Tactical Museum

Nadiff Reborn and Convenience.

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.    

Nadiff Site

My brother, Peter's, book (blue) was piled up on the Nadiff display shelf.

New Tokyo Art Guide in English

A new English language art guide has just been launched. Chin Music Press publishing and TABlog Editor Ashley Rawlings editing. I am not sure when it will be in the bookstores. It costs ¥3000. I contributed an essay on Tokyo art spaces. It is another much needed addition to English language information about contemporary art and culture in Tokyo, following on from the exploits of REALTOKYO, ArtIt Magazine, TAB and the 101 Art Fair etc.
Art Space Tokyo
I experienced a first yesterday, when a student at MAD showed me the latest copy of the Tower Records free magazine in which a musician called DJ Baku is interviewed. In the interview he referred to this blog and my post about Japan entering a second age of Sakoku (isolation). It's official - Tactical Museum is read by the Japanese hip hop DJ fraternity!

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.

Speaking 7 inches, Endo Ichiro and Shibuya underpasses.

I spoke yesterday at the 101 Art Fair with Haruka Ito, Director of magical art room. Many people came. I opted to translate myself, which resulted in a very interesting proto-performance in which I would say a few things in Japanese followed by English, but the content would invariably begin to dissipate. So in effect I think I ended up speaking a kind of 'A' side and a 'B' side, each with slightly different mixes of an original.

Haruka invited Ichiro Endo, an artist who lives in a small van, along to share his thoughts. Endo has worked with Makoto Aida a bit, making a very funny video with him where we see him running into the main wall of the Roppongi Hills Mori Tower (where the Mori Museum is) for twenty minutes. Endo did not go to art school. He travels around in his small van, which also doubles as a mobile studio/ exhibition space.

Endo's practice revolves around the phrase 'Mirai-E' - Towards the Future. There he is in front of one of his signature large banner paintings with the above characters. I suggested in the talk that we may link this kind of approach to characters like Taro Okamoto, who wrote an interesting treatise called 'Jomon Doki Ron' (Thoughts on Jomon) in 1952. The Jomon was the Mesolithic pre-historic period of Japan. Okamoto's interest in Japanese pre-history and a sense of the primitive can, I think, be usefully re-visited to think about the work of younger artists like Endo, as well as many artists emerging now whose works seem to touch on aspects of magic, ritual, invisibility, animistic traditions, Japanese myth and festivals and images of primal nature. I find this interesting in light of the dominant discourses which have so strongly defined Japanese art recently - subcultural tendencies reflected in Superflat and the banality of the everyday reflected in Micropop (and in the sociological critiques of thinkers like Miyadai Shinji -  'Owari Naki Nichijoh'). Sawaragi Noi has, I believe, also touched on these aspects. Okamoto's primitivism must, of course, be read in light of his search for a post-war Japanese avant-garde within a broad European Modernism, as well as part of a rather essentialist 'Nihon-jinron' (unique Japanese-ness) search. Nevertheless, one of my impressions of seeing work by younger artists at the two art fairs as well as at graduation shows, has been to think about such things.

Endo has been involved in something else of interest. At the end of last year, as part of a city scheme to gentrify and evict homeless people from an underground passageway near the 246 highway in central Tokyo, a so called 'gallery' was initiated on the tunnel walls. Endo and others have objected to this and made a series of counter art actions and events in this tunnel. Makoto Aida has written about this process at length (in Japanese only). Makoto Aida's writing on the Shibuya underpass 'Gallery'.

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.....

5 Bidai Ten: degree shows of five art universities.

Young Japanese artists seem to be immersed in a Symbolist/ Introspective search - a response to the crises of Japanese culture and society, a feeling of unease, insecurity, limited prospects etc. To quote my favorite 'raver' the late Terence McKenna, "As the inevitable chaostrophy approaches people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets itself into trouble it casts itself back to the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew." The fourth year students responses are to a kind of archaic revival, a returning to the liminal zones of childhood, primitive mark making, symbolist and romantic landscapes, animistic visions where humans and animals communicate, ethereal, mist-like abstractions which evoke ectoplasmic photographs of the late C19th, parodies of European classicism and Myth, fairy tales and Pre-Raphaelite imagery, psychological imagery of shattered bodies, fragmentation, isolation and dolls. All of these motifs and themes can be traced to pre or early Modernist art concerns. They seem to be emerging now in Japan, following a century of searching for a 'Japanese Modernism' in the mold of Europe and America. The formal concerns of Mono-Ha and Appropriation (post-modernism) have been eclipsed by urges to return to an Older past, states of infancy, paradisical childhood and immersion in ideas of Nature.

The problem though is that much of this is carried out Formally - as simple quoting from familiar, well trodden, cliched sources, popular culture, manga etc. The potential radicality of this project is almost erased. What it can be is a serious and intelligent MINING, an ARCHAEOLOGY, of history, those pre-modern ideas and experiences which were largely supressed by Modern processes in the Meiji period as well as by Post-War US occupation administration. The traces, seeds of something interesting seem to be there in many of these works, but they remain refractions, simulacra. The students need to get out into the woods, start farming, research folk Shinto and its rituals, REALLY dream and use the imagination as devices to re-vision Japanese society today and their experiences in it.

160 works in the Exhibition.

JapRockSampler and Michelin Guide Furor

I have been reading Julian Cope's 'JapRockSampler'. I highly recommend it. What's nice about it is its weaving together of psychedelic rock, avant-garde music, art and social and cultural histories. One begins to form histories in the mind, linking artists to musicians, art groups to concerts etc. It is a richly researched work. The book has a website HERE.

On another note, this morning's International Herald Tribune ran a front page article on the snubbing of Michelin Guide Tokyo by a number of Tokyo chefs and Tokyo Governor Ishihara. A chef, Mr. Toshiya Kadowaki is quoted as saying "Japanese food was created here, and only Japanese know it. How can a bunch of foreigners show up and tell us what is good or bad?". The current issue of Goethe magazine is running an alternative Michelin Guide issue and an in depth critique of the 'official' Michelin guide. Leaving aside the stunted 'Nihonjinron' attitude of chef Kadowaki and Governor Ishihara, what interested me was the vigour and authority of the counter critiques which the French guide book has caused in some quarters here. It seems to point to a sense of pride in a very living culinary culture. This is very different to the position of art, where magazines and editors never engage in critical debate about what's considered good or current. I think it is great that the publication of the Michelin guide has led to the creation of some sense of a public debate (albeit led by sadly conservative voices who espouse the age long myth of Japanese 'essence').
This past Saturday Director of the Echigo-Tsumari Triennale, Fram Kitagawa gave a lecture at MAD in which he spoke about the lack of a civil society (shimin shakai) in post-war Japan which would provide art with a public arena of discourse and debate. Rather, art has remained an abstracted idea, a closed domain with little sense of being embedded in a public. Interestingly Kitagawa proposed that part of the reasons for this sitaution can be traced back to the failiures of the Iwakura Mission, sent to Europe in the late C19th to gather knowledge about Modernity. They naively interpreted art museums as great civic and political mechanisms of collecting and categorising 'culture' rather than as active elements within a discourse-buillding public sphere. Hence, art has remained cut off from life experiences, and been developed as something representative of a thing called 'culture'. Perhaps in the world of culinary culture, this sense of detachment is far less sharply defined. After all, food is something which most people can partake in easily and with little cost.
It is interesting to ponder a similar 'foreign' invasion which occurred in the art world in Japan in the 1950s - the so called 'Informel Senpuu' which swept through the Gutai group and essentially folded its activities into a broader history of Euro/ American-centric abstract painting. The more impermanent, time-based and experimental works of early Gutai was gradually subsumed into this Informel reading, leading many artists to turn to abstract painting and jettison their earlier attitudes. Although an example from over a half century ago, it raises an interesting counter example to what the Michelin Guide has stirred up. The sad part of the current Michelin debate though is that the counter Japanese position takes an extreme and essentialist position, that effectively and perversely curtails further debate by insisting that non Japanese cannot understand Japanese food. I would hope that magazine editors had more intelligence. Rather than this orthodox 'Nihonjinron' position, a more dynamic discussion on the complex issues of cultural understanding through food, how food is today immersed in global processes and whether there can indeed be 'alternative' histories and canons to what publications such as Michelin have protected, would serve to create a richer and more vibrant culinary culture.
Perhaps if there was something like a Michelin Guide for contemporary art that swept into Tokyo and published its findings in the manner of rankings, a similar outcry would ensue and public discussion generated....or then again, it may simply confirm current hierarchies and consolidate structures. Or, following Kitagawa's proposal, what the Japanese state needs to do is appoint a New Iwakura Mission to go yonder, survey different models for art and attempt to re-tune the current state of things.

Artist Makoto Aida has a superb work called 'Discover the Element of New Taste' , which I worked with him on for The Singapore Biennale 2006. It elegantly captures many of the issues I was pondering above.

'Goth' at Yokohama Museum of Art

‘Goth: Reality of a Departed World’ at The Yokohama Museum of Art was firmly rooted in a post-Marylin Manson landscape fully replete with nose-hooks, tattoos and horror sources. This is a very different set of references to the goth subcultures of my experiences going to school in the UK, which emanated from bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Ghost Dance and The Cure. Unfortunately for me at least, the exhibition did not explore these recent manifestations of goth subculture and chose to reference its artistic and literary history instead, delving into grand themes of death and life. The exhibition did not clearly delineate these distinctions in its presentation or texts. Compared to its older sister, punk, goth subculture is less concerned with the social space, with confrontation and politics, preferring to carve out subjective spaces of poetry and imagination. The historical references of Goth subcultures have thus usually been the Romantic movement of Northern Europe in the C19th.

Alien Sex Fiend: excessive, camp theatrics, funny.
The work of the Mexican artist Dr. Lakra presented a highly engaging and complex layering of readings regarding our potential understandings of ‘goth’ today. Dr. Lakra is interested in tattoos. He draws intricate tattoos and markings onto the bodies of models and personalities adorning the covers of popular magazines, original Japanese woodblock prints and mass produced plastic dolls. Like Guy Debord and the Situationists, the work is a highly effective detournement of readily available media images, transforming them into completely different signs for social deviancy or subversion. Dr. Lakra spent two months living and working in Tokyo, and he has made several new bodies of work. Particularly memorable was an eagle like relief head made up entirely of colorful wax food samples bought in the Kappabashi area of Tokyo. Mounted on a stained wooden board, the work seemed like a trophy of Dr. Lakra’s detourning skills, a testament to the power of the imagination to turn readymade objects into strange, unruly totems which pierce the rules of commerce and capital. This work related to a series of powerful portraits by the Japanese artist Pyuupiru, who has been documenting her male to female sex change process since 2003. The series showed her face covered in various substances and materials including strips of raw meat, psychedelic colored liquids, clay looking paste and hair. Each portrait bore a suggestive title such as ‘A surgeon who sells skin’, or ‘An ecstatic drug addict’. Pyuupiru’s presentation seemed linked to Dr. Lakra’s in its explorations of marking as a form of transformation and transgression, although the ‘ready-made’ in Pyuupiru’s case was her own body. Pyuupiru’s portraits pointed to a contemporary concern of many ‘goths’ with the body and its transformations through fashion, decoration, piercing and perhaps ultimately with altering one’s subjectivity in relation to the society one inhabits.

Theda Bara, Goth Vamp icon, US silent film actress. 1885-1955.

Elegant Gothic Lolita fashion brand EGL.

The only documentary style work in the exhibition was a room of photographs by Masayuki Yoshinaga who took pictures of Japanese Gothic Lolita followers. These photographs were at once both a testament to an intense subculture of deviating from social norms, but also a peculiar confirmation of a homogenous and marketable fashion trend encouraged by street fashion magazines like Fruits. Although in parts, the exhibition seemed to slide into a parade of visual clichés (skulls, blood etc) which moulded it into a kind of ‘freak show’, there were just enough works which propelled the exhibition beyond these readings, into areas of transgression and dark unconscious desires.

I have always thought of UK goths as, on the whole, considerably dirtier and unkempt, compared to their contemporary Japanese counterparts. This relates to the historical lineage with Romanticism, and with a sense of returning to nature etc a la Wordsworth, or CD Friedrich.

siouxsie.

Note: The reviewer was a Goth in his younger days, living in the UK.

'Space for Your Future' was 'Space of the Museum'.

A Good New Year.

January 5th 2008, and my first outing to a museum exhibition is ‘Space For Your Future’ at Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT), curated by Yuko Hasegawa. Although I arrived early at around 11am, the galleries were buzzing with visitors. This is a show about a curator trying to probe new aesthetic criteria for new times, a show brazenly wearing its ‘future-vision’ goggles, and a show with not a single painting in it. Curatorially, Hasegawa proposes that we are living in an age when different genres and disciplines must engage one another and actively feed off one another, encouraged by the speed and ubiquity of the internet and new technologies. It is, though, an age of few visions or optimism, an age when no one quite knows where to head. I would like to write at more length on the phenomenon of cross-genre exhibitions etc. at a later stage, so here I will simply note what I thought worked best in the show.
SANAA’s ‘Flower House’ (2007) was for me the centre piece of the exhibition. Poised gracefully on the uppermost floor of the museum, the installation comprised a half scale model of a house made out of curving transparent Perspex materials covered by a flat roof. Inside the house were little chairs, tables, a bed and dozens of potted plants with dried flowers in them. The entire house was surrounded by green potted plants, and a few chairs. I sat in a chair and surveyed the house, imagining myself strolling through its shapely spaces.

SANAA, 'Flower House', 2007, installation at MOT.

The gallery lighting had, moreover, been replaced by hanging tungsten lamps to presumably keep the potted plants growing. This small detail really got me excited about the installation. It was a detail which pushed the boundaries and codes of the museum so that it could sustain life. John Cage used to say that exhibitions should include plants and stones here and there to make them livable spaces, and in its own way, SANNA’s installation perfectly captured a sense of life in the normally austere surroundings of museum galleries. Great cheers for potted plants in galleries!

Exceedingly good mushrooms.

It was good to see works by Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Bless and Hussein Chalayan. The psychedelic Brazilians made a two-storey wooden construction adorned with their usual colorful patterns, mobiles, sand and fluorescent paint. One could go upstairs or into small rooms with little cushions to sit on. The installation should have served as the show’s café or tea shop so that people could actually spend time relaxing in its nests. Simply constructing it inside one of the museum’s galleries really deadens it, makes it mute. I felt something similar with the installation and video documentation of Bless. Their work felt like a contemporary version of Thomas Couture’s massive painting hanging in the Orsee Museum entitled ‘Romans of the Decadence’ (1847) which depicts a huge orgiastic feast. I understand that the video documentation playing in their space was from a fashion show in Paris where the models played a game loosely based on soccer while wearing the clothes.

Bless, still from video of fashion show.

Thomas Couture, 'Romans of the Decadence', 1847.

For an exhibition which purported to expound and explore new aesthetic directions and ‘genes’ for art, Space For Your Future remained well behaved in the sense that much of the work was restrained from flowering fully, from becoming. The limitations and restrictions of the museum institution seemed to blunt many of the works, which needed to be touched, sat on, mulled over, slouched on and generally engaged with on more than a visual level. The experience of seeing the show became a bit like flipping through one of those cross-genre magazines which adorn the shelves of Tsutaya or Aoyama Book Center. I wanted to feel more heat. I presume that heat is generated when two or more foreign objects begin to vibrate closely to one another. However, the show had a strangely clean and cool air to it which made me think that some bigger power or force was preventing the vibrations from taking place.

'0-10, The Last Futurist Exhibition of Pictures', Petrograd, 1915.
"The exhibition was to display a complete renewal in art, as Malevich wrote to the composer Matiushin in May 1915, 'we intend to reduce everything to zero...and will then go beyond zero'. It was to be the Last Futurist Exhibition, the end of Western European domination of the Russian avant-garde, and the beginning of a new age". (from The Avant-Garde in Exhibition. New Art in the 20th Century, Bruce Altshuler, University of California Press, 1994, p. 78.)

Sakamoto Ryoma's Boots

Sakamoto Ryoma (3 Jan 1836 - 10 Dec 1867) was a leader of the movement to overthrow the Tokugawa Bakufu. He wore ankle length elasticated leather boots, apparently because it prevented him from slipping on the wet decks of ships.
I declare Ryoma a proto-CosuPure-ist.

Ryoma's Boots memorial statue.