FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Exhibition: “Masao Mochizuki: Television 1975 - 1976”
May 14– July 11, 2008

Opening Reception: Wednesday, May 14, 6-8 PM

The Cohen Amador Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition “Television 1975-1976”, the first US exhibition of images created in the 1970’s by Japanese photographer Masao Mochizuki. By systematically photographing a series of images from television broadcasts into a progressive grid, Mochizuki illuminates the passive and manufactured manner through which the world is experienced and digested in contemporary society.

In the 1970s, recognizing that it was no longer tenable to seek the imagery which defines history outside in the world, Mochizuki turned his focus to the way the external world is no longer experienced, but passively received through television. Using a Mamiya 6 x 6 twin lens camera, Mochizuki sat in front of a television in a darkened room taking multiple exposures of the imagery projecting outwards. In effect, the television comes to function as the lens of the camera, focusing external imagery for private, visual consumption. Through this, Mochizuki attempts to grasp what he calls the “life-force” of television: its never-ending onslaught of imagery; how no matter whether there is a viewer or not, the television continues to stream images.  Regardless of the gravity of the news being reported, or the excitement of a sporting event as it unfolds; the television is unflinching and unchanged by the events it depicts.  It is therefore a metaphor for the viewer’s own detachment, how he or she can watch dramatic events unfold and be unaffected because of the safety of his or her distance and the cold rationality of the medium.

Each of Mochizuki’s photocompositions contains 35-630 equally sized images, which have been shot in a grid format and have a textual corollary.  Western programs such as sports broadcasts, news programs and American documentaries, progress sequentially from left to right; they therefore reflect western style writing.  Programs meant for the domestic Japanese market appear in vertical lines from upper right to left, similar to Japanese text.  In this way the images come to replicate another detached medium of information dissemination: the newspaper.  With its strict grid typography and its black and white monochromatic scale, the newspaper functions similarly to Mochizuki’s photographs; relating events in a causal, matter-of-fact sort of way.  Furthermore, the odd faded glow captured in each of Mochizuki’s individual picture cells has a similar appearance to faded grey newspaper.  This smattering of images, which arrests the fluid continuity of television and reforms it into a series of photo fragments, attempts to recapture the fleeting nature of televised imagery, how every face, event and story on television is never maintained, but instantly replaced.  A baseball pitcher or newscaster might appear in several of the photo-fragments but we are unable to fully grasp anything about his or her identity, as, through Mochizuki’s process, we are withdrawn from the sense of action and narrative portrayed on the television screen.  This format thereby highlights that act of creation, underscoring the constructed nature of televised programming, and therefore emphasizing the constructed nature of its insights into the outside world.

Mochizuki was born in Osaka in 1939, graduated from Tokyo College of Photography in 1963 and won the Society of Photography Award in 1999. His work has been exhibited in Europe and Japan, and is contained in public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art.