Sachiko Abe.

I've been meaning to write about Sachiko for a while, I've been to see her art performance in the A Foundation a few times now at different times throughout the day. The work consists of her, seated on a high ledge in the warehouse section of the building simply cutting paper. The paper falls down onto the floor in a waterfall motion and leads across the floor to a tall pile graduating to the ceiling. Her work is all about being in a trance like state, almost mediative whilst cutting paper and it reminded me of my own practice, that of producing work in an almost automatic state in order to escape excessive and repetitive thoughts. 


The first time I saw this performance the room was pretty crowded, tourists, school children and students filled out the cold room. Of course this produced a lot of noise and Sachiko actually stopped mid way through her performance, I asked the gallery assistant what was happening and she said that Sachiko finds the loud noise distracting and it 'stresses her out' and that she would stop until peace and quiet returned. Artistic temperament more like. For what it was worth I enjoyed her work, it demonstrates process and time in a brilliant way, but the whole setup of the exhibition/performance was somewhat strange for me. I didn't fully understand why she had to be situated so high above us, dressed in a white robe, it felt like some form of hero worshiping ceremony which made me uncomfortable. I felt threatened by her, threatened by her perceived superiority over me. She also had a microphone attached the scissors to amplify the sound throughout the room, I was unsure as to how this added to the overall performance.


I've been attempting to research on her life and background to gain some understanding of her drives to produce this sort of work and she is quite elusive in Google land but from what I can gather she started to cut paper whilst in a mental hospital nine years ago in order to distract away from cutting herself, and she hasn't stopped since. 


A part of me really can relate to this concept of engaging yourself into an activity, action or movement in order to distract the mind away from exaggerated thoughts but another part thought the deployment of the work was a little pretentious.