The Bourreaucrat

Exhibition:
Aki-Ex Gallery
5-4-44 Minami Aoyama
Minato-ku, Tokyo 107

On this voyage of representation, The Bourreaucrat performs a ritual of writing an official document of authorization known as a certificate of prestige. This attenuated ritual includes elements reminiscent of the ceremonies performed for the bestowal of certificates of authority, the Diploma as related to the diplomatic envoy's power of representation. In its contemporary use as it relates to the authority to become a professional practitioner in a specified field or the capacity granted to declare oneself a member of a social group. The title itself is a composite word derived from the French words bureaucrat, an official and bourreau, meaning executioner or person that carries out the death penalty, also known as "the executor of high works" (exécuteur des hautes œvres). The ritual becomes a process performance enacted by the Bourreaucrat for the supposed purpose of status verification and ranking. A somewhat strained if not stressful ceremony challenging the fragile borders between desire, humility and the desperately frustrating.

This apparatus, a machine commissioned by the Embassy for the granting of certificates of prestige, has never in fact properly performed its prescribed function. As a failed prototype, its work remains strictly symbolic to all but the Ambassador. Unable to appreciate the merits of a consummate Hanko stamping apparatus, the ambassador perseveres in his mission in spite of the humiliation of not being recognized by most officials in his ceremonious role. To rectify this, an assiduous compilation of protocol questionnaires, automated and ordered by the assistant computer, are presented in the interrogation chamber, forming a perpetually growing database of questions derived themselves from the answers given.

The apparatus itself, not unlike an insect in appearance or an industrial steel press, at times resembling a microscope, stands guard for inspection and whimsicaly grants a certificate of prestige on impulse. The act itself is a random cycle of three possible mannerisms accentuated by the rattling sounds of a stamp driving shaft and a breathing machine that is mounted on the apparatus, all of which is underscored by the random animation of a slot-machine like brain and a deliberately threatening and sometimes even violent stamping motion of the shaft that officially stamps the certificate upon request.

Ambassador Solo is a person, indeed any person in search of "Identity" who in the process of finding himself from "within", inadvertently catches a glimpse of the same person "without" and can't help but see humor in the process.