Ujino and the Rotators
The Rotators – is this sculpture, or musical instruments? Is this art, or performance? Such questions are essentially mistaken. This type of analysis can only come from a Western way of thinking which understands cultures in terms of hierarchies. For a Japan which has lost its "history" through unconditional surrender and occupation, in which the advance of modernity has been accompanied by progressive amnesia, a flat homogeneity is vastly preferable to any rigid hierarchies. One might add that hierarchical thinking is most at home with the Christian idea of a beginning and an end; but in the world of Pop-Art there is a craving for Nietzschean eternal recurrence. A homogeneous mish-mash of materials that are around everywhere and accessible to everyone – electric sockets, junk, used vinyl discs, actuators – endlessly rotating, shedding all pretence of meaning, wildly and noisily gyrating: The Rotator is a brilliant, late-appearing 21st-Century direct descendant of Futurism, Dada, Pop-Art, and Noise-Industrial!
