Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 23

A Restatement: The Art of ‘Ground Zero’ (Part 4)
Iwaki Yumoto II


All photos ART iT (March 2012)

I returned to Tokyo from Iwaki Yumoto and in the New Year, on Tuesday, January 24, 2012, I set foot for the first time inside TEPCO’s head office building in Uchisaiwaicho.

I had gone to attend one of the press conferences held twice a day at designated times in the morning and evening(1) to brief the media on the radiation leaks at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Of course, although I am an art critic, I am not a journalist as such. However, I do have a membership card issued by the International Association of Art Critics, or AICA. As it is not widely known, I should mention that the AICA membership card is an authentic press pass issued by the association’s headquarters in Paris, and on principle holders of this card can attend press conferences almost anywhere in the world. Even if the conference has no obvious connection with art, for example, because it is the writer’s privilege to determine what is or isn’t art-related, this is never a hindrance. Of course, no one is better at sniffing out information important to their work from seemingly unrelated fields than a journalist with a keen sense of smell. And while I certainly do not fit into this category, I had been asked at the time to write a piece looking at “3.11,” so I was keen to confirm with my own eyes and ears the current situation at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant and how this was being conveyed to people by TEPCO.

Incidentally, since I have brought up the subject of press cards, let me also mention that in respect to this ID card alone, members of the organization known in Japan as the Association of Art Critics should properly be described as art journalists as opposed to art critics. However, among the members of the Japanese Association of Art Critics (the Japanese branch of AICA) there are no so-called newspaper reporters. This might strike readers as odd, but there is a kind of a twist here. By this I mean that in Europe and North America, the overwhelming majority of the journalists who contribute by-lined articles to newspapers are freelancers. This also applies to art journalists. In other words, these individual journalists are not protected by any kind of organization. When push comes to shove, they are weak. Which is precisely why, despite their independent status as individuals, it was deemed necessary to form an association in order for them to protect their rights and enable them to continue working freely.

In Japan, on the other hand, the majority of newspaper articles are written by employees of newspaper companies, and the right to gather news is guaranteed not to individuals but to companies. For this reason, there has been no need here to go to the trouble of insisting on the right of individuals to gather news or write stories. Not having checked the membership in detail, I cannot be positive about it, but one would expect that freelance art journalists make up the largest group within the European and American branches of the Association of Art Critics. Or rather, instead of being the preserve of researchers affiliated with universities or art museums, “art criticism” itself is largely independent of these institutions and more journalistic in nature.

In Japan, however, the number of such freelance journalists is incredibly small. Outside the art world, the existence of the “kisha clubs” that have recently become the target of scathing criticism partly explains why such opportunities to gather news have been restricted to the major media organizations. But in terms of the sparseness of freelancers, the art world is without parallel. In fact, looking at the makeup of the Association of Art Critics, while its members include not a single active newspaper journalist from any of the major media organizations that are so numerous in Japan, freelance journalists are still in the minority. Instead, the organization is dominated by members of established organizations, many of them university researchers or art museum professionals, such as directors or curators. This in itself is in a sense an imbalance, and I remember listening in astonishment once as one leading member seemed to ridicule the position of those members who did not belong to any particular organization. Despite the fact that AICA is an association established to protect individuals who do not belong to an organization, in Japan its priorities are grossly wrong, with some members even making a display of their status as individuals protected by an organization. Indeed, for someone like myself who is affiliated to a university, this is more than a little thought provoking.

Why is it thought provoking? Because for journalism, the status of a freelancer carries a great deal of meaning. If the core of journalism is keeping tabs on authority, then today, the media itself is none other than one big authority structure. And when it comes to the mass media, as typified by newspaper and television companies, in one sense it is the ultimate authority. In other words, for journalists today, keeping tabs on and criticizing such media companies should be an extremely important principle governing their conduct. But here there arises a contradiction. If journalists, who ought to keep tabs on the exercising of power at large, are members of this same institution, and in some cases even involved in the exercising of this power, how can they criticize the prejudice or corruption that occurs within it? For the notorious “kisha clubs,” too, leaving aside the question of their monopoly of information, this kind of self-contradiction (keeping tabs on authority ultimately entails criticizing the organization to which one belongs, rendering unrestricted media criticism impossible) is the most pressing issue.

In fact, this is something that applies to current events with far greater social significance than art, for example, and as far as the art world is concerned, those in authority would probably even prefer it if even more journalists attended their press conferences. Art, as it is known in Japan in particular, is a field whose very viability is often called into question, to the extent that requiring the adherence to principles such as keeping tabs on authority is meaningless. This being the case – notwithstanding some degree of inconsistency – it is actually unavoidable that the activities of those working in the field become multifaceted. In extreme cases, such as that of Takashi Murakami, there emerge artists who double as critics and who at the same time must make it a part of their job to stage events and manage galleries, for example. Rather, it is this that is the true originality of Japanese artists. In a place like Japan, there arises the need for those with authority to be able to accomplish everything that can be done.

So the problem probably comes down to the self-awareness of the individual, and the extent to which they can remain conscious of this contradiction and maintain the kind of tension that can only be maintained on the basis of this consciousness, and where and how they can use this as a foundation for building the kind of creativity that can only arise from such a congested state of affairs. If, conversely, they relax for a moment, everything becomes a matter of “collusion,” with the scene inevitably turning into a private hangout in the form of a “contemporary art village” or “nuclear power village” (and in fact one cannot say that such a state of affairs does not already exist).

We seemed to have strayed from the topic of the TEPCO press conference, but in fact all the things I have mentioned are closely related. This is because in the wake of last year’s disaster we need to adopt a fresh, more flexible approach to such fields as criticism, creativity and reporting, based on a new kind of tension, and boldly open them up to new, as-yet-unnamed fields of activity. This is precisely why I have visited the stricken area whenever I have had the chance, and continue to incorporate what I have learned there in my own criticism. And in order to lend further support to the things I witnessed in Iwaki Yumoto, I feel I need to intervene in a more journalistic fashion in circumstances as they are currently unfolding.

But let us return to the original topic. Carrying my AICA press card and the magazines with the articles I had written about the disaster to date, I made my way to the TEPCO head office to continue the preparatory work for the series of essays I was writing on the disaster. I had chosen to attend the evening press conference starting at six o’clock. As I walked through Ginza on my way from Shinbashi to Uchisaiwaicho, I was reminded of the fact that the area around Uchisaiwaicho where TEPCO’s head office is located is the heart of corporate Japan, where buildings housing the headquarters of the likes of Mizuho Bank and NTT Communications stand side by side. In fact, if I had continued straight along Hibiya-dori to Tokyo Station, I would have passed the Imperial Hotel and the head office of the Dai-ichi Life Insurance Company (familiar to those in the art world as the sponsor of the “VOCA” exhibition held each year at the Ueno Royal Museum, which has close links with the Imperial family), which served as the headquarters of MacArthur’s Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) during the occupation, and eventually Nijubashi bridge at the Imperial Palace. Unless one thinks about it, it is easy to overlook the fact that this neighborhood is one that has flaunted a symbolic power that has continued uninterrupted from the dawn of modernity to the present. That evening, however, I got a very strong sense of this.

And so I made my way alone to TEPCO’s head office, where the lights had been dimmed so excessively that I had trouble finding the front entrance, to attend the company’s regular press conference. (To be continued)

 

 

    The press conferences are usually held twice a day, from noon and from six in the evening. On Saturdays and public holidays, however, there is no midday press conference.

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

Copyrighted Image