Richard Hawkins: Hijikata Twist @ Tate Liverpool, until 11 May

Review by Sacha Waldron | 28 Apr 2014

Sadako crawls in jerking slow-motion out of the well and into her victim’s television set in Ring, and Kayako, a little less discerning, reigns disjointed, creeping terror on everyone she meets in Ju-on (The Grudge). These deceased and troubled ladies are not just, as writer David Kalat terms them, the 'Dead Wet Girls' of Japanese Horror: they are also practitioners of a form of dance-performance style Butoh, founded in the early 1950s by choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-1986). Butoh’s complex form of movement, its influences and notation, are the subject of Tate Liverpool’s current ground floor exhibition, Richard Hawkins: Hijikata Twist.

Working mainly in a collage, LA-based Hawkins has an enduring fascination with Hijikata’s cut and paste scrapbooks called ‘Butuoh-fu’ (‘fu’ meaning ‘notation’). The choreographer would combine his own notes with poetry and prose from writers (such as Jean Genet) and clip black-and-white reproductions of Western paintings from magazines. Artists such as De Kooning, Dubuffet, Sutherland and Bacon were used as material to explore the extremities of figuration and the potential of the human body. Hijikata’s interpretive descriptions can be found in the scrapbook documents, loaned from Japan for the exhibition: 'a monster made of dust', he writes of Jean Dubuffet’s The Tree of Fluids (1950); of Van Gogh’s portrayal in Bacon’s work, '(he has) a body composed entirely of particles… His skull packed with branches and straw'. 

Hawkins has been working on his own reconfigurations of Hijikata’s scrapbooks in the form of individual and gridded collections of framed collages, often pasted onto sugar-paper coloured office filing dividers. Hawkins' process is akin to an archiving of Hijikata’s original documents, but with the method’s free-association allowing the artist to go off on his own tangents and indulge in the pleasure of making. A selection of the mid-century work from De Kooning, Bacon etc. that is referenced has also been taken from the Tate collection for this exhibition – but it is testament to the strength of Hijikata's and Hawkins' work that these superstar items are not the central focus of the show. Hawkins' collages are psychological, wormhole puzzles that allow you to fall into a mirror world of Hijikata and the history of Butoh, but which also open up the ‘twist’ of Western figurative painting – its potential to go beyond its art-historical status and be mined for creative potential. [Sacha Waldron] 

Mon-Sun, 10am-5pm, free