Tactical Museum

US Embassy Art

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.

Art & Social Change Predicament in Japan: Recent Round-ups

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. 

Lieko Shiga Review on Artscape International and Art Universites.

My review here.

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'.

CREAM Yokohama is a Must-SEE.

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.

'Imin' and Asia Art Triennale reflections.

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.

Berlin Wall on the Embassy Wall, Moats and Apes

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

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

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

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

Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale 2009

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

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

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

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

Of the works I saw, the successful were:

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

 

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

A cloud that looked like the islands of Japan.

ArtIt Website

ArtIt Website has launched.

I am one of the many in-site bloggers.
Under the pseudonym 'PATA-PHYSIC PAST', I have decided to post a writing and museology project I have been pursuing for some years. It comprises found photographs, art and captions.

Hopefully updated weekly.

Yoroshiku,

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.

Kato Shuichi

I watched a great documentary last night on NHK about the recently deceased Japanese writer and critic Shuichi Kato. Kato wrote a book called 'Kotoba to Sensha' (Words and Tanks), which traced his thoughts on living through the events of 1968 when he was living in Vienna, and particularly his experiences of visiting Prague just prior to the Soviet invasion. The documentary was shot in July this year, and he appeared a fragile but highly articulate voice for critical reflection on Japan's post-war condition. Speaking about the students protests in Japan in 1968 he commented that the significance of those times was that students identified and attempted to question the growing influence of the Military-Industrial-Academic Complex (Gun-san), after it became known that major universities such as Tokyo University were receiving donations from the American military, while bombs fell in Vietnam. For this, they should be proud said Kato. Kato often said that 1968 has not ended, in the sense that we continue to live through similar conditions as then.
A key phrase which Kato repeated was 'Heisoku kan' -  a sense of weariness, tiredness, hopelessness - which he feels permeates developed societies deeply to this day. It was against this sensibility that he identifies the student, worker and cultural revolts of the 1960s as proposing a radical change of life and society - 'seikatsu wo kaeru!'. Kato seemed to be a humanist and socialist to the end. He railed against the de-humanizing effects of a systematized society and went so far as saying that the history of Japan post Meiji was in fact also a history of de-individuation and of de-human-ness (hi-kojin ka/ hi-ningen ka). He urged for the urgency and continued relevance of 'shisoh' - philosophy and critical thinking - saying that this had two fundamental aspects: first, the writing, checking and confirming of facts against history and the past, and secondly, asking What To Do?, which generates the richness of creative and utopian thinking. He ended by saying that we needed to re-energize a sense of being human into the world again: 'Ningen rashisa wo sekai ni mou ikkai saisei suru'.

Shuichi Kato - 19 September 1919 - 5 December 2008

Very brief bio in Wikipedia.