Mike Slack - Walking in Place 3: Tokyo

'Mysterious, unfathomable, and unutterable as the mystic experience itself is, the road that leads to it should not be.' – Eugen Herrigel, The Method of Zen Walking in Place 3: Tokyo extends the path of Tucson-based artist Mike Slack’s previous two volumes (on Berlin and New Orleans, both newly republished) into the gently sunlit corners and cul-de-sacs of Japan’s largest city — an incomprehensibly vast megalopolis teeming with unexpected pockets of sensuality, humour, and quietude. As with the previous books in this series, Slack’s ambulations are objectively site-specific — this is identifiably Tokyo terrain — yet oddly subjective. The journey is both outward (on foot) and inward (in the mind’s eye). The resulting images are at once formal and poetic; Slack’s playful renderings foreground the city’s unique palette of architectural eccentricities, graphic gestures, and cultural echoes, as much as they dissolve them. Here, we traverse zones of transcendental order within the flux of a chaotic megacity. There is calm amidst the density. Our gaze tilts upward to survey vast architectures; spans outward to note the unlikely curvatures, stairwells, and domestically scaled architecture; and hones downward at the oblique tile-work, the odd flourishes, the cats, the shadow play, and the fine grain of the city. In this humorous, nonetheless exacting sequence, the city folds in on itself to describe Tokyo’s curious, utterly unique, ambience. The underpinnings of Previous / Next image (9 of 9) architectural Metabolism – the mid-century Japanese avant-garde movement – seem relevant here. The way Slack renders it, the city becomes an ever-changing organism in constant flow, decay, and renewal; where the jewels of perception and life reveal themselves, if only we free ourselves to look. Not unlike the first two books in this series, Walking in Place 3: Tokyo is less a city guide than a pocket-sized psychic map – an open proposition for gentle collisions in mind, body, and urban space. In Tokyo, we consider the liminal space between the contemplation and nonchalance, and the fruit that such a state can bear. We pause on how the mind’s eye can both simplify and amplify the world.