Tactical Museum

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. 

Out/ In

I noticed that the Outsider Art Fair was held recently in New York, its 18th manifestation. This made me think about my own art background and the fact that I was taught by two of the most significant figures working in this field in the late C20th.

My art teacher at Aldenham school was John Maizels, the founding editor of Raw Vision magazine and author of Raw Creation. Although I never excelled in the studio, I remember John very clearly. He lived down the road from the school gates near the big Hare Krishna temple. My brother Peter, who is today an artist, worked closely with John.

My PhD supervisor and professor was Roger Cardinal, who then taught at Kent. Roger wrote the seminal book 'Outsider Art' in 1972, coining the term and outlining its parameters. I worked very closely with him for over three years, writing my thesis. Roger remains my most important mentor/ teacher.

Roger Cardinal, left.

It's never really occurred to me in a big way that the two art-related teachers in my life were also intensely related to outsider art. Thinking about this now, after working as a curator in the contemporary art world for over ten years, is quite interesting. For one thing I have never once felt the urge to work in a museum or a gallery, preferring the more unstable route of working independently and founding an art non profit. I can also point to certain experiences of art which triggered my move into studying art - Kurt Schwitters and Franz West are two important artists who I saw in exhibitions and affected me strongly. Roger Cardinal's writings on Kurt Schwitters are some of my favorite pieces of art writing. Franz West's work I think moves into the domains of fetishes, African art and wonderfully lumpen forms. My fascination with altered states, mysticism and psychedelics led to a Masters degree in the Study of Mysticism and Religious Experience at Kent - all subjects deeply related to John and Roger's fields. My imminent move to the forests of Nagano prefecture is also partly I think inspired by wanting to put physical distance between myself and Tokyo, the hub for art activities. I do often feel despondent, or at least worn, by the whole contemporary art world. I certainly find little pleasure in 'playing' the global art circuit of openings etc - and I say this as someone who has had the good fortune to participate in it as a biennale/ triennale curator. 

I feel that it is a good time now to think again about what my two teachers are about. Whether this results in an extended hibernation or withdrawal from the Tokyo contemporary art scene....we'll see.

John Maizels profile in NY Times.

Roger Cardinal Bibliography at Amazon 

Roger Cardinal in Tate Outsider Art Chronology

Hooooooooooo

Prime Minister Hatoyama practicing the slow release of Qi or Prana breath together with little balls of light while answering questions from the press corps.

Naturalization in 1890

Looking through my Dad's books while on vacation in Nagano I came across 'Japanese Things' by Basil Hall Chamberlain, first published in 1890. It is an A to Z of all things Japanese, written by a British Japanologist who taught Japanese at the then Tokyo Imperial University (now Tokyo University). 

Thinking about my current predicament, a step away from becoming a Japanese citizen, 

I wondered if he had written on this subject from the perspective of 1890.

The only reference to this topic was a short paragraph under the topic 'Adoption'. 

Read the paragraph beginning "Until quite recently".

Bede Griffiths on Love

Art is Not Culture

Four perspectives by four people around the above line which I have been quite affected by recently.

1. Aldous Huxley writing in a 1963 essay titled 'Culture and the Individual'. :

" BETWEEN CULTURE and the individual the relationship is, and always has been, strangely ambivalent. We are at once the beneficiaries of our culture and its victims. Without culture, and without that precondition of all culture, language, man would be no more than another species of baboon. It is to language and culture that we owe our humanity.(......) Since human beings respond to symbols as promptly and unequivocally as they respond to the stimuli of unmediated experience, and since most of them naively believe that culture-hallowed words about things are as real as, or even realer than their perceptions of the things themselves, these outdated or intrinsically nonsensical notions do enormous harm. Thanks to the realistic ideas handed down by culture, mankind has survived and, in certain fields, progresses. But thanks to the pernicious nonsense drummed into every individual in the course of his acculturation, mankind, though surviving and progressing, has always been in trouble. History is the record, among other things, of the fantastic and generally fiendish tricks played upon itself by culture-maddened humanity. And the hideous game goes on...."

2. Terence McKenna from a talk given at St. John the Divine's Cathedral, Synod Hall, New York, April 25, 1996:

 

"Culture is not your friend, no matter what your culture is. And this is sort of not a Politically Correct thing to say, because in the present ambience, (sort of, those who haven't gotten the word) there's a lot of attention to recovering our ethnic roots and to expressing our unique ethnicity, and so forth and so on -- I think that's the beginning of understanding. But all terms that stress ethnicity are words applied to groups of people. Have you ever noticed that? Have you ever noticed that you're not a group of people, you're a person? So you may be "Jewish", you may be "Black", you may be this, you may be that but there is no obligation to take upon yourself the generalized quality of these things, because the generalized qualities belong to thousands of people examined at a time. If you misunderstand that you become a caricature. You act out your ethnicity as a caricature.
So culture is not your friend, ideology is not your friend... Who's your friend? Well, to my mind, the felt presence of immediate experience is the surest dimension, the surest guide that you can possibly have. The felt presence of immediate experience."

3. Julia Kristeva writing in Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia UP, 1984).

"Finally, in the history of signifying systems and notably that of the arts, religion, and rites, there emerge, in retrospect, fragmentary phenomena which have been kept in the background or rapidly integrated into more communal signifying systems but point to the very process of signifiance. Magic, shamanism, esoterism, the carnival, and "incomprehensible" poetry all underscore the limits of socially useful discourse and attest to what it represses: the process that exceeds the subject and his communicative structures. But at what historical moment does social exchange tolerate or necessitate the manifestation of the signifying process in its "poetic" or "esoteric" form? Under what conditions does this "esoterism," in displacing the boundaries of socially established signifying practices, correspond to socioeconomic change, and, ultimately, even to revolution? And under what conditions does it remain a blind alley, a harmless bonus offered by a social order which uses this "esoterism" to expand, become flexible, and thrive?"

4. Jonathan Meese published a manifesto in the January/ February 2009 issue of Art Review magazine:

1. Art is Total Baby
2. Art is Total Joy
3. Art is Total Power (no human power)
4. Art is no Culture
5. Art is Total Humility
6. Art is Total Leadership
7. Art is no problem, Art needs no victims, Art needs no humans
8. Art is Total sweet Metabolism
9. Art is the only political party of the future
10. Art is no Ritual

Pataville, Pata

One of the first artists I worked with as a curator and a good friend, Guy Mayman, has a blog.

Its great.

Its made from his works.

Pataville

In a classic case of synchronicity, it so happens that my new blogging endeavor over at  ArtIt also uses the term 'Pata' in its title. Both Guy and myself seem to have traveled, quite independently, through the dreamland of Alfred Jarry and his Pataphysical College.

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,

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.

Intimations of Terence McKenna

Part of my reading in the past three months has been re-visiting the books and audio lectures of the late Terence McKenna (1946 - 2000).

Terence was somewhat of a rogue thinker, forever on the fringes of acceptable debate and often referred to as the heir to Timothy Leary, which I think is rather unfair. To me a more accurate relationship can be made with the British writer Aldous Huxley. I once attended a two day workshop seminar by Terence in London in 1994, where I sat and listened to his hypnotic voice discuss ideas about Time, novelty, psychedelics, history and what he called 'The Archaic Revival'. I think my initial interest in him came through his involvement with groups like The Shamen and Space Time Continuum who both created backing electronic tracks to Terence's monologues. While most academics and scholars have pretty much dismissed his ideas, I have recently come across a number of references to McKenna in interviews of artists (Carroll Dunham, Fred Tomaselli ) and in the now swelling debates about apocalypse and the end of the world in 2012 . The main cultural reference for 2012 issues seems to be aspects of the Mayan calender, but McKenna's Time Wave Theory (also called Novelty Theory ) also indicated late December 2012 as a point of some phase shift event. Listening to Terence's voice again on downloaded mp3 talks and lectures (a good starting point would be Psychedelic Salon Podcasts or LanceRules) my early interests in mysticism (in which I did a Masters at Kent) and its various manifestations with shamanism, entheogens and speculative philosophy have been stirred once again. I suppose in particular my perspectives on art being made now has, in the last year or so, been gradually moulded by intimations of what Terence would call an 'Archaic Revival'. This is something I have quietly been pondering as I wander through biennales and galleries, or speak with artists. Other posts in this blog have also outlined aspects of this territory. Something Terence said in a public talk has resonated in particular: "The secret faith of the C20th is not Modernism. It is a nostalgia for the Archaic, for the Paleolithic." This neatly sums up his position, and much of his writings and speaking was concerned with explicating the manifestations of this 'nostalgia' through art movements, music and entheogens.
Many exhibitions and art projects today seem to be referencing what can be called a 'pre-Modern' time line, accessing notions of the occult, the unseen and ritual to evoke disturbances or breaks with our current space-time (for example read Lars Bang Larsen's article The Other Side in frieze magazine 2007), or moving outwards to re-connect our present with the infinity of space, science fiction domains and telepathic technologies. I find this very interesting because I think it also moves art practice and thinking about art back into a realm which it has always occupied, although often forgotten and veiled over by pre-occupations with heavy theory. Taking into account and giving room for the important discussions about Primitivism and cultural globalisation which have matured since the 1990s, I feel that much current art asks us to consider different linguistic landscapes which take account of bodily experiences, perturbed states of consciousness and their evaluation. In mapping this terrain the work of Terence McKenna seems to offer some significant markers. Another McKenna-ism which he frequently used was 'Culture is not your Friend!' - indicating that culture is an operating system which dictates how one can behave and think in a given context, effectively curtailing one's abilities to investigate potential. In an age when culture seems to stand for some abstractly defined sense of 'Goodness', and for those of us who work in the so-called 'cultural industries' such a mantra may be rather important. For Terence the figure of the shaman was someone who knew this, and who intentionally 'took flight' from it, crucially returning to share knowledge with the community.
How one can 'take flight' today, eight years on from Terence's passing, is something which we perhaps need to imagine.