haiku tsurezure

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haiku tsurezure - #37
A dialogue between art and haiku
Rafaël Rozendaal + Yuzo Ono

Yuzo Ono

YO: As an artist, you have been presenting your internet artwork for a long time, and have had many exhibitions, including one at the Towada Art Center in Japan. In the process, you encountered Japanese haiku and began to write your own haiku. You not only publish your haiku on your website but also exhibit them as artwork at exhibitions and even put together a book of your haiku. I would like to hear about these activities today.

Generosity at Towada Art Center, Japan

Before starting our conversation, I would like to tell my thoughts on the relationship between your artwork and your haiku. There are two keywords. One is code, and the other is rhythm.
Firstly, you seem to think haiku works more like a code of digital technology. It means haiku is not a final output, but rather a trigger that sets something in motion within readers. I agree with that view. Reading haiku gives something emotional to readers but it may have no end, no goal, and moreover, perhaps no rigid and solid meaning. This scheme may be quite similar to your internet artwork which are expressed through code-based digital programs.
If haiku works as a code for readers, I think there are two reasons for it. The first reason is that because of its briefness, the margin or white space for haiku is large. Therefore haiku leaves substantial room for readers’ imagination and then works as a code to stimulate it. The second reason is that the briefness of haiku allows it to remain in readers’ memory as a single whole mass and to be ruminated upon. This function is just like a code. In contrast, this is not the case for longer poems, because most people cannot memorize the whole of each poem.
Secondly, the other keyword of my argument is rhythm. Your haiku never follows the 5-7-5 rule which is dominant in Japanese haiku. But I don’t think it means you are indifferent to rhythm. You often utilize repetition, contrast, balance, and collision generated among the three lines of each haiku. It can mean that you are very conscious of how those three lines make rhythm in each haiku of yours.
Now, I will start my questions. I learned that you first encountered haiku at a workshop in Kawasaki (Japan) because one of the participants wrote haiku responding to your artwork. What was your first impression when you encountered haiku at that time?

RR: Through the years, I’ve dealt with different art mediums, which each came with a lot of stress, it's very stressful. Software can break, a painting can be damaged. I felt like haiku could be very peaceful, much less worrying.
One aspect that I like about haiku, it’s easy to get started. If you see a Hollywood movie, a big production like Star Wars, you don't think ‘Oh, I'm gonna make a movie tomorrow.’ But in haiku, I feel I can give it a try.

YO: After that, you have been curious about haiku, looking into Basho’s or other historical poets’ works. You said you were surprised by the fact that Basho’s ‘old pond’ haiku didn’t decay.

RR: Yes, it creates an image in your head and it’s very crisp, very fresh, and it’s new every time.

YO: Is it because of the briefness of haiku?

RR: Maybe it's also the idea of water feeling very clean and the movement in the water and you feel that maybe it's a spring morning and this feeling is very crisp.

YO: It can mean haiku is not just brief but also adept at catching a crisp moment that contains movement within it. I think it exactly relates to the perspective of thinking of haiku as a code.
Then, if you have any favorite haiku or haiku poets, please let me know.

RR: I read some different haiku anthologies, but I don’t remember the names of the poets. I just remember the atmosphere, such as the feeling of nature and time before big cities, it felt like much more seeing the sun, waking up, and seeing the sunrise. There was a funny one about farts in mosquitoes, and also the monkey’s face haiku.

Permanent Distraction at Site Gallery, Sheffield

YO: Why did you decide to write haiku yourself, rather than just looking into or reading haiku?

RR: I've always liked simple things. When I first saw the internet, I thought maybe I could make a webpage with very simple tools.
Also, one of the reasons I started haiku is I am always on my smartphone. A computer forces you to take in data. It offers you so much and you are constantly reading, watching, and listening. But I want to create and to create you have to stop taking in. On the phone, it’s too small to make drawings, so I was thinking ‘What can I do on the phone?’ One of the things is text which is very easy to write on the phone. To me, haiku should be spontaneous. I notice something and right away I can write down the version and maybe play with it and modify it. It is almost like the spontaneous feeling of sending a text message. This is why I like haiku. It is almost the size of a text message. So it feels very relevant in our time because text is very important in our time.

YO: Regarding your haiku, you don’t follow the 5-7-5 rule. Why is that?

RR: One important thing to note about the 5-7-5 rule is that when I read Basho it was not 5-7-5 because it’s a translation. English is a totally different language structure from Japanese, so to me, it's almost arbitrary to use 5-7-5.

YO: The prominent American novelist Jack Kerouac has written a lot of haiku, and he thought just the same way as you, and because Japanese and English are structurally different, he didn’t follow the 5-7-5 rule though his haiku were excellent.

RR: He has a very free spirit.

YO: What do you think about the rhythm of haiku?

RR: Of course, I play with it, and not every time it's as good as the other, but I like the process in haiku of a setup and then a change. That is something I'm looking for.

YO: I feel the rhythm that you created in your haiku is excellent, and this sensibility for rhythm is shared in your internet artwork. On top of that, in my view, this sensibility is quite similar to Japanese freestyle haiku poets, such as TANEDA Santoka and OZAKI Hosai, who threw out the 5-7-5 rule. Instead, I believe what they tried to do was to find an indigenous rhythm in every single haiku of theirs.
And besides the 5-7-5 rule, you don’t use seasonal words in your haiku.

RR: I think a lot of my haiku are more about the world I live in. There are seasons, but I think five hundred years ago the seasons were very present, much more than now. Now what comes into my email inbox is a bigger psychological aspect of my life than if it’s raining or snowing. It is not really relevant whether emails arrive in spring or winter. The feeling of an email can be so big. In our world sometimes the weather is important, but we have air conditioning and heating. We can eat bananas in winter. The taste of tea in spring in Japan was very different from the tea in fall, but now we drink Coca-Cola all year round. Is YouTube different in summer or in winter? These are interesting questions because we still live in the natural world, but the natural world is pushed out of our consciousness. Then you can decide as an artist, do I want to recreate the consciousness of five hundred years ago or do I want to see what the world now is?

YO: Haiku interests you a lot, but how about other forms of poetry?

RR: I don’t know why but it’s something about the three lines which is very interesting to me.
I didn’t learn so much about poetry in school, but I really approach it more as a visual artist. I'm interested in moments, and thoughts. It’s almost like turning a thought into a mental object such as haiku. It's a lot about energy which you feel at a certain moment.
There’s a moment I'm waiting for a train and that can be the starting point of my three lines for haiku. When you read them, you see something completely different, so that's interesting. When you are outside, you always have your phone with you and this is our life now. So haiku was a perfect medium if you sit on a train for half an hour and your mind is blank. I feel like it fits my life which is always on the move. The blank space of travel feels like a very good place for haiku.

YO: Your statement reminds me of the freestyle haiku poets again, because both Santoka and Hosai were wanderers and always on the move. I think it can mean writing haiku is quite suitable for the mind of wandering around, and the blank means not only the blank of time but also the blank of mind.
By the way, I have selected my three favorite haiku of yours from those you have already published.

In your haiku, I feel a moment of self-reflection, a tiny contradiction of subtle movement in consciousness, and the resonance between that contradiction and reality. I think the Japanese freestyle haiku poets and you seem to share this sensitivity which can extract something big out of tiny contradictions of everyday life.
So, this is another question. Why did you decide to turn haiku into physical art forms exhibited at galleries? How did you feel when haiku became material in that way?

Color, Code, Communication at Museum Folkwang

RR: I think it’s because in art it’s very common to understand that a work is something that you look at with an open mind without expecting a beginning or ending. If I look at a painting, it’s not like a movie or something where it has to have a conclusion. I like the idea when something is on the wall in a gallery or a museum. We see it almost as an image in the same way you might look at a river or a fountain. You don't expect it to change. You can look at it for a long time and I think galleries and museums are kind of like a church for atheists. It is a place for contemplation, a place to slow down. Then I had to think, what is the best way to present haiku in a larger space? You might see it next to a painting or a video in a similar state of mind.
One thing I noticed is first I posted my haiku on Twitter, people didn't respond that much. Then I made a haiku book and I would share photos of the book on Instagram and then people liked it a lot more. I think Twitter is so fleeting, so quick. Somehow, the idea that somebody printed a book and then photographed it feels like more dedication. At my exhibition, I wanted to simulate a book in the mural, so it had two rectangles with color and also created a space for the haiku to be isolated.

YO: Your argument hints at another perspective. While the English language has 26 letters in its alphabet, the Japanese language has thousands of letters due to the huge number of Chinese characters. I think it means a lot when it comes to written haiku. That is to say, the visual appearance or texture of haiku is very important in the Japanese language. And this feeling might be somewhat similar to the feeling of facing artworks in galleries. I mean instead of using Chinese characters in Japanese, you chose to create alphabetic haiku physical on the gallery walls.

RR: I think so.

YO: Earlier, you mentioned that Basho's haiku do not decay. You also said that this is a distinctive feature of haiku compared to paintings or other genres, but why is it?

RR: The big difference is that, for example, I’m making paintings now in my studio, and right now the colors in the painting are certain, but in one hundred years, the colors will change and I know that. We know any physical art form will decay.
On the other hand, digital art is interesting, because it doesn’t decay. In fact, it improves over time, because screens will get better and better.

YO: I see. That is why you think haiku never decay because they are different from physical art forms and digital forms. But if what you have said is the reason for it, other works written in text, not only haiku, don’t decay, do they?

YO: I have to say that in the past most Japanese haiku poets have been somewhat indifferent to foreign haiku. One of the major reasons is that most of them are not good at foreign languages. But I believe this situation is gradually changing.

RR: I definitely feel certain elements of human life are universal, like the way our hands are connected to our eyes when we draw. In historical cave drawings, you can see style changes that happened at the same time in Australia, France, and Africa thirty thousand years ago. So, even if people don’t read a lot of haiku, and if you ask them to write very short poems, maybe in different parts of the world they will come to the same essence.

YO: I agree with you. In my view, we can consider those short poems as equivalent to haiku or exactly haiku. Many cultures must share this same root, and I believe this is why now haiku is so popular around the world.
Then, are there any artists who give you a haiku-like feeling?

RR: I think the paintings of Vermeer are just like haiku. Someone is pouring milk into a bowl and the light is coming into a room in a certain season. That is exactly haiku to me.
There are many other names. David Hockey has a painting of someone going into a pool with a splash of water, and that’s very similar to Basho. And I think Mondrian feels a lot like haiku with three colors which are almost like three lines of haiku. Also maybe, Agnes Martin, and Roy Lichtenstein in his early works.

YO: Most of the names you mentioned make sense to me because one obvious feature of modern art is simplicity which is also a strong feature of haiku. But naming Vermeer struck me a bit because his painting style is meticulous and far from simplicity.

RR: In Vermeer, there is an absence of narrative and absence of drama, not like, say, Caravaggio whose style is so dramatic. I think in daily life a lot of people like to have conclusions, but a lot of my work is about the absence of narratives. Haiku refuses to give you conclusions, and that’s why haiku feels open. In an animation, textile, text, or any medium, you can have an absence of a conclusion with no beginning or ending.
My background is the history of painting, so I think a lot about the idea of still-life. To me, maybe if painting is a reflection on seeing, then haiku is a reflection on thinking or a state of mind. Similarly, the narrative is very reduced in both, so you don't know why a bowl of fruit is on the table but the painter decided to paint the fruit or the flowers. Similarly, you don't know where I am and when I forgot to buy the avocado in my haiku. The narrative is almost completely removed. So it's really about the psychology of the very brief moment.

YO: This is the last question. Are there any further projects you’d like to do in the future that involve the relationship between haiku and art?

RR: I have to say doing this interview makes me more excited about haiku again.

YO: I am very glad to hear that.

RR: I think when you are a creative person, there is an idea that you fall in love with an idea and when you fall in love, you cannot think about anything else. Right now, I fell in love with painting and I am very obsessed with it. But it's nice when I have a larger exhibition and can combine animation, painting, and haiku, all in one space. To me doing a museum exhibition is really an interesting way to put everything next to each other.

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Rafaël Rozendaal
Rafaël Rozendaal is a Dutch-Brazilian visual artist currently living and working in New York City. He is known as a pioneer of Internet Art. His websites attract an audience of 60 million unique visitors per year. He is best known for these websites, but also creates drawings, installations, tapestries, and haiku. He has worked with institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, the Whitney Museum, the Folkwang Museum, Kunstverein Frankfurt, the Media Art Institute, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
website: https://www.newrafael.com/

Yuzo Ono
Yuzo Ono is a haiku poet and writer based in Japan. He studied at the University of Tokyo (BA) and the Royal College of Art (MRes, fine arts pathway) in the UK. He won the Modern Haiku Association Award for Criticism in 2002 and the Modern Haiku Association New Talent Award (honorable mention) in 2005. He is a councillor of the Haiku International Association and a member of the British Haiku Society.
website: https://yuzo-ono.com/