Takamatsu's practice was dedicated to the critique of cognition and perception, through the rendering and variation of morphological devices, such as shadow, tautology, appropriation, perceptual and perspective distortion and representation.
[3] As part of his coursework, Takamatsu studied the beginnings of pictorial modernities spanning Sesshū Tōyō to Paul Cézanne (as noted in his writings).
[3] Sponsored by the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper between 1949 and 1963 and held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, this annual exhibition was modeled after the French Salon des Artistes Indépendants.
Takamatsu and his peers became increasingly interested in moving beyond figural representation and into the mediation of performance and environments, causing the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum to institute rules banning obtrusive materials and installation arrangements for the 14th edition.
On the Fluxus-produced map of Hi-Red Center's activities, compiled and edited with the help of Shigeko Kubota, the Yamanote Line Incident is listed as number three.
The group's name was formed from the first kanji characters of the three artists' surnames: "high" (the "Taka" in Takamatsu), "red" (the "Aka" in Akasegawa), and "center" (the "Naka" in Nakanishi).
[19] Although the group's inaugural exhibition, Fifth Mixer Plan (Dai goji mikisā keikaku, May 1963), featured artworks the three artists had created independently, such as Takamatsu's busy entanglements of strings, Akasegawa's objects wrapped in printed 1000-yen notes, and Nakanishi's Konpakuto obuje ("Compact Objets"), egg-shaped translucent resign sculptures that embalmed everyday items, the emphasis on collaborative "direct action" came to the fore in the group's later activities, which featured a variety of "events," "plans," and "happenings."
[21] Participants included Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik, and were photographed from six sides to create a quasi-medical document ostensibly meant for the outfitting of personal fallout shelters.
The artists and their assistants dressed in goggles and lab coats, roped off small areas of public sidewalk and meticulously cleaned them to mock the efforts to beautify the streets ahead of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.
[9] Although Hi-Red Center succeeded in attracting media attention and has come to be considered highly influential on later Japanese artists, its activities were short-lived; the group would dissolve only a year and a half after its inception, with Akasegawa recounting cryptically that “after Cleaning Event there was simply nothing left to do.”[18] In 1964, Takamatsu began his signature Shadows (影, kage) series of paintings (which he continued until the end of his life).
During this period of his career, Takamatsu, along with other Japanese artists like Nakahira Takuma, Enokura Koji, and Terayama Shuji, were actively interested in literature from Europe.
In November 1966, Takamatsu participated in From Space to Environment, a landmark two-part exhibition and event program in Tokyo that greatly influenced architecture, design, visual art, and music in Japan.
[27] However, one of the key differences that distinguishes Takamatsu's practice from Mono-ha is the presence, or direct influence, of an artists' creative subjectivity in the final form of the work.
Artists in Japan were critical of the Japanese establishment for their handling of the student protests and the unrest caused some art schools to become closed temporarily and in some cases, permanently.
[29] Takamatsu was included in the Japanese Pavilion for the 33rd Venice Biennale (1968) by art critic Hariu Ichirō, alongside Miki Tomio, Sugai Kumi, and Yamaguchi Katsuhiro.
[31] Hariu was a proponent that Japan's pavilion should be conceived as providing a platform for “international contemporaneity” [kokusaiteki dōjisei], where Japanese artists could appear in dialogue with their peers overseas.
[32] His vision was consistent with the leading art critics in the 1960s, Sano Takahiko noting that the Biennale was shifting to prioritising experimental practices, and should be seen as a form of cultural diplomacy.
Their commentaries led to the International Art Association supporting and restructuring the planning for the Japanese pavilion, namely allowing commissioners to serve two consecutive terms.
The first three commissioners selected in this period (1968–78) were the progressive critics Hariu Ichirō, Tōno Yoshiaki, and Nakahara Yūsuke, also known in Japan as the “Big Three” [go-sanke].
Notably, Takamatsu had planned to install Sunday Plaza in a location that was situated near existing hills, with the inclined background at the highest point, in order to pronounced the distorted and inverse perspective lines.
[27] Hiroyuki Nakanishi has considered Takamatsu's practice of producing similar works within sustained series as Takami[elevated place], the distillation of his concepts through the iterative making process.
[8] Point was Takamatsu's Exploration of "a single centripetal unit that cannot be divided any further",[4] not simply a geometric term, however, but a singular moving entity that straddled the space-time of reality and emptiness.
[37] Adrian Ogas notes that Takamatsu may have had a vision that the “points” represented as a cluster of accumulated lines of cells that are creating existence, self-propagating to build a life form as yet unseen.
[42] Beyond the abstracted length exemplified by string, Takamatsu also used to series to worlds—prompting things enter into unexpected associations by attaching everyday objects to his ropes and cords.
Slackcan be understood as a continuation of the Perspective series, in which the representation and perception of space is distorted by Takamatsu's mode of centering optical effects in the physical construct of these installations.
[45] Duncan observes Takamatsu's process of transforming the ordinary object and material to be secondary to his questioning of our ability to conceive the one-ness of things in their different and multiple forms.
Chairs are rendered unseat-able by positioning a brick underneath its leg, slabs of iron and brass posed as weightless by being held up by a piece of thin string.
In a series of essays titled “Sekai kakudai keikaku” (“A Plan for World Ex-pansion”), Takamatsu portrays an ever-evolving complexification of social ties.
Yoshida Kenchi describes Takamatsu's rose as reminiscent of Allan Kaprow's description of happenings, moving through imaginary and hallucinatory moments with a tone more passive than active.
"This cacophony of things, images, events, and bodies in Takamatsu's essay “Fuzai tai no tameni [For That Which That Does Not Exist]" turn into four lengthy rope-like sentences meandering through the complex intertwining of subjecthood and objecthood.