Tactical Museum

Tokyo Trattoria!

Utrecht became Trattoria today. The chefs were Abake, Martino Gamper, Francis Upritchard and friends. I have the pleasure to be working with Francis now on an unusual art project that will be revealed soon, and she also shows at Kate MacGarry gallery in London (where Peter also is). Trattoria is an irregular dining event that has been organised by the above for almost ten years. See also Dent-De-Leone.

While a tsunami warning sounded on the city public address system and the sun shone after the morning rain the little back room and balcony of Utrecht was a hive of cooking and eating. Fashion designer Semble who I met a couple of years ago at Kandada was there, and I got to speak to several graphic and interior designers and a writer. Ellen was the center of attention on arrival.

Maki of Abake (hair of).

Hiroshi Eguchi of Utrecht conducting.

Martino at the steam barbecue machine.

A closer look at the home-made steam barbecue machine.

What came out of the steam barbecue machine was delicious.

For an article about Trattoria I found, see Here.

Thank you to all of the chefs, Hiroshi san and the company.

Ways of Knowing

This essay was published in Metronome No. 11 'What is to Be Done?' Tokyo. Edited by Clementine Deliss as a special edition for documenta 12 magazines. 2007.
Written by Roger McDonald.

Having passed through a traditional academic PhD program, and its various research methodologies, it is good to be able to look back and survey what it all means. Now, as one of the programming directors of MAD, the independent study program of Arts Initiative Tokyo, and as an independent curator and part-time lecturer, the days of intense library-based research or reading have opened out to broader approaches of acquiring knowledge. The question of Moving Schools is also one that takes on an increased resonance within such a discussion. So in this short writing I would like to share my thoughts.

It seems to me that moving schools already exist in myriad forms. If one can define a school as any community – transient, impermanent or more solidified – which comes together to create or disseminate forms of knowledge, then one is faced with many examples. How we define knowledge also fundamentally alters the ways in which we can think about this, and I am always drawn to Henri Bergson’s approach of understanding knowledge as a spectrum spanning intellectual, analytical reasoning through to experiential, physical or even mystical gnosis. Pilgrimages constitute a nomadic, but highly directed, community of followers who wander through multiple spaces ingesting specialized forms of knowledge and insight. For them temples or sacred sites may function as knowledge bases, where new spiritual learning takes place. The conversations, meetings and sharing which occurs during their journeys become key knowledge acquiring routes.

The circus is another, highly mobile yet familiar and nostalgic kind of learning vessel. Offering different forms of spectacle and entertainment, as well as diversions from everyday life, the different forms of knowledge imparted by circuses as they pass through a town constitute an important counter-balance to the kinds of formal learning we are taught at schools. The circus shows us risk, physical danger, humour, thrill and elation, contributing to our emotional knowledge base. The phenomenon of raves from the early 1990s and continuing in various forms today may also constitute a moving school of sorts. Coming together to dance in fields or warehouses, often under the effects of drugs, the spaces created by raves generate unique energies and learning possibilities. Perhaps it is about communicating with a stranger through dance or an insight created by a particular combination of sounds. I learnt things in raves which feedback continually into aspects of what I do today. They are not particularly quantifiable, but perhaps about providing me with a sense of what a community could be, and actually participating in this.

What are some of the ways in which we acquire knowledge? I would like to outline four which I find interesting in my own research and work, and also all non-disciplined ways – in other words not tied to formal, institutional or testing methods. First, one can acquire knowledge from a community. This may be through events like workshops or therapy sessions where participants share experiences and ideas. It can also happen on dance floors, generating powerful energies which circulate collectively. Traditional learning environments, schools and campuses, also provide a community for knowledge travelers. Second, there is the route of knowledge acquisition through the ingestion of elixirs, plants or specially prepared substances. Most commonly associated with many forms of shamanism, this way is also the most biologically direct, literally altering the synaptic junctions in the mind to affect changes in consciousness. With the now popular use of so called ‘smart drugs’ to aid learning and memory, I feel that it is only a matter of time before we find ourselves returning to forms of ingestion-learning, albeit manufactured and controlled by large pharmaceutical companies.  Third, there is knowledge acquisition through mimicry or copying. A fundamental aspect of most traditional arts of Japan including ikebana, tea and various martial arts, through copying a master, one becomes slowly imbibed with certain codes and forms. The practice of drawing from life and plaster casts (which still continues as a method of entrance examination in Japan) also relates to this kind of knowledge acquisition. Copying can be used to control and repress, but it can also be an effective tactic of resistance and camouflage. Fourthly, there is gaining knowledge through mistakes, trial and error, digression and waste – things which formal education tries to discard. Learning how to operate a new electronic appliance is usually like this, but it can also be used creatively and intentionally to generate dissonances. I think that dancers and performers would be highly aware of this as a way of proceeding, and the amazing work of Merce Cunningham comes to mind.

Finally, the question of creating or enabling specific spaces where knowledge can be accessed or tapped into. What kinds of spaces, if any, are suited to generating knowledge? What kinds of tools and adaptors encourage or aid learning? Traditionally such spaces have been identified with silence (the library, study) and solidity (imposing architectures of stone, permanence). But it seems to me that there are clearly different types and possibilities of space where learning or knowledge acquisition can happen. The tools which we use today to access knowledge or explore it have also radically changed – the internet and computers being perhaps the most important. Timothy Leary spoke of the importance of ‘Set and Setting’ in relation to the psychedelic experience, whilst the Swedish artist Oyvind Fahlstrom talked about building ‘Pleasure Houses’ instead of culture centers. The office and sofa designs of Verner Panton opened furniture out to embrace intimacy and collectivity. Modular design, mobility and fluidity characterize one of my favourite pieces of furniture, the bean bag, designed by Zanotta in 1969. I feel that curatorial studies should incorporate sessions in interior and furniture design, as these fields map our physical and psychological relations to spaces, colours, shapes and touch. The blog-sphere has been an important space for me, in sorting ideas and research and sharing it with others. It has an informality and ease about it which academic papers lack. Finally I must confess to doing much quality reading in the toilet – a fantastic space for learning. Perhaps one of the last private spaces yet to be fully invaded by media, it is on the toilet that one truly becomes a vessel through which various paths of knowledge pass.

Hosting the Mix (a long essay on recent 'crossings' in Japan)

The recent Henry Darger exhibition at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art was an interesting example of a wider phenomenon which can be traced through much recent contemporary Japanese art. This phenomenon reflects a desire to mix separate genres and art forms together. It can be traced in a number of museum exhibitions such as ‘JAM: Tokyo-London’ at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in 2002 which showed works by 43 ‘creators’ using the concept of the music jam session to, as the press materials state, ‘experience the energy created by this meeting of different genres’. Takashi Murakami’s ‘Superflat’ exhibition from 1997 and Noi Sawaragi’s curated ‘Nihon Zero-Nen’ in 1999 both asked audiences to traverse diverse cultural fields including animation, otaku, model making and science fiction. Japan’s first bi-lingual art magazine, ArtIt, has been pursuing an editorial line exploring cross genre approaches, from issues such as ‘The Boundary between Art and Design’ (winter/spring 2004), ‘180 creatives from all genres’ (spring/summer 2005) and ‘Collaboration: multiplying talent many times over’ (summer/fall 2006). In 2007 two major museum exhibitions have brought these tendencies to large audiences: ‘Space For Your Future’ curated by Yuko Hasegawa at The Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT), and ‘Roppongi Crossing: Future Beats in Japanese Contemporary Art’ at the Mori Museum selected by four curators. What is going on with this urge to break down artistic categories?

Henry Darger 

The Hara exhibition certainly played the role of exposing what is called outsider art to a large audience, most of whom were probably unaware of the unique historical and sociological debates regarding the art of the insane or mentally ill. I am particularly interested in the cultural marketing of outsider art in Japan because it was my PhD professor, Roger Cardinal, who proposed the term ‘outsider art’ in 1972. The term has a long and specific history and has certainly played an important role within any reading of artistic modernism. I was surprised and curious to learn from my students at various art universities how popular the Henry Darger exhibition was. Part of this trend in Japan can be attributed to the non-canonical status that outsider art has – like Japan, which has passed through various translations of Western art history, methods and techniques since the late Meiji period, outsider artists have been afforded the privilege of working in a demarcated space, away from the strictures and histories of the art historical canon and its philosophical underpinnings. This is certainly potentially liberating, and allows us to think about all kinds of people as creators of visual languages and worlds. And yet one is left wondering on whose ‘rules’ was Henry Darger’s works seen and read at the Hara Museum? In whose interests were the intricacies and undulations of outsider art flattened out so that it could be shown in a museum of contemporary art?

Part of this is certainly to do with the so called ‘end of Grand Narratives’ and the splintering of ‘micro-narratives’ which Post-Modernism apparently heralded. Museum collections and their privileging of specific canons, genders and perspectives have been challenged. But I feel that the more important reason for this penchant for flattening has to do with the nature of the culture industry, and how ‘art’ has today become commodified like ice-cream or brand clothes. This line of analysis was expounded by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their 1947 essay on the ‘Culture Industry’. Adorno and Horkheimer looked to the economic modes of production in which culture is produced and the ways in which art is affected by and affects the relationship between culture and economics, between the products of society and power relations within society. We live in a situation where, as Frederic Jameson puts it, ‘culture’ has become a product in its own right. The significance of Adorno and Horkeimer’s analysis lies in its supposition that culture is today an industry, and that this exists upon capitalist systems of power. The British critic Julian Stallabrass suggests that this commodification of culture has sharpened in the last fifteen years: “during the 1990s there was an intensification of the forces, many of them old features of capitalism, that contributed to the dominance of triumphant consumer culture over art, and indeed over all other cultural production.”  Stallabrass goes on to say that with the collapse of alternative economic models in 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall) and the declining fortunes of Germany and Japan, it is the neoliberal model which has become dominant. Neoliberalism is defined by its embrace of privatization, high unemployment, low wages for workers, the weakening of unions and neglect of public services, all aspects which can be felt in Japan since the 1990s.

In the name of ‘collaboration’ or greater ‘crossing’ we see today in Japan, design, architecture, graffiti, painting, photography, film and outsider art melted into highly digestable exhibition packages, flattening out previously distinct art forms with their own specific histories, discourses and lines of inquiry. One of the defining characteristics of free market capitalism is that goods and services are standardized or homogenized on a whole spectrum of levels from their manufacture and distribution to the ways in which goods exist in law and various guidelines, to their marketing and consumption. This makes it essentially easier and cheaper to produce more goods and administer systems which keep the market fluid and stable. Differences serve the very practical purpose of making the market more exciting and free by offering a diversity of choice, which however, exist only on the terms which the market allows: an ubiquitous ever multiplying web of networks and nodes.

The nature of today’s world market encourages greater diversity and ‘crossing’, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri recount in ‘Empire’: “ The ideology of the world market has always been the anti-foundational and anti-essentialist discourse par excellence. Circulation, mobility, diversity and mixture are its very conditions of possibility. Trade brings differences together and the more the merrier! Differences (of commodities, populations, cultures and so forth) seem to multiply infinitely in the world market, which attacks nothing more violently than fixed boundaries; it overwhelms any binary division within its infinite multiplicities.”  Can we suggest that exhibitions like Space For Your Future and Roppongi Crossing echo the sentiments outlined by Hardt and Negri? Is their rhetoric of diversity and crossing precisely reflective of the hegemony of neoliberalism over culture and its vessels like the museum? Crucially, it seems that these tendencies in Japan today have emerged with very little sense of critical distance or analysis, and resulted in museums simply absorbing the rules of neo-liberalism, becoming another reflective node in its ‘infinite multiplicities’.

Cross genre exhibitions can offer highly explosive counter narratives to what museums have been showing us. This remains though, intricately tied to the ways in which it is done – the game plans which are envisioned. Most crossing exhibitions and projects sadly act like compulsive black holes, flattening out the potential complexities of the various works through the mechanisms and rhetorics of the museum, which ultimately prevails as the chief purveyor of meaning. Museums in Japan today face increasing pressures to ‘serve’ a public and generate income to maintain themselves. One of the key benchmarks for this was the passing of the Shitei Kanrisha Seido (or greater autonomy law for institutions) in 2003. This has opened up the running of public cultural institutions in Japan to a process of bidding, with greater financial independence being a key factor in the final decision making process. This has impacted art museums in various ways. For example The Yokohama Museum of Art will be the first museum I know of in Japan to start a ‘school’ program from April 2007, that actively engages students with their permanent collection.

In the light of this, exhibitions like SFYF and ‘Roppongi Crossing’ have cleverly and pragmatically adopted the rules of a sophisticated ‘culture industry’ which is sustained by the desires and mechanisms of capitalist neoliberal economics. Both exhibitions marketed themselves by highlighting their ‘non art pure’ pedigree, which was somehow magically bestowed on them by the seemingly simple inclusion of designers or animators. This tendency is moreover not only confined to museum exhibitions, but can be seen across many media including magazines, club cultures and the fashion and design worlds. The museum was crucially left un-tainted by the inclusion of different genres, when what should be happening is the emergence of greater discourse and critique. Letting painting, architecture and graphic design engage in a serious dialogue should create all manner of interesting tensions, harmonies or dissonances. These could be evoked in the exhibition space through exhibition design, in wall texts, catalogue writings or in various kinds of public events or programs. How the hosting museum or curator chooses to mix these together and manifest them is key, according to what rules and value systems? For public institutions, the question of public money obviously remains a central question, and one that generates issues about public accountability and access.

Rolywholyover exhibition view, Mito, Japan.

I think about John Cage’s exhibition ‘Rolywholyover’ (1991-2) as an example of how the museum could be temporarily ‘blinded’ or ‘hijacked’, by a truly accommodating and open attitude. ‘Rolywholyover’ was an exhibition co-curated by John Cage in 1992, just prior to his death. It was a retrospective of Cage’s own visual works, but also a manifestation of his methodologies and attitudes towards life and living, in the form of an exhibition. Cage was  interested in trying to set up a condition of real open-ness, where many different genres and disciplines could be presented together. What he achieved was a truly ecological situation in the museum, where radical change, chaos and translations happened. This kind of ecological condition cannot happen simply by selecting artists and presenting them in a space: I think that it happens only when the curators and artists begin to develop a vision together, which also means developing an attitude towards art and towards the museum. It means taking risks and initiating new ways of display or framing that the museum and artists might actually find deeply disturbing or difficult.

Another example I would like to briefly introduce is the multimedia collective USCO who toured the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s creating psychedelic mixed-media shows which used multiple slide and film projectors, strobes, pulsing light machines and multiple sound tracks. The New York Times reporter Grace Glueck called it a ‘programmed pandemonium’ . USCO was one manifestation of a wider movement towards multi-media and the dissolving of boundaries between different media which writers such as Marshall McLuhan and artists such as Alan Kaprow and the EAT group were actively espousing. USCO’s extravaganza’s involved a decidedly psychedelic and mystical aspect, that acted as a kind of sensory re-programming which could ultimately result in an experience of radical re-birth. What I find interesting in USCO’s approach to mixing genres is their uncompromising stance towards creating spaces where consciousness could potentially be challenged, the ego weakened, and some kind of psychological change take place. Indeed, it is intriguing to ponder the discussions from this period concerning the merging of media and the merging or melting of consciousness. The role played by psychedelic substances such as LSD in supposedly breaking down psychological categories and divisions, seems to be echoed in the breaking down of genre categories in light shows and the ‘Happenings’ of Kaprow and others. Much of the rhetoric of Timothy Leary and others certainly revolves around the breaking of previous game patterns and habits through participation in psychedelic experiences or spaces. A comprehensive and critical reading of this area is offered by Felicity Scott in her paper ‘Acid Visions’.

I think that there is a case to urge museums to actually do ‘less curating’, in the sense of creating big budget selection shows of artists. If we thought about Cage for a moment, we can also suggest another vision for curatorial practice today that would be about creating conditions or ‘scenarios’ as Nicolas Bourriaud often speaks of. Instead of selecting artists according to subjective curatorial themes, a Cageian approach would suggest something more expansive and open-ended. The parameters or algorithims for a project would be set out, rather than the contents being privileged. So, curators would begin their discussions by asking, “what kind of situation do we want to create here?”, “what kinds of experience do we want to encourage in this show?”. In this way the audience becomes immediately something central to the discussions, rather than being an abstract add-on which the education team deals with at a later stage. So for example, there could be a show based on the simple premise of making the museum a livable space – a non-oppressive space which perhaps operates on different rules to our everyday lives. How would you try to set this situation up in a museum? And to really engage this topic I think it becomes crucial to re-think the rules of the museum and to take risks in it. Maybe you have to open the museum up twenty-four hours (like BankArt 1929 Yokohama did in 2005), or maybe you have to allow visitors to stay overnight there? (like Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery did for Tsuyoshi Ozawa’s Capsule hotel project). From these questions, I think one can begin to think about art – because it must be something which is sustained by experience and which must emerge out of real experiences (trips) first. Within this condition or scenario, there can be many layers of meaning or direction – all kinds of themes or concepts.

I often think about parties when I think about these issues – a party is a specific condition which has a specific direction. You want to try to create a situation in which the guests can relax, enjoy themselves, dance maybe and return home with good memories. The DJ and initiator of The Loft, David Mancuso has spoken about the importance of the conditions for creating a successful party – since the 1970s, his parties have included free food and fruit, water, lots of balloons and the best quality audio system available. He never mixes tracks together, preferring to play each song in its entirety to respect the music and also to share the full experience with the guests. Timothy Leary has called this aspect ‘set and setting’ – the importance of creating the right conditions for a specific experience.

As museums, magazines and other creative industries become increasingly enamored by ideas of ‘collaboration’ and ‘crossing’, it becomes also necessary to think about the rules of the game. In the name of selling more magazines or attracting greater audiences editors and curators are today actively and significantly reaching out across various disciplines and creating mixed landscapes which contain many different elements. Although by no means a new phenomenon (the ‘This is Tomorrow’ exhibition at The Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1954, for example, was an experiment in multi-tasking, cross-disciplinary curating), recent tendencies towards presenting various fields simultaneously also convey specific conditions about the value and role of cultural industries today. The vessels or media which do the presenting (museums, magazines etc) do so with very specific historical and economic motivations and contexts which should not be easily forgotten. We seem to be passing through a moment when these various vessels feel that they can be more experimental than before and try to forge new moulds and methodologies. However, it also feels that the underlying rules which have sustained vessels like the museum have yet to be peeled open in any really revealing ways. Although traditional curatorial methods regarding classification or display have certainly been rethought and revitalized, museums continue to exude a powerful presence as investors of art historical meaning and value. If exhibitions are to show different disciplines and forms together without simply flattening their differences under the rubric of the museum, it is the museum institution itself (and the consciousness of those who work/present there) which must accommodate a potential for change.

The museum or exhibition space (and this can be anything from a large museum to a temporary space) should be a revolutionary space, in the sense of presenting opportunities for people to change their modes of thinking and engage in a different set of rules. As John Cage shows us, it should be a possibility to seriously engage with people and spaces in a radically open, joyful and experimental way. I think, for instance, that listening to Cage’s ‘Concert for Piano and Orchestra’ (1957-58) is a deeply transformative experience. With no master score or conductor as author, the orchestral players may start anywhere in his or her part according to their independently derived timetable. This listening experience is quite similar for me (but with a greater intensity of pleasure), to listening to Indian ragas, with their highly disciplined, yet subtle variations on a raga and a mood through the use of microtones, ‘alap’ (gradual unfolding introductions) and so on. All I can say is that these listening experiences seem to be moments of temporary ‘game-transformation’, epiphanic moments which move one’s consciousness and changes it – a turning which can also be considered to be the foundations and sustaining energies of wider political or social action.

Shahid Pervez.

Sorry

Sumo Yokozuma Asashoryu and boxer Kaneda both held apologetic press conferences this past week in Tokyo. The whole apology thing has been getting out of hand lately -  there seem to be so many disgraced politicians, corrupt businessmen, inept policemen and dishonourable sportspeople lately that the whole ritual of public apology has slid into a rather sordid state of affairs. Particularly annoying are the ever righteous 'wide show' and so called evening 'news' anchors and their highly well behaved 'commentators' (they should be renamed 'guardians of the status quo'/ ''don't rock the boat-ers'), who endlessly try to elongate and dissect the 'sincerity' and 'purity' of the apologies.
I had a vision of a whole new mode of public sculpture in Japan - bronze casts of various public figures bowing low or sinking to their knees in apology placed on very high plinths around the place. There could be tasteful composition sculptures of groups of bowing people, like the US Marine monument of the Iwo Jima flag raising. A prize could be awarded annually to the sculpture which best manages to express the sincerity and truth of the apology, judged by an expert panel of Zen Roshi's, Freudian analysts, sculptors, former Samurai and news anchors. Or, NHK could begin a digital television channel which just loops endless permutations of people apologising formally in public - a multiplying public archive of apology for the nation. Actually, rather more practically, someone should create little digital apologies for mobile phone screens. On being told off at work, one could simply open one's phone and hold the screen solemnly up to the boss and play the appropriate apology scenario. This way, everything is purely above board, detached and without any nonsense - the trick would be in selecting the right scenario for the occasion, thus 'reading' the situation and expressing one's sincerity and sense of respect.
All of this attention on unfortunate individuals, also rather conveniently shifts the focus away from the fact that Japan is a country which seems averse to apologising - to former wartime victims, victims of mistaken blood transfusion which has led to HIV infection, victims of environmental and health devastation or to tax payers who seem forever to be paying for golfing trips for politicians or the building of massive, empty construction projects which go bankrupt.

   

Pictures from Naha. October 30-31, 2007.

T-shirt icon templates by Hiroharu Mori on an old wall.

Hiroharu Mori helps a workshop participant.

Kai and myself lecturing.

16 HOUR MUSEUM, March 25th

The second eight hour segment of 16 HOUR MUSEUM happened at SuperDeluxe in Nishi Azabu on Sunday March 25th from 1pm - 9pm. One week on from the 17th section in Daikanyama, the programs of the 25th segment was framed by the more club-like space of Deluxe and by the production of a 100 page Journal which we edited and published in an edition of 500. The Journal, titled 'MUSEUM IS OVER! IF YOU WANT IT', is largely bilingual and includes texts, reviews, summaries, artists works and lists by many of the participating lecturers, artists and curators (see below). It was the first time for AIT to self-publish such a magazine and, as chief editor, it was something well worth doing. Our hope is that it contributes to a broader discussion in Japan now about the state and future of public museums and about other possibilities.

The two air walls which I designed in 2001 were also used to demarcate spaces within Deluxe (above). We designated a couple of volunteers as 'Inflatable Team', and their job was to pump the walls with air every one hour or so as they slowly lose air and start to sag. The notion of having to publicly re-pump the walls of our museum was something rather poignant - it symbolically asserted our desire to open out the workings of a museum and how it can be re-wired.

Like in Daikanyama, we brought forty or so 'zabuton' mats for visitors to sit or lie on. Samples of the journal were placed around for reading.

Swamp Publications (above), an artists group who perform live 'artist book-making' were invited to create a special 16 Hour Museum edition, to be inserted as a supplement into the journal. On benches, the artists drew, sprayed, stencilled and photo-copied non-stop through eight hours, making over two hundred artist books which were given away for free together with our Journal. Again, our interest in exposing the production processes inherent in working with artists and curating was reflected in this durational action.
The highlight of the day was a performance by Tadasu Takamine, who re-made an action he first did in Canada soem ten years ago. Tadasu (below) was editing the video until thirty minutes before the performance, which somehow went off without any major glitches. The action consists of Tadasu inside a large cardboard box which he rolls over from the inside. This is co-ordinated with changing scenes on large video screens projected behind the box area. The work used segments from various interviews the artist made with curators and artists concerning recent changes in museum laws, and the effects of this. There were so many people in Deluxe by the time of the performance that we had to restrict entry.

Like the first AIT Hour Museum in 2002, we again invited DJ Duck Rock (below) to play tunes throughout the proceedings. This aspect has been another important part of our museums, not in terms of initiating any kind of 'club' atmosphere, but more in terms of using music and sounds as an additional aural layer which visitors can enjoy. The volume was set reasonably, enabling people to converse, and Duck Rock's selection ranged from Spaceman 3 through to some low-key break-beats. Duck Rock also contributed a Top Twenty selection of tracks for the Journal.

Other elements included a small installation by Masahiro Wada, monitors showing our alternative spaces video interview archives, and screenings of four artists videos. I like the brevity of our museums - and the very unique tensions and communities which they also enable. This is quite different to the usual month long exhibition, and may obviously restrict access on some level, but actually it is no different to going to see a play or a concert. Over eight hours, a number of things change and continue - hopefully creating a small and intense audience experience. I think this is the kind of 'museum' I would be quite happy encouraging.

MOT the Music

MOT the Music is a new initiative organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) where professional musicians are invited to perform in front of particular works of art in their permanent collections galleries. With the appointment of Yuko Hasegawa (formerly of Kanazawa C21st Museum) to cheif curator at MOT a couple of months back as well as the appointment of younger curators like Fumihiko Sumitomo (also AIT founding member, formerly of ICC), there is some expectation now in Tokyo about the future of MOT. MOT the Music is a great idea - a way to broaden their audience, particularly to their permanent collections (which is usually very quiet), and bring in something fresh. I have not been, but from things I hear, it seems that this kind of event brings in new audiences. Listening to music near art has a long history of course - one thinks of salons in royal palaces and of course church musics. More recently, venues like Palais de Tokyo have initiated club nights, though admittedly slightly demarcated from art works. I think there are groups in the US who make independent podcasts to go to MOMA with....adding music and narration. While one hears about the need for slowing down and silence in museums today, it is also interesting to think about the ways in which music and sound can generate rich experiences of art works. I must admit to being a long time walkman listener, strolling around the city almost always listening to music.  It adds another dimension to one's encounters with places - memories inter-weave with new sights and smells, and occasionally there is a moment of intense sublime magic, when sound and physical experience meet. I have archived in my mind certain places in Tokyo which go particularly well with certain songs - also depending on whether it is a sunny day or raining etc.

Sunday Afternoon

I went for a stroll along the Sumida river yesterday afternoon, ending up in the Ginza. Along the way I took some photographs.

  Anti-Homeless picnic bench and table by the river.

                             Quite a nice rendering of a skateboarder (erased).

                                                       The hokohsha tengoku (literally pedestrians paradise) on the main Ginza shopping thoroughfare on a Sunday afternoon. There is even a phrase which means ambling along the Ginza - Ginbura. It was here in 1993 that a group of then young art students initiated Ginbuart - a guerrilla street art action for a day involving Tsuyoshi Ozawa, Makoto Aida and Masato Nakamura amongst others. Today, the closure of the street brings out pet-owners parading their dogs and cats, a few registered street performers (The City of Tokyo has made it compulsory for street performers to be registered) and a chance to gaze at the city from the vantage point of a car. As I ambled along I realised how much the city ordinarily forces us to march or propel ourselves along on narrow pavements and public passageways. I was also reminded of how little we actually experience walking on the road - in Japan, where there are hardly any demonstrations or protest marches, this seemed doubly poignant.

Yokohama Triennale snippet 03

Reading Momus's comment about Atelier Bow Wow for snippet 02 (read more about it here at imomus) , I was inspired to write about the 'Kokusai Yatai Mura' or 'International Food Stall Village' which occupies a slender flank of the Triennale. Most large-scale international exhibitions are rather exhausting affairs to experience, being big and involving a lot of walking. The ways in which they try to provide rest and sustenance to audiences varies enormously from exhibition to exhibition. This year's Arsenale exhibition at the Venice Biennale offered free mineral water stations to quench thirst. Artists have sometimes provided this service - I remember one artist at the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (2003) making various kinds of herbal liquors which people could freely taste. Yokohama 2005 has very much incorporated eating and drinking within its exhibition dramaturgy. On one side of the show is a long corridor-like space called the International Food Stall Village. Several mobile food stalls and vans sell hot food, beer and ice creams. Visitors can sit at one of Atelier One's super elongated 'Yatai' stall counters ('White Limousine') and enjoy the sea breeze. Although the food is basic, it was fantastic to be able to drink beer half-way through seeing the exhibition and start the second half in a slightly merry state of mind. I actually thought it worked very well, as the bar is near entertaining works like Navin Rawanchaikul's 'Curatorman Inc.' game and COUMA's ping pong tables.

  Navin playing at being a curator.

'International Food Stall Village'.

Hots Dogs, Beer.....
My advice for Triennale goers would be to begin by spending time sober in the spaces nearer the entrance, where there are works which require some reading and intellectual engagement. Then break for a hot dog and beers at the food stall village and continue slightly tipsy into works nearer the exit - game-type works, video installations and the shop. It should be dusk when you exit and begin the long walk back down the pier towards Yamashita park.
Exhibitions provide audio guides to help viewers engage with the works - I think it would be good if exhibitions also gave advice on how to experience them - perhaps several kinds of 'narratives' - 'the hard-core critical route', 'the scenic route', 'the passage of drunken-ness', or 'the Way of Salvation'.....

Hey - its San Francisco!

My first visit to San Francisco - I am here invited by the California College of Art to prepare the 1st year Curatorial Practice students for their forthcoming trip to Tokyo, which AIT will host. This is a city which I have always wanted to visit, and I nearly didn't make it in because I do not own a machine readable passport! All visitors to the USA now must have a so called machine readable passport, which means that the passport can be computer scanned (presumably the data being processed into some huge centralised surveillance system). Because I still use an old style British passport that does not have this, I was stopped at the airport and taken into a special office to the side for further questioning. An immigration officer sat behind a desk and asked me various questions about my work, purpose of visit etc. Things seemed to be in order, so I was granted a one time 'parole' entry. As my current passport does not expire until 2011, I guess I cannont return to the USA until after then!