About Dumb Type's work
Dumb Type's work is as formally complex as it is socially involved. Their most well-known works fall somewhere within the bounds of performance, often accompanied by installations. In many ways, such work fulfills their original declared intent to "develop an art/performance form to fill the gap between static visualart and performance dependent on dialogue." The 'dumb' in Dumb Type thus does not denote a level of intelligence, but rather describes a desire to create without words. "When we first came together," explained Furuhashi in High Performance (Summer 1990), "we just had too many things we wanted to say. We decided not to shout. We try to keep it simple." Although Dumb Type's work spans a much greater range than performance, they are generally perceived as a performance group because touring outside Kyoto forces them to modify works to fit more conventional settings and traditional schemes of venue scheduling. When they work in Kyoto, they are known for spending weeks or, given the opportunity, months just preparing a space for one of their events, often completely restructuring an interior to meet their demands.
The first major work, The Order of the Square (1985), moved from site-specific venue to site-specific venue over the course of a year. They constructed twenty small telephone booth-size buildings, each housing an individual performance to be observed through a peep hole. The first presentation was in a gallery, but later presentations were held on the street, in a department store, in a temple garden of ("There was one crazy monk we knew who let us do it, noted Furuhashi) and other sites. Audience members contracted to see the whole year's performance, receiving a key that opened one of the boxes. Once a month they got an announcement to come see a new work. Other early performance works by Dumb Type include Plan For Sleep (1984-86) and Every Dog Has His Day (1985).
The performance Pleasure Life, created in 1988, marks an historic moment for Dumb Type. Described as the seed of Dumb Type's formal and thematic language, Pleasure Life touches on the themes of order, media and information. Thirty-six tube-metal platforms were spaced over a grid, each bearing an object--video monitor, video camera, glass of water, plant or something specific to the city in which the work was being performed. Five performers moved inside the grid while four spotlights followed them from four corners. Pleasure Life has been likened to a zoo exhibit, a miniature pseudo-environment created so that we may observe a species in its "natural habitat"?in this case, a crowded, high-tech urban place that quite obviously resembles late twentieth-century Tokyo. An original soundtrack ranged from industrial and trance to television sitcom music. The work was visually hypnotic. Dumb Type's program statement asks the audience to consider: "How do they communicate with each other within their systematised life in the Colony? How do they learn the systems of this society? How do they express their love? What does 'pleasure' mean to them? What about 'Life'?" It also goes on to note: "Technology today has in many ways created a network covering the globe, making the world smaller, and sending accurate information tens of thousands of miles, from point A to point B, in just a few seconds. In reality, however, when we try to communicate, for example, the few words 'I Love you,' with just these three words we are forced to realise the vast distances between us."
The next major work pH (1990-93) was a multimedia project combining performance, installation, video and printed matter. The staging for pH was unique: the audience sat high above a narrow sixteen-meter white linoleum floor. A pair of computer-controlled truss beams continuously crisscrosses the set upstage and down, while beam-mounted slide projectors project images onto the floor "screen" and performers fight the implacable mechanical motions of the beams.
The performance S/N (1992-96) is about the body as love, and involves performers fighting against even more sophisticated technological stage devices. With AIDS as the thematic center, the work brings out issues such a gender, homosexuality, nationality, identity, and life and death. S/N is critical not only of the reality of discrimination in contemporary society, but also attempts to use this criticism as an opportunity to advocate the message that love can equal communication, provided that humans and technology can be permitted to intersect freely and equally.
Art installations by Dumb Type include Lovers (Dying Pictures, Loving Pictures), created in 1994 by Furuhashi, and now in the Permanent Collection of The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In a dark, square, otherwise empty room there appear images of several nude, near-lifesize men and women, walking, standing, embracing in slow motion. When the viewer approaches a wall to see the images better, a new figure appears--Furuhashi himself--moving slowly toward the viewer and then vanishing behind the viewer.
The Installation OR was created in April 1997 for the permanent collection of NTT Inter Communication Center, Tokyo.
Frost Frames was created by artistic director Shiro Takatani in May 1998 for the Spiral Hall, Tokyo. This installation was also recently exhibited in Lyon, Paris and Maubeuge, France.
Music projects include Shiro Takatani's contribution as artistic director on the opera Life by Ryuichi Sakamoto, which premiered in September 1999. In March 1998, Dumb Type designed the "symphonic novella" by Gerard Hourbette for the first cycle of Dangerous Visions, a project of Art Zoyd and the Orchestre National de Lille, combining philharmonic orchestration with new sound/image
technologies.