Tactical Museum

12 Moons at AIT: Panpsychic Curating.

We have been organising a curating course at AIT since 2001. My team from last year's Curation Practice course orgnaised '12 Moons: Communicating with the Full Moon', an instruction art website and event based project.
You can read and realize the instructions here.

On the full moon of May 9, we organised the first event at AIT. Over 50 people came, 20 or so staying through the night until dawn. The curating team presented ideas behind the project including a survey of Rudolf Steiner's lunar thinking and a short history of instruction based art. A special guest also came, Yumikino san, who runs one of only two bio-dynamic farms in Japan (near Narita, Chiba). In between treating the earth with special elixirs of cow horn and planting seed according to lunar cycles, he renovates a beautiful old farmhouse which he hopes to eventually turn into a bio-dynamic center. We set up a bio-dynamic cafe, serving food and drinks made from this method.

At midnight we asked those present to collectively realize the instruction work of the Swedish artists IC98 . This was one of the most powerful moments of the night, transforming a room of thirty or so people into a space of silence and non-electricity.

We intend to continue adding instructions to the website and making further full moon events. As I wrote on the website introduction, the project conceives the full moon to be its principle audience. The Enlightenment equation of Artist Producer - Curator Mediator - Public Audience feels awkward and strained now. I propose that there are really no privileged knowledge perspectives, no place from where a curator or an artist can 'pass on' knowledge. We today all share the same hallucinations. The age is psychedelic. Laterally shifting the attention of our activities away from human audiences to a cosmic dimension is perhaps one way to probe our hallucinatory predicament. By doing so we may temporarily re-align ourselves away from what Felix Guattari refers to as 'Integrated World Capitalism', and be open to the felt experience of the body in Space.

Some pictures from the evening.

'Ninjas', Peter McDonald, 2008.

Small exhibition of moon related objects.


Yumikino san.


Realizing Tranquility Base in AIT Room, IC98 instruction.

Tsukimi-Udon served at dawn.

One of the key images for us in thinking about this project was Charles Duke's family photograph left on the surface of the moon during the Apollo 16 mission. The photograph is in a plastic bag and on it are written the words: 'This is the family of Astronaut Duke from Planet Earth. Landed on the Moon, April 1972.' An interesting essay on the moon photo can be read here. We thought about this as perhaps the first intentional curatorial gesture to be held outside the atmosphere of earth.

Immersion Course

It all began on Wednesday evening, April 1st.
Ryoji Ikeda at MOT is an exhibition for chromophobes, for Matrix Trilogy fans and white cube fetishists.

      

Some parts of the museum lobby had been renovated. The Nadiff run museum shop now finds itself in a new corner, polished.

The venerable Mr Johnnie Walker at the opening about to eat a bit of broccoli.

On to the regally colored 2nd edition of the 101 Tokyo Contemporary Art Fair at Akiba Square, Akihabara. Compared to last year the walls of the booths were noticably thicker. Amid the crowd, Fumio Nanjo of The Mori Museum and Agathe and Antonin , organisers of last year's fair.

   

Thursday, 2nd April, evening. Opening of Art Fair Tokyo at International Forum. I find art fairs incredibly difficult places to navigate, let alone see art. Taken by the current of the crowds, the experience is akin to white-water rafting.

    

Rather than use my own eyes, I discovered the pleasure of looking at things through the view-finder of my camera. I started to take pictures of the gathered high-priests - gallerists and dealers.

 

       

from left: Mr. Kodama of Kodama Gallery, Ms. Shimada of  Gallery Side 2,  Mr. Wako of Wako Works of Art, Mr. Shiraishi of SCAI The Bathhouse.

         

from left: Mr. Mitsuma of Mizuma Art Gallery, Misako of  Misako and Rosen, Mr. Koyama of Tomio Koyama Gallery, Jeffrey of Taka Ishii Gallery.

       

from left: Mr. Aoyama of Aoyama Meguro, Ms. Fujiki of  Mujinto Production, Ms. Urano of  ArataniUrano, Mr. Ikeuchi of Roentgenwerke.

 The Director of Art Fair Tokyo, Misa Shin.

Friday 3rd April, late afternoon, opening of The Kaleidoscopic Eye' at The Mori Art Museum.  A well installed, but somewhat cold exhibition of well known artists from a European aristocratic collection.

       

Klaus Weber's 2003 work, Public Fountain LSD Hall, made it for me. It is a small glass fountain, modelled on the fountains at The Great Exhibition of 1851 London, flowing with potentized LSD, which neutralizes its consciousness altering properties and makes it into a homeopathic remedy. While looking at it I was introduced by a museum patron to a former Minister for Education in Japan, a moment of magical synchronicity.

I went back to the 101 Art Fair to hear their first panel discussion, on the impossible but always welcome topic 'What is contemporary art and what is not?'. Moderated by Andrew Maerkle, formerly of Art Asia Pacific magazine, but now living in Tokyo, it furnished some interesting points. The panel consisted of:

          

from left: Andrew Maerkle, Jeffrey Rosen (Taka Ishii Gallery), Shihoko Iida (Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery) Junya Sato (Boice Planning) ,

 

Haruka Ito (Magical Art Room) , Satoshi Okada (collector).

Two things in particular remained with me. Jeffrey spoke of contemporary art in Japan as in its infancy, and therefore having a sense of immediacy, which I thought usefully captured a prevalent mood current here now. I understood immediacy as coming across in certain naive styles, the often seen blurred effects in painting, Micropop tendencies and the neo-Gutai/Dada performance of artists like Ichiro Endo who I have written about here before.

The issue of history and discourse building was inevitably raised. The interesting point about the ongoing emergence of art movements in Japan since the late 1990s offered a counter-trajectory to European/ N. American histories. It does seem both odd and somewhat natural that movements should become one of the main vehicles through which micro histories are charted and 'written' - Superflat, Micropop, Shibuya-kei, Showa 40 nen kai etc. 

Saturday 4th April, AIT resident artist from Finland, Meri Nikula led a body/ voice workshop for a dozen people which I attended. It was the best thing in the entire bonanza art weekend. Beginning with various meditation and warming up exercises, Meri got us grunting and chanting, stumbling around the room with our eyes closed and generally sounding very much like those apes that appear in the first twenty minutes of Kubrick's Space Odyssey 2001.

        

Refreshed and 'aped' up, I walked to openings at various galleries in the Shirogane art complex. Kodama Gallery was showing wall drawings by Olaf Breuning, including this funny parody of a Murakami image.

Nanzuka Underground was showing fetishistic tribal masks by Akiyoshi Mishima. 

  

Yamamoto Gendai looked like an extension of Gunter von Hagen's  Body Worlds exhibition of flayed human corpses which has toured the globe recently. The works were by Motohiko Odani.

               

On the upper floors were new galleries selling ancient Buddhist art and relics. Black limousines and ambassador's cars lined the street outside.

                                                    

Sunday, April 5th. I was invited by O.F.F., the Oosutoria Freespace Foundation, to an informal meeting with other alternative art space people. Begun by Georg Russegger and Elsy Lahner, they currently live and make projects from an apartment in Bashamichi, Yokohama. We talked about the problems and complexities of creative city policies in Japan today, about international cooperation and the relative inflexibility of cultural policy and frameworks in Japan which tends to be bound by strict codes and modes of operating.

    

O.F.F. space, Hitomi Hasegawa of MIACA, and Takahiro Kaneshima of  Far East Contemporaries.

 

Georg, Elsy.

The long weekend reminded me that art spans a constantly self-transforming spectrum of experiences, from classical museum or gallery based displays, the disorientation and high of the commercial art fair, opening parties, public discussions and talks, tiny encounters while wandering through galleries, the intensity of participating in workshops, drinking and eating with artists and colleagues, and the sense of depth and friendship one finds in small gatherings. Writing this at my desk, I find myself alone again but strangely filled with images and memories.

Chim Pom, Cai Guo-Qiang, Hiroshima, Sky, Issues

Edan Corkill has written a piece in today's Japan Times about Chim Pom's recent Hiroshima sky scandal, contextualized within other recent art transgressions in Japan.
READ HERE

Bonny Cassidy, currently in residence at Akiyoshidai International Art Village, has written a piece about Cai Guo-Qiang's 'Black Fireworks' held at the A-Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, comparing it with Chim Pom's recent action.
READ HERE

Chim Pom 'wrote' the term 'Pika', meaning explosion or blast but also the first constituent of the global anime phenomenon known as Pikachu which the artists group have referred to in the past, in the skies above Hiroshima.

Chim Pom leader and Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art curator Yukie Kamiya (rear) apologise at a press conference.

*Above images pasted from Hiroshima Peace Media Center (Japanese only).

Desperately Trying to Fall Down a Crevasse - Yokohama Triennale 2008

Interior of Shinko Pier venue (architects Nishizawa Ryue).

The third installament of the Yokohama Triennale, currently showing, is titled Time Crevasse. Under the Directorship of Tsutomu Mizusawa and five curators the exhibition purports to emphasize 'performative work involving the body rather than a conventional display of artwork in an ordinary gallery setting, thereby bringing out a sense of time more vividly' (from the short guide Directors introduction). There is certainly plenty of work that deals with performance, dance in one form or another, sound and other 'live' mediums. The Triennale seems to weaken this bold mission in two principal areas however.

The first is on the architectural/ installation front where, particularly in the main warehouse space of the Shinko Pier, the exhibition seems to take on a strange ordered quality that squeezes many works into well behaved displays. The architects chose to build half finished walls throughout the space, creating cubes within the architectural box, blocking out natural sunlight from the windows and creating exposed rear passages and corridors. The unfinished walls retained their industrial maker brands, as well as the supporting white structures. It reminded me of the 2005 Triennale, which also chose to go with a half finished look - a question of cost? Or an attempt at exhibition design? Either way, the effect was one of demarcated, rational planning where individual works kept to themselves with almost no spillage to neighbors. Were the architects suggesting that the exposed rear corridors and passageways were metaphors for crevasses? I hope not. This design and curatorial decision did not assist artists like Jonathan Meese, Mike Kelley, Falke Pisano, Shilpa Gupta or Michelangelo Pistoletto, whose installations would have benefitted from a greater sense of connection to the space itself and other works...Pistoletto's smashed mirrors did not reflect much back except  the viewer, Meese's detritus was neatly cornered, Pisano's fabric and bamboo tents remained without wind, Kelley's occult ode to candle rituals and Nazism remained isolated and Gupta's large photographic canvases which depicted dozens of boys and girls in lines looked sadly locked up. This very cubic exhibition design also seemed to diminish any sense of curatorial linkage or connectivity, as the experience became one of traversing separate spaces through the unfinished inter-zones. The possibility of losing one's balance and falling into a time crevasse in such a space was unlikely. Disorientation or dissolution seemed most definitely NOT to be on the installation agenda - in favor of a strange sense that approximated walking through a large aristocratic family home or castle - spaces designed for very specific revelations of authority, control and elaborations of meaning. It was also paradoxical that the more intense, transgressive works were compartmentalized in enclosed spaces with warning signs outside them for children etc. This was the case for Herman Nitsch, Paul McCarthy and Mathew Barney in the NYK  Waterfront Warehouse.

Jonathan Meese.

Falke Pisano

Interior of Shinko Pier venue

The second area concerned the question of presenting performative work through the various mediums of documentary film, video, sound and related reproduction technologies. I left the exhibition feeling that it had effectively explored the limits of presenting performance work, but without adding any significant new approaches or modes to the ongoing discussion. Time after time, I found myself standing before a monitor, a screen, a bank of speakers and realizing how in-personal the experience was, how removed from bodily sensation it was. The crucial point lay in the very passive engagement style that much of the works initiated. Documentary or archival style work that included reading materials, study environments or library-like spaces for learning were almost absent.  For all the talk of performativity and the body, I was surprised how much work relied on electrical technologies of play-back.  Certainly this suggests a sense of peering back into, or down into time runnels, but I was reminded how dominating the experience of television is. The curators could have, for instance, pondered painting, drawing or certain forms of object making as time-inscribing processes which present quite different play-back experiences to those of reproduction technologies. The standard documentary films of performance and happenings, such as were shown in the excellent Art of Body, Art of Action archive of films in the Red Brick Warehouse, seemed to resonate strongly, perhaps because they were largely silent and historical and thus also auratic - full of history, time's passage and hence also archival. Tino Sehgal's work at the Sankeien gardens was though, very personal and ongoing, consisting of two dancers in a perpetual kissing embrace, rolling around on the tatami floors of an ancient house while birds flew outside, tourists strolled through and the sunlight slowly moved. This piece is performed throughout the entirety of the Triennale, an amazing and bold decision. Could not many more works taken a similar route? The dancer Tanaka Min similarly dances near his tin hut outside the NYK venue, but irregularly and without notice. Once again I heard echoes of the 2005 Triennale, which attempted to follow a similar ongoing mode as a circus, with workshops, cafes, games etc daily. The issue of presenting performance works and time based works is a complex one, but surely one which curators should engage with creatively in exhibitions of this scale and ambition? Added to the fact that this Triennale included no wall captions or contextual texts even in the guidebook (which consisted only of previous work information), the visitors experience is potentially a highly challenging one. Although the works were largely by well known, respected artists it seemed simply unkind to expect audiences to 'experience' them with no option of learning more about their social, historical or referential contexts. Notwithstanding the ever present risk of curatorial over-pedagogy, this Triennale should have at least offered some elegant, brief labeling on site or in the guidebook.

Fujiko Nakaya

The more engaging works included those sited in the Sankeien garden which clearly communicated with their specific sites and moods. The NYK Warehouse was also sharply focused and powerful, with all of the warning sign works and its large damp warehouse spaces. Paul McCarthy's video installation was a tempest of whirling Demon-Disneyland that altered the mind. Rodney Graham's early performance piece showing him lobbing potatoes at a gong benefitted from its siting in the barren concrete and slightly damp smelling spaces of the warehouse. Herman Nistch's stained altars, photographs and videos very directly reminded one of the alienated modern body, trying desperately to re-engage through ritual and sacrifice that at times looked sad. Joan Jonas's video installation, Marina Abramovich's spirit adjuster platforms, Douglas Gordon's animal videos, Nakanishi Natsuyuki's paintings, Yoko Ono's Cut Piece video...all generated an overall sense of meaning which illuminated aspects of the body, spirit, matter and time. This venue drew out the multiple resonances in the works through its abandoned materiality, but also by letting works bleed into each other, allowing images to seep into one's view from different spaces. This meant that the body of the visitor was kept alive, challenged and constantly having to negotiate itself - through adjusting the eyes, ears, and letting things other than the work intrude into the experience. As a curatorial space it managed to carry some of the themes and moods of the Director.

Herman Nitsch

Cerith Wyn Evans

The archive of video and films screened in the Red Brick Warehouse was another highlight, but perhaps more because of their historical value as rare documents. I was told off by a gallery attendant for filming a video on my camera. Mostly silent, and transferred from 8mm or 16mm film the films, which ranged from early Gutai stage performances, Butoh dance, Shelter Plan by Hi-red center and the Taj Mahal Travellers touring hippie venues, were also examples of how performance and action can be documented through film. Montage and collage techniques, long shots, rapid editing and handwritten captions were in evidence. Hijikata's butoh actions provided a Japanese counterpoint to the abject transgressions of Nitsch and McCarthy, somewhat more restrained and distant from a sense of guilt. One thing which struck me though as I wandered through this maelstrom of art performances was how sombre much of it is. There is an air of heavy seriousness which hangs around much of the works, manifested through either rumbling, screeching electronic noises, sudden kinds of editing which cut narrative and monotonous voices. Before such works one invariably begins to act in specific ways, becoming quiet, contemplative perhaps, and strangely introverted. The now well worn cliche that 'art performance' is 'serious', not pleasurable, seemed to be very much perpetuated in the Triennale's selection of works (haven`t any curators heard of David Mancuso?) The mechanics of the art exhibition - security, safety etc - are obviously also factors that limit and restrict our access and experience of works. I was left thinking how we end up being spectators of moments and actions performed by others and how - if at all - the exhibition as a medium has and can become more elastic, more forgiving and more loving.

Aki Sasamoto

Peter Wins!

My brother Peter won The John Moore's Painting Prize!

- scene -
'Rain' by Dorothy Morrison comes on, and we start to jump and whoop!
- end -

Congratulations.

Some links:
The Guardian
The BBC
The Liverpool Echo

Curating in SL

Yesterday I spent one hour in Second Life organizing my contribution to Cao Fei's project for The forthcoming Yokohama Triennale (opening Sept 12). Cao Fei is currently managing the building of a city called RMB City in Second Life. Parts of its construction site will be launched at Yokohama. When Cao was in Japan a few months ago we met, and spoke about virtual spaces etc. I had become a resident of SL in early 2007, and made several replica sculptures there. Cao has invited me to show some of these in RMB city, so yesterday was a day of 'transporting' or transferring my objects to her staff, and sorting out logistics. It was the easiest curatorial/ project episode I have perhaps ever been involved with! I am excited to see how her physical installation in Yokohama turns out, but for those who can venture into SL, you can experience the work online. More on this as it develops. 
Cao Fei's Blog

Atomic Sunshine in Tokyo

I just went to see 'Into the Atomic Sunshine' at Hillside Gallery in Daikanyama. For details please read Edan's article in The Japan Times .
I left feeling somewhat awkward. It was not particularly the themes or topics addressed in the project, nor the selected art works that made me feel like this. I have been pondering this. I think what made me feel like this was the abstract level of the exhibition and project. By this I mean that Watanabe Shinya, the curator, chose to move into the domain of war, post-colonialism, pacifism and post-war Japanese art through the filter of a legal document - Article 9 of the Constitution. The exhibition and its explication through symposia and texts seemed largely to spin across quite dense legal and philosophical terrain. In other words, by referring singularly to a constitutional document the project seemed to be limited and refracted by its reliance on belief systems and ideology. I think that my feeling of awkwardness came about because of this. There were almost no works in the exhibition which rested on more personal or experiential episodes. How can a legal document such as Article 9 be experienced today? I wished for a different curatorial layer in the project, one that could perhaps have inverted the state-centric discussions of international politics into a field of personal experiences and matters of the body. For me, a creature like Godzilla, for example, seems to be an attempt to actually map Japan's atomic trauma onto a body - albeit very large and covered in scales -  in order to provide a more experientially graspable sense of what are perhaps 'post-human' issues. Atomic Sunshine's curatorial approach rather tended to bring together works which stayed literally close to legal and state-centric readings of the issues - actually incorporating the document in works through text, material, recreation, national symbols etc. You can read more about the project via the curator's website: SpikyArt.

Nadiff Reborn and Convenience.

After many months absence, the art book store Nadiff re-opened in a new building in Ebisu. The opening last night was a scrum. Unwisely, some of the tenant galleries in the building placed their congratulatory flower vases on the narrow steps leading through the building, effectively making the stairs huge congestion zones. When I left, just after 7pm, there were perhaps 100 people waiting in line outside to get in. Magical Art Room and two other galleries have spaces in the building, and there is a bar/ cafe on the roof.
The new building seemed to be another good example of the survival strategy of art spaces in Tokyo to huddle together in shared premises. It certainly makes for a more convenient experience for the consumer.

Convenient.

Inconvenient.

On the topic of convenience, I have recently been imagining at my university seminars what it would be like if Japan banned convenience stores, or at least made them In-Convenience stores (In-Vini, to shorten the word like Con-bini). The idea emerged when thinking about what inconvenience means today, especially in a city like Tokyo where such privilege is placed on the ideal of 'service'. At a time when the birth rate is declining and part time workers are beginning to map the economic future of this country, I wonder what significance 'service' has? Being inconvenienced may actually be highly liberating. They are perhaps moments (cracks) when one is made aware of the multiple normally invisible economic and labour frameworks which sustain everyday life in a city. Inconvenience means waiting, becoming emotionally agitated or finding something difficult - all actually processes which most children are taught to understand and accept in varying ways. As one enters the mature labor market and begins to move in certain kinds of social circuits, the notion of being inconvenienced somehow emerges as a major issue. Recognizing the many types of inconvenience though, I nonetheless feel that things have gotten overly convenient. The convenience store is the primary physical symbol of this tendency, and also a place (or perhaps more accurately a 'non-place' in Auge's sense) which actually perversely sustains micro-conveniences which must be constantly re-supplied. So, maybe in a strange way the convenience store is actually already the in-convenience store, manufacturing a looped system of micro-desires and micro-satisfactions with no perceivable end in sight.    

Nadiff Site

My brother, Peter's, book (blue) was piled up on the Nadiff display shelf.

Strange Attractors: recent exhibitions reflecting on 'The Transcendental Object at the End of Time'.

As ArtForum dedicates its current issue to gazing back at the events of May 1968 I have noticed a decidely C21st runnel being formed around issues and languages of space, E.T's, alchemy, the Middle Ages, ecological catastrophe and other related topics by exhibition curators recently. The following is a list of exhibitions which have happened or are about to happen since February of this year which seem to relate to this territory in some way:

THE END WAS YESTERDAY- Part II
at kunstraum  Innsbruck, Austria
May 31 - June 22 2008
THE END WAS YESTERDAY – PART II brings together an international group of 19 contemporary artists depicting various post-apocalyptic phenomena. The exhibition takes place in a world which has already come to an end and deals with the state between apocalypse and an immediate attempt of reorientation.

ECPLIPSE: ART IN A DARK AGE.
Moderna  Museet, Stockholm.
31 May - 24 August, 2008
The artists in Eclipse work with installation, sculpture, performance, video projection and painting, exploring and portraying fields that are irrational, dark or politically incorrect. Several of them have a fascination for the absurd sides of life, resulting in refreshingly humorous works. Existential issues concerning the conditions of mankind are the starting-point.

SUPERNATURAL
11th May – 10th August 2008
CCA  Kunsthalle, Majorca; Spain
Our idealistic concepts of nature are proving to be archaic, and we are re-awakening to a new version of nature. The exhibition SUPERNATURAL reflects the vision of a nature strangely altered through cross-pollination with popular culture, technology and romanticism. While "nature" refers to both real and fictional ideas of nature, "super" relates to constructed images, artifice, utopia or to scientific research.

Life on Mars
the 2008 Carnegie  International
May 3, 2008 - January 11, 2009
Are we alone in the universe? Do aliens exist? Or are we, ourselves, strangers in our
own world?
Life on Mars, the 2008 Carnegie International explores the important yet continually perplexing question of what it means to be human in the world today. “The thematic premise behind the show has to do with the idea of the intimate moments in our daily lives that we miss by walking through our worlds and not seeing what is right in front of us. It also has to do with the more infinite sense of being part of the larger universe and finding ourselves on the inside and looking out.” says Fogle. “The art world itself is Mars, and the best contemporary art asks you more questions than you sometimes have answers for.”


GOD & GOODS. Spirituality and Mass Confusion
Villa Manin Centre for Contemporary Art
20.04. - 28.09.2008
GOD & GOODS. Spirituality and Mass Confusion aims to open a dialogue with the topic of religion being it an immense, controversial and unresolved debate but also a concept open to new and diverse forms of interpretation.
The works of the twenty-eight artists in the exhibition underline existential questions, play with the senses and perception of reality and challenge in some cases the mechanisms of beliefs. Art looks at religion from an outside perspective: it can expose the evocative power of an image as well as relate the mythology of consumer goods to holy iconography.


Stray Alchemists
Ullens Center for Contemporary Art
April 12 - July 13, 2008
UCCA’s first international exhibition introduces six artists from Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia whose works--spanning from sculpture and installation, to performance, collage, drawing, photography and video--are breathing new life into the contemporary art world. As the show’s title suggests, the artists are in the process of transforming how the mediums in which they work are typically understood, letting material processes influence the outcomes of their experiments.

Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art
Barbican Art Gallery
6 Mar-18 May/08
Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art presents contemporary art works under the fictional rubric of a museum collection conceived by and designed for extraterrestrials. This ambitious, playful and irreverent exhibition features over 100 artists and more than 175 works, primarily sculptures along with mixed media, video, photography and works on paper.
This exhibition is partly inspired by the first chapter of Thierry de Duve"s Kant after Duchamp, in which an imaginary anthropologist from outer space sets out to inventory "all that is called art by humans". Adopting a pseudo-anthropological approach, the Museum employs eccentric taxonomies and surprising juxtapositions. The fictitious Martian perspective opens up contemporary art to fresh interpretations and allows for its reassessment from an alien standpoint, thus mimicking the way that Western anthropologists historically interpreted non-Western cultures through foreign eyes. Looking at contemporary art as though from outer space offers the potential to make the familiar strange and to turn the dominant Euro-American art tradition into the "Other". It also raises pertinent questions about the use and value of contemporary art in human culture.

GREENWASHING
Environment: Perils, Promises and Perplexities
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy
29 February - 18 May 2008
"As rockets go to the moon the darkness around the Earth grows deeper and darker"
Robert Smithson
GREENWASHING presents the work of 25 international artists and artist-groups whose practice suggests that the literalism embedded in old-fashioned concepts such as 'environmentalism' and 'nature' is not equipped to comprehend the ecological territory of our time. Today we negotiate an evermore urgent and pervasive ecological (and thereby cultural, political, social and economic) arena that is darkly shadowed by potentially catastrophic ecosystemic collapse.

*Note: the short descriptions after each exhibition are taken from their respective websites or e-flux notices etc.

Heavy, Fast Week for Art in Tokyo

As gasoline prices fall, the Diet remains deadlocked, philosophers are refused entry, a film (Yasukuni by Li Ying) is effectively forced out of all theatres in Tokyo, this week sees the city embracing the global contemporary art bubble with the opening of the long running Art Fair Tokyo and the new, younger 101 Art Fair. I am due to speak with Haruka Ito of Magical Art Room on Saturday 5th at 14:00 in one of the public programs accompanying the 101 Fair. As is often the case with these affairs, the rather dramatic title of our session is 'Japanese Art Now!' (note the exclamation mark. Does it point to a sense of shock? delight? or anger?). The session publicity blurb includes the following remark: "As some new post-Superflat artists emerge in Japan, we take a look at the Japanese contemporary art scene at the beginning of the 21st century". wow.
The thing is, that I recently keep feeling that things are decidedly not of the 21st century here - that things are veneered in all of the smooth coatings of global culture, and yet that underlying much of this remains serious questions about how we want to live today in this society, this culture. Recent cultural news items which I have posted about here make me really think about the state of affairs in the place of my birth.
I am moreover, now undergoing the process of 'Kika' (changing of nationality from British to Japanese). More on this as I transform.
With all of the late nights, drinking and hard selling that is about to descend on central Tokyo, I paste images of one of the more famous of the 'energy drinks' here. While absolutely intolerant of all drugs, Japan simultaneously generates one of the largest hyper caffeine based 'energy drink' markets in the world. This is the drug for the labouring masses, the all night office salaryman, the truck drivers, the pre exam student and the hard-selling gallerist. This is the world of Murakami's wide-eyed amphetamine-hi DOB - where the world becomes flat, shiny and very fast.
And here is when I move towards the door.....