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. 

New Year as a Japanese Citizen.

I had the opportunity to visit the US Embassy Residence in Tokyo last month.

 

I asked a friend to take a photograph of me standing in the same spot where General MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito stood for three photographs at their meeting on 27 September 1945. The 1945 photograph was taken by US Army photographer Lt. Gaetano Faillace in the main reception room on the first floor.

 

Although the furniture has changed and the thick carpet taken out, the pillars and rounded windows at the rear are unchanged.

The third image is a simple superimposition of the two. A spirit photograph of sorts. One of the principal power spots of modern Japan. A James Joyce domain where space, time and history floats, potent.

Lieko Shiga Review on Artscape International and Art Universites.

My review here.

The end of the year is always hectic - particularly with lectures at AIT, but also Tama and Musashino Art Universities. My classes at Tama, on the City and Art for 3-4th year students and 1st year's Introduction to Contemporary Art, have four sessions to go each. The Musabi class on Reading contemporary art through texts also nears its completion, and an avant-garde has even self-appointed itself in the group to organise a 'nomikai' drinking session. As well as preparing lectures weekly, universities and AIT must also prepare curricula and schedules and guests for next year - I decided to stop at Tama, and continue at Musabi, and there is a new offer from Joshibi. I feel that Musabi is my 'base' in many ways. I get this feeling through the architecture of the place, its formal but also slightly worn seminar rooms, which contrasts with Tama's brilliant white and shiny halls. I really find it itchy being in white pristine spaces for too long, especially trying to engage students in discussion on complex topics that need time and thinking. I have found that the time-worn corridors of Musabi are more conducive to this. And there is the issue of how lecturers are situated. At Tama, we get a neat, little room to ourselves, next to the administrative offices. At Musabi we share a large open office with the admin staff, where the art magazines are stacked, photo-copiers whirr and bento is taken. This is clearly a better system. I am sure that the architectural, and by extension narrative, contexts mould the students in particular ways. I don't think universities should be white and pristine, like hospitals. They should be in dull shades of scarred and worn green's, blue's and grey's, because this gives permission to the students to use the space, to kind of take it over (by sticking posters on walls, hanging out in seminar rooms etc.). Pristine white spaces seem to say, 'don't touch me' and 'only occupy the centre of rooms'.

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.

The Spectre of Spillage

I went to see the Mike Kelley exhibition at Wako Works of Art yesterday. It is very good. Kelley is presenting four groups of photographs and a selection of recent sculptures from the 'Kandor' series. The photographs all relate to Kelley's long interest in spiritualist, symbolist and pictorialist photography. Of particular interest to me was seeing The Ectoplasm series, initially made in 1978 with artist David Askevold for a project entitled 'Poltergeist'. The Wako exhibition shows never-before printed images.

The exhibition made me think about fakery, the human body as an organ always on the verge of spillages and liquid excretions, and how artists have related to matter as some manifestation or extension of something totally Other, fluid and unspeakable, like ectoplasm. 

Above, Theodor Prinz, Ghost, c 1900 and below, Edouard Isidore Buguet, Fluidic Effect, 1875.

If there is one artist who 'turned me on' to contemporary art it is the Austrian Franz West. I have always thought about his Adaptives - blobular sculptural forms which can be held and awkwardly played with - as something similar to psychic excretions, unformed unconscious shapes which we are invited to examine and behold. West has exhibited with Kelley in the past, and the two clearly share interests.

The idea of spillage may also be used in thinking about UFO phenomena. Carl Jung and Terence McKenna have both proposed that we think about them not as actual physical things out there, but as extensions or excretions of our imaginations - perhaps objects refracted back from some Other place into our here and now - into our imaginaries.

An interesting, but marginalised, scholarly resource that provides a useful theory into such speculations may be Julian Jaynes' 1976 "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind". In the bicameral state human beings actually heard voices which they interpreted as coming from Gods or spirits - the mind is conceived as still fragile, open to the interjections and disturbances of Mysteries.

 

This little painted stone by Max Ernst from 1934 is another favorite of mine. It reminds me of the human urge to mark material objects in order to somehow soften or prepare their surface for spillage to occur. My reading of archaic cave drawings and scratchings also follow this thinking. The preparation and ingestion of psychedelic substances by people through time and into the present can also be understood as a loosening of the bounded mind, allowing for temporary re-circulation and seepage.

Berlin Wall on the Embassy Wall, Moats and Apes

On my walk to AIT this morning I came across a wonderful exhibition of historical photographs charting the history of the Berlin Wall. The images look like they have been specially glued to the long concrete wall of the German Embassy that runs up along the hill by Arisugawa Koen in Hiroo. I found myself walking like a crab, sideways along the pavement, looking carefully at each large image. You can see the selection on the embassy website link above. Many of the images I had seen before, many were new to me.

The experience of unexpectedly coming across such an exhibition is rare and always satisfying. After a few moments of adjusting oneself to engaging with the presentation (a part of me continues to walk to AIT), stopping in the street to look and read is intensely nice. This particular exhibition, commemorating 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, looked all the more sharp for being pasted on the long grey concrete wall of the embassy compound which I walk past most days.

As an aside I am now reading The Yamato Dynasty on the loo, and I started to think that there is an impassable wall in the middle of Tokyo in the form of the moats surrounding the Imperial Palace. Moats are very clever for being negative structures, inclines into the earth. They keep people out and also provide aesthetic pleasure, by housing swans and sweeping vistas. I suppose they crucially also keep the Imperial Family in. This got me thinking how any 'Fall of the Imperial Moats" would necessitate strong swimmer climbers who, instead of knocking walls down, would have to build bridge-like structures across the moats or ferry people over in small craft. This is clearly the domain of the stealthy folks living in Iga and Koga, the ninja.

Occasionally they are partially breached, as we saw in October 2008 when a British man living in Spain dove in and started to climb one of the moat walls. It was a scene from Planet of the Apes - the naked barbarian hurling rocks at the police trying to evade capture. He was caught and arrested I believe.

Naturalization in 1890

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

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

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

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

Read the paragraph beginning "Until quite recently".

ArtIt Website

ArtIt Website has launched.

I am one of the many in-site bloggers.
Under the pseudonym 'PATA-PHYSIC PAST', I have decided to post a writing and museology project I have been pursuing for some years. It comprises found photographs, art and captions.

Hopefully updated weekly.

Yoroshiku,

12 Moons at AIT: Panpsychic Curating.

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.

Atomic Sunshine in Tokyo

I just went to see 'Into the Atomic Sunshine' at Hillside Gallery in Daikanyama. For details please read Edan's article in The Japan Times .
I left feeling somewhat awkward. It was not particularly the themes or topics addressed in the project, nor the selected art works that made me feel like this. I have been pondering this. I think what made me feel like this was the abstract level of the exhibition and project. By this I mean that Watanabe Shinya, the curator, chose to move into the domain of war, post-colonialism, pacifism and post-war Japanese art through the filter of a legal document - Article 9 of the Constitution. The exhibition and its explication through symposia and texts seemed largely to spin across quite dense legal and philosophical terrain. In other words, by referring singularly to a constitutional document the project seemed to be limited and refracted by its reliance on belief systems and ideology. I think that my feeling of awkwardness came about because of this. There were almost no works in the exhibition which rested on more personal or experiential episodes. How can a legal document such as Article 9 be experienced today? I wished for a different curatorial layer in the project, one that could perhaps have inverted the state-centric discussions of international politics into a field of personal experiences and matters of the body. For me, a creature like Godzilla, for example, seems to be an attempt to actually map Japan's atomic trauma onto a body - albeit very large and covered in scales -  in order to provide a more experientially graspable sense of what are perhaps 'post-human' issues. Atomic Sunshine's curatorial approach rather tended to bring together works which stayed literally close to legal and state-centric readings of the issues - actually incorporating the document in works through text, material, recreation, national symbols etc. You can read more about the project via the curator's website: SpikyArt.