慶應義塾大学アート・センター　Keio University Art Center

This year marks the 120th anniversary of the birth of Shuzo Takiguchi. To commemorate this anniversary, the Keio University Art Center, which owns a collection of Takiguchi's works, and Toyama Prefectural Museum of Art and Design, will hold a joint project. The former is a symposium, and the latter an exhibition. ( Click here for exhibition information. )

 Shuzo Takiguchi (1903-1979), a poet, exhibition organizer, art critic, and plastic artist, was active in a variety of fields, producing mysterious books commonly referred to as "handmade brochure." These books are the handiwork of Takiguchi himself and do not go through the process of publishers or printers. They are composed of magazine clippings, silver paper, labels and stickers, handwritten notes, and other so-called fragments and appear to be both finished and incomplete. For Takiguchi, who regarded a "book" as "something that contains a single act (“Ararat’s boat or seeing through the small days into molasses of the sky" (1972)), and who wanted to create "a book that will never be bound or paged" ("Around the Blank Paper" (1963)), it was very important for the book to be in a temporary state. 

 In this symposium, we will consider the general books distributed mainly in bookstores and "handmade books" as opposites and position Takiguchi's "To and From Rrose Selavy" (1968) as an existence that oscillates between the two. Through this book, we will consider how Takiguchi thought about production and what a "book" is.

 In the first part, members of the Shuzo Takiguchi Research Group will analyze "To and From Rrose Selavy." In the second part, members of the Shuzo Takiguchi Research Group will engage in a discussion centering on artists who create books not only as containers of information but also as figurative objects that should be invented together with language.

Symposium Flyer: download