"Life Through Vegetable, Flour and Sand'
Ingredients: Vegetables, Flour, Sand.
Mix thoroughly, dry and form into patties.
List of Works upper wall:
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Vertumne (portrait de Rodolphe II), vers 1590 painting, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Nature morte : L'Homme-potager, (tableau réversible), vers 1590 painting, Edvard Munch, The Lumberjack 1913, Liang Kai Sixth Patriarch Cutting Bamboo.
List of Works middle wall:
Guy Mayman collage 2010, Guy Mayman collage 2010, Craigie Horsfield, Krakow, 1970s, Kai Althoff Painting.
List of Works lower wall:
William Blake drawing, Clare Rojas, Untitled 2007, Wolfgang Tillmans, Haircut, 2007.
I feel like writing here again.
Its been over one year since I stopped.
Different name. Different writing. Same Author.
Now transmitting from Mochizuki, Nagano, Japan.
Hello.
I now live in Nagano, near the town of Mochizuki.
Hiroshige depicted it in the print above, one of the 69 stations of the Kiso-Kaido, or inland road which connected Edo and Kyoto. As its name suggests, the moon shines brilliantly around here - the area being nearly 800m above sea level and near the large Saku plain. Like the travellers depicted by Hiroshige I too commute into Tokyo two days a week, but with a considerably lighter load.
Although there is now a fair distance between my home and Tokyo, I consider myself very much plugged into the big city - not only the fact that I rely on the bullet train to travel into it to teach but also that the web has enabled me to teach from home online. Although I admire Thoreau's writings about wilderness withdrawal, this is not that. Even though our nearest neighbors live over 100m away, beyond the trees, and it is dark and silent at night, the city is there somehow.
Having said this, there is an amazing sense of space and time here, which I did not feel in Tokyo. My eyes adjust to seeing far away or into distant trees, and the quiet somehow focuses the mind. TV looks and sounds more stupid, music sounds more important as does the radio. Its early days yet, and I am sure that with settling, will come all kinds of challenges. And insects.
What is the distance that now exists between me and Tokyo? And what of the name of this blog - I think I add a few spaces between Tactical Museum and Tokyo.
Utrecht became Trattoria today. The chefs were Abake, Martino Gamper, Francis Upritchard and friends. I have the pleasure to be working with Francis now on an unusual art project that will be revealed soon, and she also shows at Kate MacGarry gallery in London (where Peter also is). Trattoria is an irregular dining event that has been organised by the above for almost ten years. See also Dent-De-Leone.
While a tsunami warning sounded on the city public address system and the sun shone after the morning rain the little back room and balcony of Utrecht was a hive of cooking and eating. Fashion designer Semble who I met a couple of years ago at Kandada was there, and I got to speak to several graphic and interior designers and a writer. Ellen was the center of attention on arrival.
Maki of Abake (hair of).
Hiroshi Eguchi of Utrecht conducting.
Martino at the steam barbecue machine.
A closer look at the home-made steam barbecue machine.
What came out of the steam barbecue machine was delicious.
For an article about Trattoria I found, see Here.
Thank you to all of the chefs, Hiroshi san and the company.
Tactical Museum Tokyo began life in 2004 as my online research archive on alternative art practices in Japan, a place to collate information, networks and thoughts on the tactical aspects of art. Six years on, as I have hopefully indicated in various posts here, the conditions for contemporary art in Japan have changed in significant ways. One of the more pertinent has, I think, been the effects of broader privatization policies initiated by Prime Minister Koizumi which has altered the fabric and framework of public museums and funding. The past two years has seen the emergence of various art-connected initiatives and projects that move into the terrain of what in Europe and the US has variously been called art activism, intervention or socially/ politically engaged practice. Events like Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice which happened in New York in October 2009 may indicate a summation or coming together to share experiences and futures. Whereas much of the discussion around alterity in relation to Japanese art has been conducted around a discourse of 'alternative art spaces' and non profits, I feel that there has been a shift recently, or perhaps more appropriately, a broadening out of the discussions to encompass many different approaches and kinds of practice. This is partly a question of generational shift, as pioneering 'alternative space' artists from the 1990s such as Masato Nakamura of Command N has moved into a more strategic role as Director and founder of the soon to open Chiyoda Arts Center, 3331. Non profit groups like my own AIT is in its tenth year, and thus qualifies, in Japanese terms, as an 'old' or veteran practice.
I use the term predicament in the title intentionally, because I do feel that this area remains isolated within the arts scene as well as within any broader social movement or emergence of organised radical politics. This may not be at all a negative thing. In contrast to the Euro-American emphasis on Mouffian antagonism or a Negrian sense for direct action, I do feel that very different methods may be more appropriate for the Japanese context. Those times when direct street protest or action are enacted here by art-related people, I cannot help but see something related to cosu-play, a formalised and ultimately self-circular mannerism. I do strongly feel that quite different creative avenues and means need to be enacted or excavated from the realities embedded here. Many of the practices rounded-up here may point to such avenues. I am also very interested in something which tends, by its very nature, to remain un-noticed or un-reported. This is a long tradition of quiet dissent, of largely rural withdrawal which emphasizes not so much a call to action and common movement, but something based in changing the individual life and mind, and thereby realizing different ways within this society. This is a tradition that probably encompasses the strategies of Gandhi, but also late nineteenth century English Socialist-Anarchists like Edward Carpenter and Taisho era radical thinkers like Sanshiro Ishikawa. If anything, I feel that it has been this avenue of near silent revolution which characterizes a Japanese radical potential, not simply in its 'purified' and at times highly fascistic forms as Zen Buddhism, but in the many small individual or community generated ways of doing things that don't follow dominant state or media lines of thinking. It does seem that many of the more recent practices lean on aspects of this quiet dissent, crafting voices and spaces via web, radio, zine or other means.
So here goes with a very partial and subjective round-up:
Hajime Matsumoto of Shiroto no Ran was surveyed by momus in Koenji Renaissance. Paper Sky International version interviewed Yoyo san on Vege Shokudo
The ongoing privatization of Miyashita Park and the activities of 246 Hyougen-Sha Kaigi, with Yoshitaka Mouri of Geidai supporting - UK IndyMedia reporting, and artist Hikaru Fujii's Nike related works, and NikePolitics.
Critic Noi Sawaragi gives a good contextual overview of recent art activism in his ArtIt 2009 review.
Read the curators statement for the upcoming Roppongi Crossing 2010 at The Mori Art Museum. There is a 'street' art element within the exhibition and their framing of current practice within the shadow of Dumb Type should be interesting.
IllCommons Japanese blog of artist Masanori Oda, who I worked with for the first Yokohama Triennale in 2001. He seems to be one of the key artist figures involved in many protest actions. I saw him at a Miyashita Park concert and at CREAM, Yokohama.
Korosu-Na event held at former Yamamoto Gendai gallery space in 2003, organised by critic Noi Sawaragi. See the guest line up for other names.
remo, non profit video and media space in Osaka, who have run lectures and seminars covering radical thinkers including Hardt & Negri and Maurizio Lazzarato.
remo hosted one section at CREAM, video festival held last year in Yokohama, titled 'Activism 3.0 (as-yet-untitled) - New Activist-Artists Against Capitalism in the World After The Lehman-Shock' - Information.
CREAM Lab space hosted many socially-engaged art spaces and initiatives, and their twitter page is here, and they keep a blog here. There is another blog with video etc from the Lab called activism3cream.
Tokyo Damage Report sometimes reports on protests and street demos, such as this photo filled May Day protest.
Scroll down the page to see the related events and symposium held at the Beuys in Japan exhibition just ended at Art Tower Mito.
Yesterday AIT organised a discussion as part of the Tokyo Art Point Project between artist and blogger (in Japanese) Hiroshi Fuji and environmental and community activist Hiroshi Iijima of the Asaza Project.
I noticed that the Outsider Art Fair was held recently in New York, its 18th manifestation. This made me think about my own art background and the fact that I was taught by two of the most significant figures working in this field in the late C20th.
My art teacher at Aldenham school was John Maizels, the founding editor of Raw Vision magazine and author of Raw Creation. Although I never excelled in the studio, I remember John very clearly. He lived down the road from the school gates near the big Hare Krishna temple. My brother Peter, who is today an artist, worked closely with John.
My PhD supervisor and professor was Roger Cardinal, who then taught at Kent. Roger wrote the seminal book 'Outsider Art' in 1972, coining the term and outlining its parameters. I worked very closely with him for over three years, writing my thesis. Roger remains my most important mentor/ teacher.
Roger Cardinal, left.
It's never really occurred to me in a big way that the two art-related teachers in my life were also intensely related to outsider art. Thinking about this now, after working as a curator in the contemporary art world for over ten years, is quite interesting. For one thing I have never once felt the urge to work in a museum or a gallery, preferring the more unstable route of working independently and founding an art non profit. I can also point to certain experiences of art which triggered my move into studying art - Kurt Schwitters and Franz West are two important artists who I saw in exhibitions and affected me strongly. Roger Cardinal's writings on Kurt Schwitters are some of my favorite pieces of art writing. Franz West's work I think moves into the domains of fetishes, African art and wonderfully lumpen forms. My fascination with altered states, mysticism and psychedelics led to a Masters degree in the Study of Mysticism and Religious Experience at Kent - all subjects deeply related to John and Roger's fields. My imminent move to the forests of Nagano prefecture is also partly I think inspired by wanting to put physical distance between myself and Tokyo, the hub for art activities. I do often feel despondent, or at least worn, by the whole contemporary art world. I certainly find little pleasure in 'playing' the global art circuit of openings etc - and I say this as someone who has had the good fortune to participate in it as a biennale/ triennale curator.
I feel that it is a good time now to think again about what my two teachers are about. Whether this results in an extended hibernation or withdrawal from the Tokyo contemporary art scene....we'll see.
John Maizels profile in NY Times.
I am preparing some curatorial/ art things there in the forest which shall be announced soon via the internet.
The asphalt road ends outside the back door.
I had the opportunity to visit the US Embassy Residence in Tokyo last month.
I asked a friend to take a photograph of me standing in the same spot where General MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito stood for three photographs at their meeting on 27 September 1945. The 1945 photograph was taken by US Army photographer Lt. Gaetano Faillace in the main reception room on the first floor.
Although the furniture has changed and the thick carpet taken out, the pillars and rounded windows at the rear are unchanged.
The third image is a simple superimposition of the two. A spirit photograph of sorts. One of the principal power spots of modern Japan. A James Joyce domain where space, time and history floats, potent.
The International Festival for Arts and
Media Yokohama 2009, titled CREAM and directed by AIT colleague Fumihiko
Sumitomo opened last week and is now on across several venues in Yokohama. With
a focus on reproduced images, spanning film, video, digital, new media and
internet based art works and projects, CREAM attempts to explore the quality
and possible futures of a world awash in moving images.
I went along with the thought of how the exhibition would alter or re-formulate my experience of moving images, which is primarily and unconsciously rooted to television. One of the critical keys for me was how a collection of works using video, film and other medias could re-propose the spectacle of the tele-visual? After some three hours watching and wondering I can say that for me the exhibition component of CREAM at least, seriously engaged with these questions, offering a complex and layered experience and re-negotiation of how it is that we can watch today – extending the questions to who it is that can watch, how and with what kinds of faculties and into areas of the social, political and psychological consequences of the moving image.
The most memorable works were sited in the
BankART Studio NYK galleries.
One is greeted by an impressive and immensely fun four screen film montage by master sampler Christian Marclay. Composed of dozens of films, many well known, the film amounts to a jam session between sound-makers across time and across the films. Moments of extreme dissonance shift to passages of partial familiarity as another cinematic narrative and history is woven together before us.
Pablo Valbuena’s simple projection of
slowly morphing geometric shapes onto a corner of the gallery architecture led
me into Chantal Akerman’s quietly monumental installation comprising multiple
monitors showing scenes from daily life taken in former Eastern Europe. What
really struck me walking through the monoliths was being exposed to the back of
the television monitors which began to look like parts of the housing blocks
and city architectures conveyed in the images themselves.
On the uppermost floor one is greeted by Alfredo Jaar’s black box presenting a powerful film of mostly text. It tells the story of a South African photojournalist called Kevin Carter who took a Pulitzer prize winning image of a starving girl in Sudan, watched over by a vulture. The interior of the box where one watches the film is set up ominously with four flash-bulb lights either side of the screen. This un-nerves you. Why are they there? They must go off sometime. When they do flash, I physically jumped off the bench. It flashes simultaneously with the single and only visual image of the entire piece, which is the above-mentioned photograph taken by the cameraman. It very literally captures the jump from reading text to the physicality of the image, and its effect/affect on/in the world. As with many of Jaar’s works this experience stays with you for some time.
The most engaging work for me was Aernout
Mik’s film titled ‘Schoolyard’ (2009). Running for what seemed like a long
time, it is a film shot in Mik’s signature style – silent, painting-like scenes
that are played out by ordinary people with simple props and actions. The film
is projected on two screens side by side, showing similar scenes or scenes
delayed slightly in time. We see groups of young people, some hooded, some in
veils, people in suits and ties who may be teachers and large men in blue
shirts who try to police the situation. There is no definite story or
narrative. Sometimes the mass of people engage in a single act like carrying a
body aloft or climbing into and out of a car. Most of the time the mass reverts
to clusters of individuals sitting, chatting, staring. The yard becomes a
metaphor for a potent state of eruption, which never fully happens. The guard
men try to impose some order, but it is short-lived, and things revert to a
state of what can perhaps be described as a community of spectators which
pushes and pulls in on itself. The situation seemed like an allegory of the
world we live in today – a networked ‘Empire’ where relations sustain
everything, but in which it is difficult to propose or enact different scales
of time or space. There were moments when the film looked like a scene painted
by Breugel, a teething landscape of bodies and desires, and moments of quiet
beauty as when flayed bodies were carried high by group so people, reminiscent
of Christ carried from the cross. Mik often references mass drills for
emergencies, and this film also incorporated stuffed dummies, placards and
masks, that seemed to stand for a theatrical recreation of protest or riot.
Shiga Leiko showed a ten minute photo/slide film composed of images she had taken. The fast-paced, jerky editing and monotone noise soundtrack created a mood of uncanny horror. Her photographs of people floating in the air, in slightly odd poses and brightly flash-lit scenes at night reminded me of the Black paintings of Goya crossed with the Blair-Witch video. I suppose in some senses Shiga’s photographic oeuvre touches that of the early Mike Kelley in its obvious formal references to spiritualist photography, but she also leans on recent Japanese horror cinema and the practice of artists like Nan Goldin and their coupling of photography with slide sequences and sound.
I came away from the exhibition with a peculiar paradox in my mind: that these works which use moving images, sound and time-based methods through elaborate editing, sampling and selection procedures, somehow produce effects which are closer to what John Berger in his seminal 'Ways of Seeing' series characterised painting by - as being 'silent and still'. This thought occurred to me as I walked home to the station. The effects of television or much cinema is largely one of immediate satisfaction, a kind of dullness that one nevertheless quite likes. Experiencing the works at CREAM today changes the rules. It is as if movement is recycled back into its constituent singular elements, and it is this that we experience. What Alfred North Whitehead called 'occasions of experience' - the basic aspects of reality that, in combinations and complexes form human experience and perception. It was as if the art works used motion and images to reveal the still and silent codes of the very fabric of experience itself.
In addition to the exhibition, CREAM happens through a series of ongoing events, performances, talks and online archives.
I strongly recommend going to see it, for its well selected works and general investigation into image and media now.
I went to see the Mike Kelley exhibition at Wako Works of Art yesterday. It is very good. Kelley is presenting four groups of photographs and a selection of recent sculptures from the 'Kandor' series. The photographs all relate to Kelley's long interest in spiritualist, symbolist and pictorialist photography. Of particular interest to me was seeing The Ectoplasm series, initially made in 1978 with artist David Askevold for a project entitled 'Poltergeist'. The Wako exhibition shows never-before printed images.
The exhibition made me think about fakery, the human body as an organ always on the verge of spillages and liquid excretions, and how artists have related to matter as some manifestation or extension of something totally Other, fluid and unspeakable, like ectoplasm.
Above, Theodor Prinz, Ghost, c 1900 and below, Edouard Isidore Buguet, Fluidic Effect, 1875.
If there is one artist who 'turned me on' to contemporary art it is the Austrian Franz West. I have always thought about his Adaptives - blobular sculptural forms which can be held and awkwardly played with - as something similar to psychic excretions, unformed unconscious shapes which we are invited to examine and behold. West has exhibited with Kelley in the past, and the two clearly share interests.
The idea of spillage may also be used in thinking about UFO phenomena. Carl Jung and Terence McKenna have both proposed that we think about them not as actual physical things out there, but as extensions or excretions of our imaginations - perhaps objects refracted back from some Other place into our here and now - into our imaginaries.
An interesting, but marginalised, scholarly resource that provides a useful theory into such speculations may be Julian Jaynes' 1976 "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". In the bicameral state human beings actually heard voices which they interpreted as coming from Gods or spirits - the mind is conceived as still fragile, open to the interjections and disturbances of Mysteries.
This little painted stone by Max Ernst from 1934 is another favorite of mine. It reminds me of the human urge to mark material objects in order to somehow soften or prepare their surface for spillage to occur. My reading of archaic cave drawings and scratchings also follow this thinking. The preparation and ingestion of psychedelic substances by people through time and into the present can also be understood as a loosening of the bounded mind, allowing for temporary re-circulation and seepage.
I have been following a recent series of public service manner posters pasted around the Tokyo Metro with interest. I realized that the symbolic bad persons depicted had non-Japanese counterparts.
From the United Kingdom, supreme punk icon and eater of cup noodles using a pronged fork, Mr Sid Vicious:
From Italy, the icy greased hair Godfather of the Mafia tradition, Mr.Al Pacino:
From Suburban America, that icon of inept fatherhood, salaryman and general barfer, Homer Simpson:
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.
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