Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 51

Remembering Seiko Mikami, media artist – or was she? V


Photo: Naoya Hatakeyama, © studio parabolica

With this installment, I will bring to a close for the time being this essay concerning Seiko Mikami, which I have been writing intermittently since the completely unexpected news of her death was reported at the start of this year. That said, this is of course not the end. We have only just begun our contemplative journey with the now departed Mikami. No one can decide where this journey will end.

When I started writing this essay, the first question I posed was, “Was she a media artist?” I did so for no other reason than that I felt there was some lingering inconsistency in the fact that, while she began her career as an artist as someone virtually unconnected to media art and with all the potential that comes from not being bound by such a “label,” from a certain point onwards – for better or worse – she became “entombed” as one of the founders of “media art” for the purposes of “sealing” her career up to that point. This feeling of inconsistency arises from the feeling of doubt I have that the origins of Mikami as an artist can be traced to her being motivated to make art not by the development of technology, something that characterizes media art, but by something completely different. Because by bringing this into the open I hoped it would be possible to discover a new key to understanding Seiko Mikami the artist, a key that not only was separate from both media art and junk art, but could bridge the gap between the two.


Announcement for “New Formation of Decline” (1985) at the abandoned former Ebisu Beer Factory Laboratories. Photo courtesy Roentgenwerke, in cooperation with Shigeki Kimura.

What is this key? After an inquiry spanning several installments, we have apparently arrived at the notion of “skin.” It is extremely thin, yet it serves as a boundary clearly separating the outside and the inside with the skin as an interface and at the same time mediates between the two, with Mikami using the term “world membrane” to refer to the relative movement according to which the inside and outside appear to somehow be reversed. The evidence suggesting that this is “skin” in the broad sense of the word is as outlined in detail last time when I traced Mikami’s work chronologically.

However, regarding this matter, I touched on the fact that Mikami fluctuated slightly between two different Japanese words for “membrane,” both pronounced himaku but using slightly different characters. She ultimately settled on one of the two, but in fact there is a difference in meaning between them that exceeds the bounds of mere nuance.

So what is the difference between these two Japanese words for “membrane”? In short, whereas one indicates a nominal “subject,” the other indicates a passive “condition.” In other words, it constitutes a “passive voice” in the form of “receiving.” This indicates a condition in which an interior filled with something is uniformly covered by some kind of membrane (ie, skin). I suspect that for Mikami, this itself defined the human body.

Why, though, must the human body be covered in skin to begin with? Looking at Mikami’s artwork, it would appear to offer two answers to this question. The first is to protect the (internal) body from various pollutants and different environments outside the encapsulated body. The second is to prevent the exact opposite of this – which is to say the release into the outside world of contaminants stuck inside the encapsulated body.

At her 1990 solo exhibition “Information Weapon 1: Super Clean Room” at the Toyoko Global Environment Institute (Yokohama), Mikami visualized these beautifully contrasting characteristics of world membrane in all the work with the protective clothing the audience was required to wear.


Visitors to “Information Weapon 1: Super Clean Room” (1990, Toyoko Global Environment Institute, Yokohama) changing into protective clothing. Photo courtesy Roentgenwerke, in cooperation with Shigeki Kimura.

Protective clothing is precisely a tool to conjure a “world membrane” by enveloping the human body in an artificial skin. Unfortunately, since the Fukushima nuclear accident, we have seen such clothing all too frequently via news reports and the Internet. Albeit temporarily, such clothing is a necessary and nowadays essential tool for protecting the human body from disseminated radioactive material. According to Mikami, however, because the human body itself is actually originally a world membrane, it might be more accurate to say that this clothing not only doubly protects the body but also serves as a metaphor for the human body itself. In fact, at her 1990 solo show, the protective clothing served the exact opposite function, which is to say it was used to protect the highly pure environment of the super clean room outside the clothing from the already contaminated human bodies of the audience. Despite the existence of these two completely opposite purposes, however, the same protective clothing can actually be worn. Because the difference between preventing contamination outside from being brought inside and preventing contamination inside from escaping outside is ultimately only a relative difference. The two are in fact nothing but interchangeable, opposite sides of the same situation.

If we take our cue from this, then it would mean that during the period when her work was referred to as junk art, Mikami took as her motif a contaminated world membrane made using No Entry signs and Handle with Care marks and protective clothing, whereas after she came to be regarded as a standard-bearer of media art she came to attach importance to the question of how to protect the inner sensations of the human body by means of a new world membrane in which environmental changes in the outside world (such as variations in gravity or isolation in clean rooms) are converted into electronic/digital devices. Frankly speaking, the only difference between the two is the signs, clothing and technology. And if we follow such a relativization, then the question of whether she was a junk artist or a media artist no longer has any meaning whatsoever. In short, throughout her career, from her dazzling debut in which she shot to prominence like a comet to her sudden demise like a meteorite falling to earth, Seiko Mikami was an artist who consistently dealt with the world membrane.


“Eye-Tracking Informatics” (2011), Yamaguchi Center for Art and Media (YCAM).


Seiko Mikami + Sota Icihikawa, gravicells – Gravity and Resistance (2010, new revised version), Yamaguchi Center for Art and Media (YCAM). Both: Photos: Ryuichi Maruo (YCAM), courtesy Yamaguchi Center for Art and Media (YCAM)

The photobook BEIRUT, which I mentioned at the end of the previous installment, clearly demonstrates this. This volume, which is filled with nothing but photos of ruins of buildings that have been damaged in every conceivable way due to relentless bombardment, is the starting point of Mikami’s art practice, but what is striking is that the image on the cover is of a statue whose arm has broken off and whose body is covered with bullet holes. Here we have a human body whose membrane has failed, as it were. That it is a lifeless mannequin is not because it is a human figure that had no life to begin with, but simply because it failed to form a world membrane. In the true sense of the word, it is a corpse.


Sophie Ristelhueber – Beirut (Thames & Hudson, 1984) Mikami’s personal copy of the book.

Conversely, for Mikami, world membrane could become none other than the constantly changing life phenomenon itself. Or rather, looking back at the path she later followed, it is beyond doubt that her very focusing on world membrane meant laying bare the “relentless crisis” of the human body exposed to the outside world. That being the case, in the sense that the countless buildings in this photobook – lying collapsed like papercraft models – were forsaken by the world membrane, it is beyond doubt that for Mikami they all represented adapted human bodies. Surely it is for this very reason that Mikami felt compelled to resuscitate this “junk” and bring it back to life as human bodies (bones, nerves, brains) by encapsulating it once again – if for no other reason than to enable her to continue living in this ruin-like world.

Taking a hint from Walter Benjamin’s “The Destructive Character,” Mikami referred to these “rites of passage” for the purposes of rebirth as “positive acts” for “people who were at once trailblazers opening up new routes through history and revolutionaries” and who were “able to find various paths through mountains of rubble,” actually writing as much in the margins of her copy of this photobook. With the world membrane of Seiko Mikami itself having finished its activities as a life form, it would appear that these positive acts with respect to world membrane in the form of bold ventures and interventions in history and the path to becoming a revolutionary with respect to the notion of the human body have returned once again to rubble. But is this really the case?

In order to ensure this does not end simply in reminiscence regarding the latent potential of an individual artist, I risked a crisis by launching in this world a certain marginal (ie, critical) venture. Because I considered that it would be just such a “positive act” by a “destructive character” (Benjamin) that would somehow lead to Mikami’s interrupted work being carried on and some day result in her “long-cherished desire” being realized. However, I no longer have enough space to discuss this here. As well, this is not the proper occasion to discuss it. I will leave it for now, and when I find the proper occasion I will reveal it as my “pointed gift” to Mikami.

Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 1-6

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