery. The vast time span that Vipassana references and the scale discrepancy vis-à-vis the invisible, culturally inflected processes it enacts—to transmute material into scented vapor into mindfulness—set the experiential stage for Energetics. All the works in the exhibition are similarly culturally coded, attune the senses to invisible energies, and shift the measure of time and space from human to geological, even astral, scale.

This recalibration is natural, Tajima intimates, when everything is mediated by data on a plane incommensurable with human life, which, in turn, is conditioned by technologies old and new. The multi-sensorial emphasis, elevated mindset, and expanded temporality of Vipassana returns in Naturans (2024; p. 66) in the guise of a flower arrangement that Tajima realized in the tradition of the Sogetsu school of ikebana, in which she is a student. The triangulation of past, present, and future encoded in the arrangement is recursively represented in its sculptural iron container, shaped as three inverse pyramids wrought together. In Tajima’s interpretation, the lifetime of a flower is a performance where blossoming and wilting are both augmented and transfigured by UV fluorescence.

The layering of ancient and contemporary life-enhancing techniques is further expressed in works from the Pranayama series (2017–ongoing). The series references the “energy work” of acupuncture, hydromassage, and yoga that today condition urban bodies globally. Borrowing their name from the breathregulating, energy-clearing technique of yoga, Tajima’s

Pranayama sculptures feature a biomorphic volume that stands in for the human body and is pierced by bronze jet nozzles at pressure points specific to acupuncture charts.

Across Energetics, Tajima deploys the polysemy of the quartz crystal, a signifier for new-age energy work as well as for the most precise time-keeping mechanisms. Taking a human stance in works such as Pranayama (Monolith, L, Rose Quartz) (2022; p. 54), rose quartz lends instead materiality to Sense Object, (January 1st, 2023, United States) (2024; p. 50). Variously calling to mind the work of artists who came of age in the 1960s—the tempered glass cubes of Larry Bell, the technological reliquaries of Paul Thek, or the nuclear gardens of Tetsumi Kudo, for instance— Sense Object consists of a clear glass pedestal that contains a tiny disk-shaped optical crystal, set in rose quartz and encoded with the emotions of United States social media users on January 1, 2023. To make the work, Tajima employed the same advanced systems of data collection and analysis that read text-based posts as emotions to predictive ends, whether to affect sales, romantic matches, election results, or otherwise.

Just as Sense Object materializes a massive volume of intangible data—emotions as digital code as Minimalist shrine—Tajima’s Negative Entropy series (2012–ongoing) gives physical form to entropic sonic vibrations. Seven paintings from the series are featured in Energetics. These consist of Jacquard loom weavings of varying sizes stretched onto acoustic panels, borrowing their design from spectrographic translations of sound recordings that the artist takes at different locations. The environments that she has mapped have evolved over time, from sites of production to Buddhist temples to the brain itself. To make these works, Tajima takes field recordings at specific places and translates them into digital spectrograms. While the program renders the waveform

in black and white, Tajima attributes to it a color scheme culled from options already in circulation: the Photoshop wheel in the earlier works in the series, the seasonal color combinations of fashion sportswear in more recent years. The file is then fed into a Jacquard loom and rendered as a weaving.

The technology that Tajima chooses to ultimately materialize the contingencies of sound is revelatory of the long and parallel history of textiles and computation, garment production and digital technologies.⁵ Invented at the turn of the nineteenth century, Jacquard looms automatized the weaving process using patterned-punched cards to encode and execute a design. The innovation improved efficiency and consistency, opening the way to mass production. Conversely, it transformed the skillsets required of a textile worker to repetitive, specialized, and fractional tasks. By the 1830s the same punched card technology offered the basis for the analytical engine, programmed to perform algebraic operations and the precursor of computers. Similarly, it progressively affected the daily operations demanded of a human worker, and both inventions drastically imprinted on social norms and subjectivities ever since. Tajima returns to Jacquard looms not with nostalgia for an order of things past but rather for the new forms of sociality, control, and freedom that are negotiated within new systems of production—whether industrial or digital.

As the series’ title implies, these works absorb entropic processes. Fleeting sonic vibrations are stilled as they are weaved into material form. The steps required to capture and transmute sound into warp and weft, however, come with loss of information due to different machine calibration and approximation between the unit structures of the various software and hardware involved. Similarly, the sensual characters of sound dissipate when

mediated as visual information, and the sound-dampening supports upon which they are stretched further absorb sonic vibrations in the gallery.

Tajima refers to her Negative Entropy works as “portraits.” Like the choice of the sitter for portraits, the character and occupation of the different sites inform aesthetic variations for each set of Negative Entropy works, which, in turn, modulate their meaning. Tajima realized her first group of acoustic portraits during a residency at Philadelphia’s Fabric Workshop in 2012. There, she intended to give form to the changing state of production in the city (from heavy industry to digital economy) by recording sound at the few manufacturing plants still extant— including a weaving facility—as well as at emerging lights-out data centers, so called to indicate near total automation and obsolescence of human oversight required for their functioning. Deepening her interest in the relation between intangible energies and material or immaterial production, for an ensuing group of portraits, Tajima recorded sounds at Seishoji temple in Japan, including a bell ringing a call to meditation and morning prayer. Shown in Energetics, Negative Entropy (Seishoji Priest Prayer Drumming, Pale Yellow, Quad) (2023; p. 46) represents the spiritual practice of Zen meditation as a rhythmic pattern of intensities, doubled.

Her most recent series probes more concealed sonic vibrations, portraying the electric pulses emitted by the brain during surgical stimulation intended to repair damage. Working closely with a neuroscientist, Tajima obtained scans of brain frequencies that she then translated into a woven pattern and rendered at a monumental scale. Just as for Vipassana, where disparity in scale aggrandizes invisible dynamic processes, the grand format that Tajima chooses for these portraits mirrors the affective impact

and near awe when confronted with the inner calibrations of the brain.

The historical correlation between modern weaving and computing is encoded in the Negative Entropy works, which also perform the processes of storage, retrieval, and transmission of information of the technologies that made them. Since her early works—the moveable partitions realized for Disassociate, for instance—Tajima has approached painting as a diagrammatic surface that stores information that can be read (the artist, in fact, can read spectrograms and plays with their orientation, doubling, and scale with ease). Hers are paintings without a painter that index their production in their mode of making.

As such, Tajima’s Negative Entropy series invites us to reconsider the work of an earlier generation of artists. Similarly pairing an object and the sonic portrait of its production, Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961; fig. 6) is a spare wooden box that contains a tape recording of the sounds made during its construction. Lasting as long as it took Morris to

Fig. 6

Robert Morris, Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, 1961 wood, internal speaker, 7" cassette of ¼" tape, 1999; artist provided Digital Audio Tapes (D.A.T), 2011; digital copy of D.A.T tapes; total run time 3.5 hours

Seattle Art Museum, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Bagley Wright

build the box in the studio, the tape is played on a loop, making the experience of the artwork inextricable from the time and energies expended toward its production. Exemplary in its collapse of labor and experience, Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, however, concentrates on material procedures and entropic processes occurring within the studio alone. For More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid and The Wages of Sin (1987), Mike Kelley purchased handmade baby blankets and stuffed animals at thrift stores and loosely assembled them into a large tapestry. Similar to Tajima’s Negative Entropy portraits, More Love Hours contains material labor conditions (the low wages at toy factories) and immaterial affective economies (the cathected energies of childhood), all while halting them by removing them from circulation.

Another painting to be read, Tiravanija’s Less Oil More Courage (2003) collapses painting, geopolitics, and a critique of their imbrication in a way that is similar to Tajima’s Negative Entropy works. A sentence culled from the sociality of New York’s art world is slightly modified and painted in oil, shifting from the emotional conditions of making a painting to the global wars on natural resources and the buying power of oil money fueling the art market.⁶ While Less Oil More Courage enacts a vicious circle, Tajima’s Negative Entropy—and her work in Energetics as a whole—performs a creative refunctioning of scientific advancements, where the play between material structures and immaterial energies has dissident potential.

Endnotes

1 Tajima founded New Humans with Howie Chen and Eric Tsai in New York in 2003 to realize collaborative works involving sound, installation, and performance. An archive of their work, which makes use of physical materials, piercing drones, sheer static, and low bass frequencies, can be retrieved at http://www.newhumansnyc.com/ info.htm.

2 See Michael Asher, Writings 1973–1983 on Works, 1969–1979, ed. Benjamin H.D. Bluchloh (Halifax, Nova Scotia: Press of the Nova Scotia Art and Design and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Los Angeles, 1983), 1–4.

3 A cursory online search retrieves scent diffusers with similar aesthetics, such as Aroma (Be) Free™ Matte Black, see https://www.saje.com/products/aroma-be-freematte-black?variant=45051450163497. Its product description reads: “Transform your space with the power of scent, using 100% natural essential oil blends. This designforward, cordless, and rechargeable diffuser is also heat-free and whisper-quiet, acting as both a functional and fashionable piece of decor for your home.”

4 See Mika Tajima (Los Angeles: Kayne Griffin and Inventory Press, 2022), 98.

5 For a recent reflection of this dual development in relation to the history of painting, see Michelle Kuo, “Textility and Technology,” in Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction, ed. Lynne Cooke (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2023), 225–43.

6 The sentence is a modified quote from the late New York artist Peter Cain, “reflecting a successful painter’s self-questioning in the moment.” See Karl Holmqvist, “Call me by your t-shirt,” in Rirkrit Tiravanija: A Lot of People, ed. Ruba Katrib and Yasmil Raymond (New York: MoMA PS1, 2023), 272–73.

Negative Entropy (Deep Brain Stimulation, Siena, Full Width, Exa)

2023

cotton, polyester, nylon, aluminum, wood

132 1/2 × 205 1/2 × 2"

Negative Entropy (Deep Brain Stimulation, Yellow, Full Width, Exa)

2023

cotton, polyester, nylon, aluminum, wood

135 × 204 3/8 × 2 3/4"

Negative Entropy (Deep Brain Stimulation, Purple, Full Width, Exa)

2023

cotton, polyester, nylon, aluminum, wood

135 × 204 3/8 × 2 3/4"

2023

cotton, polyester, nylon, wool acoustic baffling felt, wood 72 × 55"

Negative Entropy (Inscape Holding Breath Meditation, Quad)

Negative Entropy (Yokohama Symphostage, Drilling Excavation, Blue, Quad)

2023

cotton, polyester, nylon, wool acoustic baffling felt, wood 72 × 55"

Negative Entropy (TAE, Test Shot, Inner Divertor Operation, Norman, Orange, Single)

2023

cotton, polyester, nylon, wool acoustic baffling felt, wood 36 × 27"

Negative Entropy (Seishoji Priest Prayer Drumming, Pale Yellow, Quad)

2023

cotton, polyester, nylon, wool acoustic baffling felt, wood 75 × 56"

Sense Object, (January 1st, 2023, United States)

2023

5D memory crystal encoded with sentiment data (24 hours’ worth [2023/01/01] of Twitter data from United States), rose quartz

40 × 24 × 24"

Pranayama (Monolith, L, Rose Quartz)

2022

rose quartz, cast bronze Jacuzzi jet nozzles

32 × 22 × 15"

Pranayama (Monolith, R, Rose Quartz)

2023

rose quartz, cast bronze Jacuzzi jet nozzles

39 × 29 1/2 × 24"

Pranayama (Monolith, V, Rose Quartz)

2023

rose quartz, cast bronze Jacuzzi jet nozzles

67 1/2 × 35 × 32"

Vipassana

2024

peppermint leaf, eucalyptus leaf, yerba santa, rosemary verbanon, geranium oil, citronella oil, rose damask oil, eucalyptus globulus oil, psilocybin, vaporizer, steel, wood

13 × 9 1/4 × 8" pyramid

32 1/2 × 24 × 24" base

45 1/2 × 24 × 24" overall

Naturans

2023

steel, fluorescent solution, live cut flowers dimensions variable

List of works

22 Negative Entropy (Deep Brain Stimulation, Siena, Full Width, Exa), 2024

cotton, polyester, nylon, aluminum, wood

132 1/2 × 205 1/2 × 2"

26 Negative Entropy (Deep Brain Stimulation, Yellow, Full Width, Exa), 2024

cotton, polyester, nylon, aluminum, wood

135 × 204 ⅜ × 2 ¾"

30 Negative Entropy (Deep Brain Stimulation, Purple, Full Width, Exa), 2024

cotton, polyester, nylon, aluminum, wood

135 × 204 × 2 ¾"

34 Negative Entropy (Inscape Holding Breath Meditation, Quad), 2024

cotton, polyester, nylon, wool acoustic baffling felt, wood

72 × 55"

38 Negative Entropy (Yokohama Symphostage, Drilling Excavation, Blue, Quad), 2024

cotton, polyester, nylon, wool acoustic baffling felt, wood

72 × 55"

42 Negative Entropy (TAE, Test Shot, Inner Divertor Operation, Norman, Orange, Single), 2024

cotton, polyester, nylon, wool acoustic baffling felt, wood

36 × 27"

46 Negative Entropy (Seishoji Priest Prayer Drumming, Pale Yellow, Quad), 2023

cotton, polyester, nylon, wool acoustic baffling felt, wood

75 × 56 × 2 ½"

50 Sense Object, (January 1st, 2023, United States), 2024

5D memory crystal encoded with sentiment data (24 hours’ worth [2023/01/01] of Twitter data from United States), rose quartz

40 × 24 × 24"

54 Pranayama (Monolith, L, Rose Quartz), 2022 rose quartz, cast bronze Jacuzzi jet nozzles

32 × 22 × 15"

56 Pranayama (Monolith, R, Rose Quartz), 2024 rose quartz, cast bronze Jacuzzi jet nozzles

39 × 29 ½ × 24"

58 Pranayama (Monolith, V, Rose Quartz), 2023 rose quartz, cast bronze Jacuzzi jet nozzles

67 1/2 × 35 × 32"

62 Vipassana, 2024 peppermint leaf, eucalyptus leaf, yerba santa, rosemary verbanon, geranium oil, citronella oil, rose damask oil, eucalyptus globulus oil, psilocybe cubensis, vaporizer, steel, wood

13 × 9 1/4 × 8" pyramid

32 1/2 × 24 × 24" base

45 1/2 × 24 × 24" overall

66 Naturans, 2024 steel, fluorescent solution, live cut flowers dimensions variable

Acknowledgments

Deepest gratitude for the energy, hard work, and humor of the amazing studio team, for without their help none of this would be possible: Lara Nickel, Kim Nam, Jon Waites, and Logan Frances. Thank you to Pace for the immense support in realizing my new works. I am grateful to Colleen Grennan for the years of support in bringing this project to fruition. Thank you to Matilde Guidelli-Guidi for writing this insightful text and weaving the past projects into the present. Special thanks to Johnny Lu and Ezer Longinus for their expertise and breezy composure when contending with my perplexing technology dreams. Thanks to Pejman Shojaei, Gabriella Perez, Sarah Prickett, Sylvain Marchand, Kimberly Drew, and the Pace warehouse crew. Thanks to TextielLab, Joy Alaoui, Jultia Krah, MTL, Pranayama, and Charles Benton. Special thanks to Prof. Peter Kazansky (developer of 5D Memory Crystal technology, University of Southampton, UK) for his willingness to work with me. Huge thank you to neurologist Dr. Amanda Carpenter for opening the door into the mysteries of the human brain. Thank you to my parents, Fumiko and Toshiki Tajima, who instilled in me the curiosity to contemplate how the universe behaves. Thanks to my brother Yuhki, whose belief in me has kept me afloat during hard times. Gratitude for my two critters, Sena and Biggie, who bring joy to every space they inhabit. Lastly, immense appreciation for Howie Chen, who, exemplifying Aries energy, brings the sharpest wit, provoking intellect, and heart capacity with no bounds. Love to all my ride or dies—onward to the fourth dimension.

—Mika Tajima

Published on the occasion of

Mika Tajima: Energetics

January 12 – February 24, 2024

Pace Gallery

540 West 25th Street New York

Publication © 2024 Pace Publishing

Artworks by Mika Tajima © Mika Tajima

Text by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi © 2024 Matilde Guidelli-Guidi

Front and back cover: Negative Entropy (Deep Brain Stimulation, Siena, Full Width, Exa), 2024 (detail)

pp. 4–5, 20–21, 32–33, 48–49, 60–61, 64–65: Installation views, Energetics, Pace Gallery, New York

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Every reasonable effort has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.

Photography:

Courtesy the artist: p. 10 (fig. 3)

Charles Benton: pp. cover, back cover, 22–31, 35–37, 39–41, 43–45, 47

Peter Clough: pp. 4–5, 20–21, 32–33, 48–49, 51–53, 55, 57, 59–61, 63–65, 67–77

Elizabeth Mann, courtesy Seattle Art Museum: p. 17

Tom Powell: pp. 8–9

Charlie Villyard: pp. 10 (fig. 4), 11

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ISBN: 978-1-948701-73-0