Tomio Koyama Gallery Tokyo - Kyoto | TKG Editions　Ginza - Kyoto

When I look back upon my life I think how nice it is to have the experience of over thirty-five years of full time art making. So there are some advantages to getting older. When we are young, there is a concreteness to our lives, a sense of being "immortal", above the law, outside the influence of the passage of time. As we age this gives way to an observance of time, of events, of what remains and endures beyond time, and what passes away. In art, there are styles of art making? fashions? if you will. We all know them: abstract expressionism, Marxist feminism, etc. But what are these theories of art? Where do they come from? Are they innate to the art object itself?

Of course not. Good, bad, self, other, in style, out of style : these are all concepts of the mind, and are separate from the art object itself…

The object itself concerns me. I have contemplated, manipulated, torn, drawn on, stamped on, twisted, shouted at and mutilated the piece of white paper year in, and year out. Critics will say, "You already did that. Why are you returning to the piece of paper ? "

This time, "Ream" shows how open ended the piece of paper can be: it can even be a film ; it can even be not itself. Each object that emerges from this wrestling is about the object itself, in that very moment of time. It's about the moment by moment renewal of the thing itself. It can be turned inside out, stretched to its limits, until it caves in and dissolves into a nothingness that is beautiful, merging infinitely with space.

The pencil has haunted me over the years. I re-discover its meaning through my own process with it. It is at the very nexus of who I am, always in my pocket. The pencil then moves from being a tool in my hand, to being an actual piece on the wall that I contemplate. It's a dialectical relationship: experiencing it in duality, I and the object? out there, and then we're together again, in the act of making something, one event, just being, just doing? where does the pencil and where does the artist, Tom Friedman, begin and end ?

I like to renew my understanding of the object continuously : to shed old ideas about the figure, the styrofoam ball, the pencil, the piece of paper. I like the challenge of its ultimate essence, its essential self, again and again. The styrofoam ball has long been a symbol of the tiniest, the atomic, of matter itself. I think about the figure: let's take it to the edges of non-existence, even to a monstrous, open-ended state, another being, from another realm, the guardian at the door, "Mahakala" : the door of the unknown, a door into open systems, or even unknown systems, like the Logic of Stars. Where do we go from here? The exploration of the unknown is unfolding in my work right now. The Black and White figure tells another story. The materials, the choice of color : the pure feeling of "presence" that I wanted to elicit, pure being-ness, wanting to get to an essential place of the existence of the figure.

So it is Not Something Else. In fact, it isn't even that. Not Something Else! Subject and object dissolve into the suchness of the thing itself.

Many years ago, I was influenced by Zen Buddhism. I had an epiphany when I heard the story about the dog. The Zen Master said to his student, "it's not "It's a dog!’ …It's just Dog! Dog! Dog!" To me, the direct experience is what art, even what life, is all about. Subject and object can and do, in those great moments, dissolve into themselves, leaving us in simple wonder. The direct experience, the thing itself, Not Something Else. It's a phenomenological discourse, made possible through the works of Duchamp, Neuman, Richter, even the philosophers, Lao Tzu, Shakyamuni Buddha, Descartes, Heiddeger, and Bourdieu.

Imagine a building collapsing. Some rooms are in ruins, and some are intact. The structure is old and falling apart, just a ghost of its previous self. We can hear the voices of the past: people who have lived and died here, workers who have toiled. But only the structure has suffered. Can you speak of the space as ruined or intact? Nothing happened to the space itself. It just is. Similarly, there is a place where nothing happens to life when forms break down and names are wiped out. The goldsmith melts down old ornaments to make new. Sometimes good pieces go with the bad. He takes it in his stride, because he knows no gold has been lost. Actually, by working with the suchness of the object, what I am really working with is space itself, it's all the same thing, really.

Tom Friedman