2011年5月、イケムラさんは、ネブラスカ州のオマハに位置する友人のスタジオへと向かう途中、ニューヨークに立ち寄り、John Yau氏とEve Aschheim氏のふたりが住むアパートを訪れました。
Yau氏は、詩人にして批評家、イケムラさんについての散文を発表したこともあります。Aschheim氏は画家。ドローイングを創作の中心のひとつに据えていたり、プリンストンのような歴史ある大学で美術を教えていたりするなど、イケムラさんとの共通点が少なくありません。
クリエイターである三人の会話は、イケムラさんのスペイン時代についての質問から始まります。やがて、イケムラさんの作品の特徴のひとつである「少女」という存在について、そして女性のアーティストとして生きることについてと、話題は広がっていきました。
＊この鼎談の日本語訳（抄訳）は、追ってアップいたします。
Leiko Ikemura, John Yau and Eve Aschheim in the apartment in Midtown Manhattan
on Thursday, May 19, 2011.
SPAIN
| Eve Aschheim: |
Welcome Leiko! You came from Berlin. You must be one of the only Japanese women artists from your generation in Berlin or even in the whole of Germany. What would your opportunities have been in Japan, had you stayed there, as a woman artist? |
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| Leiko Ikemura: |
I don't know, because I left Japan much earlier. I studied language in the university in Japan, but interrupted my studies to go to Spain. |
| Eve Aschheim: |
How old were you when you went to Spain? |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
Twenty-one. I started to study art in the academy in Sevilla. At that time I was not only the only Japanese, but also the only foreigner. It was during Franco's time, so it was difficult to move around much… |
| Eve Aschheim: |
Why did you go to Spain? |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
Well, that's a good question. I was fascinated with the culture and the language, and I thought that we ambitious Japanese had to leave the country to achieve something. Japan, after the Second World War, was becoming Americanized, without really knowing the Western culture we were imitating. And Japan struggles with low confidence in our own culture and tradition. We could not see an original Picasso, an original Matisse, or an original Velázquez. I really wanted to see the works as someone who lived among them, and not only experience them through books. |
| John Yau: |
Did you study poetry and literature in Spain – because you know Spanish poetry quite well. |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
Garcia Lorca was important, for example. Italy was the center of culture, so Spain is a little bit apart. Spain is always not in the middle. Therefore, they have their own languages, which are unique. Even now, I'm very impressed when I go to Madrid; the Prado is one of the most beautiful museums. |
| John Yau: |
And it's really very different than going to the Louvre; Spanish painting is more somber. |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
Yes, somber. For me, the Louvre is also a demonstration of thievery and power, what they had taken. What's your impression, Eve? |
| Eve Aschheim: |
Well, one thing I see in the Spanish painting is the dark interiors that I also see in your work – black backgrounds, and a certain kind of light. Some of your paintings feel like night paintings, or twilight. |
| John Yau: |
And moody. |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
Or a sense of melancholy. Maybe I'm influenced by Spanish paintings I had looked at during that time; Picasso was still contemporary. And Spanish culture was cut because of Franco, so the young generation in the 70s, didn't know that a very important movement was starting in Germany, with Fluxus and Arte Povera, and artists like Beuys and Kounellis and company. So we did not know much in Spain about what was happening in Germany, but it was also interesting to work in this atmosphere of – how can I say – seclusion. |
| John Yau: |
One that is separated. |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
Yes, separated. It's like Spain is never, ever going to be Europe; they say the peninsula is the beginning of Africa. |
| Eve Aschheim: |
Moorish culture. |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
Yes, Arabian culture, and in this case, it was cut off, not only geographically, also by time. So, between my childhood and maturation is a kind of initiation as an artist. You also need to develop as a person. For that, Spain was good because I was not functioning at all. When you come from a different culture… I didn't know the language, the social structure. It was a special space. |
| Eve Aschheim: |
When you're an outsider… both literally and figuratively, you don't have to fit in. |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
They didn't expect anything of me. And so that time was dreamlike… But then after seven years in Spain, I went to Switzerland, and then to Germany. Once I was in Switzerland I started to become aware of what was happening in the art world because I saw shows of contemporary art for the first time. |
| Eve Aschheim: |
What was the reason you moved to Switzerland? |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
I was involved with someone who lived there. Also, I wanted to be financially independent as a woman; it's very important to me. One couldn't get work as a foreigner in Spain. I went to Switzerland to find a job, like teaching. |
LINE and UNCONSCIOUS
| Eve Aschheim: |
Can you talk about the difference between the three media: drawing, painting, and sculpture? What's the relationship between them for you? |
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| Leiko Ikemura: |
Sometimes I have difficulty with painting, but I'm still fascinated by it. So when I couldn't continue working, instead of struggling, I made drawings as a way to explore. I forget everything and I am able to begin to get more deeply involved. This is often possible for me in drawings. |
| Eve Aschheim: |
There is an indeterminacy of the forms in your drawing, where they are not namable and function as more than one thing. They seem very dreamlike. |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
I think they create their own visual world and also are parallel to my life at the time, very immediate and also a bit naïve. |
| Eve Aschheim: |
Yes. One thing that strikes me is this symbolic power of these images. I mean they feel in some ways almost archaic. The symbolic power of the forms that you choose, simple but profound forms. |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
Something archaic? |
| Eve Aschheim: |
Some of them are like talismans, power objects or voodoo dolls. |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
Oh, I never thought about that. |
| Eve Aschheim: |
But these watercolors are interesting because they're deceptively simple, and they look simple, but then you see that the figure dissolves into light, and into other shapes – somehow you let it become all these other forms. And I'm wondering, are you interested in the unconscious? |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
Very much. |
| Eve Aschheim: |
Did you read Jung? |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
Jung, Neumann and Eliade were important for me. In the 90s, I started to explore the unconscious form as an origin of life. The primal power of unconsciousness… |
FORMS BETWEEN or GIRLS
| John Yau: |
A lot of your forms are between one thing and another. They can be a head, a body and an object, and you can't nail it down and say, oh, this is what it is. At the same time, in your paintings, in your paintings of the girls, you feel like you can't quite know what the figure is thinking. |
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| Eve Aschheim: |
You can't access it. |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
My intention was to make pre-adolescent female figures from my particular perspective. My painting is not a projection of the female ideal as done previously by men, but somehow opposing, and showing an interior life. And then I remember my childhood. We had these difficulties as girls, before we grew up and entered into society and then learned codes of behavior, how to deal with the world. I think this moment is very fragile. |
| Eve Aschheim: |
Pre-puberty. But that's a moment when girls are actually more powerful before they get socialized to figure out about boys and how to be. They're free in a certain way that later they become less free and more self-conscious. |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
Yes. |
| Eve Aschheim: |
You know, and it's interesting, they seem to have that kind of innocence. |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
They still have that innocence, becoming a pre-sexual, pre-gendered moment. A pre-defined being. I don't think that we are born as a woman or a man. There is a biological condition, but then there is also educational and social conditioning. And this certain period of our development, this remote yet important period of our experience that we are going through, is a delicate but beautiful time. I record this and use it as a motif. It's a kind of a possibility, like a gateway. I get into, once again, losing my self and transforming this situation… |
| Eve Aschheim: |
Asian women are seen in the West to some extent as more exotic, more docile. So how did that affect you…? |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
Well, I was against that kind of expectation. I think it's also one of the reasons that I left Japan because it was just so strong there. I couldn't free myself from this atmosphere. Now, I think less so, because the women there are stronger now. There is a difference between the woman artists who came from Japan in the generation before me, and me. For example Yoko Ono and Yayoi Kusama. It was a completely different situation for them. For example when Kusama came to New York it was the time of Happenings. |
OUTSIDER / WOMEN ARTISTS
| Eve Aschheim: |
Well Yoko Ono and Yayoi Kusama became part of a scene that got a lot of attention and became historically important. |
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| Leiko Ikemura: |
Very much. It's a completely different situation in my case. I had to fight alone and that's the first question that Eve asked, which was very interesting because nobody asked me before. |
| Eve Aschheim: |
Nobody in Germany asked you? |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
No. |
| Eve Aschheim: |
You've been interviewed before, but perhaps the interviewers lacked an understanding of the perspective of the foreigner, the outsider. |
| John Yau: |
And there has never been a scene that you can be identified with. You've always been a singular figure, rather than part of a group, such as Yoko Ono and Fluxus. |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
I started out like this; since then I have become more connected. So I can't say I'm completely an outsider. Early on, however, I was on the periphery of a movement in Germany that was still very male, you know. |
| Eve Aschheim: |
The women artists in Germany complain about sexism. |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
I also remember when I started teaching in the university in Berlin, in 1991, there was not a single woman painter in the profession. |
| John Yau: |
Yes, that's right. I think Maria Lassnig is the first woman to teach painting in any German-speaking university and that's not until 1980. |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
And it was also in Austria, not in Germany. She was already 60 years old or so. You could hardly find any women teaching in the university, and least in painting. If you found someone, she was maybe in media or installation. When I came to teach at the university in Berlin in ‘91, Rebecca Horn had also just started. There were also very few woman exhibiting in German museums. The German painters were Baselitz, Kiefer, Richter, etc: powerful men. I also made large paintings in the 80s as challenge against this man's world. |
| Eve Aschheim: |
Who were your friends, your close painter friends or other friends through the 80s? |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
In the 80s, I met artists of the Junge Wilden, the Mühlheim Freiheit group, German abstract painters, as well as Swiss and Austrian artists in Cologne. |
| Eve Aschheim: |
So who did you talk to about your work? |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
That's a good question, Eve. We were all younger then; we visited each other quite frequently and made exchanges. It was not only artists visiting studios but also critics, collectors and gallerists. Cologne at that time was an international center for contemporary art. |
| Eve Aschheim: |
Are you also looking around at other women artists? There have been a number of women artists trying to deal with issues of how women are depicted, inventing their own mythology: June Leaf, Dana Schutz, Katherine Bradford, Mary Frank, Judith Linhares, Nicole Eisenman, Amy Sillman. |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
I like June Leaf's work very much. I would like to know more about the other artists you mentioned. Modersohn-Becker is an early figure of this kind. I've admired her work. Meret Oppenheim afterwards. And Maria Lassnig was remarkable. Even more, I am impressed by Alice Neel. |
| Eve Aschheim: |
Louise Bourgeois? |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
And of course, Louise Bourgeois. Eva Hesse and Atsuko Tanaka were also very important to me in the 90s. |
| John Yau: |
Right. But Maria Lassnig for instance is not known in America. She's barely known. |
| Eve Aschheim: |
There was a big divide between Germany and the US; after the war, rarely did German artists show here. It's different now, changing. In your sculpture of the girl with her hands poking in her eyes and mouth there is a consumption that seems almost metaphysical… |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
That's true. I think Janine Antoni is interesting in a related way: consumption, but also self-destruction. It is somehow assault-like. You know, painting with her hair… |
| Eve Aschheim: |
Eyelashes too, yes. |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
I also appreciate how artists like Ana Mendieta, Valie Export, Susan Rothenberg, Kiki Smith and Nancy Spero engage the body. |
LANDSCAPE
| Eve Aschheim: |
Your recent seascape paintings that we saw in Berlin, they seemed like a like a lost paradise. |
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| Leiko Ikemura: |
The time of the beginning. |
| John Yau: |
An elemental world made up of animals, water and people. |
| Eve Aschheim: |
They had an ashy quality, smoky and misty, but also ashy. It wasn't optical. It was visceral and volcanic. So you go from the girls who are pre-culture, to the beginnings of culture. I was thinking about memory and if you dream in black and white or in color. |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
I daydream a lot and it's obviously meditative in color. It's visionary – in this way I create space beyond reality, like a landscape of my inner world, a landscape that is a distant memory at the same time. |
| John Yau: |
There are also some references to wars in the paintings of the ships and the planes, that you must have seen images of in Japan. |
| Leiko Ikemura: |
Yes, even before my birth, there is a collective memory of war. It´s timeless, and it's a primal image. |