On the eve of his first solo show in Switzerland, the artist discusses uncertainty, multi-tasking, and the need for new temporalities

How Taro Izumi turned a postponed exhibition into an evocative response to the global crisis 

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The work of Taro Izumi (born in 1976, Japan) stands at the crossroads of the technological and the poetic. Postponed by several months due to the COVID-19 pandemic, his next show, ‘ex’, which opens on September 2, 2020 at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, is a poignant response to the ongoing global crisis. It is also emblematic of an artist who as readily produces videos, QR codes, and barely-there installations. The works feature balls trapped in acrylic boxes, the sound of empty theaters recast as music, and the artist discussing with a lawyer&nbsp;whether or not nature could be sued for making humans sick. Locked up in his bathroom, Izumi took a moment off from installing his exhibition&nbsp;to answer Art Basel’s questions.

What is the first thing you ever created?I remember drawing pictures of people at the hospital while I was waiting for my mother to give birth to my brother. I did other drawings before then, but since I was basically still a baby, I have no memory of making them, and only saw them once I got older.Where do you look for inspiration? One way of hitting on inspiration is to think while experiencing different things simultaneously: like watching TV, surfing the internet, and listening to music while hearing the sound of the trees swaying amid the mix of traffic fumes and air outside, and, at the same time, reading a book and a manga. It’s a way of notionally recreating the reality of multiple events happening simultaneously across the world. But it doesn’t work when I write. To answer these questions, I have had to lock myself in a compartment within a compartment: my bathroom.What makes you smile?For some reason, these days when I wake up, I can remember the things I was saying in my sleep, which are pretty funny. Who do you admire most?I’m always blown away by cities and cultures that were produced by, and continue to evolve through, all kinds of people influencing each other. Otherwise: good cooks, mountain climbers, and the builders of ancient tombs – rather than those buried inside them. I guess the first thing is that I generally respect and at the same time am in awe of people other than myself.

What do you wish you could change in the world?I’d like for there to be more opportunities for experimentation.How can we come together to re-imagine the artworld after the crisis is behind us?There’s a saying that nations collapse but rivers and mountains remain. Maybe we can come up with a long-term plan by moving toward the stance of the rivers and mountains in the saying, rather than the nations. All things, not just nature, are part of a process, which is uncertain and unstable. When we think about an exhibition – if we assume that it is not a process for presenting a result – then the first thing to think about is how to deal with time. Every year, museums organize exhibitions to last a given span, and the artists and other people involved in the exhibitions operate in line with that schedule. But what’s the basis for thinking about that span and schedule in the first place? Is it predicated on the approximate lifespan of a person? Or the unit of a day as marked in a calendar? Why aren’t there more exhibitions that go for a year, or ten years, or a century?If the framework were reset to such a long span that you couldn’t keep track of your yawning, maybe time is all that would be left to artists. And maybe we could then divide that time between activities we can’t see and activities we don’t show.Things don’t exist just because we can see them, and there are things that exist even though they are invisible. We are feeling the impact of this reality now due to the global pandemic. Paradoxically, this also shows us the need to be skeptical of what we see. I seem to have lost track of the question, but I guess that means this response wasn’t a result-oriented process.

How has your practice changed during these uncertain times?There’s always been a part of me that is super fastidious, and now I’m noticing other people going about their lives being concerned with the same part I’ve been concerned with.I’ve always thought about how not being visible is not the same as not existing. In artworks and other things people make, the artist’s consciousness operates on both the part they want to show and the part that is invisible, and I’ve been observing how that consciousness gets divided. I often see people using video as proof of some process. Proof that the guy went some place and did something there. But of course, that’s not how it works. When a person shows you something, it necessarily means there’s something else they’re not showing. I think that under the current circumstances, it’s become all the more important to think about the void of what we can’t see.As for the ‘uncertain times’ in the question, I’d say that even without the crisis we still stand on uncertainty: I of course myself live an uncertain existence, and the people who view my uncertain works amid their uncertain lives also see things uncertainly. Instead of there being uncertain times and not uncertain times, it’s really only that there are situations and times when people get a stronger sense of that uncertainty. Answers translated from the Japanese by Andrew Maerkle.Taro Izumi is represented by&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1291/Take-Ninagawa" target="_blank">Take Ninagawa</a>, Tokyo and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/gallery/1533/Galerie-Georges-Philippe-Nathalie-Vallois" target="_blank">Galerie Georges-Philippe &amp; Nathalie Vallois</a>, Paris.&nbsp;<a href="https://www.tinguely.ch/en/exhibitions/exhibitions/2020/taro-izumi.html" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://www.tinguely.ch/en/exhibitions/exhibitions/2020/taro-izumi.html" target="_blank" style="font-weight: normal;">‘ex’</a>&nbsp;runs from September 2 to November 15, 2020 at Museum Tinguely, Basel, Switzerland.

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