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. 

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.

A M E R I C A N S

Harry Smith (1923-1991).  Page.

Dock Ellis. Page.

'Hell in the Pacific'. Lee Marvin, Toshiro Mifune. John Boorman. 1968.  Page.

David Mancuso, The Loft, New York.  Page.

Terence McKenna (1946-2000). Page.

Morris Graves (1910 - 2001). 'Northwest Mystic' painter.  Page.

Lisa Law.   Page.

Paul Thek (1933 - 1988). Page.

Ruth Asawa. Page.

Mark Tobey (1890 - 1976). Page.

Woody Allen. Page.

 

Curating in SL

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

Reminders

I have been taking photographs on my mobile phone camera during my walks to work etc. of images in the city depicting people in states of altered consciousness/ transcendence.

If, as Henri Lefevbre suggests in 'Production of Space', each society produces its own spatial configurations which echo their various social and economic codes, focusing on these particular image types made me think about how states of mind are today equally objects of aspirational consumption as well as continuing to represent rather more archaic archetypal images rooted in religious traditions. I was very taken by the dark photograph of a poster depicting Dogen Zenshi (patriarch of Zen Buddhism) which was pasted on a window of an antique shop in Omote-Sando, opposite Paul Smith and other brand boutiques. Even through the reproduction of a poster image, his stern, ink brushed face seemed to resonate with a sense of terrifying counsel in the dark gloom of the night.

Heavy, Fast Week for Art in Tokyo

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

Negri Matters

I attended the explanation meeting for Negri's sudden Japan visit cancellation last night at The International House. In short, it seems that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Immigration Office hastily and without any prior notice demanded that Negri apply for a visa, even though the organisers had confirmed numerous times with them that he did not require a visa to enter Japan. The visa issue emerged two days prior to Negri's planned arrival, on the 17th. Details of the case can be read at Japan Today , The Tocqueville Connection and breitbart.com.
Japanese law states that people with a criminal record and over one year in prison cannot enter Japan. There is a clause to this though which states that political prisoners are exempt. The Japanese authorities insisted that he submit all relevant documents which would prove that he was a political prisoner - something which, according to statements made at the meeting, would involve tracking down thousands of pages of court documents in Italian and take many months. This was simply impossible to achieve. I was surprised to hear that Negri's French partner, Judith Revel, was also  requested to apply for a visa, even though as a French citizen this is not needed.  The organisers last night could not hide their immense sense of disappointment, and commented that this effective denial of entry amounted to an infringement of Negri's human rights as well as to the curtailment of intellectual, research and cultural freedom of university institutions. Some commented that it amounted to a sense of paranoia and political intervention by the government, especially in the run up to this summer's Tohyakou G8 Summit, which Japan hosts.
The various events which were planned will nonetheless go ahead.
Tokyo University intends to use real-time media technology to try to realise a symposium with Negri in remote attendance. Kyoto University will hold a symposium with the oranisers reading aloud Negri's prepared paper. Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music will hold a two day event of symposiums and art actions. They also plan a 'mochi-tsuki' (sticky rice pounding) event, where participants can vent frustration by taking turns pounding rice. More information Here.
I wrote some months back about Japan entering its second period of 'sakoku' (isolation). The trigger then was the introduction of finger-printing technologies for all non Japanese entering Japan, thinly veiled under the rhetoric of its anti-terrorism laws. Only the United States and Japan asks all visitors to submit bio-data. Now, with Negri's case, Japan is once again in partnership with the United States, as the only other country which effectively denied him entry. Negri's letter mentioned that he has travelled to 22 countries without restriction - the United States was the only exception, as it demanded piles of documents which were simply not reasonable to gather. Japan seems to have followed suit.
It is indeed a sad day when the apparatus of the state cannot accommodate one thinker to enter its borders.

Sublime and Ridiculous

Concurrent to denying philosophers entry to the country, the Foreign Minister was appointing a large animation cat - Doraemon - to the post of official 'anime Ambassador' of Japan.

See THIS  AP news story for more.

Japan effectively denies entry for Antonio Negri

Antonio Negri ('Empire', 'Multitude' etc) was to arrive in Japan this week for a series of lectures and discussions. I was to hear him speak at the International House of Japan this coming Saturday. I received a phone call from I-House about one hour ago informing me that his trip has been abruptly cancelled. The organising committee is holding a meeting to explain the circumstances of this decision tommorrow evening, which I intend to attend.
For immediate news please see THIS webpage on the I-House website, which has the letters from Negri explaining the course of events in Japanese and French.
More details as I get them.

Sorry, Again

This morning on the 'Tokudane' morning show on channel eight there was a segment titled 'Shazai Ryoku', which means something like 'The Way/ Method of Apology/Remorse'. It reviewed the year's many public apologies, dissecting them and providing useful advice for anyone faced with a similar situation.  One business crisis management expert offered these four tips:
1. Wear a dark suit to convey an appropriate mood of contrition.
2. Don't smile.
3. Don't speak with your fellow bowers.
4. Bow for at least five seconds in unison to allow the media to capture your apology.

Bas Jan Ader, still from the film 'I'm too sad to tell you'. Ader famously disappears and perishes while trying to cross the Atlantic ocean in a tiny yacht, solo, for a work titled 'In Search of the Miraculous' in 1975.

The flier image for an exhibition I curated in 2000 called 'Table Manners' at the Mizuma Art Gallery. The image was made by my brother, Peter, and shows Grant Green standing in the dry stone garden of Ryoanji, Kyoto. I really like this image. He looks so relaxed and pleased. It reminds me of those St. George and the Dragon images, with the knight in armour standing over the slain dragon.