BORDEAUX.- This retrospective is the first solo show of Takako Saito (born 1929 in Sabae-shi, Japan) in a French museum. It brings together more than 400 works since her beginnings in the 1960s alongside Fluxus artists George Maciunas in the United States, and George Brecht and Robert Filliou in France, before she settled in Düsseldorf at the end of the 1970s.

Comprising sculptures, paintings, performative and sound works as well as books, the exhibition surveys more than fifty years of Saito’s career, from her early works based on games (most notably chess) to her latest clothing designs. The retrospective, which bears witness to an ongoing interest in everyday objects and audience participation, will be punctuated by three performances by the artist, who turns 90 this year.

The exhibition is accompanied by a trilingual catalogue (German, English, French) published by Snoeck Publishing (Cologne), with essays by Dieter Daniels, Larry List, Marc Schulz, Takako Saito, and Johannes Stahl.

AN ABC FOR TAKAKO
Johannes Stahl, 2017
Takako Saito often works in cycles or series. One of the reasons for this is the prospect of finding ever new variations. An abecedary can help readers navigate through her work. But it doesn’t necessarily follow a logical order – no more so than the texts, that is. I shall therefore strictly stick to the alphabetical order.

A
Takako’s English titles often use the indefinite article ‘a’. Her works all evolve from a series of individual results. Although each of these results is a work in its own right, it forms part of a series of developments.

Book
Takako has created an impressive number of books. More surprising still are the forms and ideas that the word encompasses: from bound sheets of paper or a leaflet to various kinds boxes or even a tree trunk containing bits of paper with signs on them. (After all, the German word for ‘book’, Buch, comes from Buche, ‘beech tree’.) The vast array of objects called ‘books’ complicates the task of anyone who wants to make one on Takako.

Café-théâtre
Coffee is conducive to communication. ‘Does anyone want to have a coffee with me?’, I read on a handwritten sign in 1995. Below it said: ‘I make the coffee myself. If someone comes, I drink with them. If no one comes, I drink alone with this piece of paper.’ In France and New York, Takako cooked to earn a living. She knows a thing or two about hospitality. The theatre often comes naturally.

Do it yourself
When she left Japan (or maybe I should say: when she ventured off the beaten track) in 1963, Takako wanted to lead a self-determined life. The connections between art and the DIY movement have given rise to a comprehensive debate and a substantial number of publications. One of the key aspects of this relationship is amateurism: doing something (art, for example) without being trained or without doing it professionally. Takako, who never attended art school, always creates the right conditions. Her You and me Shop supplies the necessary materials. You choose something, which you then arrange in a bowl according to your own ideas. The two of you sign the work: you and me.

Experimentation
Exploring unfamiliar areas holds a much bigger place in Takako’s works than one might have guessed about someone who is skilled at so many things. Her books, for example, are the result of long series of tests with materials of various origins: ink, soybean oil, plant juice, water. The images she has harvested from the surface of the water fill entire volumes. This bears witness to a lively curiosity, but also to an almost alchemical approach: trying, trying again, making slight changes, preserving intermediate states, anticipating the result. The circumstances and constituent elements of the process may or must remain partly obscure. Obviously, after a while, manipulating these materials becomes a matter of experience, or even virtuosity. This is often the moment Takako chooses to stop. After all, other secrets are waiting to be discovered.

Fluxus
George Maciunas’s lists and charts trying to clarify who belonged to the Fluxus movement, when, and why, are in fact impenetrable. The concept, as propagated by Fluxus, of the open work of art as a catalyst for public participation had been internalised by Takako (and certainly others) well before the word Fluxus was coined. Takako never adhered to the idea of the unsigned work produced by an artistic entity called Fluxus, nor to the programmatic, if not dogmatic, definitions that regularly ran counter to the initial idea of an open movement. When speaking about the protagonists of the Fluxus network, Takako often invokes the image of a family or a circle of friends – people who come together regularly. This does not exclude major differences or personal disagreements.

Geography
It might be raining in Wiesbaden at the time of writing. There, Rolf Hinterecker has painted a chess game on a roof according to Takako’s instructions. Since then, the rain has been playing chess. In Moers, it was the wind that played chess.

Head
About the game heads: The external appearance of a head does not necessarily tell us what goes on inside. The same is true for the mysterious paths through which marbles and other objects travel in Takako’s sculpted heads: one can never predict through which opening they will fall out. This resonates with what Larry List has written about Takako’s chess games: ‘She has critically expanded the spatial and mental limits of the game and no longer plays this game, but has turned into a grandmaster in the art of playing with it.’

It’s all happened accidentally
Chance often comes to Takako’s rescue. Apart from that, she prefers to work without assistants.

Japan
A biographical notes generally states where the person comes from. But is there anything typically Japanese or typically American, French, English, Italian or German about the work of this citizen of the world, who has lived so many years in so many different places?

King
Chess is the game of kings. This is one of the reasons why it follows very strict rules evocative of hierarchies and social relations. Takako likes to break the rules, or rather, to make them available to us, the players. First comes the sensory appraisal: How much does each of the seemingly identical wooden cubes weigh and which piece in the game of chess does it represent? Then there is the slanted plane: Better be careful when playing, because everything risks sliding down, which means that the game has to be built up again.

Life
Life is also a matter of survival.

Music
Performances such as Opera suggest that sound marks Takako’s work more than it may seem at first. Each of the countless cubes of paper and each of the objects sewn on her clothes has a specific sound, to which she listens. But the music starts already when, following the indications of a work title, one listens to the song of birds or the sound of a sledgehammer. And it doesn’t stop at the sounds of rolls of toilet paper – silent music is also music.

Noodle Edition/Shops
Although Saito has continuously exhibited in galleries, she has become an expert in self-marketing through her Noodle Edition. This commercial part of her artistic activity includes producing, with the simplest means, sales catalogues of editions and price lists and, occasionally, dispatching works of art by post. Anyone who has ever unpacked Takako’s objects during an installation will have noticed her experience and sense of economy in these things. Her various shops are not just forms or playful instructions for communication (as in children’s toy stores), but they encourage viewers to think about the different layers of meaning of her objects.

Outfit
Takako makes many of her outfits herself from used clothes that she mends and adapts. For her, it’s a question of aesthetic self-determination, of material and value preservation, a matter of upcycling, creative research and, not least, economy. Making or repairing clothes is closely linked to her performances, where roles are often predetermined by clothes, encouraging us to ask ourselves if the same is true for society on the whole. Clothes make people, as the saying goes.

Performance
Takako performs or offers to perform in each of her exhibitions. The important thing is that she doesn’t perform alone in front of an audience from which she is separated, but that others participate. If possible, everyone.

Quality
Experts say that Takako’s work can also be recognised from the precision with which it is executed. The patience and care with which she realises her objects, performances and exhibitions are closely linked to her idea of quality. She is only happy with a result when it looks to have reached maturity and perfection.

Radiator
Takako knows how to bleed the radiators in her house.

Studio
Having her own studio is a vital necessity for Takako. The process that unfolds there is essential to the form and quality of her work, whether it is made of wood, textile, paper, paint or metal, painted, mounted, printed, engraved or sewn.

To my friends
Takako has often collaborated with other artists or has engaged with their work or persona. See her humorous portraits of colleagues like Emmett Williams or her drawings explaining how to look at the work of Al Hansen; some of her group portraits are genuine sociograms.

UFO boat
Everyone who is familiar with UFOs knows that they are a world in themselves. Everything in it is different from ours, and yet – as we know from the appearance of UFOs on cinema screens – a lot of things going on there are similar to our own lives. Politics teaches us that there is a high and a low, and that there is an interaction between the two. But in Takako’s work, a fleet of UFOs can float along the wall without any indication of top or bottom, leaving us wondering if it might not suddenly disappear into the wall.

Untitled
Not all of Takako’s works are titled. In most cases, the shape of the object speaks volumes. When present, the titles say a lot about the way the artist uses the different languages she knows, and language in general: Das Flüstern der Vögel (The Murmur of the Birds), Ein Traum vom Bauer (A Farmer’s Dream) or UFO-Boot (UFO Boat) suggest numerous associations. And as Die Gelde im Himmel (The Monies in Paradise) shows, Takako’s titles are explicitly allowed to trip over certain words.

Viel Vergnügen!
Have fun! This is the title of many of Takako’s works. A game instruction from the 1970s states: ‘The winner is probably the team who more enjoyed the game.’

Wonderment
For her long series of experiments, Takako’s capacity for astonishment and pleasure of discovery prove to be a real resource. With her, the interaction of different lacquers takes on an almost mythical or sociological dimension. Many of her works (and letters) exploit the fact that sheets of parchment paper blister and turn opaque when exposed to heat. Even if the thermophysical process at work here can be described, the resulting form remains a mystery at which we look in wonderment. (Think of popcorn.)

X x X x X’s freedom
The yellow and black cubes of different sizes growing out of the wall appropriate more than the three classic dimensions of the exhibition space. The time one spends with them adds a further dimension. By reassembling the cubes, visitors cause curvatures in the spatial order. Surely physics has something to say about this.

You and me
Everything boils down to this. Without observers or witnesses and hence participants or players, it doesn’t really become art.

Z
Before (maybe) reading this alphabet from A to Z, it’s best to look at the work first.