Journey to Synesthesia: Modernism and Contemporary Theory

2024/08/30

Perhaps the word "curator" has finally become established in the public consciousness. The job of a curator involves collecting and exhibiting works as a professional staff member at art galleries and museums. I have been doing this work for over 40 years, and if someone asks me, "What on earth do you do for a living?", I answer that I am a man who has supported his family by "borrowing other people's paintings and hanging them on walls." What I teach at the university is mostly related to that field.

Having published four books during the four years of the COVID-19 pandemic, I may have managed to maintain my dignity as the head of the household.

I am the type of person who does not write about things thought up in the head or studied in books. Therefore, I have only written in this book about things I know through my body. It is a collection of my observations on artworks, design in general, and things I felt physically through touching objects as a curator. What makes this different from my previous books is that I have written about music, which has been a long-held ambition of mine. Not only is it written about, but it is paired with my specialty, art—lined up, compared, played on, and written "under the pretext" of each other.

My specialty as a curator is the bold technique of taking artworks—which are usually displayed on the same wall based on period or trend—separating them from their time and space, bringing them together from afar, and making them "meet." Because of this, some people might look askance at my work, wondering, "Isn't this a bit of a stretch?"

There are likely many works that write about or point out the contemporaneity of art and music, but this is not a display of such academic insight. It is, so to speak, an essay written with a bit of humor and amusement about things that have connected within my personal experience. I have put in the effort to ensure that this itself stands as a piece of criticism or (at least in my intention) a superb work of literature.

It is a work I am proud of, aiming for such supreme skill, but on the other hand, it may still be a case of "the sun is setting, and the road is long." The late Hisashi Inoue also said: "Make difficult things easy, easy things deep, and deep things interesting..."

However, from my next book onward, I am considering giving up on overly complex art essays and switching to food essays, which is another of my greatest specialties.

Journey to Synesthesia: Modernism and Contemporary Theory

Ryu Niimi

Artdiver

392 pages, 3,300 yen (tax included)

*Affiliations, job titles, etc., are as of the time of publication.