Tactical Museum

Display: Life Through Vegetable, Flour and Sand

 

"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.

 

 

Tokyo Trattoria!

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.

New Year as a Japanese Citizen.

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 Spectre of Spillage

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.

Berlin Wall on the Embassy Wall, Moats and Apes

On my walk to AIT this morning I came across a wonderful exhibition of historical photographs charting the history of the Berlin Wall. The images look like they have been specially glued to the long concrete wall of the German Embassy that runs up along the hill by Arisugawa Koen in Hiroo. I found myself walking like a crab, sideways along the pavement, looking carefully at each large image. You can see the selection on the embassy website link above. Many of the images I had seen before, many were new to me.

The experience of unexpectedly coming across such an exhibition is rare and always satisfying. After a few moments of adjusting oneself to engaging with the presentation (a part of me continues to walk to AIT), stopping in the street to look and read is intensely nice. This particular exhibition, commemorating 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, looked all the more sharp for being pasted on the long grey concrete wall of the embassy compound which I walk past most days.

As an aside I am now reading The Yamato Dynasty on the loo, and I started to think that there is an impassable wall in the middle of Tokyo in the form of the moats surrounding the Imperial Palace. Moats are very clever for being negative structures, inclines into the earth. They keep people out and also provide aesthetic pleasure, by housing swans and sweeping vistas. I suppose they crucially also keep the Imperial Family in. This got me thinking how any 'Fall of the Imperial Moats" would necessitate strong swimmer climbers who, instead of knocking walls down, would have to build bridge-like structures across the moats or ferry people over in small craft. This is clearly the domain of the stealthy folks living in Iga and Koga, the ninja.

Occasionally they are partially breached, as we saw in October 2008 when a British man living in Spain dove in and started to climb one of the moat walls. It was a scene from Planet of the Apes - the naked barbarian hurling rocks at the police trying to evade capture. He was caught and arrested I believe.

Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale 2009

I returned from a three day visit to the fourth Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale a few days ago, spanning multiple sites in Niigata. Its founder and Director, Fram Kitagawa, has spoken of not being so concerned with curating an art exhibition, and more concerned with activating the region and its people through the vehicle of the festival. The experience of moving through the landscape (albeit in a bus) and walking in the heat and rain to see art works is certainly powerful. By day two I felt the slight onset of ‘minka’ (old empty rural farmhouses) fatigue. Many artists showed installations and projects in abandoned farm houses. Certain languages seemed to emerge after the sixth or seventh house. Hanging string, cord, newspaper and wood to fill space seemed a particularly popular one as did a sense of hand crafting objects. Much of the materials used were ‘poor’, perhaps reflective of the limited funds and production time available. One of the exceptions to this was Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller who created a highly tuned installation illusion which made one think that there was a thunderstorm happening outside using intricate sound, light and plumbing systems.

 A few works (it is a pity that the number is not higher considering what could be done) really affected me, responding to their placing, being aesthetically and formally accomplished and sustaining a sense of the complexity and multiplicity of the natural and economic contexts (one of the primary rallying cries of the triennale has been the regeneration of this region through art and festival). I reminded myself of Kitagawa’s curatorial approach which is essentially one of saying that he does not curate, welcomes all levels and types of creativity as that is how the world is, and is primarily directed towards the activation of the region via festivity. It is therefore difficult to think about the triennale only as an art exhibition and critique it on this level. A nagging voice in the back of my mind kept telling me to remember the social regeneration agenda. However I kept returning to the question of how the art felt, how I experienced the triennale as an exhibition of art works. There are clearly many interests and concerns at stake. The way that I personally moved through the festival was as someone visiting from outside, thinking about the art works in their respective contexts, how they made me feel and think about the architecture, history and time of the area, or materially manifested specific ideas and concerns. After all, an exhibition, whether housed in a museum or across many kilometers of countryside, is a deeply physical and psychic experience. My body shares the space with art and its contexts. The tiniest of details, materials or the way that an object is placed affects this relationship. How does one measure something like regeneration of a local region? Clearly economics is one way. However I would argue that one of the potentials of art in this regard is precisely its abilities to materially (and thus bodily, psychically) affect spaces. It seems to me that there are works that manage this more successfully than others. Among the many possible reasons for this I would particularly point to the ability of certain works to sustain many possible outcomes simultaneously without becoming read as simply one thing. An exhibition such as the Echigo-Tsumari Triennale, rooted in highly complex and demanding ecological, economic and social contexts, seems to urge for an awareness of this living, multiplying energy situation – perhaps more so than an orthodox gallery setting. The metropolitan art world feels a long way away.

My brother and I ordered the negitoro-don at a restaurant which specializes in katsu-don.

I suppose that I became more acutely aware of what may be called aesthetic responses to art works, their formal and material presences before me and all of the complex relations that they create. This is something perhaps slightly different in degree to a strictly formalist contemplation of art which may be somewhat more self-contained. Like many similar community or city regeneration art projects in Japan today, it often felt that the art remained formally weak. So often I felt that works spent too much energy speaking too directly of the community or the landscape or the local context, becoming somewhat pedantic. The dots could too easily be joined together and an all too simplified ‘answer’ drawn. The more successful works managed to always maintain a sense of multiplicity. They did not allow for easy or obvious conclusions to be drawn, rather letting my imagination stray and ponder. Many of the more successful works which held this sense of complexity did so by introducing something alien, strange or unfamiliar into the context rather than staying close to local materials and contexts. It is perhaps by materially jarring what is present in a particular place by bringing something unfamiliar to it that one can begin to reflect on where one is. One is made more aware of one’s present condition by reflecting on something so alien to it. Sun Ra and the Afro-Futurist enterprise may explore a similar territory. Marcel Duchamp referred to this multiplying aspect of art works as its ‘co-efficient’, a temporal process that is played out during the experiencing of any work. Nicolas Bourriaud put it this way: “ A work of art has a quality that sets it apart from other things produced by human activities. This quality is its (relative) social transparency. If a work of art is successful, it will invariably set its sights beyond its mere presence in space: it will be open to dialogue, discussion…” etc.

Of the works I saw, the successful were:

 Yukihisa Isobe – excavating the earth (in the vein of Robert Smithson et al.) to reveal a river bed from the Jomon period in the middle of a rice paddy. The only work I saw which did not make or add to the context but subtracted in order to reveal archaic time.

 

 

 

Kidlak Tahimik – together with his assistants from The Philippines he built a traditional hut on stilts on a mountain side with totem ritual sculptures and spaces.

 

Christian Boltanski – a huge installation in an old school where one walked through a designated route, incorporating Boltanski’s signature black portraits, image-less video projections, light bulbs etc.

 

Kazufusa Komaki＋Noctural Studio’s Cocoon House – a project about silk worms grown in an old farm house where a woman lived, which had a diorama of the village under the floor boards which one could see through a small hole in the floor – reminded me of Gaston Bachelard’s ‘Poetics of Space’.

 

Richard Deacon – a large sculpture made of connected different sized sausage/ rice shapes made of shiny silver overlooking a valley. I liked how it made no attempt to use local materials or blend into the countryside, but formally stood out like an oversized rice ball made by a one year old.

 

 

A cloud that looked like the islands of Japan.

Stateless but Baby-full

At 11:55AM Japan time on July 7th 2009 I became stateless.

As part of the process of gaining Japanese citizenship I must renounce UK citizenship. The official Home Office acceptance of my renunciation came through and I went to pick it up at the British Embassy Tokyo.

My British passport was snipped at the corner, invalidating it.

I am now without a passport of any state. Suspended in limbo while I wait for the final switching process to complete.

It is also the last time that I entered the British Embassy compound in Tokyo as a British citizen (thus entering 'my home turf').

As I lose nationality of one state, I am happy to say that I became a Dad yesterday. Hooray! A baby girl, name to be decided.

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.