Tactical Museum. Tokyo

Hooooooooooo

Prime Minister Hatoyama practicing the slow release of Qi or Prana breath together with little balls of light while answering questions from the press corps.

Naturalization in 1890

Looking through my Dad's books while on vacation in Nagano I came across 'Japanese Things' by Basil Hall Chamberlain, first published in 1890. It is an A to Z of all things Japanese, written by a British Japanologist who taught Japanese at the then Tokyo Imperial University (now Tokyo University). 

Thinking about my current predicament, a step away from becoming a Japanese citizen, 

I wondered if he had written on this subject from the perspective of 1890.

The only reference to this topic was a short paragraph under the topic 'Adoption'. 

Read the paragraph beginning "Until quite recently".

Bede Griffiths on Love

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words about things are as real as, or even realer than their perceptions of the things themselves, these outdated or intrinsically nonsensical notions do enormous harm.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

Pataville, Pata

One of the first artists I worked with as a curator and a good friend, Guy Mayman, has a blog.

Its great.

Its made from his works.

Pataville

In a classic case of synchronicity, it so happens that my new blogging endeavor over at  ArtIt also uses the term 'Pata' in its title. Both Guy and myself seem to have traveled, quite independently, through the dreamland of Alfred Jarry and his Pataphysical College.

ArtIt Website

ArtIt Website has launched.

I am one of the many in-site bloggers.
Under the pseudonym 'PATA-PHYSIC PAST', I have decided to post a writing and museology project I have been pursuing for some years. It comprises found photographs, art and captions.

Hopefully updated weekly.

Yoroshiku,

Kato Shuichi

I watched a great documentary last night on NHK about the recently deceased Japanese writer and critic Shuichi Kato. Kato wrote a book called 'Kotoba to Sensha' (Words and Tanks), which traced his thoughts on living through the events of 1968 when he was living in Vienna, and particularly his experiences of visiting Prague just prior to the Soviet invasion. The documentary was shot in July this year, and he appeared a fragile but highly articulate voice for critical reflection on Japan's post-war condition. Speaking about the students protests in Japan in 1968 he commented that the significance of those times was that students identified and attempted to question the growing influence of the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (Gun-san), after it became known that major universities such as Tokyo University were receiving donations from the American military, while bombs fell in Vietnam. For this, they should be proud said Kato. Kato often said that 1968 has not ended, in the sense that we continue to live through similar conditions as then.
A key phrase which Kato repeated was 'Heisoku kan' -  a sense of weariness, tiredness, hopelessness - which he feels permeates developed societies deeply to this day. It was against this sensibility that he identifies the student, worker and cultural revolts of the 1960s as proposing a radical change of life and society - 'seikatsu wo kaeru!'. Kato seemed to be a humanist and socialist to the end. He railed against the de-humanizing effects of a systematized society and went so far as saying that the history of Japan post Meiji was in fact also a history of de-individuation and of de-human-ness (hi-kojin ka/ hi-ningen ka). He urged for the urgency and continued relevance of 'shisoh' - philosophy and critical thinking - saying that this had two fundamental aspects: first, the writing, checking and confirming of facts against history and the past, and secondly, asking What To Do?, which generates the richness of creative and utopian thinking. He ended by saying that we needed to re-energize a sense of being human into the world again: 'Ningen rashisa wo sekai ni mou ikkai saisei suru'.

Shuichi Kato - 19 September 1919 - 5 December 2008

Very brief bio in Wikipedia.

Intimations of Terence McKenna

Part of my reading in the past three months has been re-visiting the books and audio lectures of the late Terence McKenna (1946 - 2000).

Terence was somewhat of a rogue thinker, forever on the fringes of acceptable debate and often referred to as the heir to Timothy Leary, which I think is rather unfair. To me a more accurate relationship can be made with the British writer Aldous Huxley. I once attended a two day workshop seminar by Terence in London in 1994, where I sat and listened to his hypnotic voice discuss ideas about Time, novelty, psychedelics, history and what he called 'The Archaic Revival'. I think my initial interest in him came through his involvement with groups like The Shamen and Space Time Continuum who both created backing electronic tracks to Terence's monologues. While most academics and scholars have pretty much dismissed his ideas, I have recently come across a number of references to McKenna in interviews of artists (Carroll Dunham, Fred Tomaselli ) and in the now swelling debates about apocalypse and the end of the world in 2012 . The main cultural reference for 2012 issues seems to be aspects of the Mayan calender, but McKenna's Time Wave Theory (also called Novelty Theory ) also indicated late December 2012 as a point of some phase shift event. Listening to Terence's voice again on downloaded mp3 talks and lectures (a good starting point would be Psychedelic Salon Podcasts or LanceRules) my early interests in mysticism (in which I did a Masters at Kent) and its various manifestations with shamanism, entheogens and speculative philosophy have been stirred once again. I suppose in particular my perspectives on art being made now has, in the last year or so, been gradually moulded by intimations of what Terence would call an 'Archaic Revival'. This is something I have quietly been pondering as I wander through biennales and galleries, or speak with artists. Other posts in this blog have also outlined aspects of this territory. Something Terence said in a public talk has resonated in particular: "The secret faith of the C20th is not Modernism. It is a nostalgia for the Archaic, for the Paleolithic." This neatly sums up his position, and much of his writings and speaking was concerned with explicating the manifestations of this 'nostalgia' through art movements, music and entheogens.
Many exhibitions and art projects today seem to be referencing what can be called a 'pre-Modern' time line, accessing notions of the occult, the unseen and ritual to evoke disturbances or breaks with our current space-time (for example read Lars Bang Larsen's article The Other Side in frieze magazine 2007), or moving outwards to re-connect our present with the infinity of space, science fiction domains and telepathic technologies. I find this very interesting because I think it also moves art practice and thinking about art back into a realm which it has always occupied, although often forgotten and veiled over by pre-occupations with heavy theory. Taking into account and giving room for the important discussions about Primitivism and cultural globalisation which have matured since the 1990s, I feel that much current art asks us to consider different linguistic landscapes which take account of bodily experiences, perturbed states of consciousness and their evaluation. In mapping this terrain the work of Terence McKenna seems to offer some significant markers. Another McKenna-ism which he frequently used was 'Culture is not your Friend!' - indicating that culture is an operating system which dictates how one can behave and think in a given context, effectively curtailing one's abilities to investigate potential. In an age when culture seems to stand for some abstractly defined sense of 'Goodness', and for those of us who work in the so-called 'cultural industries' such a mantra may be rather important. For Terence the figure of the shaman was someone who knew this, and who intentionally 'took flight' from it, crucially returning to share knowledge with the community.
How one can 'take flight' today, eight years on from Terence's passing, is something which we perhaps need to imagine.

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.

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!