Tactical Museum

'Showcase' a gathering of non profits in Yokohama

AIT took part in 'Showcase' over the weekend. Organised by Emiko Kato of Art Autonomy Network Japan, around fifty non profit and alternative arts groups from around Japan gathered in ZAIM, Yokohama for the three day networking and general hang out-fest. I think Emiko was inspired by a similar gathering in Shanghai hosted by BizArt in 2004 called the 'International Meeting Between Autonomous Cultural Centres Stemming from Citizen and Artistic Initiatives', to which both Emiko and AIT were also invited. As I have posted before, Yokohama City is putting efforts into building itself into a Creative City, and one of the results of this has been an influx of small non profit arts groups gravitating towards Yokohama because of cheap space rent and a basically supportive environment. So it made sense to hold such a meeting here, although when one begins to ponder some of the consequences of this, a more complex picture emerges. One interesting comment I heard from an arts teacher from Kurashiki in Okayama prefecture was concern about Creative Cities adversely sucking up creative talent in focused spots, with the result that regional cities like Kurashiki end up becoming mere consumers of what is created in larger cities like Yokohama. Speaking with organisers from other areas of Japan, it becomes apparent that local government arts policies and funding structures are very different, meaning that initiatives create unique structures and methods of operation. For example, Osaka city supports arts groups with free or low rent of disused spaces, whilst Tokyo does not. Nov from REMO in Osaka was there, and we discussed how our respective organisations create communities. REMO focuses on new media forms of expression and is, I think, one of the interesting initiatives now in Japan. They hold regular video workshops, events and screenings, framing their practice within not only an art context, but within a much broader 'media' context. I was impressed by a video workshop they do called 'Remoscope', which involves participants making one minute videos within strict Ozu-esque guidelines, such as 'fixed camera, no sound, no zoom, no edit, no effect'.
I wished that Showcase could have organised more formal initial introductions between the various groups, and also held more discussion forums. I was actually surprised at how many spaces chose to use their allocated spaces as art installations - this made the event rather too loose I felt, when it could have been a good opportunity to concentrate on discussion and perhaps some kind of publication. Anyway, it was an enjoyable three days in Yokohama. As with these things, I suppose  a deeper level of dialogue always begins after the event....on this front, AIT will moderate a roundtable about the meanings of alternative art spaces now at Yokohama Museum of Art on April 3, entitled "Alternative in Over! If You Want It".

Mizuki Endo and Rhythm

Independent Curator Mizuki Endo spoke at our MAD curating course last night. Mizuki is based in Fukuoka and has been running rhythm , a platform generator organisation founded by him in 2001. He began a DIY magazine in 2001, and has since organised numerous noise/ experimental music events, art projects, film screenings and set up alternative spaces in various cities. One of my favourite projects is 'Bunker Music', begun three years ago in the basement space of a dentist in the centre of Fukuoka city. Not having the money to buy CD's of many musicians and groups he was interested to learn more about, Mizuki decided to initiate a listening lounge once a month, where twenty or so people gather to listen to a curated selection of one artist or group's music. They borrow CD's from local independent record shops and create a space to collectively enjoy them. Thus far they have held these nights once a month and covered artists from Faust through to Ornette Coleman. A bar covers some basic costs, and the independent record shops also sell a few CD's, making it good for them to lend the records. Mizuki also always makes a cheap flier on which the monthly artists discography and untranslated liner notes or interviews are included.
Mizuki was awarded first prize of the Premio Lorenzo Bonaldi young curators prize in 2005 and realised the exhibition 'Aesthetics/ Dietetics' at the Gamec Museum of Contemporary Art. Read about it here.
AIT will work with Mizuki next year on an experimental remote teaching/ research project. He will spend six months travelling in the US on an Asian Cultural Council grant.

Yason Banal 'Disaster But Disco' Interview part 2

  Yason as 'high priest' sits at his ritual table.
 

'Disaster But Disco' happened without major disaster on Friday at AIT room. Yason and his two performers animated his installation set up with a series of actions and short gestures which included a fictional news cast about visionaries appearing in Daikanyama and Yason tattooing his two cohorts with fake sticker tattoos. The image above shows Yason applying tattoos under a rotating cheap disco light that was positioned in the centre of the space. Part 2 of my interview with Yason about this performance-installation is below:
Can you explain a little about the performance element of tonight? What the two half naked tattooed men are doing and your role in it?
The performance tonight is quite important, at least to me personally, as I haven`t presented my body 'live' for quite some time. Usually what I show are traces of my performance via photography, video and sculpture, or if done 'live' employ other people/bodies instead.
The two guys in the performance resemble sculptures; they are not actors.  It continues my interest in masculine stupor and awkward figurines, as well as sleepwalking as an in-between state  between reality and the subconscious, stillness and action.  Visually, the black strip of electric tape on their eyes and headphones on their ears are very similar to the 'straight' guys you see appearing on amateur Japanese porn. I find this fascinating - the Japanese notion of outer and inner realities (I forgot what they're called) - blocking out 'disasters' and other disturbances to norm, and living in a sort of fantasy 'disco' land. I think its also dangerous, because there is little acknowledgement or tolerance of certain deviations and ideas.
The black strip on the eye-line also remind me of visionaries in the Philippines, religious devotees who claim to have seen God, Jesus or the Virgin Mary. In both cases (porn and religion), the focus is on the eyes - the epicenter of ecstasy and knowledge. But also in both cases, these porn actors and religious visionaries are amateurs and charlatans. The realities and apparitions they claim to see are fake, blocked by their own pathology.
My participation in the performance will move between various elements culled from different sources/ constellations, marked by my stenciling of tattoos on the two males bodies as well as small actions inspired by samurai porn, death metal disco, folk science and news-casting.   
Why is everything black! Its the colour of many things - death and mourning, but also a sense of high fashion and minimalism. I noticed you have taped objects like umbrellas up in black tape and sprayed things black. Its like you are pushing everything into a state of deep space?
Yes.. deep space.. Not just constellations in outer space but in sunny islands such as the Philippines. I've become interested in macho minimalism, as well as the notion of a 'tropical gothic' - something I want to further develop formally. To explore the dark side of the "dancing sun" so to speak, and sunny, supposedly "happy" people and forms.
Another deep space that comes to mind is the  beach. Its a place for frolic and fun, but can also quite be quite menacing. I like the idea of how black waves devour/embrace all the colourful creatures and objects in its path. And it continues, the destruction and creation of patterns. There's a certain horror to it, but also melancholy. Deep within the void/the disaster is a tropical island of colors and flavours, clashing but engaging nevertheless. Its resurrection and quite hopeful.
Is this installation a prelude to your work for the Singapore Biennale in September?
Yes. Yes!
Finally, how has Tokyo been to live in? What have you found interesting, strange, wonderful?
Many things - people, places, music, the culture and of course the city. I like getting lost, and Tokyo is the perfect place to do that, discovering new unintended paths in the process. I feel normal here too, which is probably good for me these days. I wish I had more time though, language skills, resources and
sleep. Hopefully next year when I come back I can get to relax more, see more and say more than "arigatoh" and "gomen nasai."
Thanks Yason

Preparations towards 18 Hour Museum...

AIT is currently planning the next in our series of temporal 'museums' - we began this in 2002 with 8 Hour Museum, followed by the second in 2004 and the third this year. The first two manifestations went on for eight hours, but for the third we extended this to twelve hours, spanned over a weekend. Our thinking for these events have, from the start, been pragmatic and utopian - that is, responding to the lack of space for exhibition making in Tokyo by deciding to 'create a museum' for a limited duration, whilst also trying to probe the experimental dimensions of what could be done. I am particularly interested in the various (largely unwritten) histories of such hybrid events that blend elements of exhibition, club and disco cultures, screenings and lounges. I guess this has a lot to do with the fact that most of these kinds of events happen outside of the museum (probably breaking most of their rules of behaviour), and have been organised by a range of people from artists and curators to community groups and activists. What we try to initiate through our time-based 'museums' is probably shared or at least sensed by many people of our generation who experience museums as a rather formalised spaces and who are open to engaging with installation works, interactive pieces or environments that invite you to stay in them for a long period of time. I remember for the first 8 Hour Museum, some people who came left almost immediately, unable to grasp what it was, whilst most seemed to find their space within it and stayed for several hours. It helped that the largest space was given over to a huge bean bag lounge/ bar, around which were placed various 'services' and 'displays'. What interested me was the fact that this space was not bound by a singular focus (like the DJ or a screen), but purposefully allowed to contain multiple activities and sounds. I suppose the notion of 'programming' an event, in the way that Timothy Leary writes about psychedelic experiences or David Mancuso writes about his Loft parties, is something which we are into exploring further though.
So, we are now preparing for the next 'museum', which we hope to set up for eighteen hours, all night in early 2007. I have been reading various things as background material for this - histories which I would one day very much like to try to compile. More on these snippets as they arise.

'Disaster But Disco': Yason Banal at AIT

Our current artist in resident at AIT is Manila based Yason Banal, who will also show in the Singapore Biennale this coming September. Yason has just about completed an installation in our space in Daikanyama and will make a performance there tommorrow (Friday 9th) from 7pm. I interviewed Yason about this and post it in two parts, as it is a bit long. Pictures of AIT room now accompany the interview below.

Interview Part 1 begins below:

Hi Yason, Firstly, what is the meaning of 'Disaster but Disco'? Disco implies a place of colorful lights and pleasure, but it is offset with disaster?
Disaster But Disco, to put it plainly, is a space for both sufferance and pleasure, death and joy. Its perfectly summed up by two little known sexy starlets from the Philippine silver screen:
1) Stella Strada wrote on her suicide note: "It's a crazy planets!"
(misspelling intentional? still a mystery but hilarious and poignant just the same)
2) Azenith Briones said in the camp classic
'Temptation Island:' "There's no water. There's no food. Oh whatever, might as well dance then."
It’s this relentless drive to seek awkward pleasures and resistances as  well as errors and terrors that I find interesting. Tokyo possesses this drive to go on and continue amidst tragedy - surviving disasters both natural and manmade such as earthquakes, recessions and the atomic bomb.
Disaster But Disco also stands for DBD, which in Filipino parlance alludes to pirated movies sold on the black market. I am interested in music and film cultures, and how they can be used to reflect and deflect existing forms and narratives, and hopefully create new constellations in the process.
I understand that this installation and performance is inspired by a number of different elements - the Great Earthquake of 1923 Tokyo, constellations, your interest in Death Metal music and the intense Catholic traditions in the Philippines. Can you explain a little about these elements and how have you woven these things together in this installation?
Disasters are said to be caused by the bad alignment of stars. Stars can mean both heavenly bodies in outer space or failed celebrities in media hell Constellations are like disco lights. One bulb goes off and a dark disaster can happen, like tripping on the dance floor, or an earthquake destroying a city
like Tokyo.
Constellations are formed by various bodies in space, forming various alignments. I see my work, including the AIT project, as another constellation formed by various ideas, each with a certain trajectory of its own, but hopefully all of them at sometime meet at a certain point, and make sense to the viewer somehow, however nervous the alignments may seem.
I've become acquainted with black metal music 2 years ago when I did a show for the Oslo Kunsthall in Norway. I met these kids in a club - boy were they full of angst and make up. I found the mock scary attire hilarious, and found them quite sweet and fragile. I started hanging out with a few of them on and off for two months while in Oslo. Death metal in the Philippines is also quite big, and am friends with a few musicians from that community. Death and black metal are different in aesthetic though; in this work I have geared more towards black metal, for its camp and mock evil undertones.   
But both Norwegian black metal and Pinoy death metal are definitely critical, if not hateful towards Christianity. The growling reminds me of earthquakes, as much as fault lines make me think of sixties minimalism. The black metal make up and get up is a disaster, and is more disco than devil. Disasters, discos, jihads and metal concerts also cause mob hysteria, and cause agony and ecstasy at the same time. Any culture has this 'stampede' consciousness and 'religious' experience.  Philippine Christian pageantry  in its ritual performance and visual design is actually quite pagan, so I find that kind of surreal and subversive in a way. It has somehow effortlessly blended hardcore Catholicism with witchcraft, like a black metal gospel choir.

 

Learning Book #001 - FREE to download

I was just sent Learning Book #001 by Rikke Luther of Learning Group (currently also working together for the Singapore Biennale). AIT hosted a 4m diameter cardboard dome made from their [Collecting Systems] project in Japan in late 2004. All this and more is carefully documented in this little booklet, which can be downloaded for free as a pdf at the Learning Site web. It is well worth a read through, listing four projects which all utilised their [Collecting Systems], a project that looked into the re-use of unused materials and the economies which surround them. I am currently working with Learning Group for Singapore, where they plan to create new knowledge bases around issues of public land, access and underground structures in Singapore.

Mapping Kodaira: "at/@"

AIT has just curated an exhibition in a new art space run by an eye surgeon in Kodaira, Tokyo. 'at/@' is the inaugural show in the new space, called Shiraya Art Space, and shows new works by Kazz Sasaguchi and Yasushi Noguchi. AIT member Keisuke Ozawa was curator in charge, and developed a project around various mappings of the town by the two artists. The space is a slick white cube two storey building, and has the feel of a collectors home.

The first floor of the space during the opening on Saturday May 13.
Sasaguchi showed two series of works, each attempting a unique form of 'mapping' of Kodaira. One project involved monitoring the heart beats of various dogs as they walked around the town. The results were shown as video documentation. The other was a series of photographs of people's hands, on which the artist had traced maps of Kodaira - using hand lines as markers of the land.

Noguchi explored another kind of mapping through collating the data from used receipts given by visitors, and transposing this onto a computer model. Each receipts location and time of issue provided the data for a 3D graphical map of Kodaira which was projected onto a wall. This project will continue throughout the exhibition period.
The artists worked with already existing or unconscious aspects of the town, playfully suggesting that the streets we travel through daily are also pregnant with different readings, possibilities and textures. A small brochure accompanies the exhibition with a text written by Keisuke.
Shiraya Art Space is 2 minutes from Kodaira station on the Seibu-Shinjuku line (from Takadanobaba JR)
Opening hours: 10:00 - 18:00.
Inquiries: 042 - 341-0235.

Gold Medal for Fuji Hiroshi in Dhaka.

A picture of a very happy Hiroshi Fuji, who won one of the Grand Prizes at the 12th Bangladesh Biennale, currently on in Dhaka. I think it's a great prize - a round gold medallion (that makes a plastic-like sound when poked lightly in the middle), together with a laminated certificate. They were handed to me by the Prime Minister of Bangladesh on March 5th, as Hiroshi had to return to Japan early. So, we made a small award ceremony in our favourite eating and drinking place, 'Tachimichiya' in Daikanyama together with the staff of The Japan Foundation. Congratulations.

AIT Curator in Residence Postcards

Sophie O'Brien has been staying with us as curator in residence, supported by Asialink, Australia. Sophie is an independent curator and writer and also works in the Australian Arts Council as exhibition manager for projects including the 2004 Biennale of Sydney and 2005 Australian pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Before coming to Japan she asked artist friends to send her postcards, and the results of this little mail project is currently showing on the wall of AIT room. Low-cost and tactical in approach, Sophie's postcards are a good example to our curation students of making small scale but interesting projects with the simplest of means.

Hiroshi Fuji's Japanese Blog - for pictures of Bangladesh and AIT's recent 12 Hour Museum.

Although only in Japanese, artist Hiroshi Fuji's Great Blog  shows lots of pictures from two recent AIT related exhibitions - Hiroshi was one of two artists (the other being Yuken Teruya) AIT selected for the Bangladesh Biennale which has just opened in Dhaka, and he was also participating with his Kaekki Bazaar toy exchange project in the latest manifestation of AIT's experimental temporary 'museum' events, 12 Hour Museum.