The Brooklyn Rail

The morning of March 8, 2023 I was overjoyed to find an invitation in my mailbox to the opening of Pi-Pi-po, po, Takako Saito’s exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Bochum, Germany. This meant the prolific, nonagenarian artist was continuing to delight people with her work.

My first exhibition at the CAPC was about Beau Geste Press, a community of “dupli-cators, printers, and artisans” in Devon, England where, in 1973, Takako Saito was making paper boxes. I contacted her at the end of 2016 to gather her account of this collective art publishing venture.

I reached Saito by phone during a Christmas trip to Cologne. She never had a computer but wrote copious letters and always answered her phone when it rang. The very next day, I traveled to the outskirts of Düsseldorf to the apartment-studio complex she’d occupied since the late 1970s. I was immediately enveloped in her marvelous lair. She had created an immersive total environment where her clothes, the floors, walls and ceilings of a succession of studio rooms with specific functions were all covered with her various artforms.

This profound experience convinced me that a major exhibition was necessary to celebrate the fifty-year-plus career of this radical artist. Her early affiliation with Fluxus was certainly evident, but she managed to emancipate herself from it to create a unique body of work in which the notions of play and participation became essential. On March 8, 2019, a vast retrospective of more than four hundred works opened at the CAPC.

A catalogue published by Snoeck in partnership with the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Siegen documented the exhibition while an impressive handwritten list of 595 works compiled by the artist along with all the correspondence with her attested to the volume of exchanges made in preparation for the exhibition.

I remember a joyful yet lengthy installation process. My role was to “edit”—that is, to remove extra works as Takako added them. On my impromptu weekend visits to the museum my children and I often surprised her perched atop a ladder or dozing on a chair amidst her work.

There were countless chess set photos covering the Public Garden railings; posters all over town of Takako wearing her Kleid Buch No. 3 book-dress with multiple pockets; Takako totally immersed in her Kugelmusik and Blind Opera performances; Takako, shopkeeper, at her You and Me Shop. Takako eagerly hosted tours of graduate art students but also paid a surprise visit to the end-of-year party of the Stendhal kindergarten school in Bordeaux that had been working on projects related to her exhibition. Her Headball Music of hundreds of paper cubes tumbled onto people in the nave of the CAPC; the Wine and Canapés Chess Games were enjoyed by the public and her Takakophonie performance events closed the exhibition, which was visited by nearly 90,000 people during its run.

At the end of the exhibition, the museum wisely acquired twenty-four Saito artist’s books, shop pieces, installations, performance costumes, works on paper, and photo-collages—an array which has no equivalent in France or anywhere else! I take immense pride to have worked with the CAPC team to share with the public the work of Takako Saito, a unique free spirit in the art world and to have enriched the museum’s collection with this exceptional group of works for future generations to enjoy.