TACTICAL MUSEUM. Tokyo

Revolutionary Passage

Peter Fischli and David Weiss 'Dr Hoffman on the first LSD trip'
From 'Suddenly This Overview', 1982

January 11, 1906 – April 29, 2008

New Tokyo Art Guide in English

A new English language art guide has just been launched. Chin Music Press publishing and TABlog Editor Ashley Rawlings editing. I am not sure when it will be in the bookstores. It costs ¥3000. I contributed an essay on Tokyo art spaces. It is another much needed addition to English language information about contemporary art and culture in Tokyo, following on from the exploits of REALTOKYO, ArtIt Magazine, TAB and the 101 Art Fair etc.
Art Space Tokyo
I experienced a first yesterday, when a student at MAD showed me the latest copy of the Tower Records free magazine in which a musician called DJ Baku is interviewed. In the interview he referred to this blog and my post about Japan entering a second age of Sakoku (isolation). It's official - Tactical Museum is read by the Japanese hip hop DJ fraternity!

Reminders

I have been taking photographs on my mobile phone camera during my walks to work etc. of images in the city depicting people in states of altered consciousness/ transcendence.

If, as Henri Lefevbre suggests in 'Production of Space', each society produces its own spatial configurations which echo their various social and economic codes, focusing on these particular image types made me think about how states of mind are today equally objects of aspirational consumption as well as continuing to represent rather more archaic archetypal images rooted in religious traditions. I was very taken by the dark photograph of a poster depicting Dogen Zenshi (patriarch of Zen Buddhism) which was pasted on a window of an antique shop in Omote-Sando, opposite Paul Smith and other brand boutiques. Even through the reproduction of a poster image, his stern, ink brushed face seemed to resonate with a sense of terrifying counsel in the dark gloom of the night.

Plants Speak with Us

On my walk home the other evening I noticed this notice outside a florist near Ebisu. It made me stop, take this picture, and think about what it said.
I tend to think that flowers and plants share aspects of Mind, and that we should try to talk with them. The various plants at home have names.
There was a German experimental psychologist called Gustav Theodor Fechner who wrote a book called Nanna in 1848 (translates roughly as soul-life of plants). Fechner posited that plants contain a central nervous system like us and that we should talk with plants.

In 1970, George Milstein released an album called 'Music to Grow Plants' (ESC Records #121). It has a wonderful cover.

It seems to me that these examples are intimations of our archaic links with the natural domain before the categorical imperatives of science and taxonomy or the rigidly psychosis identifying characteristics of modern psychology.
Not to mention the profound historical relationships we have made through plants with a panoply of sacred visions and imaginings. Entheogen is the term used to describe the use of plants in sacred contexts.

Speaking 7 inches, Endo Ichiro and Shibuya underpasses.

I spoke yesterday at the 101 Art Fair with Haruka Ito, Director of magical art room. Many people came. I opted to translate myself, which resulted in a very interesting proto-performance in which I would say a few things in Japanese followed by English, but the content would invariably begin to dissipate. So in effect I think I ended up speaking a kind of 'A' side and a 'B' side, each with slightly different mixes of an original.

Haruka invited Ichiro Endo, an artist who lives in a small van, along to share his thoughts. Endo has worked with Makoto Aida a bit, making a very funny video with him where we see him running into the main wall of the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower (where the Mori Museum is) for twenty minutes. Endo did not go to art school. He travels around in his small van, which also doubles as a mobile studio/ exhibition space.

Endo's practice revolves around the phrase 'Mirai-E' - Towards the Future. There he is in front of one of his signature large banner paintings with the above characters. I suggested in the talk that we may link this kind of approach to characters like Taro Okamoto, who wrote an interesting treatise called 'Jomon Doki Ron' (Thoughts on Jomon) in 1952. The Jomon was the Mesolithic pre-historic period of Japan. Okamoto's interest in Japanese pre-history and a sense of the primitive can, I think, be usefully re-visited to think about the work of younger artists like Endo, as well as many artists emerging now whose works seem to touch on aspects of magic, ritual, invisibility, animistic traditions, Japanese myth and festivals and images of primal nature. I find this interesting in light of the dominant discourses which have so strongly defined Japanese art recently - subcultural tendencies reflected in Superflat and the banality of the everyday reflected in Micropop (and in the sociological critiques of thinkers like Miyadai Shinji -  'Owari Naki Nichijoh'). Sawaragi Noi has, I believe, also touched on these aspects. Okamoto's primitivism must, of course, be read in light of his search for a post-war Japanese avant-garde within a broad European Modernism, as well as part of a rather essentialist 'Nihon-jinron' (unique Japanese-ness) search. Nevertheless, one of my impressions of seeing work by younger artists at the two art fairs as well as at graduation shows, has been to think about such things.

Endo has been involved in something else of interest. At the end of last year, as part of a city scheme to gentrify and evict homeless people from an underground passageway near the 246 highway in central Tokyo, a so called 'gallery' was initiated on the tunnel walls. Endo and others have objected to this and made a series of counter art actions and events in this tunnel. Makoto Aida has written about this process at length (in Japanese only). Makoto Aida's writing on the Shibuya underpass 'Gallery'.

Heavy, Fast Week for Art in Tokyo

As gasoline prices fall, the Diet remains deadlocked, philosophers are refused entry, a film (Yasukuni by Li Ying) is effectively forced out of all theatres in Tokyo, this week sees the city embracing the global contemporary art bubble with the opening of the long running Art Fair Tokyo and the new, younger 101 Art Fair. I am due to speak with Haruka Ito of Magical Art Room on Saturday 5th at 14:00 in one of the public programs accompanying the 101 Fair. As is often the case with these affairs, the rather dramatic title of our session is 'Japanese Art Now!' (note the exclamation mark. Does it point to a sense of shock? delight? or anger?). The session publicity blurb includes the following remark: "As some new post-Superflat artists emerge in Japan, we take a look at the Japanese contemporary art scene at the beginning of the 21st century". wow.
The thing is, that I recently keep feeling that things are decidedly not of the 21st century here - that things are veneered in all of the smooth coatings of global culture, and yet that underlying much of this remains serious questions about how we want to live today in this society, this culture. Recent cultural news items which I have posted about here make me really think about the state of affairs in the place of my birth.
I am moreover, now undergoing the process of 'Kika' (changing of nationality from British to Japanese). More on this as I transform.
With all of the late nights, drinking and hard selling that is about to descend on central Tokyo, I paste images of one of the more famous of the 'energy drinks' here. While absolutely intolerant of all drugs, Japan simultaneously generates one of the largest hyper caffeine based 'energy drink' markets in the world. This is the drug for the labouring masses, the all night office salaryman, the truck drivers, the pre exam student and the hard-selling gallerist. This is the world of Murakami's wide-eyed amphetamine-hi DOB - where the world becomes flat, shiny and very fast.
And here is when I move towards the door.....

Recipe for Green Fairy Pie. from a torn note found inside an earthen pot discovered by Mr. and Mrs. F. Nolen when they moved into 732 North Cherry Drive, Idaho in 1983.

My Grandmother told me about this recipe, which has been made for at least 4000 years on the Irish West coast.
"Careful Be when Calling the Fairy Pie. The Stars and the Moon shall Rise and Sink Twelve Times Before this Pie Plays the Piper."
Ingredients:
Fresh green peas.
Flour
Egg
Raisins
Dried Fig
Water
Butter
Nutmeg
Seeds of the XXXXX (words have been erased in the original document).
Take the green peas and boil them in salted water.
Make pie dough as it was done before.
Put the peas in a large baking tray.
Mix in the raisins and figs. sprinkle with nutmeg.
Place the flattened pie dough over the mixture.
Make twelve holes in the pie dough with the middle finger.
Inside each hole insert seventy seeds and a knob of butter.
Seal the holes with remaining dough.
Bake in a hot oven until dough rises and becomes brown.

(the following addendum was added to the recipe and written by hand along its left margin)

Charlotte. Make this for your dear brothers when they return from the war. It will heal them and bless them with the constant constancy of the Fairies without whom we all wander aimlessly on the waves. With Constance. Mother.

Negri Matters

I attended the explanation meeting for Negri's sudden Japan visit cancellation last night at The International House. In short, it seems that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Immigration Office hastily and without any prior notice demanded that Negri apply for a visa, even though the organisers had confirmed numerous times with them that he did not require a visa to enter Japan. The visa issue emerged two days prior to Negri's planned arrival, on the 17th. Details of the case can be read at Japan Today , The Tocqueville Connection and breitbart.com.
Japanese law states that people with a criminal record and over one year in prison cannot enter Japan. There is a clause to this though which states that political prisoners are exempt. The Japanese authorities insisted that he submit all relevant documents which would prove that he was a political prisoner - something which, according to statements made at the meeting, would involve tracking down thousands of pages of court documents in Italian and take many months. This was simply impossible to achieve. I was surprised to hear that Negri's French partner, Judith Revel, was also  requested to apply for a visa, even though as a French citizen this is not needed.  The organisers last night could not hide their immense sense of disappointment, and commented that this effective denial of entry amounted to an infringement of Negri's human rights as well as to the curtailment of intellectual, research and cultural freedom of university institutions. Some commented that it amounted to a sense of paranoia and political intervention by the government, especially in the run up to this summer's Tohyakou G8 Summit, which Japan hosts.
The various events which were planned will nonetheless go ahead.
Tokyo University intends to use real-time media technology to try to realise a symposium with Negri in remote attendance. Kyoto University will hold a symposium with the oranisers reading aloud Negri's prepared paper. Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music will hold a two day event of symposiums and art actions. They also plan a 'mochi-tsuki' (sticky rice pounding) event, where participants can vent frustration by taking turns pounding rice. More information Here.
I wrote some months back about Japan entering its second period of 'sakoku' (isolation). The trigger then was the introduction of finger-printing technologies for all non Japanese entering Japan, thinly veiled under the rhetoric of its anti-terrorism laws. Only the United States and Japan asks all visitors to submit bio-data. Now, with Negri's case, Japan is once again in partnership with the United States, as the only other country which effectively denied him entry. Negri's letter mentioned that he has travelled to 22 countries without restriction - the United States was the only exception, as it demanded piles of documents which were simply not reasonable to gather. Japan seems to have followed suit.
It is indeed a sad day when the apparatus of the state cannot accommodate one thinker to enter its borders.

Sublime and Ridiculous

Concurrent to denying philosophers entry to the country, the Foreign Minister was appointing a large animation cat - Doraemon - to the post of official 'anime Ambassador' of Japan.

See THIS  AP news story for more.

Japan effectively denies entry for Antonio Negri

Antonio Negri ('Empire', 'Multitude' etc) was to arrive in Japan this week for a series of lectures and discussions. I was to hear him speak at the International House of Japan this coming Saturday. I received a phone call from I-House about one hour ago informing me that his trip has been abruptly cancelled. The organising committee is holding a meeting to explain the circumstances of this decision tommorrow evening, which I intend to attend.
For immediate news please see THIS webpage on the I-House website, which has the letters from Negri explaining the course of events in Japanese and French.
More details as I get them.

LDP MP's ask to see 'Yasukuni' film

There was an interesting item on News 23 (channel 6) tonight about conservative LDP lawmakers asking to see the documentary film 'Yasukuni', to make sure that it was not 'anti-Japan' and that grant money was not 'mis-used'. You can read a report HERE. It seems to be the first time that politicians have intervened in this way before public screening. One of the lawmakers being interviewed stressed that she wanted to make sure that the film portrayed history objectively and was not ideological. This means that all sports commentary, evening news programs with their incredible 'commentators', and pretty much everything else in the cultural industries need politicians to nursemaid prior to general public release.

5 Bidai Ten: degree shows of five art universities.

Young Japanese artists seem to be immersed in a Symbolist/ Introspective search - a response to the crises of Japanese culture and society, a feeling of unease, insecurity, limited prospects etc. To quote my favorite 'raver' the late Terence McKenna, "As the inevitable chaostrophy approaches people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets itself into trouble it casts itself back to the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew." The fourth year students responses are to a kind of archaic revival, a returning to the liminal zones of childhood, primitive mark making, symbolist and romantic landscapes, animistic visions where humans and animals communicate, ethereal, mist-like abstractions which evoke ectoplasmic photographs of the late C19th, parodies of European classicism and Myth, fairy tales and Pre-Raphaelite imagery, psychological imagery of shattered bodies, fragmentation, isolation and dolls. All of these motifs and themes can be traced to pre or early Modernist art concerns. They seem to be emerging now in Japan, following a century of searching for a 'Japanese Modernism' in the mold of Europe and America. The formal concerns of Mono-Ha and Appropriation (post-modernism) have been eclipsed by urges to return to an Older past, states of infancy, paradisical childhood and immersion in ideas of Nature.

The problem though is that much of this is carried out Formally - as simple quoting from familiar, well trodden, cliched sources, popular culture, manga etc. The potential radicality of this project is almost erased. What it can be is a serious and intelligent MINING, an ARCHAEOLOGY, of history, those pre-modern ideas and experiences which were largely supressed by Modern processes in the Meiji period as well as by Post-War US occupation administration. The traces, seeds of something interesting seem to be there in many of these works, but they remain refractions, simulacra. The students need to get out into the woods, start farming, research folk Shinto and its rituals, REALLY dream and use the imagination as devices to re-vision Japanese society today and their experiences in it.

160 works in the Exhibition.

JapRockSampler and Michelin Guide Furor

I have been reading Julian Cope's 'JapRockSampler'. I highly recommend it. What's nice about it is its weaving together of psychedelic rock, avant-garde music, art and social and cultural histories. One begins to form histories in the mind, linking artists to musicians, art groups to concerts etc. It is a richly researched work. The book has a website HERE.

On another note, this morning's International Herald Tribune ran a front page article on the snubbing of Michelin Guide Tokyo by a number of Tokyo chefs and Tokyo Governor Ishihara. A chef, Mr. Toshiya Kadowaki is quoted as saying "Japanese food was created here, and only Japanese know it. How can a bunch of foreigners show up and tell us what is good or bad?". The current issue of Goethe magazine is running an alternative Michelin Guide issue and an in depth critique of the 'official' Michelin guide. Leaving aside the stunted 'Nihonjinron' attitude of chef Kadowaki and Governor Ishihara, what interested me was the vigour and authority of the counter critiques which the French guide book has caused in some quarters here. It seems to point to a sense of pride in a very living culinary culture. This is very different to the position of art, where magazines and editors never engage in critical debate about what's considered good or current. I think it is great that the publication of the Michelin guide has led to the creation of some sense of a public debate (albeit led by sadly conservative voices who espouse the age long myth of Japanese 'essence').
This past Saturday Director of the Echigo-Tsumari Triennale, Fram Kitagawa gave a lecture at MAD in which he spoke about the lack of a civil society (shimin shakai) in post-war Japan which would provide art with a public arena of discourse and debate. Rather, art has remained an abstracted idea, a closed domain with little sense of being embedded in a public. Interestingly Kitagawa proposed that part of the reasons for this sitaution can be traced back to the failiures of the Iwakura Mission, sent to Europe in the late C19th to gather knowledge about Modernity. They naively interpreted art museums as great civic and political mechanisms of collecting and categorising 'culture' rather than as active elements within a discourse-buillding public sphere. Hence, art has remained cut off from life experiences, and been developed as something representative of a thing called 'culture'. Perhaps in the world of culinary culture, this sense of detachment is far less sharply defined. After all, food is something which most people can partake in easily and with little cost.
It is interesting to ponder a similar 'foreign' invasion which occurred in the art world in Japan in the 1950s - the so called 'Informel Senpuu' which swept through the Gutai group and essentially folded its activities into a broader history of Euro/ American-centric abstract painting. The more impermanent, time-based and experimental works of early Gutai was gradually subsumed into this Informel reading, leading many artists to turn to abstract painting and jettison their earlier attitudes. Although an example from over a half century ago, it raises an interesting counter example to what the Michelin Guide has stirred up. The sad part of the current Michelin debate though is that the counter Japanese position takes an extreme and essentialist position, that effectively and perversely curtails further debate by insisting that non Japanese cannot understand Japanese food. I would hope that magazine editors had more intelligence. Rather than this orthodox 'Nihonjinron' position, a more dynamic discussion on the complex issues of cultural understanding through food, how food is today immersed in global processes and whether there can indeed be 'alternative' histories and canons to what publications such as Michelin have protected, would serve to create a richer and more vibrant culinary culture.
Perhaps if there was something like a Michelin Guide for contemporary art that swept into Tokyo and published its findings in the manner of rankings, a similar outcry would ensue and public discussion generated....or then again, it may simply confirm current hierarchies and consolidate structures. Or, following Kitagawa's proposal, what the Japanese state needs to do is appoint a New Iwakura Mission to go yonder, survey different models for art and attempt to re-tune the current state of things.

Artist Makoto Aida has a superb work called 'Discover the Element of New Taste' , which I worked with him on for The Singapore Biennale 2006. It elegantly captures many of the issues I was pondering above.

Ways of Knowing

This essay was published in Metronome No. 11 'What is to Be Done?' Tokyo. Edited by Clementine Deliss as a special edition for documenta 12 magazines. 2007.
Written by Roger McDonald.

Having passed through a traditional academic PhD program, and its various research methodologies, it is good to be able to look back and survey what it all means. Now, as one of the programming directors of MAD, the independent study program of Arts Initiative Tokyo, and as an independent curator and part-time lecturer, the days of intense library-based research or reading have opened out to broader approaches of acquiring knowledge. The question of Moving Schools is also one that takes on an increased resonance within such a discussion. So in this short writing I would like to share my thoughts.

It seems to me that moving schools already exist in myriad forms. If one can define a school as any community – transient, impermanent or more solidified – which comes together to create or disseminate forms of knowledge, then one is faced with many examples. How we define knowledge also fundamentally alters the ways in which we can think about this, and I am always drawn to Henri Bergson’s approach of understanding knowledge as a spectrum spanning intellectual, analytical reasoning through to experiential, physical or even mystical gnosis. Pilgrimages constitute a nomadic, but highly directed, community of followers who wander through multiple spaces ingesting specialized forms of knowledge and insight. For them temples or sacred sites may function as knowledge bases, where new spiritual learning takes place. The conversations, meetings and sharing which occurs during their journeys become key knowledge acquiring routes.

The circus is another, highly mobile yet familiar and nostalgic kind of learning vessel. Offering different forms of spectacle and entertainment, as well as diversions from everyday life, the different forms of knowledge imparted by circuses as they pass through a town constitute an important counter-balance to the kinds of formal learning we are taught at schools. The circus shows us risk, physical danger, humour, thrill and elation, contributing to our emotional knowledge base. The phenomenon of raves from the early 1990s and continuing in various forms today may also constitute a moving school of sorts. Coming together to dance in fields or warehouses, often under the effects of drugs, the spaces created by raves generate unique energies and learning possibilities. Perhaps it is about communicating with a stranger through dance or an insight created by a particular combination of sounds. I learnt things in raves which feedback continually into aspects of what I do today. They are not particularly quantifiable, but perhaps about providing me with a sense of what a community could be, and actually participating in this.

What are some of the ways in which we acquire knowledge? I would like to outline four which I find interesting in my own research and work, and also all non-disciplined ways – in other words not tied to formal, institutional or testing methods. First, one can acquire knowledge from a community. This may be through events like workshops or therapy sessions where participants share experiences and ideas. It can also happen on dance floors, generating powerful energies which circulate collectively. Traditional learning environments, schools and campuses, also provide a community for knowledge travelers. Second, there is the route of knowledge acquisition through the ingestion of elixirs, plants or specially prepared substances. Most commonly associated with many forms of shamanism, this way is also the most biologically direct, literally altering the synaptic junctions in the mind to affect changes in consciousness. With the now popular use of so called ‘smart drugs’ to aid learning and memory, I feel that it is only a matter of time before we find ourselves returning to forms of ingestion-learning, albeit manufactured and controlled by large pharmaceutical companies.  Third, there is knowledge acquisition through mimicry or copying. A fundamental aspect of most traditional arts of Japan including ikebana, tea and various martial arts, through copying a master, one becomes slowly imbibed with certain codes and forms. The practice of drawing from life and plaster casts (which still continues as a method of entrance examination in Japan) also relates to this kind of knowledge acquisition. Copying can be used to control and repress, but it can also be an effective tactic of resistance and camouflage. Fourthly, there is gaining knowledge through mistakes, trial and error, digression and waste – things which formal education tries to discard. Learning how to operate a new electronic appliance is usually like this, but it can also be used creatively and intentionally to generate dissonances. I think that dancers and performers would be highly aware of this as a way of proceeding, and the amazing work of Merce Cunningham comes to mind.

Finally, the question of creating or enabling specific spaces where knowledge can be accessed or tapped into. What kinds of spaces, if any, are suited to generating knowledge? What kinds of tools and adaptors encourage or aid learning? Traditionally such spaces have been identified with silence (the library, study) and solidity (imposing architectures of stone, permanence). But it seems to me that there are clearly different types and possibilities of space where learning or knowledge acquisition can happen. The tools which we use today to access knowledge or explore it have also radically changed – the internet and computers being perhaps the most important. Timothy Leary spoke of the importance of ‘Set and Setting’ in relation to the psychedelic experience, whilst the Swedish artist Oyvind Fahlstrom talked about building ‘Pleasure Houses’ instead of culture centers. The office and sofa designs of Verner Panton opened furniture out to embrace intimacy and collectivity. Modular design, mobility and fluidity characterize one of my favourite pieces of furniture, the bean bag, designed by Zanotta in 1969. I feel that curatorial studies should incorporate sessions in interior and furniture design, as these fields map our physical and psychological relations to spaces, colours, shapes and touch. The blog-sphere has been an important space for me, in sorting ideas and research and sharing it with others. It has an informality and ease about it which academic papers lack. Finally I must confess to doing much quality reading in the toilet – a fantastic space for learning. Perhaps one of the last private spaces yet to be fully invaded by media, it is on the toilet that one truly becomes a vessel through which various paths of knowledge pass.

'Goth' at Yokohama Museum of Art

‘Goth: Reality of a Departed World’ at The Yokohama Museum of Art was firmly rooted in a post-Marylin Manson landscape fully replete with nose-hooks, tattoos and horror sources. This is a very different set of references to the goth subcultures of my experiences going to school in the UK, which emanated from bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Ghost Dance and The Cure. Unfortunately for me at least, the exhibition did not explore these recent manifestations of goth subculture and chose to reference its artistic and literary history instead, delving into grand themes of death and life. The exhibition did not clearly delineate these distinctions in its presentation or texts. Compared to its older sister, punk, goth subculture is less concerned with the social space, with confrontation and politics, preferring to carve out subjective spaces of poetry and imagination. The historical references of Goth subcultures have thus usually been the Romantic movement of Northern Europe in the C19th.

Alien Sex Fiend: excessive, camp theatrics, funny.
The work of the Mexican artist Dr. Lakra presented a highly engaging and complex layering of readings regarding our potential understandings of ‘goth’ today. Dr. Lakra is interested in tattoos. He draws intricate tattoos and markings onto the bodies of models and personalities adorning the covers of popular magazines, original Japanese woodblock prints and mass produced plastic dolls. Like Guy Debord and the Situationists, the work is a highly effective detournement of readily available media images, transforming them into completely different signs for social deviancy or subversion. Dr. Lakra spent two months living and working in Tokyo, and he has made several new bodies of work. Particularly memorable was an eagle like relief head made up entirely of colorful wax food samples bought in the Kappabashi area of Tokyo. Mounted on a stained wooden board, the work seemed like a trophy of Dr. Lakra’s detourning skills, a testament to the power of the imagination to turn readymade objects into strange, unruly totems which pierce the rules of commerce and capital. This work related to a series of powerful portraits by the Japanese artist Pyuupiru, who has been documenting her male to female sex change process since 2003. The series showed her face covered in various substances and materials including strips of raw meat, psychedelic colored liquids, clay looking paste and hair. Each portrait bore a suggestive title such as ‘A surgeon who sells skin’, or ‘An ecstatic drug addict’. Pyuupiru’s presentation seemed linked to Dr. Lakra’s in its explorations of marking as a form of transformation and transgression, although the ‘ready-made’ in Pyuupiru’s case was her own body. Pyuupiru’s portraits pointed to a contemporary concern of many ‘goths’ with the body and its transformations through fashion, decoration, piercing and perhaps ultimately with altering one’s subjectivity in relation to the society one inhabits.

Theda Bara, Goth Vamp icon, US silent film actress. 1885-1955.

Elegant Gothic Lolita fashion brand EGL.

The only documentary style work in the exhibition was a room of photographs by Masayuki Yoshinaga who took pictures of Japanese Gothic Lolita followers. These photographs were at once both a testament to an intense subculture of deviating from social norms, but also a peculiar confirmation of a homogenous and marketable fashion trend encouraged by street fashion magazines like Fruits. Although in parts, the exhibition seemed to slide into a parade of visual clichés (skulls, blood etc) which moulded it into a kind of ‘freak show’, there were just enough works which propelled the exhibition beyond these readings, into areas of transgression and dark unconscious desires.

I have always thought of UK goths as, on the whole, considerably dirtier and unkempt, compared to their contemporary Japanese counterparts. This relates to the historical lineage with Romanticism, and with a sense of returning to nature etc a la Wordsworth, or CD Friedrich.

siouxsie.

Note: The reviewer was a Goth in his younger days, living in the UK.

Art Center Ongoing Opens with Wada's Tasty Kebabs

A new alternative art space and cafe opened yesterday in Kichijoji, Tokyo. It is called Art Center Ongoing. Ongoing are a group of students who have been putting together exhibitions of young artists in vacant spaces and, more recently at art spaces like BankArt Yokohama. Ongoing's Director is Nozomu Ogawa, who we invited to speak at our school at AIT when they first started, four years or so ago. In the current climate of a booming contemporary art market in Tokyo,with mass media magazines and even television programs zooming into all things 'Art', the state of other, non market-oriented approaches or art spaces is something to think about. With no city or state funding for this sector, things are invariably led by the commercial side, with top gallerists like Tomio Koyama and Sueo Mitsuma becoming spokespersons for 'Japanese contemporary art'. This is fine, as things go, but crucially remains tilted heavily towards the private, commercial side of things. Is there any counter-balance to this?
So it is good to see the opening of an art cafe and space which is committed to different visions. I have always felt that a 'healthy' art scene (if this is not a contradiction!), is one which accommodates many layers of activity, from the high-end commercial through to non profits, artist spaces, schools, functioning museums and a critical media. With the current paucity of public support for contemporary art in Tokyo and public institutions under funding pressures to create block-buster shows, things are critically tilting towards a market-led scenario. But, I feel that different things keep happening on various scales. In times of prosperity the media tends to ignore tactical things in favour of bigger, easy to understand stories. Another recent example of a different layer in Tokyo was Central East Tokyo.
Art Space Ongoing will open Fridays through Sunday. There is a cafe on the first floor and a gallery space upstairs. The first exhibition showed a new installation by Masahiro Wada - a very interesting artist who founded the artists collective 'Homebase' - Wada's webpage   is here. We have worked with him at AIT a number of times, and his show at Ongoing combines various elements which he has worked with including kebabs, fairy lights, neo-primitive wooden carvings and large rotating plaster shapes. Some images of the space and the show below:

Hosting the Mix (a long essay on recent 'crossings' in Japan)

The recent Henry Darger exhibition at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art was an interesting example of a wider phenomenon which can be traced through much recent contemporary Japanese art. This phenomenon reflects a desire to mix separate genres and art forms together. It can be traced in a number of museum exhibitions such as ‘JAM: Tokyo-London’ at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in 2002 which showed works by 43 ‘creators’ using the concept of the music jam session to, as the press materials state, ‘experience the energy created by this meeting of different genres’. Takashi Murakami’s ‘Superflat’ exhibition from 1997 and Noi Sawaragi’s curated ‘Nihon Zero-Nen’ in 1999 both asked audiences to traverse diverse cultural fields including animation, otaku, model making and science fiction. Japan’s first bi-lingual art magazine, ArtIt, has been pursuing an editorial line exploring cross genre approaches, from issues such as ‘The Boundary between Art and Design’ (winter/spring 2004), ‘180 creatives from all genres’ (spring/summer 2005) and ‘Collaboration: multiplying talent many times over’ (summer/fall 2006). In 2007 two major museum exhibitions have brought these tendencies to large audiences: ‘Space For Your Future’ curated by Yuko Hasegawa at The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT), and ‘Roppongi Crossing: Future Beats in Japanese Contemporary Art’ at the Mori Museum selected by four curators. What is going on with this urge to break down artistic categories?

Henry Darger 

The Hara exhibition certainly played the role of exposing what is called outsider art to a large audience, most of whom were probably unaware of the unique historical and sociological debates regarding the art of the insane or mentally ill. I am particularly interested in the cultural marketing of outsider art in Japan because it was my PhD professor, Roger Cardinal, who proposed the term ‘outsider art’ in 1972. The term has a long and specific history and has certainly played an important role within any reading of artistic modernism. I was surprised and curious to learn from my students at various art universities how popular the Henry Darger exhibition was. Part of this trend in Japan can be attributed to the non-canonical status that outsider art has – like Japan, which has passed through various translations of Western art history, methods and techniques since the late Meiji period, outsider artists have been afforded the privilege of working in a demarcated space, away from the strictures and histories of the art historical canon and its philosophical underpinnings. This is certainly potentially liberating, and allows us to think about all kinds of people as creators of visual languages and worlds. And yet one is left wondering on whose ‘rules’ was Henry Darger’s works seen and read at the Hara Museum? In whose interests were the intricacies and undulations of outsider art flattened out so that it could be shown in a museum of contemporary art?

Part of this is certainly to do with the so called ‘end of Grand Narratives’ and the splintering of ‘micro-narratives’ which Post-Modernism apparently heralded. Museum collections and their privileging of specific canons, genders and perspectives have been challenged. But I feel that the more important reason for this penchant for flattening has to do with the nature of the culture industry, and how ‘art’ has today become commodified like ice-cream or brand clothes. This line of analysis was expounded by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their 1947 essay on the ‘Culture Industry’. Adorno and Horkheimer looked to the economic modes of production in which culture is produced and the ways in which art is affected by and affects the relationship between culture and economics, between the products of society and power relations within society. We live in a situation where, as Frederic Jameson puts it, ‘culture’ has become a product in its own right. The significance of Adorno and Horkeimer’s analysis lies in its supposition that culture is today an industry, and that this exists upon capitalist systems of power. The British critic Julian Stallabrass suggests that this commodification of culture has sharpened in the last fifteen years: “during the 1990s there was an intensification of the forces, many of them old features of capitalism, that contributed to the dominance of triumphant consumer culture over art, and indeed over all other cultural production.”  Stallabrass goes on to say that with the collapse of alternative economic models in 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall) and the declining fortunes of Germany and Japan, it is the neoliberal model which has become dominant. Neoliberalism is defined by its embrace of privatization, high unemployment, low wages for workers, the weakening of unions and neglect of public services, all aspects which can be felt in Japan since the 1990s.

In the name of ‘collaboration’ or greater ‘crossing’ we see today in Japan, design, architecture, graffiti, painting, photography, film and outsider art melted into highly digestable exhibition packages, flattening out previously distinct art forms with their own specific histories, discourses and lines of inquiry. One of the defining characteristics of free market capitalism is that goods and services are standardized or homogenized on a whole spectrum of levels from their manufacture and distribution to the ways in which goods exist in law and various guidelines, to their marketing and consumption. This makes it essentially easier and cheaper to produce more goods and administer systems which keep the market fluid and stable. Differences serve the very practical purpose of making the market more exciting and free by offering a diversity of choice, which however, exist only on the terms which the market allows: an ubiquitous ever multiplying web of networks and nodes.

The nature of today’s world market encourages greater diversity and ‘crossing’, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri recount in ‘Empire’: “ The ideology of the world market has always been the anti-foundational and anti-essentialist discourse par excellence. Circulation, mobility, diversity and mixture are its very conditions of possibility. Trade brings differences together and the more the merrier! Differences (of commodities, populations, cultures and so forth) seem to multiply infinitely in the world market, which attacks nothing more violently than fixed boundaries; it overwhelms any binary division within its infinite multiplicities.”  Can we suggest that exhibitions like Space For Your Future and Roppongi Crossing echo the sentiments outlined by Hardt and Negri? Is their rhetoric of diversity and crossing precisely reflective of the hegemony of neoliberalism over culture and its vessels like the museum? Crucially, it seems that these tendencies in Japan today have emerged with very little sense of critical distance or analysis, and resulted in museums simply absorbing the rules of neo-liberalism, becoming another reflective node in its ‘infinite multiplicities’.

Cross genre exhibitions can offer highly explosive counter narratives to what museums have been showing us. This remains though, intricately tied to the ways in which it is done – the game plans which are envisioned. Most crossing exhibitions and projects sadly act like compulsive black holes, flattening out the potential complexities of the various works through the mechanisms and rhetorics of the museum, which ultimately prevails as the chief purveyor of meaning. Museums in Japan today face increasing pressures to ‘serve’ a public and generate income to maintain themselves. One of the key benchmarks for this was the passing of the Shitei Kanrisha Seido (or greater autonomy law for institutions) in 2003. This has opened up the running of public cultural institutions in Japan to a process of bidding, with greater financial independence being a key factor in the final decision making process. This has impacted art museums in various ways. For example The Yokohama Museum of Art will be the first museum I know of in Japan to start a ‘school’ program from April 2007, that actively engages students with their permanent collection.

In the light of this, exhibitions like SFYF and ‘Roppongi Crossing’ have cleverly and pragmatically adopted the rules of a sophisticated ‘culture industry’ which is sustained by the desires and mechanisms of capitalist neoliberal economics. Both exhibitions marketed themselves by highlighting their ‘non art pure’ pedigree, which was somehow magically bestowed on them by the seemingly simple inclusion of designers or animators. This tendency is moreover not only confined to museum exhibitions, but can be seen across many media including magazines, club cultures and the fashion and design worlds. The museum was crucially left un-tainted by the inclusion of different genres, when what should be happening is the emergence of greater discourse and critique. Letting painting, architecture and graphic design engage in a serious dialogue should create all manner of interesting tensions, harmonies or dissonances. These could be evoked in the exhibition space through exhibition design, in wall texts, catalogue writings or in various kinds of public events or programs. How the hosting museum or curator chooses to mix these together and manifest them is key, according to what rules and value systems? For public institutions, the question of public money obviously remains a central question, and one that generates issues about public accountability and access.

Rolywholyover exhibition view, Mito, Japan.

I think about John Cage’s exhibition ‘Rolywholyover’ (1991-2) as an example of how the museum could be temporarily ‘blinded’ or ‘hijacked’, by a truly accommodating and open attitude. ‘Rolywholyover’ was an exhibition co-curated by John Cage in 1992, just prior to his death. It was a retrospective of Cage’s own visual works, but also a manifestation of his methodologies and attitudes towards life and living, in the form of an exhibition. Cage was  interested in trying to set up a condition of real open-ness, where many different genres and disciplines could be presented together. What he achieved was a truly ecological situation in the museum, where radical change, chaos and translations happened. This kind of ecological condition cannot happen simply by selecting artists and presenting them in a space: I think that it happens only when the curators and artists begin to develop a vision together, which also means developing an attitude towards art and towards the museum. It means taking risks and initiating new ways of display or framing that the museum and artists might actually find deeply disturbing or difficult.

Another example I would like to briefly introduce is the multimedia collective USCO who toured the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s creating psychedelic mixed-media shows which used multiple slide and film projectors, strobes, pulsing light machines and multiple sound tracks. The New York Times reporter Grace Glueck called it a ‘programmed pandemonium’ . USCO was one manifestation of a wider movement towards multi-media and the dissolving of boundaries between different media which writers such as Marshall McLuhan and artists such as Alan Kaprow and the EAT group were actively espousing. USCO’s extravaganza’s involved a decidedly psychedelic and mystical aspect, that acted as a kind of sensory re-programming which could ultimately result in an experience of radical re-birth. What I find interesting in USCO’s approach to mixing genres is their uncompromising stance towards creating spaces where consciousness could potentially be challenged, the ego weakened, and some kind of psychological change take place. Indeed, it is intriguing to ponder the discussions from this period concerning the merging of media and the merging or melting of consciousness. The role played by psychedelic substances such as LSD in supposedly breaking down psychological categories and divisions, seems to be echoed in the breaking down of genre categories in light shows and the ‘Happenings’ of Kaprow and others. Much of the rhetoric of Timothy Leary and others certainly revolves around the breaking of previous game patterns and habits through participation in psychedelic experiences or spaces. A comprehensive and critical reading of this area is offered by Felicity Scott in her paper ‘Acid Visions’.

I think that there is a case to urge museums to actually do ‘less curating’, in the sense of creating big budget selection shows of artists. If we thought about Cage for a moment, we can also suggest another vision for curatorial practice today that would be about creating conditions or ‘scenarios’ as Nicolas Bourriaud often speaks of. Instead of selecting artists according to subjective curatorial themes, a Cageian approach would suggest something more expansive and open-ended. The parameters or algorithims for a project would be set out, rather than the contents being privileged. So, curators would begin their discussions by asking, “what kind of situation do we want to create here?”, “what kinds of experience do we want to encourage in this show?”. In this way the audience becomes immediately something central to the discussions, rather than being an abstract add-on which the education team deals with at a later stage. So for example, there could be a show based on the simple premise of making the museum a livable space – a non-oppressive space which perhaps operates on different rules to our everyday lives. How would you try to set this situation up in a museum? And to really engage this topic I think it becomes crucial to re-think the rules of the museum and to take risks in it. Maybe you have to open the museum up twenty-four hours (like BankArt 1929 Yokohama did in 2005), or maybe you have to allow visitors to stay overnight there? (like Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery did for Tsuyoshi Ozawa’s Capsule hotel project). From these questions, I think one can begin to think about art – because it must be something which is sustained by experience and which must emerge out of real experiences (trips) first. Within this condition or scenario, there can be many layers of meaning or direction – all kinds of themes or concepts.

I often think about parties when I think about these issues – a party is a specific condition which has a specific direction. You want to try to create a situation in which the guests can relax, enjoy themselves, dance maybe and return home with good memories. The DJ and initiator of The Loft, David Mancuso has spoken about the importance of the conditions for creating a successful party – since the 1970s, his parties have included free food and fruit, water, lots of balloons and the best quality audio system available. He never mixes tracks together, preferring to play each song in its entirety to respect the music and also to share the full experience with the guests. Timothy Leary has called this aspect ‘set and setting’ – the importance of creating the right conditions for a specific experience.

As museums, magazines and other creative industries become increasingly enamored by ideas of ‘collaboration’ and ‘crossing’, it becomes also necessary to think about the rules of the game. In the name of selling more magazines or attracting greater audiences editors and curators are today actively and significantly reaching out across various disciplines and creating mixed landscapes which contain many different elements. Although by no means a new phenomenon (the ‘This is Tomorrow’ exhibition at The Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1954, for example, was an experiment in multi-tasking, cross-disciplinary curating), recent tendencies towards presenting various fields simultaneously also convey specific conditions about the value and role of cultural industries today. The vessels or media which do the presenting (museums, magazines etc) do so with very specific historical and economic motivations and contexts which should not be easily forgotten. We seem to be passing through a moment when these various vessels feel that they can be more experimental than before and try to forge new moulds and methodologies. However, it also feels that the underlying rules which have sustained vessels like the museum have yet to be peeled open in any really revealing ways. Although traditional curatorial methods regarding classification or display have certainly been rethought and revitalized, museums continue to exude a powerful presence as investors of art historical meaning and value. If exhibitions are to show different disciplines and forms together without simply flattening their differences under the rubric of the museum, it is the museum institution itself (and the consciousness of those who work/present there) which must accommodate a potential for change.

The museum or exhibition space (and this can be anything from a large museum to a temporary space) should be a revolutionary space, in the sense of presenting opportunities for people to change their modes of thinking and engage in a different set of rules. As John Cage shows us, it should be a possibility to seriously engage with people and spaces in a radically open, joyful and experimental way. I think, for instance, that listening to Cage’s ‘Concert for Piano and Orchestra’ (1957-58) is a deeply transformative experience. With no master score or conductor as author, the orchestral players may start anywhere in his or her part according to their independently derived timetable. This listening experience is quite similar for me (but with a greater intensity of pleasure), to listening to Indian ragas, with their highly disciplined, yet subtle variations on a raga and a mood through the use of microtones, ‘alap’ (gradual unfolding introductions) and so on. All I can say is that these listening experiences seem to be moments of temporary ‘game-transformation’, epiphanic moments which move one’s consciousness and changes it – a turning which can also be considered to be the foundations and sustaining energies of wider political or social action.

Shahid Pervez.

'Space for Your Future' was 'Space of the Museum'.

A Good New Year.

January 5th 2008, and my first outing to a museum exhibition is ‘Space For Your Future’ at Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT), curated by Yuko Hasegawa. Although I arrived early at around 11am, the galleries were buzzing with visitors. This is a show about a curator trying to probe new aesthetic criteria for new times, a show brazenly wearing its ‘future-vision’ goggles, and a show with not a single painting in it. Curatorially, Hasegawa proposes that we are living in an age when different genres and disciplines must engage one another and actively feed off one another, encouraged by the speed and ubiquity of the internet and new technologies. It is, though, an age of few visions or optimism, an age when no one quite knows where to head. I would like to write at more length on the phenomenon of cross-genre exhibitions etc. at a later stage, so here I will simply note what I thought worked best in the show.
SANAA’s ‘Flower House’ (2007) was for me the centre piece of the exhibition. Poised gracefully on the uppermost floor of the museum, the installation comprised a half scale model of a house made out of curving transparent Perspex materials covered by a flat roof. Inside the house were little chairs, tables, a bed and dozens of potted plants with dried flowers in them. The entire house was surrounded by green potted plants, and a few chairs. I sat in a chair and surveyed the house, imagining myself strolling through its shapely spaces.

SANAA, 'Flower House', 2007, installation at MOT.

The gallery lighting had, moreover, been replaced by hanging tungsten lamps to presumably keep the potted plants growing. This small detail really got me excited about the installation. It was a detail which pushed the boundaries and codes of the museum so that it could sustain life. John Cage used to say that exhibitions should include plants and stones here and there to make them livable spaces, and in its own way, SANNA’s installation perfectly captured a sense of life in the normally austere surroundings of museum galleries. Great cheers for potted plants in galleries!

Exceedingly good mushrooms.

It was good to see works by Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Bless and Hussein Chalayan. The psychedelic Brazilians made a two-storey wooden construction adorned with their usual colorful patterns, mobiles, sand and fluorescent paint. One could go upstairs or into small rooms with little cushions to sit on. The installation should have served as the show’s café or tea shop so that people could actually spend time relaxing in its nests. Simply constructing it inside one of the museum’s galleries really deadens it, makes it mute. I felt something similar with the installation and video documentation of Bless. Their work felt like a contemporary version of Thomas Couture’s massive painting hanging in the Orsee Museum entitled ‘Romans of the Decadence’ (1847) which depicts a huge orgiastic feast. I understand that the video documentation playing in their space was from a fashion show in Paris where the models played a game loosely based on soccer while wearing the clothes.

Bless, still from video of fashion show.

Thomas Couture, 'Romans of the Decadence', 1847.

For an exhibition which purported to expound and explore new aesthetic directions and ‘genes’ for art, Space For Your Future remained well behaved in the sense that much of the work was restrained from flowering fully, from becoming. The limitations and restrictions of the museum institution seemed to blunt many of the works, which needed to be touched, sat on, mulled over, slouched on and generally engaged with on more than a visual level. The experience of seeing the show became a bit like flipping through one of those cross-genre magazines which adorn the shelves of Tsutaya or Aoyama Book Center. I wanted to feel more heat. I presume that heat is generated when two or more foreign objects begin to vibrate closely to one another. However, the show had a strangely clean and cool air to it which made me think that some bigger power or force was preventing the vibrations from taking place.

'0-10, The Last Futurist Exhibition of Pictures', Petrograd, 1915.
"The exhibition was to display a complete renewal in art, as Malevich wrote to the composer Matiushin in May 1915, 'we intend to reduce everything to zero...and will then go beyond zero'. It was to be the Last Futurist Exhibition, the end of Western European domination of the Russian avant-garde, and the beginning of a new age". (from The Avant-Garde in Exhibition. New Art in the 20th Century, Bruce Altshuler, University of California Press, 1994, p. 78.)

Sorry, Again

This morning on the 'Tokudane' morning show on channel eight there was a segment titled 'Shazai Ryoku', which means something like 'The Way/ Method of Apology/Remorse'. It reviewed the year's many public apologies, dissecting them and providing useful advice for anyone faced with a similar situation.  One business crisis management expert offered these four tips:
1. Wear a dark suit to convey an appropriate mood of contrition.
2. Don't smile.
3. Don't speak with your fellow bowers.
4. Bow for at least five seconds in unison to allow the media to capture your apology.

Bas Jan Ader, still from the film 'I'm too sad to tell you'. Ader famously disappears and perishes while trying to cross the Atlantic ocean in a tiny yacht, solo, for a work titled 'In Search of the Miraculous' in 1975.

The flier image for an exhibition I curated in 2000 called 'Table Manners' at the Mizuma Art Gallery. The image was made by my brother, Peter, and shows Grant Green standing in the dry stone garden of Ryoanji, Kyoto. I really like this image. He looks so relaxed and pleased. It reminds me of those St. George and the Dragon images, with the knight in armour standing over the slain dragon.

Sorry

Sumo Yokozuma Asashoryu and boxer Kaneda both held apologetic press conferences this past week in Tokyo. The whole apology thing has been getting out of hand lately -  there seem to be so many disgraced politicians, corrupt businessmen, inept policemen and dishonourable sportspeople lately that the whole ritual of public apology has slid into a rather sordid state of affairs. Particularly annoying are the ever righteous 'wide show' and so called evening 'news' anchors and their highly well behaved 'commentators' (they should be renamed 'guardians of the status quo'/ ''don't rock the boat-ers'), who endlessly try to elongate and dissect the 'sincerity' and 'purity' of the apologies.
I had a vision of a whole new mode of public sculpture in Japan - bronze casts of various public figures bowing low or sinking to their knees in apology placed on very high plinths around the place. There could be tasteful composition sculptures of groups of bowing people, like the US Marine monument of the Iwo Jima flag raising. A prize could be awarded annually to the sculpture which best manages to express the sincerity and truth of the apology, judged by an expert panel of Zen Roshi's, Freudian analysts, sculptors, former Samurai and news anchors. Or, NHK could begin a digital television channel which just loops endless permutations of people apologising formally in public - a multiplying public archive of apology for the nation. Actually, rather more practically, someone should create little digital apologies for mobile phone screens. On being told off at work, one could simply open one's phone and hold the screen solemnly up to the boss and play the appropriate apology scenario. This way, everything is purely above board, detached and without any nonsense - the trick would be in selecting the right scenario for the occasion, thus 'reading' the situation and expressing one's sincerity and sense of respect.
All of this attention on unfortunate individuals, also rather conveniently shifts the focus away from the fact that Japan is a country which seems averse to apologising - to former wartime victims, victims of mistaken blood transfusion which has led to HIV infection, victims of environmental and health devastation or to tax payers who seem forever to be paying for golfing trips for politicians or the building of massive, empty construction projects which go bankrupt.