The Japanese closes his eyes, lowers his head, and sinks into a long reflection. The Inquirer waits until his guest resumes the conversation., 2015. HD video projection, colour, 4.23. stereo sound, amplifier, two speakers, Mp3 player, 33:52. looped. Japanese translation & voice by Christine Daly. Title from "Heidegger (and the Japanese)", On The Way To Language, 1959, 23. [The Listeners’ Guide to… Bowing, 2015; This Building Absorbs People, Liquid Architecture & Nite Art Melbourne 2015, The Melbourne School of Architecture and Design; The movement of the aside, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, 2018]
This work is informed by research in Japan. The gesture of bowing written about as ‘Empty Form’ by Barthes in Empire of Signs (1982), is the leitmotif of the project, and linked with that of receptive listening enacted in the text by Heidegger (and the Japanese), On The Way To Language, (1959) from which the work draws its name.
Drawn from footage of Post-War Japanese art and film, U.S. military archives and images of ritual practice in Ancient and contemporary Japan, a parsed selection of still imagery resembles the repeated practice of bowing. The sequence of found imagery is accompanied by a discontinuous, rhythmic voiceover in English and Japanese.
The text forges a link between ancient scripture and modern poetry, freely quoting passages and phrases from the Buddha’s Adittapariyaya Sutta: Fire Sermon and “The Fire Sermon”, the third section of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922).