"refinement, utility and abandonement near komagome station" (detail) erik sanner 1999 ink from rubber stamps and pens, pencil, and stains and marks from leaves, brick, metal, rust, cola, beer, tires, and rocks 11" x 18" "tunnel downhill from mejiro station" erik sanner 1999 oil on plywood 17" x 17" "bridges over the meguro river near gotanda station at dawn" erik sanner 1999 oil on wood 11" x 32" "unerected monuments for the not-yet-dead near nippori station" erik sanner 1999 oil on printed canvas sign 15" x 60"
	the 29 stations of the yamanote line collaboration kabegallery@ben's cafe tokyo, japan may 1999 multimedia exhibition of poetry (brian heagney), video (julia barnes), sound installation (mike rhys) and paintings (erik sanner) relating to each of the stations on the busiest train in tokyo. partially inspired by hiroshige's "53 stations of the tokkaido line", we aimed for immediacy. depending on the character of the neighborhood where each station is located, brian and i would choose a day of the week and a time of day (e.g., saturday evening for a trendy stop with busy nightlife, tuesday morning for a financial district). basically we would wander around together for hours and hours, experiencing things, looking at things, bouncing ideas off each other, trying to grasp what it was we were attempting to do. we would sometimes engage in odd behavior just for the sake of experiencing something, like spraying a fire extinguisher at a passing train. i might do some drawings, brian might start to write some lines in a notebook. at some point i would find an object to paint on, and at that spot or later somewhere to paint. spending ten hours at each station was not unusual. julia and mike joined after we had done a few; part of the reason for enlarging the group was that brian and i felt what we were painting/writing was fairly straightforward and representational of what we had seen, but other people thought it was awfully abstract; perhaps more "concrete" context (video, sound) would make our work more "accessible"; but by far the larger motive was that we really wanted to do something with mike and julia, and they were eager to involve themselves. for a few stations, the four of us spent hours and hours together engaged, at times, in our respective mediums; for many other stations, mike and julia worked independently. i made it a rule of mine to make sure to drag brian along for each and every stop, and to finish the painting there (sometimes after he deserted me for some reason or another), sometimes walking home, sometimes getting back on the train with a wet canvas held above me, careful not to get paint on anyone or anything. the way this project evolved, the way we collaborated... i look back at that time as some of the most precious moments i have ever spent. i would love to work with any combination of brian/mike/julia again. i would like to spend a year doing another yamanote project, or something else... here are brian's poems from the station neighborhoods my pictures above came out of: komagome rikugien park beneath matted slicks of pine-needles, dead leaves, looming to the surface, holding mouths palpating mutely at the mallards>br>carp, dull, implacable move. plum blossoms' flame seguing knolls, thatched gazebo's civil amnesty vie with jungle crows - volting in the conifers, mephitic, indignant, fleshed shades of the empty lot outside: mild 7 packets, betting slips, mosburger bags batteries, gyoza trays and hokka nokka tei chopsticks wrapper - for lordship of the gardens where the quality would stroll black tatters hang on stillness, reflections of an impulse old as art or middens. beyond, the skyline, yellowed and gnawing the air, know the ascendancy of crows. mejiro mejiro's sweet but my foul eart assents to weeping sores on granite, weed-tongued vents and hanging underpasses' plotless dents. the uni's dear, the hairstyles all the rage the scholars kitty-gilded in their cage but by rot's embonpoint am i assuaged. gotanda pinktown's bloom is spent by 12 o'clock so cast back on our own devices hard, intent, a putsch of putzes roaming streets in pack's delirium fire extinguishers lashed on flash cars' bonnets eggshell strip-lights thor-flung into doorwells golf-balls 3-ironed over graveyard plots to breeze-stirred tomb slat's rattled sacrilege. the sickly callus on the river lights is dawn-eased into cherry blossoms' flame a plosive din of foaming outlet vents the last slug of beer, then red-eye train. nippori cemetary treading past the rows and rows of plinths and pristine monoliths sanskrit ski-blades, crispy wreaths and sake one-cups got that usual mix of curiousity, reverence and pillage in the presence of another denomination's dead we follow the funeral summoning the numen's voltage from the faces, from the smoke the incantating of the priest his graveside bells in concert with the distant jr tune the desecration of crows jacked-up codgers, fornicating in trees give up - just watch and listen. a day of divination before unblinking altars unmeaning's varied sluicings: a blaze of gap-toothed kids on bikes the splatter of crowshit on the painted page crashed homeless on benches the emergency of cats, whisper-quick in privets an old dog listing sideways like a broken shopping trolley mourner sneaking a fag at the back of the procession and formalised hilarity of an office group splashing water on a stone - japanese custom, they beam. gut once - more like it - a woman waving heatedly, outpouring to her rock her hotline to the earless move in. nope. a man, hidden at first sitting in the tomb's lee, hunched worrying his hat in his hands. move on, feeling foolish. getting a bit cold now.