During Ellen's birthday dinner tonight I was speaking with my brother Peter and the following title for an exhibition came to my mind:
MEGA-BELLIES: ARTISTS FROM MIDDLE EUROPE WITH METABOLIC SYMPTOMS.
During Ellen's birthday dinner tonight I was speaking with my brother Peter and the following title for an exhibition came to my mind:
MEGA-BELLIES: ARTISTS FROM MIDDLE EUROPE WITH METABOLIC SYMPTOMS.
This morning I asked students at my weekly Joshibi seminar to select one branded itme in their bags and put it on a table. We then had a discussion about the ways in which these things could be categorized, interpreted and 'read'. This is what came out:
A Louis Vuitton bag
A Kitson purse
A Kitamura leather commuter pass holder
New Balance shoe
Outdoor bag
Dolce & Gabbana watch
Apple ipod
Apple iphone
Comme ca du mode purse
I helped curate a rather unique exhibition of contemporary Japanese artists in the Residence of the US Ambassador in Tokyo, titled 'Ties over Time'. There was a reception last night at the residence preceded by a press briefing to which nearly twenty media organisations came, including NHK TV News. They broadcast this on tonight's news: NHK News US Embassy Tokyo April 3 (I notice that the link is dead due to violation. 22 April. RM)
You can sort of see me in the opening shot standing in the background.
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.
The end of the year is always hectic - particularly with lectures at AIT, but also Tama and Musashino Art Universities. My classes at Tama, on the City and Art for 3-4th year students and 1st year's Introduction to Contemporary Art, have four sessions to go each. The Musabi class on Reading contemporary art through texts also nears its completion, and an avant-garde has even self-appointed itself in the group to organise a 'nomikai' drinking session. As well as preparing lectures weekly, universities and AIT must also prepare curricula and schedules and guests for next year - I decided to stop at Tama, and continue at Musabi, and there is a new offer from Joshibi. I feel that Musabi is my 'base' in many ways. I get this feeling through the architecture of the place, its formal but also slightly worn seminar rooms, which contrasts with Tama's brilliant white and shiny halls. I really find it itchy being in white pristine spaces for too long, especially trying to engage students in discussion on complex topics that need time and thinking. I have found that the time-worn corridors of Musabi are more conducive to this. And there is the issue of how lecturers are situated. At Tama, we get a neat, little room to ourselves, next to the administrative offices. At Musabi we share a large open office with the admin staff, where the art magazines are stacked, photo-copiers whirr and bento is taken. This is clearly a better system. I am sure that the architectural, and by extension narrative, contexts mould the students in particular ways. I don't think universities should be white and pristine, like hospitals. They should be in dull shades of scarred and worn green's, blue's and grey's, because this gives permission to the students to use the space, to kind of take it over (by sticking posters on walls, hanging out in seminar rooms etc.). Pristine white spaces seem to say, 'don't touch me' and 'only occupy the centre of rooms'.
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 took the train down and back to Kokura and Hakata for the second Kita-Kyushu Biennale and to see the fourth Asia Pacific Triennale at the Asia Museum in Fukuoka. Both were worth the five hour journey down.
The Asia Triennale is an important and pioneering exhibition which has also helped form the extensive Asia-Pacific collection of the Asia Museum. The fourth edition, held mainly in the museum, presented a mix of old works by established artists such as Cai Guo-Qiang, Xu Bing and Subodh Gupta and newer pieces by younger artists such as Yee I-Lan, Atul Bhalla and Seema Nusrat. Atul Bhalla (India) showed an impressive photo-text work which documented his journey along a river in a large Indian metropolis. Referencing in parts the land art approaches of Hamish Fulton and Richard Long, Bhalla's work was a poignant documentation of both the environmental and human effects of rapid industrialization. In a similar documentary vein was the powerful video and installation by Bangaldeshi artists Yasmine Kabir and Ronni Ahmmed. They filmed workers hauling steel and detritus from massive ship wrecks in a scrap yard along the Bangladeshi coast. From Japan the photographer Higa Toyomitsu's ghostly photographs of the Nanamui shamanic rituals and his images of the anti-base demonstrations in Okinawa during the early 1970s were utterly absorbing.
The 'Imin' exhibition over in Moji-ko outside Kokura for the second Kita-Kyushu Biennale was a silent, serious affair. Held in the disused former offices of Japan Railways, the exhibition consisted entirely of projected and monitor slide works. Takuji Kogo of Candy Factory Projects collaborated with Mike Bode (Sweden), Federico Baronello (Italy) and Charles Lim (Singapore) on documentary-type photo essays exploring immigration. All of the works shared a formal language which I found interesting - being translated into Kogo's signature method of slide shows which jitter between scenes. Each work was accompanied by an A4 text written by the artists explaining the contexts and situations of the respective places documented. Mike Bode and Kogo photographed Brazilian worker communities living near Toyota City. Federico Baronello's work explored the sinking of an illegal immigrant ship near the Sicilian town of Portopalo. Charles Lim contributed a work looking into the hiring of foreign domestic workers in Singapore. The artists group Second Planet created a collage slide show of historical images of Manchuria, which existed between 1932 and 1945 under various colonial and multi-ethnic formations. The fact that such an exhibition is under way in Japan is something to be recognised - and from talking with the organisers (the non profit alternative space Gallery SOAP, Kita-Kyushu), I learned that they were denied funding from various public sources because the theme and title was deemed too strong. They could have changed the title to something like 'Mobility', and shown the same works, and probably received funding - but the fact that they chose to go with 'Imin' is testament to the organisers and artists critical fibre. Having said this, the exhibition left me with a number of questions, particularly regarding the ethical position of the artist when confronting these complex issues. I kept pondering the difficult relationship which is necessarily created between the artist-witness and those who they film for an art work - migrant workers etc. What was this sense of distance which the act of photographing or filming produces? And how am I, as a viewer, implicated in this in the act of watching? The artists decision to use no sound and to stutter the images, so that a segment would endlessly micro-loop were perhaps attempts to address these issues and lessen the spectacular potential of the subject matter.
The opening symposium was held from 5pm to 7pm. I sat between two 'senpai' critics, Mouri Yoshitaka to my left and Noi Sawaragi to my right. Mouri spoke about the ability of those who could move in today's globalized situation and those who simply could not. I offered thoughts on my recent naturalization experience and trends in curatorial and critical writing towards things 'being on the move', nomadic and flowing - a position reflected in Nicolas Bourriaud's recent book 'The Radicant' for example. Sawaragi, in customary art historian mode, contributed three case studies about what he usefully termed 'Imin teki kouka' (immigrant-like effects) on Japanese art history. He cited Ernest Fenelossa and his use of Hegelian modes to write a Japanese linear art history, the 'dentou ronsou' of the 1950s between Jomon and Yayoi cultures as the true origins of Japanese culture (Okamoto vs Tange Kenzo/ Kawazoe), and debates around Mono-ha in the 1970s and the role of Korean artist Lee Ufan in theorizing it. Other interesting points which emerged included: Isamu Noguchi's 'haafu' identity, the essentialist writings of Bruno Taut in the early 1930s vs the counter essentialist position of Sakaguchi Ango, thoughts about architecture and issues about the mechanisms in Japan which continue to promulgate a Japan-culture centric discourse. The discussion centred largely around art and its writings rather than socio-economic issues of immigration, in line with the sessions title which was 'Immigration and Art'. Around seventy people attended the talk, which was held in Gallery SOAP, Kokura.
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.
I returned
from a three day visit to the fourth Echigo Tsumari Art
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
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:
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.
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