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Takamatsu Jiro 高松次郎
Slack of Net #300 鬆弛的網#300
1970
This sculptural work consists of cotton ropes tied together, forming a grid. The ropes along the sides and at the centre are taut, and the lengths in between are slack. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Takamatsu Jiro created a series of Slack works, including a number of nets that could be hung on the wall or placed on the ground. The Slack of Net series builds on Takamatsu’s interest in visual perception and the relationship between absence and presence. The series distorts the structural integrity of a grid, which is defined by intersecting straight lines. Here, the wavy lines formed by the longer lengths suggest the presence of an invisible force—or even an invisible object—pulling or stretching the net, loosening the grid. The grid has long been associated with the rational thinking that is integral to modernism, and Takamatsu presents it as something flexible, proposing an alternative to the rigidity of the modernist system. Takamatsu was a seminal figure in Japanese art in the second half of the twentieth century, and a key figure in the development of the Mono-ha movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Artists associated with this movement employed natural materials in their unadulterated state in a manner meant to reveal inherent thingness in the world.
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