A Dance to the Muzik of Time
This series makes no secret of its own construction. It uses—probably tests—the possibilities of digital software, and makes no apology for its jumps and contradictions as it maps past into present, painting into Photoshop, history into dialogue, the durability of traditional “Englishness” on to an athletic, energetic diversity of races, costumes and, inevitably, relationships to the past, all in constant motion. The title is borrowed from that of a painting by Nicolas Poussin in the Wallace Collection in London, showing four allegorical figures—perhaps the seasons—dancing to a tune played by an aged figure suggestive of Time. The same title was used by Anthony Powell for a series of 12 novels published between 1951 and 1975. Said to be the longest novel in the English language, it traces the bonds among a group of friends and lovers who become close, lose touch and later meet again, all the while witnessing and responding to events, personalities, and issues in Britain in the mid-20th century. With the title, then, Goto both establishes a relationship to historical painting—to the goal of constructing a serious, nuanced statement about the world in a single image, and alludes to a particular, subjective construction of English history. But the changed spelling of Muzik also signals a dissonance, a radical departure—from historical painting, from the form of the novel, arguably even from history as such.
Goto’s work has always been concerned with history, that is, with an understanding of the past encoded in written texts—narratives, guidebooks, and biographies. However lightly he wears his erudition, he is clearly steeped in historical sources—visual, textual, and acoustic. He writes with grace and fluency—though now more often as clarification, elaboration, or occasionally defence of the work, rather than as part of it. In fact one way to understand the development of his work might be as a challenge to a received concept of history—specifically the challenge presented by photography. In its themes, Goto’s work has tended to move forward in time—from the early twentieth century to the present. Perhaps more crucially, it has moved away from a reliance on words to “frame” or locate the pictures, and towards self-sufficient pictures. He has himself remarked that as he approaches present-day England—his own time and place, he has felt “at a loss for words.”
Text by Nancy Roth
John Goto is Represented by Galerie Dominique Fiat Paris, www.dominiquefiat.com