ありえたかもしれない正解への遡行Back Toward What Might Have Been Right

Back Toward What Might Have Been Right

“What if I had done it differently back then?”

Everyone has thought this at least once. Regrets like this cross my mind fairly often—not that thinking about them lets anyone go back in time.

What about artworks, then? Surprisingly few works carry the regret of “if only I had done it that way.” A finished work is the sum of the hesitations and decisions of the time it was made, and it is the maker who decides how it ends. Besides, a work its maker regards as a true failure never goes out into the world. Even so, countless small things are left behind in the making, because choosing one path means closing off the other branches.

Yet the routes not taken do not vanish entirely. Even when a work is complete as a single product, the same problem can be carried into another work and approached in a different way. In that sense, making art is something like an anaesthetic that softens the irreversibility of life. A work is neither its maker’s living image nor their possession; after a time spent together, each goes on to live its own time.

This exhibition traces back to the “forks that might have been” inscribed in such works, and is assembled with the imagination of walking a different path once more.

Exhibitions are usually made by placing works in an existing room. This time, because the gallery is newly opening, the plan had to take shape before the space existed. The project advanced in step with an ordinary storehouse turning into a gallery. As works were selected and new pieces responding to past forks were added one after another, more works were prepared than the space could hold.

Rather than a systematic classification by subject, form, style or period, the exhibition gives priority to the flow of formal factors passed down from one work to another, and reorganises them as if reconnecting them.

I want to present the principles of “development and design” hidden in the act of making, so often buried beneath catchy slogans and themes. Rather than illustrating topical social issues and preaching about them, I want to consider once more, firsthand, the question: what is expertise in art?

Yoichi Umetsu (artist, leader of Parplume)