Biennial displays alumna’s eccentric inspirations

Every time a six or a nine appears on the calendar between Feb. 25 and May 30, artist Aki Sasamoto performs her piece “Strange Attractors” at the Whitney Biennial. Sasamoto’s peculiar math is representative of her work in general: intriguing, innovative, and odd.

The Japanese-born, New York-based artist—who recently spoke at Columbia’s School of the Arts, from which she graduated in 2007—employs performance, dance, and sculpture in her pieces. She explains her work in abstract terms, but often analyzes the most domestic and overlooked habits of human life. So what was her focus for the influential “2010” exhibition at the Whitney?

“I have obsession lately about psychics, doughnuts, and hemorrhoids,” Sasamoto said. She explained her concept as a cluster of episodes: “I have several ideas and objects and movements,” she said. “I make a group of them … under that title. My project has multi-facets, aspects of it in medium and then in idea.”

The title of the piece manifests a “mathematical concept called strange attractors.” In the geometric realm, this involves the time-space dimensions of chaos theory. But Sasamoto’s work is more relatable than this: Objects based on theory are enveloped in her piece’s narrative, along with concrete abstractions like “I’m trying to figure out how to eat a doughnut from the inside out.”

One may be mystified when first seeing the installation for “Strange Attractors” without the performer herself. Drips of orange fishnet cloth hang from the ceiling, some with spinning wires attached. Tables and tubes and large white doughnut-shaped cloths are placed around the room.

But when Sasamoto enters the space on these carefully selected dates, the installation comes alive, with the objects relating to both her movements and her words. Climbing into tubes, interacting with the doughnuts, talking into microphones, rotating created contraptions, moving around tables, and unfolding graphs, Sasamoto tells a story that links with the installation itself.

“I’m interested in meanings of the object or meanings of the movement,” Sasamoto said. “In front of you, the meaning can change, right? Even though I say the exact same thing, it might mean completely different things today and then tomorrow.

“If a certain thing doesn’t make sense, I won’t do it that day, and then I might do something else,” she continued. This played out in the first several performances of “Strange Attractors,” with variations derived from Sasamoto’s state of mind.

“Like, the second time I performed, I ended up in a tube. I think I was dark that day,” she said. “But the third time, I didn’t end there. In fact, I just went through very quickly with that pipe. I talked twice as much. It changes. I allow that to change, even though I go with the intention to do the same thing.”

This variability, which Sasamoto calls “structural improvisation,” is part of the larger ebb and flow of current performance and past inspiration.

“As soon as the installation is done, the psychic and doughnuts and attractors … stay in it. So I don’t live that anymore,” she said. “Right now, it’s totally in the artwork.” (Mostly, that is: “You know what? That’s not true. I still eat doughnuts.”)

Like “Strange Attractors,” her past works have often drawn inspiration from the examination of habit and, quite often, food. In the 2005 “cooking show,” Sasamoto dissected procedural order, details, and mundane tasks while cutting through potatoes with an impossibly extended knife. She has employed potatoes in other performances, and has also used spaghetti. In a different 2005 piece, Sasamoto based her improvisational narrative around extravagant food.

By seeing these mundane items and tasks with an artistic lens, objects are given new perspective and movements are given new life. While contemporary art can often be intimidating, the active nature and strange familiarity of Sasamoto’s content is at once contemplative and engaging.

“I want to make a piece that has many entrances and exits, so people can come in with association with the object, or people can come in from listening to my performance and then get into it,” she said. In terms of her piece at the Biennial, Sasamoto has been experiencing a certain communication with the audience. “The reality is, a lot more people overlap—what they see is what I mean.”

The outside connections a viewer can draw from Sasamoto’s pieces mirror the way in which the artist herself finds inspiration. “I think inspiration for art is often for me not in art,” she said. “You find it in an unexpected place, or in daily life or class in other subjects.”

For Sasamoto, this sense was catalyzed in her education at Columbia, where visual arts MFA students do not have to adhere to a specific medium and are able to take a variety of courses within the University. “While I was a student, I had fun because I like a liberal arts environment. I audited many classes, I went to lectures,” she said.

But no artist would be complete without his or her vices, and no Columbia education would be complete without a Morningside haunt. For Sasamoto, these two were combined. “I lived above Kitchenette, and they have, like, a fruit scone that I just totally liked and was very toxic in my life,” Sasamoto said. “I couldn’t get away from it.”

The artist performs today, April 16, at 4 p.m. in the Whitney Museum of American Art. Sasamoto also speaks today at 7:30 p.m. in “My Turn: Aki Sasamoto and Culture Push” at the Whitney.