A Commemorative Exhibition for the 120th Birthday of Shuzo Takiguchi
A “book” as a Wilson-Lincoln System
Shuzo Takiguchi (1903-1979) unfolded diverse work as a poet, an exhibition organizer, an art critic, and a plastic artist. He produced mysterious books called by their nickname, “handmade brochures.” They did not undergo a process at a publisher or a print shop. The books were made through the manual labor of Takiguchi himself and are composed of a so-called mishmash of scraps, such as magazine clippings, aluminum foil, labels, stickers, and handwritten memos. The books appear to be both complete and incomplete. For Takiguchi, who aimed for a “book that is not permanently bound and not paginated,” it is conceivable that it was very important for him that a book exists in a hypothetical state.
The term “Wilson-Lincoln System” means an arrangement where President Wilson appears if you look at it from the left and President Lincoln appears if you look at it from the right. The arrangement resembles a double portrait, where a different face emerges if you look at it from the right or left. The term even appears as a word used by Duchamp in “Quotations from Marcel Duchamp” by Shuzo Takiguchi.
This exhibition assumes that typical books distributed mainly through bookstores and handmade brochures have antithetical existences. It places Takiguchi’s “Quotations from Marcel Duchamp” (1968) such that it has an existence that wavers in that space. Through “Quotations from Marcel Duchamp,” a book that has multiple images that appear between the two poles and make one remember the Wilson-Lincoln System, this exhibition considers how did Takiguchi perceive a “book” and productions and, moreover, what did he think a “book” was.
