post-structural jam (shut up! we know you can play...)
This exhibition is the second installment of Masato Takasaka’s Post-structural Jam which debuted at Y3K gallery in Melbourne. The idea of reiteration is appropriate here as Takasaka’s work evokes the possible effects of repetition at every juncture. Unlike many of his previous works, though, this one is quite easy to describe: fourteen A0 prints from scanned pages of Guitarist magazine pinned neatly to the gallery wall. The pages contain ads for guitars, amps and other sound equipment alongside interviews with well known guitarists and tips on technique. Significantly these pages are all torn from the middle of articles in a number of issues published in the early ’90s; hence the identities of the interviewees and interviewers are indistinct, only recognisable through anecdotes involving other musicians.
Many of the essays I have looked at on Takasaka’s work make a direct address to the artist. I have come to attribute this to his casting (in both senses of the word) of himself in the work, in the same way that these musicians are cast by their encounters with other musicians and perform identities loosely based on their own for their audiences. In this way the work is a self-portrait, a nostalgic, performative memento to failed teenage ambitions. Takasaka’s ambition is not particularly unique though, rock stardom is a pretty run-of-the-mill vocational desire… so the work is also a reflexive remark on popular notions of the artist—the artist as bohemian genius sky-rocketing to popular acclaim.1 But we are unsure of Takasaka’s complicity in this performance, so it can be read as both parodic gesture and indulgent reminiscence.
In pursuit of this reflexive study we can also discuss the work as a kind