"Life Through Vegetable, Flour and Sand'
Ingredients: Vegetables, Flour, Sand.
Mix thoroughly, dry and form into patties.
List of Works upper wall:
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Vertumne (portrait de Rodolphe II), vers 1590 painting, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Nature morte : L'Homme-potager, (tableau réversible), vers 1590 painting, Edvard Munch, The Lumberjack 1913, Liang Kai Sixth Patriarch Cutting Bamboo.
List of Works middle wall:
Guy Mayman collage 2010, Guy Mayman collage 2010, Craigie Horsfield, Krakow, 1970s, Kai Althoff Painting.
List of Works lower wall:
William Blake drawing, Clare Rojas, Untitled 2007, Wolfgang Tillmans, Haircut, 2007.
I am preparing some curatorial/ art things there in the forest which shall be announced soon via the internet.
The asphalt road ends outside the back door.
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.
I am in Naha, Okinawa for the Museum of Okinawan Time. This is the final manifestation of AIT's series of 'Hour Museums', which we have held in various spaces since 2003. We decided to come to Okinawa for a number of reasons. The last prefectural museum opens in Naha this Saturday; we have worked a number of times with the Maejima Art Center, the only contemporary art non profit in Okinawa; and we have an interest in Okinawa's unique cultural and political position within Japan. The Museum of Okinawan Time takes place for ten days from October 26 to November 4, to cooincide with the opening of the new museum. We are working with the Maejima Art Center, who have secured two vacant old shops in the amazing Sakaemachi Ichiba (a covered market). You can get a feeling of the space in the picture above. An impressive bar, stocked with about 60 or so malt whiskies and the local spirit Awamori, is up and running. Each night the bar team alternates - I think AIT is on tonight. Kai and I are leading a lecture series for four days, artist Hiroharu Mori is leading a T-shirt workshop, we are showing our video interview archive of Japanese alternative art spaces, a session of chats with local Okinawan artists is planned and a performance by the Gunder-Sanshin Trio (who mix gamelan and the Okinawan sanshin banjo) is scheduled for the night of the 3rd. We have also curated a video screening program which will be projected onto the outside walls of the new museum on the evening of the 2nd (with the permission of the museum curators). A number of friends have also come down from Tokyo including ARCUS Residency Director and MAD tutor Mizuki Endo. As I have posted before, Okinawa has been in the news recently with the huge protests against the government's proposed review of history text books. I have visited four times now, and each visit the city of Naha seems to be getting more like other cities in Japan. Where the new museum is opening, Omoromachi, there is now a brand new huge duty free shopping mall.
Our little museum is located very much in what one can call an older Okinawa. Although relatively compact in size, the narrow alley ways and small shops selling everything from cosmetics, nuts, tofu, second hand clothes and vegetables, present a type of space which is almost comletely eradicated now in Japan. Walking around there yesterday I began talking with a man who sits in front of his shop playing an electric piano. The shop opposite serves coffee. I think I will wander over now to buy a cup.
The drying up of posts lately has been in large part due to three upcoming things: a) AIT curated 16 Hour Museum which happens over two consecutive weekends (March 17th and March 25th) of which I am one of the curators/ editors. b) Ending of 2006 MAD courses (AIT's contemporary art school program) and preparing for 2007 courses which in Japan begin in April. c) the small, but not insignificant, issue of my wedding in early April. Consequently I have been to no exhibitions or openings, which is not always a bad thing, and instead been spiralling down a sequence of writing, editing, proofing, meetings, teaching and back again to editing...We are making a 100 page photo-copied Journal within the 16 Hour Museum on the issue of Museums now, particularly with reference to Japan and recent changes. I have been the chief editor, and seeing the items come in, I am very excited. This will be the first time AIT produce a publication in paper - something which I think we can continue to do for specific projects or themes in a very cheap and simple way.
My curatorial activities have included working with two artists who will show works in 16 Hour Museum: David Blandy (London) and Mary-Elizabeth Yarbrough (San Francisco) who is resident with us for three months.
The colour image above is one of Mary-Elizabeth's works. She mainly uses patterned contact sheets and various tapes to construct layered and detailed images culled from rock music, conspiracy theories, religious cults and the news. The image shown above was shown in an exhibition which explored American conspiracy theories and shows Flight 77, which is supposed to have crashed into the Pentagon in Washington. The B/W image below is by David Blandy. We will screen a video called 'Soul of London', which is part of an ongoing series of works which traces the journeys of an orange clad monk (the Barefoot Lone Pilgrim, actually David himself) in search of Soul and himself. David's videos weave together familiar fragments from well known films including 'Enter the Dragon', with shots of himself and deep soulful tracks. He was recently chosen for The Jerwood Platform in UK.
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