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| 110702 | Shogo Baba On the Physical Form of Musical Score 2 July SAT - 16 July SAT, 2011 |
Penetrating the acoustic, the visual and the verbal, Shogo Baba has explored time/space/language
through his strictly defined and totally controlled works. The titles of his works, such as
"Method of Positioning 722 Wooden Panels", "Line Segments by Each Autonomous CMYK
Ink", "4320 copyright notices by the combination of sextuple", or "720 permutation moves
by six lines" may suggest what these works should be, and they are embodied into exactly
what their titles suggest. Encompassing and exploiting the entire possibilities of a set of
specified medium and structure, Baba executes art that represents itself alone and
exterminates any extra representations in its residual.
With his background as a composer as well as an artist, Shogo Baba also produces works
referring to music, for instance, how it is possible, what alternative form it can take, or
whether its current form is the most ideal one to realize its essence. Thus his
musical works often come without any sound, let alone ordinary musical elements like
melody or chord, but with general composition methods structured into non-audible forms.
Neither being clever non-music, obsessive anti-music, emancipating experimental music,
nor flamboyant multimedia music, Baba has succeeded in handling various media to
capture music into its transparent core and present it with minimum statement.
Along with his individual projects, Baba launched a three-person artist collective
"New-Method" in October 2010, together with Takahiro Hirama and Hideki Nakazawa,
regularly issuing their monthly bulletin and releasing group works. In both activities,
be it an individual or a group, Baba has been one of the most uncompromised reductive
conceptual artists, who refrain themselves from instantly signifying their works by making
interventions to/by immediate social surroundings and cultural spectacles, as well as being
an artist with a mastery of chemistry to compose ideas and materials into fine designs and
smooth products.
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