Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 47

Remembering Seiko Mikami, media artist – or was she?


“Molecular Informatics ~ morphogenic substance via eye tracking (Version 1.0)” (1969), Canon ARTLAB, Hillside Plaza, Tokyo. Photo Mikio Kurokawa, all photos courtesy Tama Art University

The sad news of the death of Seiko Mikami came out of the blue. As someone who taught at the same university as Mikami, I heard the news, which came as a complete surprise, from a colleague just after the New Year holidays, before it was made public. It was so unexpected I could hardly believe it.

Mind you, partly because we belonged to different departments, Mikami and I hardly ever met each other at university. At the most, I probably saw her from time to time at faculty meetings. Thinking about it now, we should have exchanged opinions about various things more than we did. This is something I regret to an extent that surprises even me.

At one time, I was a fierce critic of Seiko Mikami’s artwork. She had been involved in making art from before the time I graduated and moved from Kyoto to Tokyo. Then, she was one of the “standard-bearers of the shinjinrui,” the so-called “new breed” of Japanese who came of age during the 1970s and afterwards. (1) Centered on the publishing world and media, the 1980s cultural scene – embellished with the luminance of the airy knowledge radiating from the so-called “new academism” – pulsated with an almost dazzling energy. Tokyo was the focus of this activity. Among women of the same generation as Mikami involved in this scene was Kyoko Okazaki, who is currently the subject of a retrospective at the Setagaya Literary Museum, while in the art world, women like Noe Aoki, Shoko Maemoto and Mika Yoshizawa (dubbed “super girls”) debuted as heirs of the “post-Mono-ha” tradition and were lionized everywhere. Highly individual, edgy entertainers such as Koyuki Matsumoto and Jun Togawa also appeared around this time. These women all tended to sport short hair and punkish fashion, almost as if they had got together to arrange it beforehand. The significance of this is something I have no intention of examining here. Suffice it to say that among these women, Seiko Mikami had a particularly brutal presence, almost as if she were a messenger of darkness from the dark world.


“New Formation of Decline” (1985)
Former Yebisu Beer Factory/Laboratories (now Ebisu Garden Place), Tokyo

Mikami’s activities as an artist date back to 1984. She began making mysterious installations in which scrap metal – its wreckage strewn out like a forest – was used as a metaphor for the “bones” of a city. The first impact of this work was felt with her debut exhibition, “New Formation of Decline,” held the following year at Yebisu Beer Factory (Ebisu). Here, Mikami was clearly directly influenced by the groundbreaking German rock band led by Blixa Bargeld among others, Einstürzende Neubauten (Collapsing New-Buildings), who were introduced to Japan at the time as the latest bombshell from Berlin. That the title of this solo exhibition was Mikami’s own attempt at a translation of the band’s name is something I only just grasped the other day after hearing it from Norimizu Ameya, the leader of the Tokyo Grand Guignol theatre group who employed Mikami’s services in stage design beginning with the group’s final production, Walpurgis (1986), and became her partner. (2)


“Cross Section of Cable Neuron System” (1986),
Iikura Atlantic Underground Shelter, Tokyo

Mikami went on to create “BAD ART FOR BAD PEOPLE” (Iikura Atlantic Underground Shelter, 1986), in which various cables stretching like rivers around urban infrastructure were used as metaphors for the human neuron system, and “Brain Technology” (artist’s studio, 1988), which, following on from bones and neurons, took as its motif the brain, before moving to New York. There, after participating in an exhibition curated by Robert Longo, she became interested in networks outside the human body such as those relating to wars and information, combining this with the junk that had been her principle motif up to that point to produce an exhibition that represented the culmination of all her work to date, “Information Weapon 1” (Toyoko Global Environment Laboratory, 1990).


“Information Weapons: Super Clean Room” (1990), Toyoko Global Environment Laboratory, Yokohama

The first work by Mikami I saw after moving to Tokyo was this exhibition. The venue was a research facility that housed a specially built clean room, and viewers – almost as if they were workers at a nuclear power plant – had to change into white protective clothing before entering, so that they experienced the installation indirectly through an artificial membrane that covered the contours of their body.

The reason I felt uneasy about this installation was that I thought it was a terribly half-baked attempt. The Berlin Wall, which symbolized the Cold War between the East and the West, had already come down, signaling an end to the era in which a destructive full-scale nuclear war threatened the downfall of humankind. In its place, a new, invisible information war was about to begin. With destruction invisible to the naked eye threatened from both sides, the nature of war itself was on the verge of changing dramatically. Despite the fact that the installation as a whole took a step into the “invisible” dimension with its use of a clean room, the works displayed there were much the same as before, consisting of objects/sculptures resembling nuclear missiles made from discarded circuit boards. Because information is colorless and transparent, an information war is a matter of calculation and diplomacy, and so for the aesthetics of “weapons” – vestiges of the Cold War – to creep in under the guise of junk was out of step with the times. At least, this was my main criticism at the time.

From the same standpoint, I also criticized the “WAR BAR” exhibition (Aoyama 246Club, 1990), a large-scale installation also with a military-weapon theme produced by Technocrat, an art unit formed by Norimizu Ameya, who parted company with Mikami around the same time. My goal at this time was to purge the cultural scene of these tendencies that had arisen since the advent of the new academism. It was with this in mind that I published my first collection of criticism, Simulationism (1991), which subsequently led to me working with the new generation of artists who, rather than following overseas contemporary thought as typified by the new academism, were strongly under the influence of the domestic otaku culture, which is to say artists such as Takashi Murakami and Kenji Yanobe.

Given this, I found it incredibly ironic that Tsutomu Ikeuchi, the founder and director of the Rontgen Kunst Institut, which became our base, was not only a passionate supporter of Ameya’s theatre but also a collector of Mikami’s objects/sculptures. People who, despite being of the same generation, were in a sense the standard-bearers of aesthetics/anti-aesthetics that divided the era, ended up coexisting in the same space. And so, though it may seem strange now, it was not only the “Mono-ha ~ Post-Mono-ha” tendency to which it had until recently been the successor in the “contemporary art” world that the tendency that would later come to be dubbed both “Neo-Pop” (Bijutsu techo, special issue March 1992) and “Tokyo Simulationism” (Hideki Nakazawa) regarded as its potential adversary. Intended as the first strike in this campaign was my first exhibition as a curator, “Anormaly” (Rontgen Kunst Institut, 1992, with Kodai Nakahara, Takashi Murakami, Kenji Yanobe, Gabin Ito). Naturally, the names of Mikami and Ameya were nowhere to be seen.

As a result of the transition from the Cold War to globalism, the aesthetic/anti-aesthetic images from the Cold War era would also completely lose their meaning. Whether or not it was a result of this critique of mind I do not know. But over the course of a roughly two year period centered on 1990, from November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall was rendered meaningless, to December 26, 1991, when the Soviet Union, then the largest country in the world, disappeared almost as if it had been an illusion, a major change also began to appear in Mikami’s art. She ultimately drew a line under all her previous work and made a fresh start, as it were, as an artist leading the charge in the new era of “media art” (although the term itself had not even become established). But in the end, was Seiko Mikami really a “media artist”? For me, a memorial to Mikami entails a re-examination of this question. (To be continued)

 

 

    1. “Chikushi Tetsuya no wakamono tanken: Shinjinrui no kishutachi 18” (Tetsuya Chikushi’s youth expedition: Standard-bearers of the new breed 18),

Asahi Journal

    1. , August 23, 1985, p. 55–60.

  1. I also learned from Ameya that Mikami contributed video footage to a special program titled “TV WAR” [concept: Akira Asada, video: Radical TV (Daizaburo Harada + Haruhiko Shono), music: Ryuichi Sakamoto] shown on what was then world’s largest television monitor – the Sony Jumbotron (25×4m) – in the rain on the second to last night (September 15) of Expo ’85 (March 17–September 16, 1985). However, when the project was documented on DVD (2005), the segment that Mikami had produced was deleted (most likely according to her wishes).

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

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