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Sculptor Ryuta Iida uses books as a sculptural medium, de-structuring or eliding their visual and verbal components, keeping the two in constant tension. In "poem. glass" (2007), the lines of text were clipped from their context and then the strips were jumbled inside a glass bottle. The pieces are amenable to perpetual reshuffling, their original narrative sequence potentially irrecoverable.
"poem, book" (2007) offers less possibility of narrative retrieval. Here the text is cut away from within the margins of the page, according to the predetermined arrangement of the printed poem. Only the blankness of the page which made the poem appear remains, perforated by narrow rectangles. The poem appears to have been originally written in Japanese as the slit sections are all aligned vertically, as is the convention, and the irregularity in the length of the rectangles casts an organic quality to the design that softens the harder geometry of the segments cut away. The punctured pages take the look of the now obsolete computer punch cards which were used for input of information, represented by the presence or absence of holes.
In the "Oratorical Inventory" works, all the text of a single page is cut out and then the strips are reassembled to the right of the desiccated page in criss-crossing formations, horizontal and vertical. The strips overlap so that at the intersections, fragments of written words disappear beneath others, further truncating legible sections. But they also retain, in the structuring of the thin strips, something of the linear and discursive qualities of language. The reassembled text is made an accessory to the page it gave meaning to, drawn out from what had originally been the drawn upon, made foreign, and more discernibly so when one realizes that the books are either in French or Japanese.
The desire to elaborate on the content of the written works is obviously a questionable undertaking, made clear in "I see, I can't see" (2005). Here the focus is not on cutting away strips from a two-dimensional page, but using the accumulated pages of books as a sculptural mass to pare down. The books are arranged grid-like on the wall, flush open. The amassed pages are carved away with a paper cutter in circular and wavy designs, taking on a topographic quality that leads the eye to wander across the rocky formations. Since pictorial form cannot move like the unfolding of events in a narrative, from the lined-up books on the wall the eye can jump across the different topologies of the pared-down texts. And this suggests time by implication of the hanging, of a journey across landscapes. Furthermore, these particular works rejoin an art-theoretical point of "reading artworks" by making the verbal distinctively visual and tactile.
The book gave a frame of reference, and sometimes the title of a work gave an author, such as "Owgai" or "Hiyoshi." But a more palpable frame was given by the text design on the page which determined what would be cut away, and therefore the composition of works. In "Kouri no Senaka" (2007), Iida has broken away from this. The work is comprised of dozens of cotton reels which stick out from the wall and have thin slips of text pinned to them, one message to a spool. Seemingly without a unifying theme (except, perhaps, in the ambiguous title), and given the arbitrary arrangement of the reels, the order in which one might read the fragments is relatively unrestricted. Text fragments, for example, read: "when you wake and," "the glimpse of an airfield," "like a bug, like grass," "you're not allowed to sweeten your memories," "I think, I thought." Particular readings can be drawn from these fragments, but no particular order is privileged, and so any one reading is open to revision, is essentially incomplete, as fragments are by definition.
A work of similar conception, but currently without title, is housed in a room constructed within the gallery. This time, books are tacked to the wall and a strip of text rises up from the top edge of each like a bookmark or summary speech bubble. "You're a bit different, ay!" "look, it's that silver car over there," "what is it that you want to say," "wait a little longer," read some of the strips. Here, too, the fragments of type offer only the most tenuous verbal connections.
Gone is the narrative cohesion that the individual sculptural materials once had. In their place emerges the much stronger unity of Iida's artistic oeuvre, found in the sustained attention to a sculptural medium and the possibilities it continues to offer in accumulating an unreadable library.
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