It has been three and a half weeks of work. Yukihiro Taguchi has completed a daily effort for his installation making use of the slats of the wooden floor of air garten. Going there every day, his working attitude is similar to that of any ordinary employee. He comes when the project space opens, works between 3 and 5 p.m. and then goes home. And just like in a ordinary job, there are few rules.

Rule number 1: The show changes every day, meaning that visitors will always see a different piece. Some of them saw the floor folded like a piece of paper, others saw a fence inside the space. Everyone has a different story about it. This constant transformation expands the project and faces us with an odd situation: which exhibition did we see? Or even, did we see the exhibition at all?

Rule number 2: The only fixed points are a red crowbar, left in a corner of the white and grey room, and screws from the wooden slats lying on the floor. 100 drawings are completing the working frame. The latter show possibilities of arrangements for the wooden slats, and as such serve as a working base for the everyday performance.

Yukihiro Taguchi used a particularity of the exhibition space, which is so simple that it remained unseen until his show: the length of the wooden slats is the same as the distance between the floor and the ceiling. This perfect match creates an almost invisible symmetry, resembling a forest, a domino game or a tent, among many others. Reworking the space in a frenetic and obstinate manner, he has intermittently altered the arrangements of the wooden slats towards the repertoire of our daily life. It seems the possibilities would have been infinite. But at a certain point the transformations came to an end, because most exhibitions have to end, which is terribly normal. This is the rule number 3.

Between these three rules, Taguchi has developed a vocabulary in an attempt to construct a language that, in a traditional way, uses the constant and the variable as basic elements. From these floor elements, the artist did not try to create a shape for the space, because he had already found one. Rather, he decided to experiment all the shapes this symmetry had to offer. It was probably purposeless wanting to try out every possibility, or even vain. But because of that, there was no responsibility, no chance to do one shape that would be better or more meaningful than another. The artist thereby distorted the link to productivity or improvement. These so-called positive values became indifferent. By doing so, he insisted on the fact that an activity does not need to be burdened with utility, and thus the erratic becomes a method in itself.

Yukihiro Taguchi „moment“
Air Garten
Waldemarstraße 42
17.2.‒13.3.2007