Tactical Museum. Tokyo

Art is Not Culture

Four perspectives by four people around the above line which I have been quite affected by recently.

1. Aldous Huxley writing in a 1963 essay titled 'Culture and the Individual'. :

" BETWEEN CULTURE and the individual the relationship is, and always has been, strangely ambivalent. We are at once the beneficiaries of our culture and its victims. Without culture, and without that precondition of all culture, language, man would be no more than another species of baboon. It is to language and culture that we owe our humanity.(......) Since human beings respond to symbols as promptly and unequivocally as they respond to the stimuli of unmediated experience, and since most of them naively believe that culture-hallowed words about things are as real as, or even realer than their perceptions of the things themselves, these outdated or intrinsically nonsensical notions do enormous harm. Thanks to the realistic ideas handed down by culture, mankind has survived and, in certain fields, progresses. But thanks to the pernicious nonsense drummed into every individual in the course of his acculturation, mankind, though surviving and progressing, has always been in trouble. History is the record, among other things, of the fantastic and generally fiendish tricks played upon itself by culture-maddened humanity. And the hideous game goes on...."

2. Terence McKenna from a talk given at St. John the Divine's Cathedral, Synod Hall, New York, April 25, 1996:

 

"Culture is not your friend, no matter what your culture is. And this is sort of not a Politically Correct thing to say, because in the present ambience, (sort of, those who haven't gotten the word) there's a lot of attention to recovering our ethnic roots and to expressing our unique ethnicity, and so forth and so on -- I think that's the beginning of understanding. But all terms that stress ethnicity are words applied to groups of people. Have you ever noticed that? Have you ever noticed that you're not a group of people, you're a person? So you may be "Jewish", you may be "Black", you may be this, you may be that but there is no obligation to take upon yourself the generalized quality of these things, because the generalized qualities belong to thousands of people examined at a time. If you misunderstand that you become a caricature. You act out your ethnicity as a caricature.
So culture is not your friend, ideology is not your friend... Who's your friend? Well, to my mind, the felt presence of immediate experience is the surest dimension, the surest guide that you can possibly have. The felt presence of immediate experience."

3. Julia Kristeva writing in Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia UP, 1984).

"Finally, in the history of signifying systems and notably that of the arts, religion, and rites, there emerge, in retrospect, fragmentary phenomena which have been kept in the background or rapidly integrated into more communal signifying systems but point to the very process of signifiance. Magic, shamanism, esoterism, the carnival, and "incomprehensible" poetry all underscore the limits of socially useful discourse and attest to what it represses: the process that exceeds the subject and his communicative structures. But at what historical moment does social exchange tolerate or necessitate the manifestation of the signifying process in its "poetic" or "esoteric" form? Under what conditions does this "esoterism," in displacing the boundaries of socially established signifying practices, correspond to socioeconomic change, and, ultimately, even to revolution? And under what conditions does it remain a blind alley, a harmless bonus offered by a social order which uses this "esoterism" to expand, become flexible, and thrive?"

4. Jonathan Meese published a manifesto in the January/ February 2009 issue of Art Review magazine:

1. Art is Total Baby
2. Art is Total Joy
3. Art is Total Power (no human power)
4. Art is no Culture
5. Art is Total Humility
6. Art is Total Leadership
7. Art is no problem, Art needs no victims, Art needs no humans
8. Art is Total sweet Metabolism
9. Art is the only political party of the future
10. Art is no Ritual

Antagonistic Aesthetics

There was an interesting article in today's International Herald Tribune about tourists in Kyoto sometimes crossing the lines of decency and manners to photograph Maiko and Geisha. It reminded me of the Tsukiji Fish Market badly behaved tourist episode in March of this year, when the market was closed for a limited period.

The Tribune piece closed with an astute observation by Yuji Nakanishi, professor of tourism at Rikkyo University, who said:

"Japanese tend to associate tourism with historical landmarks, but foreigners are interested in people’s lives and their lifestyles. Places like the fish market were never really considered a tourist site until quite recently, so both sides are really confused.”

These episodes reminded of Claire Bishop's critical essay (Download Claire Bishop, Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics pdf.) against Nicolas Bourriaud's relational aesthetics, published in October magazine Fall 2004. Leaning on the ideas of Laclau and Mouffe, Bishop argues that relationality is always underlined by antagonisms and schisms. Geisha-Hunters and Tuna-Harrasers mirror this sense of antagonistic relationality, highlighting the contradictions which underline global tourism between preserved 'local' traditions and free markets (Geisha were instruments for Japanese tourist marketing from the dawn of tourism in Japan. See Ihei Kimura's photographs for 'Travel in Japan' campaigns from the mid 1930s for example), as well as reminding us of the relative historical infancy of Japan's relations with the world. Accounts of early foreign visitors to Japan in the C17th, tell of the 'ill mannered' barbarian, a literary micro-genre which probably persists to this day.

Dutchmen with Courtesan, Nagasaki c1800.

Perry's Marines inspect a sumo wrestler, March 1854.

A M E R I C A N S

Harry Smith (1923-1991).  Page.

Dock Ellis. Page.

'Hell in the Pacific'. Lee Marvin, Toshiro Mifune. John Boorman. 1968.  Page.

David Mancuso, The Loft, New York.  Page.

Terence McKenna (1946-2000). Page.

Morris Graves (1910 - 2001). 'Northwest Mystic' painter.  Page.

Lisa Law.   Page.

Paul Thek (1933 - 1988). Page.

Ruth Asawa. Page.

Mark Tobey (1890 - 1976). Page.

Woody Allen. Page.

 

Peter Wins!

My brother Peter won The John Moore's Painting Prize!

- scene -
'Rain' by Dorothy Morrison comes on, and we start to jump and whoop!
- end -

Congratulations.

Some links:
The Guardian
The BBC
The Liverpool Echo

Curating in SL

Yesterday I spent one hour in Second Life organizing my contribution to Cao Fei's project for The forthcoming Yokohama Triennale (opening Sept 12). Cao Fei is currently managing the building of a city called RMB City in Second Life. Parts of its construction site will be launched at Yokohama. When Cao was in Japan a few months ago we met, and spoke about virtual spaces etc. I had become a resident of SL in early 2007, and made several replica sculptures there. Cao has invited me to show some of these in RMB city, so yesterday was a day of 'transporting' or transferring my objects to her staff, and sorting out logistics. It was the easiest curatorial/ project episode I have perhaps ever been involved with! I am excited to see how her physical installation in Yokohama turns out, but for those who can venture into SL, you can experience the work online. More on this as it develops. 
Cao Fei's Blog

Strange Attractors: recent exhibitions reflecting on 'The Transcendental Object at the End of Time'.

As ArtForum dedicates its current issue to gazing back at the events of May 1968 I have noticed a decidely C21st runnel being formed around issues and languages of space, E.T's, alchemy, the Middle Ages, ecological catastrophe and other related topics by exhibition curators recently. The following is a list of exhibitions which have happened or are about to happen since February of this year which seem to relate to this territory in some way:

THE END WAS YESTERDAY- Part II
at kunstraum  Innsbruck, Austria
May 31 - June 22 2008
THE END WAS YESTERDAY – PART II brings together an international group of 19 contemporary artists depicting various post-apocalyptic phenomena. The exhibition takes place in a world which has already come to an end and deals with the state between apocalypse and an immediate attempt of reorientation.

ECPLIPSE: ART IN A DARK AGE.
Moderna  Museet, Stockholm.
31 May - 24 August, 2008
The artists in Eclipse work with installation, sculpture, performance, video projection and painting, exploring and portraying fields that are irrational, dark or politically incorrect. Several of them have a fascination for the absurd sides of life, resulting in refreshingly humorous works. Existential issues concerning the conditions of mankind are the starting-point.

SUPERNATURAL
11th May – 10th August 2008
CCA  Kunsthalle, Majorca; Spain
Our idealistic concepts of nature are proving to be archaic, and we are re-awakening to a new version of nature. The exhibition SUPERNATURAL reflects the vision of a nature strangely altered through cross-pollination with popular culture, technology and romanticism. While "nature" refers to both real and fictional ideas of nature, "super" relates to constructed images, artifice, utopia or to scientific research.

Life on Mars
the 2008 Carnegie  International
May 3, 2008 - January 11, 2009
Are we alone in the universe? Do aliens exist? Or are we, ourselves, strangers in our
own world?
Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International explores the important yet continually perplexing question of what it means to be human in the world today. “The thematic premise behind the show has to do with the idea of the intimate moments in our daily lives that we miss by walking through our worlds and not seeing what is right in front of us. It also has to do with the more infinite sense of being part of the larger universe and finding ourselves on the inside and looking out.” says Fogle. “The art world itself is Mars, and the best contemporary art asks you more questions than you sometimes have answers for.”


GOD & GOODS. Spirituality and Mass Confusion
Villa Manin Centre for Contemporary Art
20.04. - 28.09.2008
GOD & GOODS. Spirituality and Mass Confusion aims to open a dialogue with the topic of religion being it an immense, controversial and unresolved debate but also a concept open to new and diverse forms of interpretation.
The works of the twenty-eight artists in the exhibition underline existential questions, play with the senses and perception of reality and challenge in some cases the mechanisms of beliefs. Art looks at religion from an outside perspective: it can expose the evocative power of an image as well as relate the mythology of consumer goods to holy iconography.


Stray Alchemists
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art
April 12 - July 13, 2008
UCCA’s first international exhibition introduces six artists from Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia whose works--spanning from sculpture and installation, to performance, collage, drawing, photography and video--are breathing new life into the contemporary art world. As the show’s title suggests, the artists are in the process of transforming how the mediums in which they work are typically understood, letting material processes influence the outcomes of their experiments.

Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art
Barbican Art Gallery
6 Mar-18 May/08
Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art presents contemporary art works under the fictional rubric of a museum collection conceived by and designed for extraterrestrials. This ambitious, playful and irreverent exhibition features over 100 artists and more than 175 works, primarily sculptures along with mixed media, video, photography and works on paper.
This exhibition is partly inspired by the first chapter of Thierry de Duve"s Kant after Duchamp, in which an imaginary anthropologist from outer space sets out to inventory "all that is called art by humans". Adopting a pseudo-anthropological approach, the Museum employs eccentric taxonomies and surprising juxtapositions. The fictitious Martian perspective opens up contemporary art to fresh interpretations and allows for its reassessment from an alien standpoint, thus mimicking the way that Western anthropologists historically interpreted non-Western cultures through foreign eyes. Looking at contemporary art as though from outer space offers the potential to make the familiar strange and to turn the dominant Euro-American art tradition into the "Other". It also raises pertinent questions about the use and value of contemporary art in human culture.

GREENWASHING
Environment: Perils, Promises and Perplexities
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy
29 February - 18 May 2008
"As rockets go to the moon the darkness around the Earth grows deeper and darker"
Robert Smithson
GREENWASHING presents the work of 25 international artists and artist-groups whose practice suggests that the literalism embedded in old-fashioned concepts such as 'environmentalism' and 'nature' is not equipped to comprehend the ecological territory of our time. Today we negotiate an evermore urgent and pervasive ecological (and thereby cultural, political, social and economic) arena that is darkly shadowed by potentially catastrophic ecosystemic collapse.

*Note: the short descriptions after each exhibition are taken from their respective websites or e-flux notices etc.

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

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.

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.

Japan enters a New Age of Sakoku (Isolation).

November 20th 2007 will be remembered as the day when Japan entered its second period of isolation (sakoku). From today all foreigners entering Japan are required to submit their fingerprints and face photo on entry into the country at immigration control. This is part of the anti-terrorism law which was passed after 9-11. The new controls seem to suggest that all terrorists will be non-Japanese (rather strange considering recent history here, which is so often conveniently forgotten. I think The Japanese Red Army who committed a number of murders, bombings and hijackings in the 1970s were Japanese as were members of the Aum Supreme Truth sect who released sarin gas on Tokyo subways in 1995...).  The sad part of this is that Japan will be the only other country on the earth apart from the United States that operates this policy for immigration.
Other things which make me think that Japan is entering an age of sakoku are: the recent illness and coma of Japan national soccer coach Osim; the departure of the first and only non Japanese museum Director in Japan, David Elliott, from the Mori Museum last year; Micropop artists; the closure of NOVA english schools recently due to scandal; the continuing rifts with neighbor countries and Okinawa over history text books, amongst other things.

So, next time you enter Japan, wash your finger tips and put on a brave face. You will be entered into a vast database of identities, forever.                  Cheezu.