Tactical Museum

Plants Speak with Us

On my walk home the other evening I noticed this notice outside a florist near Ebisu. It made me stop, take this picture, and think about what it said.
I tend to think that flowers and plants share aspects of Mind, and that we should try to talk with them. The various plants at home have names.
There was a German experimental psychologist called Gustav Theodor Fechner who wrote a book called Nanna in 1848 (translates roughly as soul-life of plants). Fechner posited that plants contain a central nervous system like us and that we should talk with plants.

In 1970, George Milstein released an album called 'Music to Grow Plants' (ESC Records #121). It has a wonderful cover.

It seems to me that these examples are intimations of our archaic links with the natural domain before the categorical imperatives of science and taxonomy or the rigidly psychosis identifying characteristics of modern psychology.
Not to mention the profound historical relationships we have made through plants with a panoply of sacred visions and imaginings. Entheogen is the term used to describe the use of plants in sacred contexts.

Speaking 7 inches, Endo Ichiro and Shibuya underpasses.

I spoke yesterday at the 101 Art Fair with Haruka Ito, Director of magical art room. Many people came. I opted to translate myself, which resulted in a very interesting proto-performance in which I would say a few things in Japanese followed by English, but the content would invariably begin to dissipate. So in effect I think I ended up speaking a kind of 'A' side and a 'B' side, each with slightly different mixes of an original.

Haruka invited Ichiro Endo, an artist who lives in a small van, along to share his thoughts. Endo has worked with Makoto Aida a bit, making a very funny video with him where we see him running into the main wall of the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower (where the Mori Museum is) for twenty minutes. Endo did not go to art school. He travels around in his small van, which also doubles as a mobile studio/ exhibition space.

Endo's practice revolves around the phrase 'Mirai-E' - Towards the Future. There he is in front of one of his signature large banner paintings with the above characters. I suggested in the talk that we may link this kind of approach to characters like Taro Okamoto, who wrote an interesting treatise called 'Jomon Doki Ron' (Thoughts on Jomon) in 1952. The Jomon was the Mesolithic pre-historic period of Japan. Okamoto's interest in Japanese pre-history and a sense of the primitive can, I think, be usefully re-visited to think about the work of younger artists like Endo, as well as many artists emerging now whose works seem to touch on aspects of magic, ritual, invisibility, animistic traditions, Japanese myth and festivals and images of primal nature. I find this interesting in light of the dominant discourses which have so strongly defined Japanese art recently - subcultural tendencies reflected in Superflat and the banality of the everyday reflected in Micropop (and in the sociological critiques of thinkers like Miyadai Shinji -  'Owari Naki Nichijoh'). Sawaragi Noi has, I believe, also touched on these aspects. Okamoto's primitivism must, of course, be read in light of his search for a post-war Japanese avant-garde within a broad European Modernism, as well as part of a rather essentialist 'Nihon-jinron' (unique Japanese-ness) search. Nevertheless, one of my impressions of seeing work by younger artists at the two art fairs as well as at graduation shows, has been to think about such things.

Endo has been involved in something else of interest. At the end of last year, as part of a city scheme to gentrify and evict homeless people from an underground passageway near the 246 highway in central Tokyo, a so called 'gallery' was initiated on the tunnel walls. Endo and others have objected to this and made a series of counter art actions and events in this tunnel. Makoto Aida has written about this process at length (in Japanese only). Makoto Aida's writing on the Shibuya underpass 'Gallery'.

Ways of Knowing

This essay was published in Metronome No. 11 'What is to Be Done?' Tokyo. Edited by Clementine Deliss as a special edition for documenta 12 magazines. 2007.
Written by Roger McDonald.

Having passed through a traditional academic PhD program, and its various research methodologies, it is good to be able to look back and survey what it all means. Now, as one of the programming directors of MAD, the independent study program of Arts Initiative Tokyo, and as an independent curator and part-time lecturer, the days of intense library-based research or reading have opened out to broader approaches of acquiring knowledge. The question of Moving Schools is also one that takes on an increased resonance within such a discussion. So in this short writing I would like to share my thoughts.

It seems to me that moving schools already exist in myriad forms. If one can define a school as any community – transient, impermanent or more solidified – which comes together to create or disseminate forms of knowledge, then one is faced with many examples. How we define knowledge also fundamentally alters the ways in which we can think about this, and I am always drawn to Henri Bergson’s approach of understanding knowledge as a spectrum spanning intellectual, analytical reasoning through to experiential, physical or even mystical gnosis. Pilgrimages constitute a nomadic, but highly directed, community of followers who wander through multiple spaces ingesting specialized forms of knowledge and insight. For them temples or sacred sites may function as knowledge bases, where new spiritual learning takes place. The conversations, meetings and sharing which occurs during their journeys become key knowledge acquiring routes.

The circus is another, highly mobile yet familiar and nostalgic kind of learning vessel. Offering different forms of spectacle and entertainment, as well as diversions from everyday life, the different forms of knowledge imparted by circuses as they pass through a town constitute an important counter-balance to the kinds of formal learning we are taught at schools. The circus shows us risk, physical danger, humour, thrill and elation, contributing to our emotional knowledge base. The phenomenon of raves from the early 1990s and continuing in various forms today may also constitute a moving school of sorts. Coming together to dance in fields or warehouses, often under the effects of drugs, the spaces created by raves generate unique energies and learning possibilities. Perhaps it is about communicating with a stranger through dance or an insight created by a particular combination of sounds. I learnt things in raves which feedback continually into aspects of what I do today. They are not particularly quantifiable, but perhaps about providing me with a sense of what a community could be, and actually participating in this.

What are some of the ways in which we acquire knowledge? I would like to outline four which I find interesting in my own research and work, and also all non-disciplined ways – in other words not tied to formal, institutional or testing methods. First, one can acquire knowledge from a community. This may be through events like workshops or therapy sessions where participants share experiences and ideas. It can also happen on dance floors, generating powerful energies which circulate collectively. Traditional learning environments, schools and campuses, also provide a community for knowledge travelers. Second, there is the route of knowledge acquisition through the ingestion of elixirs, plants or specially prepared substances. Most commonly associated with many forms of shamanism, this way is also the most biologically direct, literally altering the synaptic junctions in the mind to affect changes in consciousness. With the now popular use of so called ‘smart drugs’ to aid learning and memory, I feel that it is only a matter of time before we find ourselves returning to forms of ingestion-learning, albeit manufactured and controlled by large pharmaceutical companies.  Third, there is knowledge acquisition through mimicry or copying. A fundamental aspect of most traditional arts of Japan including ikebana, tea and various martial arts, through copying a master, one becomes slowly imbibed with certain codes and forms. The practice of drawing from life and plaster casts (which still continues as a method of entrance examination in Japan) also relates to this kind of knowledge acquisition. Copying can be used to control and repress, but it can also be an effective tactic of resistance and camouflage. Fourthly, there is gaining knowledge through mistakes, trial and error, digression and waste – things which formal education tries to discard. Learning how to operate a new electronic appliance is usually like this, but it can also be used creatively and intentionally to generate dissonances. I think that dancers and performers would be highly aware of this as a way of proceeding, and the amazing work of Merce Cunningham comes to mind.

Finally, the question of creating or enabling specific spaces where knowledge can be accessed or tapped into. What kinds of spaces, if any, are suited to generating knowledge? What kinds of tools and adaptors encourage or aid learning? Traditionally such spaces have been identified with silence (the library, study) and solidity (imposing architectures of stone, permanence). But it seems to me that there are clearly different types and possibilities of space where learning or knowledge acquisition can happen. The tools which we use today to access knowledge or explore it have also radically changed – the internet and computers being perhaps the most important. Timothy Leary spoke of the importance of ‘Set and Setting’ in relation to the psychedelic experience, whilst the Swedish artist Oyvind Fahlstrom talked about building ‘Pleasure Houses’ instead of culture centers. The office and sofa designs of Verner Panton opened furniture out to embrace intimacy and collectivity. Modular design, mobility and fluidity characterize one of my favourite pieces of furniture, the bean bag, designed by Zanotta in 1969. I feel that curatorial studies should incorporate sessions in interior and furniture design, as these fields map our physical and psychological relations to spaces, colours, shapes and touch. The blog-sphere has been an important space for me, in sorting ideas and research and sharing it with others. It has an informality and ease about it which academic papers lack. Finally I must confess to doing much quality reading in the toilet – a fantastic space for learning. Perhaps one of the last private spaces yet to be fully invaded by media, it is on the toilet that one truly becomes a vessel through which various paths of knowledge pass.

Art Center Ongoing Opens with Wada's Tasty Kebabs

A new alternative art space and cafe opened yesterday in Kichijoji, Tokyo. It is called Art Center Ongoing. Ongoing are a group of students who have been putting together exhibitions of young artists in vacant spaces and, more recently at art spaces like BankArt Yokohama. Ongoing's Director is Nozomu Ogawa, who we invited to speak at our school at AIT when they first started, four years or so ago. In the current climate of a booming contemporary art market in Tokyo,with mass media magazines and even television programs zooming into all things 'Art', the state of other, non market-oriented approaches or art spaces is something to think about. With no city or state funding for this sector, things are invariably led by the commercial side, with top gallerists like Tomio Koyama and Sueo Mitsuma becoming spokespersons for 'Japanese contemporary art'. This is fine, as things go, but crucially remains tilted heavily towards the private, commercial side of things. Is there any counter-balance to this?
So it is good to see the opening of an art cafe and space which is committed to different visions. I have always felt that a 'healthy' art scene (if this is not a contradiction!), is one which accommodates many layers of activity, from the high-end commercial through to non profits, artist spaces, schools, functioning museums and a critical media. With the current paucity of public support for contemporary art in Tokyo and public institutions under funding pressures to create block-buster shows, things are critically tilting towards a market-led scenario. But, I feel that different things keep happening on various scales. In times of prosperity the media tends to ignore tactical things in favour of bigger, easy to understand stories. Another recent example of a different layer in Tokyo was Central East Tokyo.
Art Space Ongoing will open Fridays through Sunday. There is a cafe on the first floor and a gallery space upstairs. The first exhibition showed a new installation by Masahiro Wada - a very interesting artist who founded the artists collective 'Homebase' - Wada's webpage   is here. We have worked with him at AIT a number of times, and his show at Ongoing combines various elements which he has worked with including kebabs, fairy lights, neo-primitive wooden carvings and large rotating plaster shapes. Some images of the space and the show below:

Hosting the Mix (a long essay on recent 'crossings' in Japan)

The recent Henry Darger exhibition at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art was an interesting example of a wider phenomenon which can be traced through much recent contemporary Japanese art. This phenomenon reflects a desire to mix separate genres and art forms together. It can be traced in a number of museum exhibitions such as ‘JAM: Tokyo-London’ at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in 2002 which showed works by 43 ‘creators’ using the concept of the music jam session to, as the press materials state, ‘experience the energy created by this meeting of different genres’. Takashi Murakami’s ‘Superflat’ exhibition from 1997 and Noi Sawaragi’s curated ‘Nihon Zero-Nen’ in 1999 both asked audiences to traverse diverse cultural fields including animation, otaku, model making and science fiction. Japan’s first bi-lingual art magazine, ArtIt, has been pursuing an editorial line exploring cross genre approaches, from issues such as ‘The Boundary between Art and Design’ (winter/spring 2004), ‘180 creatives from all genres’ (spring/summer 2005) and ‘Collaboration: multiplying talent many times over’ (summer/fall 2006). In 2007 two major museum exhibitions have brought these tendencies to large audiences: ‘Space For Your Future’ curated by Yuko Hasegawa at The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT), and ‘Roppongi Crossing: Future Beats in Japanese Contemporary Art’ at the Mori Museum selected by four curators. What is going on with this urge to break down artistic categories?

Henry Darger 

The Hara exhibition certainly played the role of exposing what is called outsider art to a large audience, most of whom were probably unaware of the unique historical and sociological debates regarding the art of the insane or mentally ill. I am particularly interested in the cultural marketing of outsider art in Japan because it was my PhD professor, Roger Cardinal, who proposed the term ‘outsider art’ in 1972. The term has a long and specific history and has certainly played an important role within any reading of artistic modernism. I was surprised and curious to learn from my students at various art universities how popular the Henry Darger exhibition was. Part of this trend in Japan can be attributed to the non-canonical status that outsider art has – like Japan, which has passed through various translations of Western art history, methods and techniques since the late Meiji period, outsider artists have been afforded the privilege of working in a demarcated space, away from the strictures and histories of the art historical canon and its philosophical underpinnings. This is certainly potentially liberating, and allows us to think about all kinds of people as creators of visual languages and worlds. And yet one is left wondering on whose ‘rules’ was Henry Darger’s works seen and read at the Hara Museum? In whose interests were the intricacies and undulations of outsider art flattened out so that it could be shown in a museum of contemporary art?

Part of this is certainly to do with the so called ‘end of Grand Narratives’ and the splintering of ‘micro-narratives’ which Post-Modernism apparently heralded. Museum collections and their privileging of specific canons, genders and perspectives have been challenged. But I feel that the more important reason for this penchant for flattening has to do with the nature of the culture industry, and how ‘art’ has today become commodified like ice-cream or brand clothes. This line of analysis was expounded by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their 1947 essay on the ‘Culture Industry’. Adorno and Horkheimer looked to the economic modes of production in which culture is produced and the ways in which art is affected by and affects the relationship between culture and economics, between the products of society and power relations within society. We live in a situation where, as Frederic Jameson puts it, ‘culture’ has become a product in its own right. The significance of Adorno and Horkeimer’s analysis lies in its supposition that culture is today an industry, and that this exists upon capitalist systems of power. The British critic Julian Stallabrass suggests that this commodification of culture has sharpened in the last fifteen years: “during the 1990s there was an intensification of the forces, many of them old features of capitalism, that contributed to the dominance of triumphant consumer culture over art, and indeed over all other cultural production.”  Stallabrass goes on to say that with the collapse of alternative economic models in 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall) and the declining fortunes of Germany and Japan, it is the neoliberal model which has become dominant. Neoliberalism is defined by its embrace of privatization, high unemployment, low wages for workers, the weakening of unions and neglect of public services, all aspects which can be felt in Japan since the 1990s.

In the name of ‘collaboration’ or greater ‘crossing’ we see today in Japan, design, architecture, graffiti, painting, photography, film and outsider art melted into highly digestable exhibition packages, flattening out previously distinct art forms with their own specific histories, discourses and lines of inquiry. One of the defining characteristics of free market capitalism is that goods and services are standardized or homogenized on a whole spectrum of levels from their manufacture and distribution to the ways in which goods exist in law and various guidelines, to their marketing and consumption. This makes it essentially easier and cheaper to produce more goods and administer systems which keep the market fluid and stable. Differences serve the very practical purpose of making the market more exciting and free by offering a diversity of choice, which however, exist only on the terms which the market allows: an ubiquitous ever multiplying web of networks and nodes.

The nature of today’s world market encourages greater diversity and ‘crossing’, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri recount in ‘Empire’: “ The ideology of the world market has always been the anti-foundational and anti-essentialist discourse par excellence. Circulation, mobility, diversity and mixture are its very conditions of possibility. Trade brings differences together and the more the merrier! Differences (of commodities, populations, cultures and so forth) seem to multiply infinitely in the world market, which attacks nothing more violently than fixed boundaries; it overwhelms any binary division within its infinite multiplicities.”  Can we suggest that exhibitions like Space For Your Future and Roppongi Crossing echo the sentiments outlined by Hardt and Negri? Is their rhetoric of diversity and crossing precisely reflective of the hegemony of neoliberalism over culture and its vessels like the museum? Crucially, it seems that these tendencies in Japan today have emerged with very little sense of critical distance or analysis, and resulted in museums simply absorbing the rules of neo-liberalism, becoming another reflective node in its ‘infinite multiplicities’.

Cross genre exhibitions can offer highly explosive counter narratives to what museums have been showing us. This remains though, intricately tied to the ways in which it is done – the game plans which are envisioned. Most crossing exhibitions and projects sadly act like compulsive black holes, flattening out the potential complexities of the various works through the mechanisms and rhetorics of the museum, which ultimately prevails as the chief purveyor of meaning. Museums in Japan today face increasing pressures to ‘serve’ a public and generate income to maintain themselves. One of the key benchmarks for this was the passing of the Shitei Kanrisha Seido (or greater autonomy law for institutions) in 2003. This has opened up the running of public cultural institutions in Japan to a process of bidding, with greater financial independence being a key factor in the final decision making process. This has impacted art museums in various ways. For example The Yokohama Museum of Art will be the first museum I know of in Japan to start a ‘school’ program from April 2007, that actively engages students with their permanent collection.

In the light of this, exhibitions like SFYF and ‘Roppongi Crossing’ have cleverly and pragmatically adopted the rules of a sophisticated ‘culture industry’ which is sustained by the desires and mechanisms of capitalist neoliberal economics. Both exhibitions marketed themselves by highlighting their ‘non art pure’ pedigree, which was somehow magically bestowed on them by the seemingly simple inclusion of designers or animators. This tendency is moreover not only confined to museum exhibitions, but can be seen across many media including magazines, club cultures and the fashion and design worlds. The museum was crucially left un-tainted by the inclusion of different genres, when what should be happening is the emergence of greater discourse and critique. Letting painting, architecture and graphic design engage in a serious dialogue should create all manner of interesting tensions, harmonies or dissonances. These could be evoked in the exhibition space through exhibition design, in wall texts, catalogue writings or in various kinds of public events or programs. How the hosting museum or curator chooses to mix these together and manifest them is key, according to what rules and value systems? For public institutions, the question of public money obviously remains a central question, and one that generates issues about public accountability and access.

Rolywholyover exhibition view, Mito, Japan.

I think about John Cage’s exhibition ‘Rolywholyover’ (1991-2) as an example of how the museum could be temporarily ‘blinded’ or ‘hijacked’, by a truly accommodating and open attitude. ‘Rolywholyover’ was an exhibition co-curated by John Cage in 1992, just prior to his death. It was a retrospective of Cage’s own visual works, but also a manifestation of his methodologies and attitudes towards life and living, in the form of an exhibition. Cage was  interested in trying to set up a condition of real open-ness, where many different genres and disciplines could be presented together. What he achieved was a truly ecological situation in the museum, where radical change, chaos and translations happened. This kind of ecological condition cannot happen simply by selecting artists and presenting them in a space: I think that it happens only when the curators and artists begin to develop a vision together, which also means developing an attitude towards art and towards the museum. It means taking risks and initiating new ways of display or framing that the museum and artists might actually find deeply disturbing or difficult.

Another example I would like to briefly introduce is the multimedia collective USCO who toured the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s creating psychedelic mixed-media shows which used multiple slide and film projectors, strobes, pulsing light machines and multiple sound tracks. The New York Times reporter Grace Glueck called it a ‘programmed pandemonium’ . USCO was one manifestation of a wider movement towards multi-media and the dissolving of boundaries between different media which writers such as Marshall McLuhan and artists such as Alan Kaprow and the EAT group were actively espousing. USCO’s extravaganza’s involved a decidedly psychedelic and mystical aspect, that acted as a kind of sensory re-programming which could ultimately result in an experience of radical re-birth. What I find interesting in USCO’s approach to mixing genres is their uncompromising stance towards creating spaces where consciousness could potentially be challenged, the ego weakened, and some kind of psychological change take place. Indeed, it is intriguing to ponder the discussions from this period concerning the merging of media and the merging or melting of consciousness. The role played by psychedelic substances such as LSD in supposedly breaking down psychological categories and divisions, seems to be echoed in the breaking down of genre categories in light shows and the ‘Happenings’ of Kaprow and others. Much of the rhetoric of Timothy Leary and others certainly revolves around the breaking of previous game patterns and habits through participation in psychedelic experiences or spaces. A comprehensive and critical reading of this area is offered by Felicity Scott in her paper ‘Acid Visions’.

I think that there is a case to urge museums to actually do ‘less curating’, in the sense of creating big budget selection shows of artists. If we thought about Cage for a moment, we can also suggest another vision for curatorial practice today that would be about creating conditions or ‘scenarios’ as Nicolas Bourriaud often speaks of. Instead of selecting artists according to subjective curatorial themes, a Cageian approach would suggest something more expansive and open-ended. The parameters or algorithims for a project would be set out, rather than the contents being privileged. So, curators would begin their discussions by asking, “what kind of situation do we want to create here?”, “what kinds of experience do we want to encourage in this show?”. In this way the audience becomes immediately something central to the discussions, rather than being an abstract add-on which the education team deals with at a later stage. So for example, there could be a show based on the simple premise of making the museum a livable space – a non-oppressive space which perhaps operates on different rules to our everyday lives. How would you try to set this situation up in a museum? And to really engage this topic I think it becomes crucial to re-think the rules of the museum and to take risks in it. Maybe you have to open the museum up twenty-four hours (like BankArt 1929 Yokohama did in 2005), or maybe you have to allow visitors to stay overnight there? (like Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery did for Tsuyoshi Ozawa’s Capsule hotel project). From these questions, I think one can begin to think about art – because it must be something which is sustained by experience and which must emerge out of real experiences (trips) first. Within this condition or scenario, there can be many layers of meaning or direction – all kinds of themes or concepts.

I often think about parties when I think about these issues – a party is a specific condition which has a specific direction. You want to try to create a situation in which the guests can relax, enjoy themselves, dance maybe and return home with good memories. The DJ and initiator of The Loft, David Mancuso has spoken about the importance of the conditions for creating a successful party – since the 1970s, his parties have included free food and fruit, water, lots of balloons and the best quality audio system available. He never mixes tracks together, preferring to play each song in its entirety to respect the music and also to share the full experience with the guests. Timothy Leary has called this aspect ‘set and setting’ – the importance of creating the right conditions for a specific experience.

As museums, magazines and other creative industries become increasingly enamored by ideas of ‘collaboration’ and ‘crossing’, it becomes also necessary to think about the rules of the game. In the name of selling more magazines or attracting greater audiences editors and curators are today actively and significantly reaching out across various disciplines and creating mixed landscapes which contain many different elements. Although by no means a new phenomenon (the ‘This is Tomorrow’ exhibition at The Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1954, for example, was an experiment in multi-tasking, cross-disciplinary curating), recent tendencies towards presenting various fields simultaneously also convey specific conditions about the value and role of cultural industries today. The vessels or media which do the presenting (museums, magazines etc) do so with very specific historical and economic motivations and contexts which should not be easily forgotten. We seem to be passing through a moment when these various vessels feel that they can be more experimental than before and try to forge new moulds and methodologies. However, it also feels that the underlying rules which have sustained vessels like the museum have yet to be peeled open in any really revealing ways. Although traditional curatorial methods regarding classification or display have certainly been rethought and revitalized, museums continue to exude a powerful presence as investors of art historical meaning and value. If exhibitions are to show different disciplines and forms together without simply flattening their differences under the rubric of the museum, it is the museum institution itself (and the consciousness of those who work/present there) which must accommodate a potential for change.

The museum or exhibition space (and this can be anything from a large museum to a temporary space) should be a revolutionary space, in the sense of presenting opportunities for people to change their modes of thinking and engage in a different set of rules. As John Cage shows us, it should be a possibility to seriously engage with people and spaces in a radically open, joyful and experimental way. I think, for instance, that listening to Cage’s ‘Concert for Piano and Orchestra’ (1957-58) is a deeply transformative experience. With no master score or conductor as author, the orchestral players may start anywhere in his or her part according to their independently derived timetable. This listening experience is quite similar for me (but with a greater intensity of pleasure), to listening to Indian ragas, with their highly disciplined, yet subtle variations on a raga and a mood through the use of microtones, ‘alap’ (gradual unfolding introductions) and so on. All I can say is that these listening experiences seem to be moments of temporary ‘game-transformation’, epiphanic moments which move one’s consciousness and changes it – a turning which can also be considered to be the foundations and sustaining energies of wider political or social action.

Shahid Pervez.

'Space for Your Future' was 'Space of the Museum'.

A Good New Year.

January 5th 2008, and my first outing to a museum exhibition is ‘Space For Your Future’ at Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT), curated by Yuko Hasegawa. Although I arrived early at around 11am, the galleries were buzzing with visitors. This is a show about a curator trying to probe new aesthetic criteria for new times, a show brazenly wearing its ‘future-vision’ goggles, and a show with not a single painting in it. Curatorially, Hasegawa proposes that we are living in an age when different genres and disciplines must engage one another and actively feed off one another, encouraged by the speed and ubiquity of the internet and new technologies. It is, though, an age of few visions or optimism, an age when no one quite knows where to head. I would like to write at more length on the phenomenon of cross-genre exhibitions etc. at a later stage, so here I will simply note what I thought worked best in the show.
SANAA’s ‘Flower House’ (2007) was for me the centre piece of the exhibition. Poised gracefully on the uppermost floor of the museum, the installation comprised a half scale model of a house made out of curving transparent Perspex materials covered by a flat roof. Inside the house were little chairs, tables, a bed and dozens of potted plants with dried flowers in them. The entire house was surrounded by green potted plants, and a few chairs. I sat in a chair and surveyed the house, imagining myself strolling through its shapely spaces.

SANAA, 'Flower House', 2007, installation at MOT.

The gallery lighting had, moreover, been replaced by hanging tungsten lamps to presumably keep the potted plants growing. This small detail really got me excited about the installation. It was a detail which pushed the boundaries and codes of the museum so that it could sustain life. John Cage used to say that exhibitions should include plants and stones here and there to make them livable spaces, and in its own way, SANNA’s installation perfectly captured a sense of life in the normally austere surroundings of museum galleries. Great cheers for potted plants in galleries!

Exceedingly good mushrooms.

It was good to see works by Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Bless and Hussein Chalayan. The psychedelic Brazilians made a two-storey wooden construction adorned with their usual colorful patterns, mobiles, sand and fluorescent paint. One could go upstairs or into small rooms with little cushions to sit on. The installation should have served as the show’s café or tea shop so that people could actually spend time relaxing in its nests. Simply constructing it inside one of the museum’s galleries really deadens it, makes it mute. I felt something similar with the installation and video documentation of Bless. Their work felt like a contemporary version of Thomas Couture’s massive painting hanging in the Orsee Museum entitled ‘Romans of the Decadence’ (1847) which depicts a huge orgiastic feast. I understand that the video documentation playing in their space was from a fashion show in Paris where the models played a game loosely based on soccer while wearing the clothes.

Bless, still from video of fashion show.

Thomas Couture, 'Romans of the Decadence', 1847.

For an exhibition which purported to expound and explore new aesthetic directions and ‘genes’ for art, Space For Your Future remained well behaved in the sense that much of the work was restrained from flowering fully, from becoming. The limitations and restrictions of the museum institution seemed to blunt many of the works, which needed to be touched, sat on, mulled over, slouched on and generally engaged with on more than a visual level. The experience of seeing the show became a bit like flipping through one of those cross-genre magazines which adorn the shelves of Tsutaya or Aoyama Book Center. I wanted to feel more heat. I presume that heat is generated when two or more foreign objects begin to vibrate closely to one another. However, the show had a strangely clean and cool air to it which made me think that some bigger power or force was preventing the vibrations from taking place.

'0-10, The Last Futurist Exhibition of Pictures', Petrograd, 1915.
"The exhibition was to display a complete renewal in art, as Malevich wrote to the composer Matiushin in May 1915, 'we intend to reduce everything to zero...and will then go beyond zero'. It was to be the Last Futurist Exhibition, the end of Western European domination of the Russian avant-garde, and the beginning of a new age". (from The Avant-Garde in Exhibition. New Art in the 20th Century, Bruce Altshuler, University of California Press, 1994, p. 78.)

Naha, November 1-3.

At the opening of the new prefectural museum, artist Yuken Teruya organised a parade performance, where citizens were invited to file into the museum holding their art works which they could exchange temporarily for a museum entry ticket.

The outdoor video screening onto the walls of the museum.

Gunder Sanshin Trio performance.

Pictures from Naha. October 30-31, 2007.

T-shirt icon templates by Hiroharu Mori on an old wall.

Hiroharu Mori helps a workshop participant.

Kai and myself lecturing.

Museum of Okinawan Time

I am in Naha, Okinawa for the Museum of Okinawan Time. This is the final manifestation of AIT's series of 'Hour Museums', which we have held in various spaces since 2003. We decided to come to Okinawa for a number of reasons. The last prefectural museum opens in Naha this Saturday; we have worked a number of times with the Maejima Art Center, the only contemporary art non profit in Okinawa; and we have an interest in Okinawa's unique cultural and political position within Japan. The Museum of Okinawan Time takes place for ten days from October 26 to November 4, to cooincide with the opening of the new museum. We are working with the Maejima Art Center, who have secured two vacant old shops in the amazing Sakaemachi Ichiba (a covered market). You can get a feeling of the space in the picture above. An impressive bar, stocked with about 60 or so malt whiskies and the local spirit Awamori, is up and running. Each night the bar team alternates - I think AIT is on tonight. Kai and I are leading a lecture series for four days, artist Hiroharu Mori is leading a T-shirt workshop, we are showing our video interview archive of Japanese alternative art spaces, a session of chats with local Okinawan artists is planned and a performance by the Gunder-Sanshin Trio (who mix gamelan and the Okinawan sanshin banjo) is scheduled for the night of the 3rd. We have also curated a video screening program which will be projected onto the outside walls of the new museum on the evening of the 2nd (with the permission of the museum curators). A number of friends have also come down from Tokyo including ARCUS Residency Director and MAD tutor Mizuki Endo. As I have posted before, Okinawa has been in the news recently with the huge protests against the government's proposed review of history text books. I have visited four times now, and each visit the city of Naha seems to be getting more like other cities in Japan. Where the new museum is opening, Omoromachi, there is now a brand new huge duty free shopping mall.
Our little museum is located very much in what one can call an older Okinawa. Although relatively compact in size, the narrow alley ways and small shops selling everything from cosmetics, nuts, tofu, second hand clothes and vegetables, present a type of space which is almost comletely eradicated now in Japan. Walking around there yesterday I began talking with a man who sits in front of his shop playing an electric piano. The shop opposite serves coffee. I think I will wander over now to buy a cup.

9 day Fast

I saw in the media that a monk on Mt. Hiei just emerged from a ritual 9 day fast during which he does not eat, drink or sleep. He must recite sutras almost continuously. This practice takes place on the 700th day of a 1000 day practice, done by the commonly known 'Marathon Monks' of Mt. Hiei.
It is said that the body of the monk begins to smell of death. He emerges from the fast supported by attendants, and drinks a specially prepared liquid.
The monk still has 300 days of practice remaining, before becoming a kind of living saint.