16 HOUR MUSEUM, March 17

A few brief remarks and pictures from the first part of the 'museum', held in the Daikanyama area on March 17.

Our approach in setting these 'Hour Museums' up has always been directed towards the creation of spaces to lounge in, to spend time and chat with friends over a cup of tea or a beer. Rather than replicating another stark white cube (of which there are plenty already in Tokyo) we have always tried to initiate different models for how art can be experienced. In Hillside Terrace Annex A (above) we thus rented twenty tatami mats which formed low seating areas upon which were placed video viewing areas, a cafe and meeting spots. We have found that inviting visitors to remove their shoes is a crucial step in allowing people to relax a little. As an aside, The Mingei (Folk Crafts) Museum here in Tokyo is one of the few museums I know of which also asks visitors to remove their shoes and wear slippers.

One of the central elements of the 17th Museum were a series of four one hour lectures, free and open to the public. We are interested in trying to probe how a museum could also be a place where different kinds of knowledge is shared and dispersed - knowledge which is not just about vision and optics. Hiroshi Minamishima, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Kumamoto began things off with a lecture about his work with leprosy patients in Japan and the art they make. Independent curator Takashi Azumaya (below) used the white board to maximum effect, illustrating his thesis about museums and audiences and for who curators make exhibitions. He used methods from semiotics and geometry to logically think through this crucial question.

The artist Katsushige Nakahashi (above) presented his various works including his ongoing 'Zero Project', where the artist traces the histories of zero fighter planes from WW2 and holds community workshops around the world. Nakahashi's current project concerns his visit and interest in the small atolls of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, and the many still radio-active nuclear test sites there.
Rounding things off was anthropologist and Creole studies scholar Ryuta Imafuku (below), who began his talk with a slide show and reading performance in the dark.

In addition to the lectures, various works by artists were exhibited and screened. Toyomitsu Higa from Okinawa screened his video of a female only shamans ritual on one of the smaller Okinawan islands to a capacity audience, Mary-Elizabeth Yarbrough, current AIT artist in resident from San Francisco, showed two tape drawings, one depicting Ron L. Hubbard the founder of Scientology and the other Rael, founder of the Raelian Movement - both men claiming special kinds of received gnosis from higher agencies. London based artist David Blandy's video 'The Soul of London', Saki Satom's 'Alternative Stories' and Second Planet's 'The Future for Museum' were also screened. All seemed to probe aspects of what knowledge is or how it can be gained - Blandy's video depicts the artist dressed as a Shaolin monk wndering the streets of London, intercut with scenes of wise men from famous films, imparting advice (Luke....), Satom's video concerned the difficulty of language and translation, and Second Planet's work showed various fortune tellers predicting the future of a certain museum in Japan.
The various works and contents which emerged on March 17th, was edited and transformed into a Journal which was distributed for free on March 25th at SuperDeluxe......