There was an interesting article in today's International Herald Tribune about tourists in Kyoto sometimes crossing the lines of decency and manners to photograph Maiko and Geisha. It reminded me of the Tsukiji Fish Market badly behaved tourist episode in March of this year, when the market was closed for a limited period.
The Tribune piece closed with an astute observation by Yuji Nakanishi, professor of tourism at Rikkyo University, who said:
"Japanese tend to associate tourism with historical landmarks, but foreigners are interested in people’s lives and their lifestyles. Places like the fish market were never really considered a tourist site until quite recently, so both sides are really confused.”
These episodes reminded of Claire Bishop's critical essay (Download Claire Bishop, Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics pdf.) against Nicolas Bourriaud's relational aesthetics, published in October magazine Fall 2004. Leaning on the ideas of Laclau and Mouffe, Bishop argues that relationality is always underlined by antagonisms and schisms. Geisha-Hunters and Tuna-Harrasers mirror this sense of antagonistic relationality, highlighting the contradictions which underline global tourism between preserved 'local' traditions and free markets (Geisha were instruments for Japanese tourist marketing from the dawn of tourism in Japan. See Ihei Kimura's photographs for 'Travel in Japan' campaigns from the mid 1930s for example), as well as reminding us of the relative historical infancy of Japan's relations with the world. Accounts of early foreign visitors to Japan in the C17th, tell of the 'ill mannered' barbarian, a literary micro-genre which probably persists to this day.
Dutchmen with Courtesan, Nagasaki c1800.
Perry's Marines inspect a sumo wrestler, March 1854.
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.
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
Edan Corkill has written a piece in today's Japan Times about Chim Pom's recent Hiroshima sky scandal, contextualized within other recent art transgressions in Japan.
READ HERE
Bonny Cassidy, currently in residence at Akiyoshidai International Art Village, has written a piece about Cai Guo-Qiang's 'Black Fireworks' held at the A-Bomb Dome in Hiroshima, comparing it with Chim Pom's recent action.
READ HERE
Chim Pom 'wrote' the term 'Pika', meaning explosion or blast but also the first constituent of the global anime phenomenon known as Pikachu which the artists group have referred to in the past, in the skies above Hiroshima.
Chim Pom leader and Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art curator Yukie Kamiya (rear) apologise at a press conference.
*Above images pasted from Hiroshima Peace Media Center (Japanese only).
Interior of Shinko Pier venue (architects Nishizawa Ryue).
The third installament of the Yokohama Triennale, currently showing, is titled Time Crevasse. Under the Directorship of Tsutomu Mizusawa and five curators the exhibition purports to emphasize 'performative work involving the body rather than a conventional display of artwork in an ordinary gallery setting, thereby bringing out a sense of time more vividly' (from the short guide Directors introduction). There is certainly plenty of work that deals with performance, dance in one form or another, sound and other 'live' mediums. The Triennale seems to weaken this bold mission in two principal areas however.
The first is on the architectural/ installation front where, particularly in the main warehouse space of the Shinko Pier, the exhibition seems to take on a strange ordered quality that squeezes many works into well behaved displays. The architects chose to build half finished walls throughout the space, creating cubes within the architectural box, blocking out natural sunlight from the windows and creating exposed rear passages and corridors. The unfinished walls retained their industrial maker brands, as well as the supporting white structures. It reminded me of the 2005 Triennale, which also chose to go with a half finished look - a question of cost? Or an attempt at exhibition design? Either way, the effect was one of demarcated, rational planning where individual works kept to themselves with almost no spillage to neighbors. Were the architects suggesting that the exposed rear corridors and passageways were metaphors for crevasses? I hope not. This design and curatorial decision did not assist artists like Jonathan Meese, Mike Kelley, Falke Pisano, Shilpa Gupta or Michelangelo Pistoletto, whose installations would have benefitted from a greater sense of connection to the space itself and other works...Pistoletto's smashed mirrors did not reflect much back except the viewer, Meese's detritus was neatly cornered, Pisano's fabric and bamboo tents remained without wind, Kelley's occult ode to candle rituals and Nazism remained isolated and Gupta's large photographic canvases which depicted dozens of boys and girls in lines looked sadly locked up. This very cubic exhibition design also seemed to diminish any sense of curatorial linkage or connectivity, as the experience became one of traversing separate spaces through the unfinished inter-zones. The possibility of losing one's balance and falling into a time crevasse in such a space was unlikely. Disorientation or dissolution seemed most definitely NOT to be on the installation agenda - in favor of a strange sense that approximated walking through a large aristocratic family home or castle - spaces designed for very specific revelations of authority, control and elaborations of meaning. It was also paradoxical that the more intense, transgressive works were compartmentalized in enclosed spaces with warning signs outside them for children etc. This was the case for Herman Nitsch, Paul McCarthy and Mathew Barney in the NYK Waterfront Warehouse.
Jonathan Meese.
Falke Pisano
Interior of Shinko Pier venue
The second area concerned the question of presenting performative work through the various mediums of documentary film, video, sound and related reproduction technologies. I left the exhibition feeling that it had effectively explored the limits of presenting performance work, but without adding any significant new approaches or modes to the ongoing discussion. Time after time, I found myself standing before a monitor, a screen, a bank of speakers and realizing how in-personal the experience was, how removed from bodily sensation it was. The crucial point lay in the very passive engagement style that much of the works initiated. Documentary or archival style work that included reading materials, study environments or library-like spaces for learning were almost absent. For all the talk of performativity and the body, I was surprised how much work relied on electrical technologies of play-back. Certainly this suggests a sense of peering back into, or down into time runnels, but I was reminded how dominating the experience of television is. The curators could have, for instance, pondered painting, drawing or certain forms of object making as time-inscribing processes which present quite different play-back experiences to those of reproduction technologies. The standard documentary films of performance and happenings, such as were shown in the excellent Art of Body, Art of Action archive of films in the Red Brick Warehouse, seemed to resonate strongly, perhaps because they were largely silent and historical and thus also auratic - full of history, time's passage and hence also archival. Tino Sehgal's work at the Sankeien gardens was though, very personal and ongoing, consisting of two dancers in a perpetual kissing embrace, rolling around on the tatami floors of an ancient house while birds flew outside, tourists strolled through and the sunlight slowly moved. This piece is performed throughout the entirety of the Triennale, an amazing and bold decision. Could not many more works taken a similar route? The dancer Tanaka Min similarly dances near his tin hut outside the NYK venue, but irregularly and without notice. Once again I heard echoes of the 2005 Triennale, which attempted to follow a similar ongoing mode as a circus, with workshops, cafes, games etc daily. The issue of presenting performance works and time based works is a complex one, but surely one which curators should engage with creatively in exhibitions of this scale and ambition? Added to the fact that this Triennale included no wall captions or contextual texts even in the guidebook (which consisted only of previous work information), the visitors experience is potentially a highly challenging one. Although the works were largely by well known, respected artists it seemed simply unkind to expect audiences to 'experience' them with no option of learning more about their social, historical or referential contexts. Notwithstanding the ever present risk of curatorial over-pedagogy, this Triennale should have at least offered some elegant, brief labeling on site or in the guidebook.
Fujiko Nakaya
The more engaging works included those sited in the Sankeien garden which clearly communicated with their specific sites and moods. The NYK Warehouse was also sharply focused and powerful, with all of the warning sign works and its large damp warehouse spaces. Paul McCarthy's video installation was a tempest of whirling Demon-Disneyland that altered the mind. Rodney Graham's early performance piece showing him lobbing potatoes at a gong benefitted from its siting in the barren concrete and slightly damp smelling spaces of the warehouse. Herman Nistch's stained altars, photographs and videos very directly reminded one of the alienated modern body, trying desperately to re-engage through ritual and sacrifice that at times looked sad. Joan Jonas's video installation, Marina Abramovich's spirit adjuster platforms, Douglas Gordon's animal videos, Nakanishi Natsuyuki's paintings, Yoko Ono's Cut Piece video...all generated an overall sense of meaning which illuminated aspects of the body, spirit, matter and time. This venue drew out the multiple resonances in the works through its abandoned materiality, but also by letting works bleed into each other, allowing images to seep into one's view from different spaces. This meant that the body of the visitor was kept alive, challenged and constantly having to negotiate itself - through adjusting the eyes, ears, and letting things other than the work intrude into the experience. As a curatorial space it managed to carry some of the themes and moods of the Director.
Herman Nitsch
Cerith Wyn Evans
The archive of video and films screened in the Red Brick Warehouse was another highlight, but perhaps more because of their historical value as rare documents. I was told off by a gallery attendant for filming a video on my camera. Mostly silent, and transferred from 8mm or 16mm film the films, which ranged from early Gutai stage performances, Butoh dance, Shelter Plan by Hi-red center and the Taj Mahal Travellers touring hippie venues, were also examples of how performance and action can be documented through film. Montage and collage techniques, long shots, rapid editing and handwritten captions were in evidence. Hijikata's butoh actions provided a Japanese counterpoint to the abject transgressions of Nitsch and McCarthy, somewhat more restrained and distant from a sense of guilt. One thing which struck me though as I wandered through this maelstrom of art performances was how sombre much of it is. There is an air of heavy seriousness which hangs around much of the works, manifested through either rumbling, screeching electronic noises, sudden kinds of editing which cut narrative and monotonous voices. Before such works one invariably begins to act in specific ways, becoming quiet, contemplative perhaps, and strangely introverted. The now well worn cliche that 'art performance' is 'serious', not pleasurable, seemed to be very much perpetuated in the Triennale's selection of works (haven`t any curators heard of David Mancuso?) The mechanics of the art exhibition - security, safety etc - are obviously also factors that limit and restrict our access and experience of works. I was left thinking how we end up being spectators of moments and actions performed by others and how - if at all - the exhibition as a medium has and can become more elastic, more forgiving and more loving.
Aki Sasamoto
My brother Peter won The John Moore's Painting Prize!
- scene -
'Rain' by Dorothy Morrison comes on, and we start to jump and whoop!
- end -
Congratulations.
Some links:
The Guardian
The BBC
The Liverpool Echo
After many months absence, the art book store Nadiff re-opened in a new building in Ebisu. The opening last night was a scrum. Unwisely, some of the tenant galleries in the building placed their congratulatory flower vases on the narrow steps leading through the building, effectively making the stairs huge congestion zones. When I left, just after 7pm, there were perhaps 100 people waiting in line outside to get in. Magical Art Room and two other galleries have spaces in the building, and there is a bar/ cafe on the roof.
The new building seemed to be another good example of the survival strategy of art spaces in Tokyo to huddle together in shared premises. It certainly makes for a more convenient experience for the consumer.
Convenient.
Inconvenient.
On the topic of convenience, I have recently been imagining at my university seminars what it would be like if Japan banned convenience stores, or at least made them In-Convenience stores (In-Vini, to shorten the word like Con-bini). The idea emerged when thinking about what inconvenience means today, especially in a city like Tokyo where such privilege is placed on the ideal of 'service'. At a time when the birth rate is declining and part time workers are beginning to map the economic future of this country, I wonder what significance 'service' has? Being inconvenienced may actually be highly liberating. They are perhaps moments (cracks) when one is made aware of the multiple normally invisible economic and labour frameworks which sustain everyday life in a city. Inconvenience means waiting, becoming emotionally agitated or finding something difficult - all actually processes which most children are taught to understand and accept in varying ways. As one enters the mature labor market and begins to move in certain kinds of social circuits, the notion of being inconvenienced somehow emerges as a major issue. Recognizing the many types of inconvenience though, I nonetheless feel that things have gotten overly convenient. The convenience store is the primary physical symbol of this tendency, and also a place (or perhaps more accurately a 'non-place' in Auge's sense) which actually perversely sustains micro-conveniences which must be constantly re-supplied. So, maybe in a strange way the convenience store is actually already the in-convenience store, manufacturing a looped system of micro-desires and micro-satisfactions with no perceivable end in sight.
My brother, Peter's, book (blue) was piled up on the Nadiff display shelf.
One week ago a popular survey and suggestions process to name the The New Tokyo Tower decided to call it "Sky Tree".
The tower is due to be completed sometime in late 2011 and is being built by the Tobu Railway Company. It will rise some 610 meters high over the downtown area of Oshiage, near where I used to live in Higashi-Mukoujima in Sumida ward.
Two other "sky" related architectures came to mind:
Sky City 1000, above, was a planned mega structure proposed in 1989 by the Takenaka corporation, but never realised.
Mori Building recently opened their Sky Deck on the roof of the Mori Tower in Roppongi.
I hope that the architects of the Sky Tree can consider arboreal elements in their design: for instance, designing a metallic tree structure that also functions like a living tree, absorbing CO2 and emitting oxygen. See this for details on the benefits of trees in urban areas. Or, I would propose that large numbers of ivy species of flowers be planted around the structure (like the Morning Glory), completely covering the metal structure over time. As one moves upwards in height, the plant species would also change to high altitude varieties, perhaps including various fruiting species that could be harvested for food, wine, medicines, entheogen ritual etc.
It seems to me that, if one is to name this new tower a tree, it should explore different paradigms and models of what a tree is and can be in a dense urban environment like Tokyo. The notion of a bio-architecture or some other such dissolving of previous boundaries may be useful. Imagine a 610m oxygen pumping, CO2 eating tower machine, covered in plants of many kinds, that also acts as a transmitter for digital signals. What would also make it something else is if it became a massive wireless hub transmitter for Tokyo and its environs, providing free net access to all. The tower would then begin to breathe like a Tree of Knowledge, made up of plant matter, bio functions and enabling pathways into cyberspace.
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