Six Ways to Stand with the Work of Visual Art in the Age of Instagrammatical Reproduction: Tanaka Tatsuya and the Beautiful Plenitude of the Reimagination

I. THE FOUNTAIN RIGHT-SIDE UP

Eight alpinists make their way up what is, for the time being, a gentle slope. Their boots press tranquil, ovular imprints into the snow, tiny testaments to the tractability of their trek thus far. The expedition has been so biddable for our eight, in fact, that they have managed to synchronize their steps, leaving a single set of footprints as the only bit of proof of the octet's momentary existence in this landscape. That is, until their transient footprints melt and fade away.

I don't mean to say that they haven't seen any hardships along the way. Two of our mountaineers—let's call them "Three" and "Six"—are clearly well on their way to hypoxia. But I do mean to say that they ain't seen nothing yet. Their guide points them toward the summit on the horizon. They do not know what is on the other side of the horizon. But we do. We know that just beyond the snow-sprinkled conifers there waits (best-case scenario) a 90-degree vertical climb up a solid wall of ice or (worst-case scenario) a 270-degree plunge to the depths below. We know this because we know this terrain better than anyone. Of course we do. We go, on good days, at least three to five times a day. So of course we know what waits on the other side of a Toto toilet.

Figure 1.

Tanaka Tatsuya, Mt. Toilet (2018). Image courtesy of the artist.

Figure 2.

Tanaka Tatsuya, Mt. Toilet (2018). Image courtesy of the artist.

There are (at least) six ways to stand with this work of visual art in our age of Instagrammatical reproduction. (I mean "work" here in the sense of the object or phenomenon that captivates our artistic attention, but I mean it more in the sense of the labor of those objects and phenomena, the force they send cascading throughout the world—how they get to work, moving us and things around.) If we are going to continue our travels with our eight alpinists and their creator, Tanaka Tatsuya (1981–), however, then we will first have to disabuse some of our friends of one of the six ways. For this abusive stance tells us that the way to stand with the work of visual art is to see ourselves and our time as greater than the work, to imagine ourselves as the CFO of a company of one, standing over and looking down on the alpinists.

The logical scaffolding of this stance is commonsensical. In an age of Instagrammatical exchange, high-speed supercomputers let flash boys make millions in milliseconds on the stock market. So someone is bound to think that their time and presence is bigger than Tanaka's microcosmic, paracosmic play with figurines, to think that, when you go to the toilet, you just need to take care of business. And so of course these someones take a jaundiced view of the work of art, sending Tanaka's toy mountaineers cascading down in an avalanche of hurry as they rush past and belittle his miniatures—as one president once put it: "I promise you, folks can make a lot more … with … the trades than they might with an art history degree."¹

The playscape of Tanaka's Mt. Toilet—the commode—almost seems to make the commonsensical case for looking down on the work of art against itself: who, Tanaka seems to imply alongside Piero Manzoni, wouldn't look down on this child's play given the bigger fish we have to fry? Thierry de Duve proposes that Duchamp's urinal marks a shift in our view of our relation to the work of art from the classical Kantian aesthetic stance—this is beautiful—to the modern aesthetic stance—this is art. A natural byproduct of this modern stance is the assertion that...