Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 52

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


Grand Guignol Mirai – Demio Fukushima 501 (2015–), video documentation shown at “Don’t Follow the Wind – Non-Visitor Center,” Watari Museum of Art.

There is a reason why “Remembering Seiko Mikami, media artist – or was she?” which ought to have concluded for the time being, is stubbornly continuing like this. The thing I alluded to at the end of the previous installment was that I was invited to give a talk with artist and khoomei singer Fuyuki Yamakawa as part of the “Seiko Mikami and the ’80s” exhibition held at parabolica-bis in Asakusabashi, Tokyo (October 2 – November 1, 2015), during which I touched on a personal and critical project I was undertaking concerning the late Seiko Mikami. Upon reflection, I decided I should devote this installment to an account of this project.

Fuyuki Yamakawa and I are both members of Grand Guignol Mirai, a unit formed in 2014 by myself and stage director Norimizu Ameya, which had recently launched a project as a foursome together with photographer Shuji Akagi. On the same day that this talk took place, October 10, the exhibition “Don’t Follow the Wind – Non-Visitor Center,” in which Grand Guignol Mirai participated, was being held at the Watari Museum of Art, also in Tokyo. This was a proxy version of “Don’t Follow the Wind,” the “exhibition no-one can visit” held inside the exclusion zone (ie, the “difficult-to-return zone”) centered on Hama-dori in Fukushima Prefecture, established in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident. In fact, I had intended from the outset to talk at these two seemingly unconnected exhibitions about this critical project that once put in place couldn’t easily be dismantled, but on the day in question I embarked on my talk without mentioning in advance anything about its contents to the organizers.


Above: Installation view of “Seiko Mikami and the ’80s” (2015), studio parabolica, Tokyo. Below, left foreground: A work assembled by Fuyuki Yamakawa in a performance staged in conjunction with this exhibition out of cables (stored in a warehouse at Tama Art University) believed to have been used by Mikami for “Bad Art for Bad People: Cross Section of Cable Neuron System” (1986).

The aim of the Mikami exhibition at parabolica-bis originally stemmed from the difficult task of trying to introduce Mikami – who was a “media artist” at the time she passed away and as such often constructed artwork in an immaterial (ie, information) environment – to later generations. Unlike with normal art, which has a material basis, with media art it is extremely difficult to preserve and hand down artworks (due to their heavy reliance on ever-progressing technologies). In their original state, even collecting such artworks and introducing later generations to them, to say nothing of staging retrospectives, is fraught with difficulty. Frankly speaking, for an artist this equates to a “second death.” Because Mikami died at a young age, such problems have quickly been exposed. Sooner or later, however, all artists in this field will probably be confronted with similar problems. No doubt the somewhat abrupt timing of this exhibition was due in part to such a sense of crisis. In a sense, it cannot be helped that Mikami’s death was due to an incurable illness. However, it is later that those left behind suddenly realize that there is hardly anything that they can exhibit. At this exhibition, this state of affairs is reflected in the fact that the focus was concentrated especially on works from the 1980s that one imagines Mikami had put under “seal.” Little by little over time, those left behind must perseveringly protect the “artworks” and “memories” concerning Seiko Mikami the artist, beginning by gathering together the (fragments of) works that barely remain as “objects.”


Seiko Mikami – “Bad Art for Bad People: Cross Section of Cable Neuron System” (1986) Iikura Atlantic Underground Shelter, Tokyo. Photo © Lyu Hanabusa.

The march of time, however, is relentless. It is with a heavy heart that I offer her as an example, but in the case of the artist Toeko Tatsuno, who also taught for many years at Tama Art University and sadly passed away last year of cancer just like Mikami, most of her work survives in art museums in the form of “paintings” and is well protected inside sturdy vaults even after the artist’s death. Accordingly, once one sets one’s mind to it, it would not be difficult to hold a substantial exhibition, and in fact a show looking back on Tatsuno’s career is now underway at the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama (“Toeko Tatsuno: Not-Yet-Seen Forms,” through January 17). For Mikami, however, no such environment exists. But then, the more one aims to establish a storage environment like that dedicated to Tatsuno’s work, the more this gap will probably widen. So, what should be done? Of course, the answer is not simply to leave behind artworks in the form of “objects.” There are countless works that, despite being properly looked after, never leave the vaults again and therefore never see the light of day. The critical point is whether or not there are opportunities for that artist’s work to be constantly remembered and verified by large numbers of people.

At one time I severely criticized Mikami’s artwork. This memorial essay itself came about as a result of my reflecting on that fact. I later re-established a friendly relationship with Mikami, but after she suddenly moved into the field of “media art” we had virtually no interaction at all, and Mikami herself rather determinedly avoided both “speaking about” her earlier work and “having it spoken about.” Perhaps the quintessential example of this was when Mikami, after taking up the position of professor in the Department of Information Design at Tama Art University, entrusted successive assistants with the job of gradually “disposing” of her work from “this period.”


Seiko Mikami – “Information Weapon 1: Super Clean Room” (1990, Toyoko Global Environment Institute, Yokohama) Photo: Naoya Hatakeyama, ©studio parabolica

In fact, Yamakawa was Mikami’s first assistant (actually a junior assistant at the time) at Tama Art University. After being instructed by Mikami to dispose of a number of cardboard packages that he was almost certain contained one of her most important early works, Information Weapon, Yamakawa asked Mikami, “Can I have this?” Mikami gave it just a moment’s thought before replying emphatically, “Sure. But you mustn’t sell it.” It was probably a non-edition prototype, a substitute that ought not to have existed in terms of the history of the work. In other words, according to Mikami’s wishes, from the moment it was transferred from Mikami to Yamakawa, essentially this “object” was no longer one of her “artworks” but a piece of “garbage.” Even so, it was no mere piece of garbage. It was “a piece of garbage that used to be an artwork by Mikami.” Following this, however, because he had no particular use for it, Yamakawa simply stored this rather bulky substitute for a lengthy period in a warehouse.

Having learnt about this by mere accident, I came up with the idea of framing “Demio Fukushima 501” (2015–), Grand Guignol Mirai’s exhibit at the “Don’t Follow the Wind” exhibition in the difficult-to-return zone, as an exhibition dedicated to Mikami that “no-one can see” “within the zone” by loading this “waste” into Akagi’s car, which represented our main material, and taking it into the venue contaminated with radioactive waste and arranging it around the car. My intention here was to undertake a re-“curation” of the remains of Mikami’s artwork, which I had previously criticized. In other words, in order to breathe life into this waste that was once art, I would install (ie, abandon) it not in a special imaginary contaminated zone as it had been in the 1980s but in the middle of a radioactive contamination zone that is now a reality in front of our own eyes. As well, by casting it into the passage of time between now and the unpredictable moment in the future when the difficult-to-return zone is lifted, and by revisiting the images of “contamination” that once inspired Mikami’s art and transitioning these to actual radioactive waste, I commenced a program of returning to this “artwork” in the middle of the 21st century as a work of criticism with the artist no longer present.

Consequently, Mikami’s “waste,” which has now been assimilated with a part of Grand Guignol Mirai’s “Demio Fukushima 501,” is at this very moment installed in a certain location in the “difficult-to-return zone” as a part of an “exhibit” whose end is not in sight. To this end, I carefully clad myself in a radiation-proof suit and cut with a box cutter the “seal” that had remained intact for decades and in late February this year installed the waste in the “venue” inside the zone. This state of affairs was very similar to the scene I witnessed at Mikami’s “Information Weapon 1: Super Clean Room” exhibition held in 1989 at the Toyoko Global Environment Institute, where visitors clad themselves in white protective clothing before entering to prevent them bringing impurities into the super clean room that served as the exhibition venue (see the image in the previous installment of this series). However, the relationship of the “membranes” that isolate the outside and inside of the body with just thin layers is the exact opposite. Because in the case of “Demio Fukushima 501,” it was to protect ourselves from the radioactive material that hung around the venue that we covered our bodies in membranes in the form of protective clothing.

Here lies the inversion of exterior and interior/inside and outside concerning “membranes” of which Mikami conceived. And it is only through the occurrence of this inversion, I think, that Mikami’s “Information Weapon” achieves the potency it ought to have had from the outset as a work of art.



Seiko Mikami – Disposal Container for Radioactive waste (1991) from the announcement for the exhibition “Curator’s Eye ’93 vol.3 Seiko Mikami.”

But will normal visitors ever have the opportunity to view this state of affairs? Or will this day never come, so that Mikami’s “artifacts” remain the “waste” that she once proposed as a concept, transformed into real “radioactive material” and stored not in an “art museum” but in an “intermediate storage facility” (though the two are in fact similar). Whatever happens, I am convinced that what is clear is that this approach is the most effective means of bringing out the greatest potential currently imaginable concerning “waste,” “membranes” and the other themes that Seiko Mikami raised and indefinitely continuing to inscribe them as indelible marks in people’s memories.

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

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