Into the psyche of Toshio Matsumoto
One of the most seminal Japanese visual artists of the 20th century, Toshio Matsumoto(1932-2017), pioneered the 60s avant-garde experimental filmmaking and multimedia. Matsumoto’s wild and visionary work went on to heavily influence Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange”. Subversive and radical in his approach- he presented a body of work that, infused with surrealist strategies, made a discordance not only artistically groundbreaking but politically charged.
Shortly after graduating, Matsumoto worked on his first short called Ginrin (1955), an experimental PR film. Ginrin was made at Shin-Riken Film Company, in collaboration with the members of Jikken Kōbō, an artist group of the post-war collective, consisting of composers and artists like Shozo Kitadai and Katsushiru Yamaguchi, who would later work on the Godzilla series.
A contemporary to the post-war creative elements of Japan like Shuji Terayama and Yukio Mishima, Matsumoto's work remains strikingly relevant to this day. Ahead of his time, Matsumoto’s avant-garde collides tradition with pop culture. In an interview with Tate, he alludes to pop culture’s stimulatory effect on him, “At the time, we understood pop art as a new movement which was represented by artists such as Warhol, Lichtenstein, or Wesselmann. There were discussions about the boundaries between pop art and concept art or kitsch; however, I have never heard of any other term being used.”
His 1973 short film, Mona Lisa, fuses those boundaries by deriving direct references from Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. Using the mass famous mysterious image of the inner subjective life of Mona Lisa, Matsumoto experiments with a litany of colors, evocative and bright, constantly changing, applied to Mona Lisa- the sole still element of the film.
Matsumoto developed in the 1960s, what he called ‘neo-documentarism’, a documentary type that was rejecting its traditional objective nature for one and confronting the subjectivities of an echoed, internal life. Made around the same time as Chris Marker’s La Jetee- a monumental feat in changing the course of cinema from being a medium of moving images to stillness- a sci-fi tale in a series of images; Matsumoto’s The Song of Stone (1963) too, weaves an abstract collection of still images into an experimental epiphany.
The idea of stonecutters carving into stone, breathing life into the inanimate- juxtaposed against the stillness of the images, almost as still as its stony subject, pushes the boundaries of the film as a medium. Strikingly sublime, The Song of Stone attempts at changing the discourse of how cinema can be perceived.
This exploration of mediums to convey a euphoric and provocative stream of ideology is important to Matsumoto’s art. Featured on Tate, MoMA, New York, and London, his art paves the way to the frenetic psychedelia that he endorsed, amidst the still objectivity that life offers. Responsive to the unconventional and unspoken, his films always narrate a structurally adventurous tale. In his most famous film Bara no Soretsu (Funeral Parade of Roses), Matsumoto retells the myth of Oedipus featuring a transvestite trying to move up their way through the euphoric nightlife of Tokyo hostess clubs.
In art exhibitions of Hong Kong's Everything Visible is Empty, and the Japanese Expanded Cinema Revisited at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, he presented a dynamic hyper-sensory stream of projections culminating his electric video synthesizer pieces like Metastasis (1971) and Mona Lisa (1973) with a post-war culture that stands in direct contrast with them. Matsumoto’s key works such as Atman (1975), Engram (1987), Phantom (1975) is an examination of his psyche, that reaches far beyond the realm of normality and offers captivating chaos.
Toshio Matsumoto experimented in an array of genres ranging from iconography and architecture to political undertones in pop culture. Aiming at creating more than flicker films, his robust immersive work with a distinct sound influenced forever the normal sense of psychosomatic rigidity.
