Akira Shimizu - Recreation
This is one of his most important artworks. He exhibited it in Muramatsu Art Gallery (Tokyo) in 1962 for the first time. After that it was also exhibited in many exhibitions including Exhibit at Japan’s Contemporary Art (1945-1965) in Museum of Modern Art, Oxford in 1985, at The Dream of a Museum, in Hyogo Prefecture Museum of Art in 2002, etc.
A series of work of Akira Shimizu takes root in "Memory" which is beside with daily life. He started his life as a standard-bearer of anti-art in the 60’s and we could see the sprout in his three initial works, Recreation, Guidebook and Black light. The wink to "Dream" can be seen in Recreation. This work arranges the bed on a huge timetable, and we may see Rauschenberg's influence on this work, on which the stuffed bird dived into the quilt. However, importance is "Sleep. " in this work above all. The bird that plunges into the “futon”(Japanese quilt) tries to drag out the main dream of a man who sleeps under the futon.
Shimizu says this bird is a hawk, and it would capture the fish in the bottom of water. “Water” may be a metaphor of various things. It may be the unconscious world, and the state of sleep, and the darkness. The bird tries to poke one's head inside to the mind of the sleeping person, to drag the dream out to the three-dimensional world, that is the consciousness. This bird embodies Shimizu’s desire to take out things that exists in “the dark” to the place where the light of consciousness reaches. So the man under the futon may be Shimizu himself.
