Futon or the Quilt
2022
video, 6:55
Camera operator - Paige Smith
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Futon or the Quilt explores the process of grappling with something one has read and translating that information, always imperfectly, into one’s own circumstances. Featuring passages read out loud from Tayama Katai’s semi-autobiographical story 蒲団 (The Quilt), it centers the ways the middle-aged writer and protagonist portrays his student Yoshiko as a 'modern girl' — an early 20th century media sensation that depicted young Japanese women as copiers of European fashions and ideologies. The protagonist lectures his student on writers such as Turgenev, Ibsen, and Geothe while suggesting that she should learn to act and think like their women characters.
Futon or the Quilt emphasizes the body and the ways that books become sites where human bodies and textual bodies meld together. There is the body of text, Yoshiko's body as described by the protagonist-narrator, and the artist's body present as a pair of hands and the reading voice. The act of reading out loud folds them into one another in unsteady scenes that complicate the power imbalances imbued in ideas of original and copy, author and reader.
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Image Description
A video and a photo. The video features a black background onto which appear two horizontal rectangular frames, one beside the other. Each frame contains the same white background, open book with red cover, and pair of light-skinned hands thumbing through the pages. While a voiceover reads selected passages from Tayama Katai’s short story translated from Japanese as The Quilt, the pairs of hands flip through the book at different rates. Each shot is brief, lasting only a few seconds before cutting, unsynchronized, to a new passage in the book, a new position for the hands. They skip to various points in the story, sometimes flipping multiple pages at once as if to search for a specific passage. In one frame, a finger traces a line of text while in the next frame a hand curls under a page, poised to flip it. Later, one pair repositions the book at the centre of the frame. As the voiceover concludes reading, the hands in the left frame flip the book to the story’s title page, and then the video cuts to black.
The photo shows the same video playing on a monitor on a white wall. The monitor is roughly two feet wide and one foot tall, and a person stands watching the video. They are wearing a forest green sweater and mustard yellow toque, with their brown hair tied into two loose buns at the base of their neck.
