A Foundation. Sachiko Abe

A Foundation

Sachiko Abe is best known for her mesmerizing series of durational performances Cut Papers that create a surplus of meaning within an apparently simple aesthetic economy. It is this scenic space of perception and production that is the focus of the work. Abe will present performances in an environment of large-scale sculptural interventions in the Furnace gallery with a new large scale drawing work produced during her 2010 residency with A Foundation funded by the Pola Foundation. An intricate graphic weave produced by intensive durational periods of drawing which might be best approached through the dimension of the fold as expressed by French Philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Like Cut Papers Abe’s drawings invite us to contemplate the intensity of ideas which accumulate and are disseminated in the transformation of a white sheet of paper into a medium of communication. She will also present a new filmic collaboration with artist Ben Rivers.

Its beautiful and incredibly calming. There are seats in the room so you can sit and enjoy the performance. Basically there's a large pillar of cut paper in the room that leads back to Sachiko Abe who sits up high cutting paper. Her scissors are connected to a speaker so you hear every cut. Its oddly calming to listen to and incredibly beautiful to look at. However, she says its neither of those things. She says it is an aestheic paradox that locates the artist at the center of a field of reciprocal subjectivity, she is an object of the gaze that returns the subject to themselves by activating a feedback loop. Amazingly she is going to be there for the duration of the Biennial, all 10 weeks. Thats quite insane. 10 weeks cutting paper. Stunning.

For around 6 hours a day, Sachiko Abe sits on a white mattress on the floor cutting paper. Curls of paper as thin as wires hang from the ceiling and billow in piles on the ground; it is like an ice palace.
Sachiko started cutting paper when she was in a mental hospital 14 years ago. It helped calm her and deflected her need to cut herself. 'It takes 40 minutes to cut one whole paper,' she writes in her explanatory note. 'The thinness is 0.5mm. During the depressed period, the thinness is about 0.3mm.'
(source:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/apr/24/art by Caroline Boucher The Observer)

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, 1964. Performed on September 15, 2003 at Theatre Le Ranelagh, Paris, France. Photo: Ken McKay, © Yoko Ono; Courtesy Lenono Photo Archive.

To examine art historical precedents of Abe’s art performance I have chosen Yoko Ono’s art performance «Cut Piece»

“Ono’s work related destruction to interpersonal, often intimate, human relations. This element was particularly thought-provoking in ‹Cut Piece›, one of many actions she did as DIAS (Destruction in Art Symposium). Ono had first done the performance “Cut Piece” in 1964, in Japan and again at Carnegie Hall, in New York, in 1965. Ono sat motionless on the stage after inviting the audience to come up and cut away her clothing.  ‹Cut Piece› entailed a disrobing, a denouement of the reciprocity between exhibitionism and scope desires, between victim and assailant, between sadist and masochist: and, as a heterosexual herself, Ono unveiled the gendered relationship of male and female subjects as objects for each other.”
( Kristine Stiles,«Uncorrupted Joy: International Art Actions,» in: Out of Actions: between performance and the object, 1949–1979, Paul Schimmel (ed.), MoCA Los Angeles, New York/London, 1998, p. 278.)

Yoko Ono and Sachiko Abe are both from Japan ethnically. There are deep cultural traditions in Japanese art – cutting paper. Kirigami and Origami are traditional Japanese art of cutting paper.