Ceremony 儀式

On this work titled "Ceremony," the artist has commented that he intended to symbolically represent a ceremony that is performed as a routine without consideration for real people with the pair of collars and ties, and that it is a product of the atmosphere of the period when antiestablishment movements were at their peak. We remember that, in those days, the word "white-collar," as opposed to "blue-collar," was used often to make the majority of Japanese to believe they, being the former, were middle-class and thus were privileged. The leather fastened down tightly over the stainless steel base seems to signify the human existence shackled by social systems and customs. The work's message is in this way clear and simple, or maybe even naive, but it is not a grave or biting social criticism since it has a humor characteristic to this artist. Tatehata has been a leading figure in abstract sculpture since the postwar years, divesting figurative elements of his work gradually to arrive at his own style through experiments in material and form under the influence of European artists including Henry Moore. The two aluminum ties standing in defiance of gravity, though representative images, anticipate in their form his latest works which are characterized by wavy lines.