V.



The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, performance, Dia:Beacon, New York, 2005. Photo Paula Court. All images: Courtesy Wako Works of Art, Tokyo.


ART iT: You mentioned how when you first came to Japan you were impressed with how different the sounds were here. In your own works the use of sound is so important.

JJ: Well, my use of sound was directly influenced by the trip to Japan. I did the Jones Beach Piece right after we got back, and that's directly influenced by the clapping of wood blocks in Noh and Kabuki. In this case the clapping measured the distance between the audience and the performers.
I'm very interested in music and always have been my entire life. Sound is the parallel track that I develop in my work. I produce and edit all my own soundtracks with the help of technical assistants and the composers that I work with. I began using very minimal sounds and then gradually I developed more complex sounds and then began to work with composers. The first mirror performances were silent, except for a poem by David Antin that had been recorded and was played back, but it was just one moment.
In Variations on a Scene (1990), with the composer Alvin Curran, I revisited a lot of ideas from the early outdoor pieces. In that performance I made sounds while Curran played electronic music. For a number of pieces I have asked composers to make structures out of percussive objects, so that they can work with them live during the performance.


ART iT: For Variations on a Scene, was the sensitivity to sound something that shaped the performance across the mise-en-scène?

JJ: There's always a relationship to sound. Often, it influences the performers' movements. Sound is always an important element for structuring the works. Sometimes I start out with a soundtrack and then work backwards from there, as with Upside Down and Backwards (1980). This is another work involving fairy tales that I made after The Juniper Tree. Sound is material just as an image can be.


ART iT: At the beginning we talked about literary references, like Aby Warburg and HD's "Helen in Egypt," and you also made the piece Sweeney Astray (1992) based on Seamus Heaney's translation of the medieval Irish epic of the same name. In such works, how does text structure the rest of the piece?

JJ: With Sweeney Astray and Lines in the Sand, I read the poems over and over again and chose the parts I liked the best for making a script. But the script only consisted of the text. I then had to develop all the parts in relation to the text. The text is the first layer.
I approach each work in a slightly different way. There's often a device; for Sweeney Astray I constructed a glass table, six feet off the ground for the actor to stand and perform on. It represented the tree for the King who is turned into a bird. Later, I worked on this piece with a theater group in Amsterdam, but before that I developed it with an East-German actor at Kunst-Werke in Berlin. It was just when this space was starting with Klaus Biesenbach, who gave me a wonderful space on the courtyard there for a month or so. I had a table made of wood with glass, and it was lucky we didn't have a terrible accident because it was rather fragile. Later the frame was built with steel, but that was where I worked out the part with the glass. So in all the works I go back and forth between the structure of the visual devices and the text. It's an interaction.


ART iT: Obviously, when you sit down and read a poem or a novel you're immersed in the text, but all kinds of associations or even distractions come to mind as you read. Would you say your works are also a way to bring that sense of intersection through reading to life?

JJ: I don't think of it that way, but yes, that's what happens, basically. That's what Reading Dante is about. That was a scary piece to do because of how important Dante is to the Italians, and I was really nervous about presenting it in Italy. But I wanted it to be about that process of reading and free association. It was directly involved with what you were just describing. Of course, I'd worked that way from the very beginning without really calling it that or thinking of it exactly in that way.






Top: Lines in the Sand, installation, Queens Museum of Art, New York, 2003-04. Photo David Allison. Bottom: Reanimation, installation view, Wako Works of Art, Tokyo, 2013.


ART iT: Returning to the idea of structure, I think it was with your retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam that you had to consciously look at the old performances and turn them into installations. I assume that this was a very conscious switch in your practice.

JJ: After the Stedelijk show I simply began to think about my work in that way. It was a big shift in focus from just performances to this idea of having the works exist without me performing live. I found it very interesting to start working with that slightly different problem of space. Now it's something I continuously think about. The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things began as a performance, but Lines in the Sand began as an installation and became a performance, which allowed the installation to develop further.


ART iT: Currently, many younger artists work with dramatic installations that can also be spaces for performances, or performances that generate installations. How has it been for you to see this develop?

JJ: Very interesting. I'm interested in other people's work and go to see exhibitions, but I don't have time to see that much. I have to stay focused. However, I do see as many of the big international group shows as possible. It’s important for me to be aware of what younger people are thinking about. And I follow the work of the young artists I have known in various art academies. This is a pleasure.


ART iT: You were trained as a sculptor. Do you think of what you do as a sculptural, additive process?

JJ: Yes, in a way I do. Since I started out as a sculptor, right at that point and up until now, I bring ideas of sculpture and space and objects into the performances and installations. So ultimately I do think about it, especially in relation to my props. For example, for Reanimation I made an object with threads of crystals suspended over a video projection. This interests me now.

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Joan Jonas: Reflections from the Mirror Room

IV.




Reanimation, installation view, Wako Works of Art, Tokyo, 2013. All images: Courtesy Wako Works of Art, Tokyo.


ART iT: Two works which interest me and might even in some way be connected to the current piece, Reanimation, are Jones Beach Piece (1970) and Delay, Delay (1972), for which you expanded the performance or event across an entire landscape, and played with sound delay as well as drawing into the landscape. Do you ever revisit these ideas in your recent pieces?

JJ: I have revisited the idea of working with landscape and distance, but not directly. I include the action or concept of drawing in all my work. I find reasons to draw in relation to the space and content of the work. For Reanimation, I didn't think of drawing in the snow before I went to Norway to record footage for the work. It's just that all of a sudden I thought, I have to draw in the snow. That's how it happened.
But I do look at my old work and think, how can I bring those ideas back? I have what I consider a vocabulary that migrates.


ART iT: With Delay, Delay in Rome, you used the motion of the Tiber as a device for movement in the performance itself. That's radical. We look at rivers all the time in the urban landscape and are not really conscious that they're moving and that our actions are intrinsically connected to that movement.

JJ: Yes, I work with what is at hand; it was an experiment. I put the rope in the river with the board on it, and I thought these six men could drag it out, but they couldn't do it for the whole performance. So that became a constant throughout the performance, them trying to drag that board out.


ART iT: What would have happened if they had been able to get the board out?

JJ: Nothing. It would have just happened. I didn't have any plan, but I liked the image of the board on the rope in the water throughout the performance.


ART iT: In your recent pieces going between performance and video do you also maintain space for that kind of contingency or accident?

JJ: I work in the same way that I have always worked. I begin each piece with a collection of materials and ideas. I allow accidents. I think first you have the structure and the subject matter, and then you program your brain to be involved in that process. In that way ideas come to you. For instance, when I was working on Mirage (1976/2005), I was walking and saw a game of hopscotch in the street - this is a common sight, but in that situation at that moment, I thought, that's perfect, and I incorporated it into the work. I allow that to happen.


ART iT: The interesting thing about Noh theatre is that the performers don't really rehearse together. They're all highly trained, but as an ensemble they might only meet once before the actual performance.

JJ: That's amazing, I didn't know that. I do rehearse. For me it doesn't work to fully improvise in live performances. I have it totally planned out, so that 99 percent of the time the only thing that varies is that I might take a little longer to get across the stage or move this before that - very minor differences - but everything is choreographed. It has a lot to do with my idea of movement, that I move in a certain way, cross the room in a certain way, pick up something - I try to do it the same way every time, because it has to do with timing, economy of movement, and a sense that the continuum of movement can be a kind of dance.


ART iT: In the 1960s you did workshops with Trisha Brown and other choreographers. Can you explain more about what these workshops entailed?

JJ: In moving toward performance I had little prior experience, so during this transition from sculpture and more traditional visual arts I attended workshops with dancers. Trisha Brown's workshop provided a situation in which one could experiment and present with the other participants. We were not working on Trisha's pieces at all. It was a very open situation of improvisation. She never commented on our work, but we discussed it among ourselves. In workshops with Yvonne Rainer, we would sometimes perform simple actions like running in her presentations. I tried to learn Trio A, which was interesting, but I never performed it. I never performed with any of those people, except Deborah Hay, once at the Whitney.






Top: Lines in the Sand, performance, Documenta XI, Kassel, Germany, 2002. Photo Werner Maschmann. Bottom: Mirage, film still, 1976. Photo Babette Mangolte.


ART iT: Simply in having bought the Portapak there, your trip to Japan in 1970 was a big turning point for your career. It's also an interesting moment in Japanese history because there was the Osaka Expo and the Tokyo Biennale, and my sense is that this was a point when there was great confidence in the Japanese art scene that a real dialogue was happening with other parts of the world, and it was also the moment when the group of artists who came to be known as Mono-ha were first being recognized. Did you have much interaction with Japanese artists or curators at that time?

JJ: I knew about the Portapak before I went, but I bought it there, and then, because I really wanted to get away from the aesthetic of minimalism and develop my own language, seeing the Noh drama, which is a kind of dance-visual theatre, was very encouraging and inspiring.
But I didn't meet many Japanese artists, and only learned about Mono-ha recently. I was with Richard Serra, and after the Tokyo Biennale opened we went to Kyoto and Nara and stayed there.


ART iT: So the encounter with Noh was really the big thing.

JJ: Yes. Also, just being in Japan. The minute I arrived I remember the sounds were different. All cities were emptier and quieter than they are now, but Tokyo in particular. I remember hearing the sounds and thinking it was so different. Everything was so different. And I'd never been to Asia, of course, so the whole thing was completely fascinating. But I was aware that the contact American artists had with Japanese artists in the 1960s had a strong impact on what was going on in New York.

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Joan Jonas: Reflections from the Mirror Room

III




Volcano Saga, photograph, Iceland, 1985. Photo Joan Jonas. All images: Courtesy Wako Works of Art, Tokyo.


ART iT: You mention how in dealing with structure and form and the medium of video, your early performances allowed the audience to see several different realities at once. For me, that's one aspect that connects the older works to the later narrative projects.

JJ: Definitely. I'm more or less working in the same way, it's just that I'm older. In the 1970s I started working with fairytales and found that in representing these stories, there was a similar abstraction to the previous work in which there were hidden myths. Later, I became interested in these big, epic pieces, and I spent a good part of the 1980s exploring how to work with a narrative. My work has been an exploration of how to tell a story through the layering of image and text.


ART iT: You hit upon a unique way to do this, by pulling apart the story into fragmented parts linked together by a bit of text as an intertitle or a voiceover that orients the viewer in a general direction.

JJ: I really chose to work in a more poetic way and not in a Hollywood or filmic way. I'm still interested in the idea of making a narrative film, with a story told in a detailed way, but so far in my kind of work, I limit how much text I use to tell the story because the work is visual. In The Juniper Tree (1976), I used almost the entire story, but later on I started to edit stories and text and experiment with how I could rearrange them.


ART iT: Was Volcano Saga (1985) an important leap in that sense?

JJ: Yes it was. But this is one of two pieces that I consider problematic, Double Lunar Dogs (1984) and Volcano Saga. People liked Volcano Saga, but in both of these pieces there is perhaps too much fragmentation. I was experimenting with how to integrate my performances with sections shot in the studio. These were works made for television. I think they're interesting because they were made in the 1980s, when artists suddenly had access to TV studios. We got big grants, so we could do things that we couldn't do before. You had to work after-hours at night with an editor, but you could really experiment with special effects, so it was very different from the 1970s. I was exploring that situation.
Volcano Saga has different levels. It includes elements of the performance and footage of Iceland and combines these in the studio with actors. These two pieces are the first time I worked with professional actors. This could be the strength of these two works.






Top: Volcano Saga, installation, Queens Museum of Art, New York, 2003-04. Photo Ari Hiroshige. Bottom: Volcano Saga, performance, The Performing Garage, New York, 1985/87. Photo Gabor Szitanyi.


ART iT: Yet from the viewer's side, there's a very stimulating sensation of all these different media and sources intersecting in the site of the installation. When you're working on a piece and putting it together, do you imagine a space where all these things cohere?

JJ: Sometimes artists are very critical of their own work. I'm always critical. I think it's the way that you move on to the next piece. When I'm working on a piece I'm inside the piece and figuring out how to make it work from the inside as well as looking at it from the outside, taking the position of the audience.
Now, because of digital technology you can do everything at home. In the 1970s I had to have it all planned out so that it could be edited in a studio in one or several nights. Now I spend weeks editing my work, considering the computer space. I find editing to be one of the more interesting parts of the process. Space has been one of the most important elements I’ve considered in my work from the very beginning. I always work with a specific space in mind. Either the physical space of a stage set I design or a site that I’ve chosen like the inspiring indoor space of Dia:Beacon or the equally inspiring outdoor space of Jones Beach. Parallel to these physical spaces, there is the space of the monitor and the space of the camera, what the camera sees.


ART iT: My impression is that, at the same time, the works spill over into each other, as in the progression from The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things to Reading Dante (2008) and Reanimation (2010-12). For example, the image of the woman, Melancholia, sitting with the dog, makes recurring appearances.

JJ: There is some overlap, yes. I'm interested in some ideas and I extend them because I feel I didn't fully explore them, or I'd like to continue exploring them. The woman with the dog appears in The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things and in Reanimation, although not in Reading Dante.
I made this image of Melancholia for The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things because for many generations of art historians, it is a major focal point. This is certainly true for Warburg. Obviously there are many levels of interpretation; I am interested in how an image or a concept is altered by placing it in various contexts: in this case, my different works. Another reason for my inclusion of Melancholia, was to show a certain sadness in relation to the natural world. My work often includes quotes from earlier work. My recent piece Reanimation is titled after a chapter in the Halldór Laxness book, Under the Glacier. There's a piece I made in 1973 with people swimming in a pool that hardly ever gets shown. I integrated it into this piece because as soon as one considers the glacier, the concept of melting ice also has to be considered. I was interested in going back into my work to find that watery world. I liked the way it worked in the context of this glacial melting. I'm interested in how you can alter the meaning of something by using it in a different way. This is also reanimation.

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Joan Jonas: Reflections from the Mirror Room

II.




Hamletmachine (2000), four-channel video play, three wall projections and one floor projection on a bed of salt, surrounded with mirror reflecting material, sound, 20 minutes. All images: Courtesy Nalini Malani.


ART iT: Clearly national identity, national myth and utopian nationalism, which are all related but different, have variously figured in your works. For example, you have the piece Unity in Diversity (2003), which connects late 19th-century Indian nationalism to ethnic violence in contemporary India. Where utopian nationalism was inspired in part by a spirit of internationalism, now in the age of globalism it's a very interesting moment to revisit that point in this whole discourse.

NM: Yes, I think it's breaking down, which is a good thing. Nationalism had its moment in the bourgeois revolutions that took place in the Western world and in India as well. When India gained its republic in 1947, it was a bourgeois revolution, not a working class revolution.
As touched upon in Unity in Diversity, there was the utopian idea that emerged in India in the 19th century, and which the middle class fought for, that all different religions and cults would live together in harmony. But now we've gone beyond that into globalism and the hegemony of the multinational or transnational entrepreneurship. Most of the cars on the road in India are either Korean or Japanese. It's that level that interests me because that's what we're living in.
In central India there is a Maoist revolution taking place. This is a region inhabited mainly by tribal indigenous people, where the land is extremely fertile and forested, and provides the tribes their livelihood, but now multinationals want to dig there for bauxite to make aluminum, like the company Vedanta Resources. But once they start digging, the land becomes barren. There are also areas in south India where a Japanese company is digging for granite. Once you dig, there's nothing left.
This is where the multinationals are coming in, excavating and taking away for profit. It's not brought back to the people who live there or are ousted from there. People don't know that there's actually a revolution happening, with the tribes coming together to fight the authorities coming in with the companies. And the government of India is hand-in-glove with the companies, because we are going towards liberal capitalism, like in the United States.
On that level, on the micro level, we have to address these problems. I'm an artist and I can only make art, but even doing that, if in some sense a few people understand, then it starts to grow. Every democracy needs work. It is not a given. You have to reach it. There are times when things might veer the other way around, but you have to try to prop it back again. It happens all across the world before you arrive at a steady situation. So parochial ideas need to be challenged. With my audience in India I want to break away from the parochial voice and push it to be more expanded and open.


ART iT: You also frequently draw from literary sources, as in Remembering Toba Tek Singh. Is that part of creating a more expanded voice?

NM: Yes. The author of the original story, "Toba Tek Singh," is Saadat Hasan Manto, an Indian-Pakistani writer known in both countries. He wrote only short stories to do with the business of Partition, and for example my family are victims of Partition - I was born in Karachi. "Toba Tek Singh" is set in a lunatic asylum in Lahore. When the people in the asylum are told that those who are not Muslim, including Christians and Sikhs, will be moved to India, while those who are Muslim will be moved to Pakistan, everyone is in turmoil. There's a Muslim man who climbs a tree and says, I don't want to go anywhere, I want to stay in this tree, because I don't know anything about this Pakistan, I think it's a razorblade factory! Manto makes the whole business of cutting the nation in two ridiculous. When nuclear testing took place in 1998, I decided to evoke that story, and its satire.
These are people who are brilliant writers, and I feel I can partake of that. I also use Heiner Mueller, whose work I admire greatly because he's able to use the classical language of myth as well as graffiti of the street. Medea (1994) was one work based on Mueller's plays, and Hamletmachine another. I have also used Christa Wolf's Cassandra, and reference the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi, who has been working with the tribal communities who are being dispossessed. The "make her" sound in the In Search of Vanished Blood installation comes from her work.






Top: Unity in Diversity (2003), single-channel video play, in Indian Art Deco room with crimson walls with a projection in golden frame, two lamps and framed photographs of Gandhi and Nehru, sound, 7 min. Bottom: Detail.


ART iT: You mention the idea of splitting the nation in two, and have made the work Splitting the Other, and then of course there's "splitting the atom" of nuclear fission. Is this something you intentionally link together?

NM: Splitting the Other has to do with psychological terminology used in theories of projective identification in the works of the post-Freudian analyst Melanie Klein. From her observation of infants, Klein came to the conclusion that a kind of strange, irrational hatred or aggression occurs when you project a part of yourself which is itself aggressive onto another and see it there, not in yourself, and then begin to attack the other. In 2002 in the state of Gujarat in northwestern India, there was an extremely violent attack by fundamental Hindus against minority Muslims. The kind of violation and aggression that occurred was so horrific: men raped pregnant women and then cut the fetuses out. Those images have never left me.
The work was made after that, so in it you see the fetus outside the womb with the umbilical cord, but I join up the brains because when you give birth to a child you also give birth to a brain, to civilization. When a man killed this woman and the fetus, he was actually killing civilization.
That's why I call it Splitting the Other, because there was a majority community who believed a minority community would somehow come back and attack them. You're talking about a ratio of 83 percent to 17 percent. The 17 percent Muslims are going to come back and kill all these Hindus? Isn't this crazy? It's this little community that was made into a demon by the fundamentalists. And of course it also happened with the Jews in Germany. So it's a mental phenomenon that needs to be examined.




In Search of Vanished Blood (2012).


ART iT: In this way you're working with allegory, but it's an interpenetrated allegory that pulls from different stories, or you work with painting, but it's an interpenetrated painting that pulls from multiple sources. It seems you work with parts more than with a whole or unified vision.

NM: I don't like to complete circuits. I think it's good to leave them open, like questions. I don't have the answers anyway. I have some ideas but I don't have all the answers. That's why it's all about communication. That's why in In Search of Vanished Blood I use footage of the person signing American hand language, which is a very efficient system of spelling, unlike in India and Europe where they must use both hands. "Democracy" is being spelled out, and then after that there is the Morse code, which is of course an old way of communicating.
But the voice you hear is a female hysterical voice, because that's the next thing we need to work on, the hysterical voice. Why is it that the hysterical voice is not listened to? What is the hysterical voice saying? It has been denigrated as an illness. Is it really an illness, and not a cry? That's my next project, hysteria.


ART iT: As shown in the video, the hand gestures of the sign language also mimic the iconography of different religious representations, like the mudras of Hinduism and Buddhism or even Christian depictions of Jesus with his hands held up in a gesture of blessing. When something is disconnected from its context, there are all these different ways it can absorb another meaning.

NM: That's also interesting. As much as I can talk about the work, I'd like others to talk about it too, because then we can make a triangular relationship, which is actually how an artwork is completed: the viewer, the artwork and me.

Pt I




Nalini Malani: Multiple Body, Multiple Voices

II.







ART iT: We were just discussing your relation to the feminist movement. You have previously described Organic Honey as an alter-ego who is erotic and sexy. My initial interpretation is that this is a re-appropriation of the commodified image of woman that circulates in the male-oriented mainstream media, but was that really the case?

JJ: I can see how you would say that. I don't have any control over how you see my work, so it's fine that you say that. But it wasn't my intention exactly. It was more a process of discovery through working with video while considering theatricality. It had a great deal to do with the technology of video, sitting in front of the video, which was like a mirror, and altering my appearance and therefore my persona. I was more involved with the idea of exploring the persona of something that was not me, but was me, through making disguises and costumes. Of course, I was also taking control of the construction of an image.
My other idea of Organic Honey was that I was exploring the idea of female identity and the question of what is female. At the time people were exploring the idea of male and female in different languages and questioning what that means. My question was, is there such a thing as female imagery, and does it have to come from a so-called woman? At the same time, I was looking at the films and performances of Jack Smith, whose imagery is very "feminine.” I was interested in actually constructing a so-called “female” identity. So there were all those questions, and then at the end of the period I went on to explore other issues, although I continued to consider in my work the roles that women play in our culture.


ART iT: Would you say Organic Honey actually developed from an intuitive process of experimentation?

JJ: Yes, I started with nothing. Or, I started with video. To work with the medium of video alone was radical. You can't imagine what it was like then, to sit in front of a TV and see yourself, and be able to make your own films in your own home, and to edit and do all kinds of theatrical things and record it and make a film. I called it film because I was also looking at film and very influenced by underground film. It wasn't based on theory, but it was based on ideas from literature, in particular, poetic structure. It was also based on the idea of montage as expressed by early filmmakers, as well as ideas of the relation of sound and image.


ART iT: Do you have the sense it could have been anything?

JJ: No, it was definitely directed. I began to work with my own figure, my self, objects and references I had collected; also, from the idea of feminism, I was working with myself as a woman - who am I? What am I? What does this mean? So that was the starting point. And then I had just been to Japan, where I actually bought my Portapak, and so I was very influenced by the Noh drama. You don't see it necessarily, but it was there as another influence.






Top: Mirror Piece II, performance, Emanu-el YMHA, New York, 1970. Photo Peter Moore, courtesy Wako Works of Art, Tokyo. Bottom: Joan Jonas 'Mirror Check' 1970 from Kaldor Public Art Projects on Vimeo.


ART iT: Of course you did the mirror performances, and used the video as a mirror, and people writing about your work tend to associate these projects with narcissism, but in Shinto shrines mirrors are put in the shrine to represent the gods, which suggests almost the obverse of narcissism: a mirror you can't identify with. Was there any similar element of dissociation from your own image that you experienced in the mirror pieces?

JJ: I think so, because I saw the image as a separate thing, yes. But I was also responding to a kind of anti-narcissistic tendency in the minimalist performers of the time, who were rebelling against dancers like Martha Graham. I wanted to question that idea of narcissism. I didn't know about the Shinto mirror, although I do have a photograph of a mirror in a shrine, reflecting my face, from that trip. I'm pretty sure I still have it.
Another thing I find interesting, which didn't initially register, is the idea of the mirror room in Noh theatre, where the performers enter their characters before going on stage. So I know there are a lot of mirror references in Japan. But I was already working with mirrors before I came to Japan, so really it came out of that, and then moving to video as a mirror.


ART iT: Previously you've used the word "erotic" to describe a number of your pieces. How did you understand the erotic in the context of doing these performances?

JJ: I don't think I consciously set out to make an erotic piece. I think my work seemed to have the flavor of eroticism because of the imagery I worked with and the feeling about it and of the time, when it wasn't a subject for other people. However, I was interested in developing my own language. Carolee Schneemann's work is rather erotic, I would say, but I didn't know about it at the time because she was living in London. Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963) is certainly erotic in a gentle way. I was interested in playing that up, actually, in going to certain limits of representation. I was really interested in the richness of imagery, the possibilities of color, texture and fabric, and a certain languid feeling.


ART iT: Formally, too, did the erotic show you a series of movements or a way of relating to objects and space?

JJ: No. I don't think it's necessarily erotic, but the only thing I can say is that I really enjoyed this reggae song that I used in Organic Honey. The words are, "You look / so radiant / standing there tonight." It's just a very beautiful reggae song, and I really enjoyed coming out with my headdress and my mask and my costume and dancing. I don't know if you would call it erotic or not. It's a little bit of an overreaction. It's a natural thing: a woman who's dancing to music - maybe it's erotic. I didn't plan on being erotic, it was just, I'm going to enjoy behaving and moving and looking this way.


ART iT: At the same time you were breaking up the field of the performance.

JJ: Yes, there were several things going on at the same time. It was about dealing with structure, and form, and the medium of video, the way the audience saw several different realities at the same time. There were all those things going on at the same time. I built up my pieces slowly with all that in mind.

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Joan Jonas: Reflections from the Mirror Room

REFLECTIONS FROM THE MIRROR ROOM
By Andrew Maerkle




The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things, performance, Dia:Beacon, New York, 2005. Photo Paula Court. All images: Courtesy Wako Works of Art, Tokyo.


ART iT: From your early performance pieces in the 1960s to the recent multimedia installations, one continuity seems to be that your works all have very dispersed elements, while also communicating some kind of narrative experience. For example, when you presented The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Things (2004-05) at the Yokohama Triennale in 2008, I wasn't aware of it when I was inside the piece, but somehow I walked away with an understanding of Aby Warburg's trip to the American Southwest in 1895 and melancholia. How do you approach the idea of the message in the work? Are you trying to find different ways to communicate something like a message, or deconstructing the idea of the message?

JJ: I don't really think of it in terms of a message. I think of it more as a kind of translation of the information into a visual representation - in this case, the text by Aby Warburg. I wasn't interested in illustrating it in his terms, using his images. I was interested in translating it into my imagery, based on what the text inspired in my life.
I felt a very personal relationship to Warburg's text because in the late 1960s I visited the American Southwest and saw the Hopi Snake Dance, so I was very moved when I found his own writing on the ritual. That's how the whole thing started. I had a direct relationship to his essay about his experience in the Southwest, and so I could refer to this indirectly through Warburg.
So I'm not thinking about message, but I am paying close attention to the text. I edit and use quotes from his text, and I hope that if one listens to his words, one will understand his ideas through my interpretation. This is my translation in image and sound, which may be difficult, but I ask the audience to stay with it and allow themselves to enter into the piece. There's something about Aby Warburg's method I feel very close to because of his way of referring to other cultures and the way he assembled and rearranged art historical images on large boards. I identify with his way of thinking about art history cross-culturally.


ART iT: In that sense the work collapses several moments across time or history into one, from Warburg's initial visit to the Southwest to his nervous breakdown and the present that we inhabit. But the work also has a very delicate connection to these different moments.

JJ: I'm sure it does. The text by Warburg was written while he was in a psychiatric institution about 30 years after his visit to the Southwest. It describes his impressions and was addressed to the doctors in the hospital to demonstrate that he had recovered from his nervous breakdown, in the same way Jose Blondet, who plays the part of Aby Warburg in my piece, addresses the audience in the performance.
But I don't have any way of experiencing what you experience, because I am so much a part of the process. I can only hope that the audience understands it. I thought of the basement space at Dia:Beacon as a kind of sanitarium. For the installation, which I developed after the performance, I included a highly edited version of the performance that was playing in one space adjacent to another with the other five projections playing simultaneously. The soundtrack for the entire installation consisted of Warburg’s words spoken by Blondet with music by Jason Moran and various sound effects. Each scene of the performance had a highly edited video backdrop, a parallel narrative to the action. I extracted certain of these backdrop sequences that I felt were the most emblematic of what Warburg was thinking and of my experience of his work and my own experience with the Hopi Snake Dance. It also relates to my interest in animals and the spirit of nature and ritual that predates my interest in Aby Warburg.






Both: Lines in the Sand, performance, documenta XI, Kassel, Germany, 2002. Photo Werner Maschmann.


ART iT: Yet in works like Lines in the Sand (2002), you have drawn more direct parallels between historical and literary references and the current political context - in this case, the specific situation in the US following the invasion of Iraq.

JJ: Yes. Lines in the Sand happened to be very directly related to what was going on as I was editing parts of HD's poem, "Helen in Troy," upon which the work was based. I didn't choose it for that reason, I chose it for other reasons. But 9/11 happened as I was working on the piece, and as I read the poem it became more and more clear that it related to the way America is, or was, at the time.


ART iT: Going back to the older pieces, how did the social climate affect you when you started doing things like Organic Honey in the early 1970s, or when you started bringing the performances out into the landscape and choreographing the landscape? For example, your first film, Wind, was made in 1968.

ART iT: I think there was a certain atmosphere around 1968, not just because of what happened, but it was the situation. The art world was very different in the 1960s and '70s, smaller and not so involved with the commercial aspect of the market and galleries. There was more of an idea of experimentation and exploring new ideas and new territory. It was very open, and the world was small enough that you sort of knew everybody and other artists participated in your work, so there was more interaction going on. Of course, I'm speaking from my generation's point of view. Maybe younger artists have a similar situation now, it's just that I'm of an older generation.
The other part of the 1960s and '70s was that the Vietnam War was going on, and there were many artists protesting and doing politically oriented art. My work was not directly involved with that kind of politics, but it was directly affected by the feminist movement, which was politically important for everybody, and it was something that everybody talked about and was involved in. All of my work from maybe 1970 on referred to the feminist movement, but indirectly. I wasn't interested in making political art, but from the very beginning I've always been interested in how my work relates to the present situation. It felt then that one was on the edge of something. I don't want to make something that exists only in the past. It has to exist in relation to the present.

II | III | IV | V




Joan Jonas: Reflections from the Mirror Room

MULTIPLE BODY, MULTIPLE VOICES
By Andrew Maerkle




Remembering Toba Tek Singh (1998), four-channel video play with 12 monitors, tin trunks and mirror surrounded with mirror reflecting material, sound, 20 min. All images: Courtesy Nalini Malani. 


ART iT: You've made works, such as Remembering Toba Tek Singh (1998) and Gamepieces (2003), that reference Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as nuclear testing in India itself. How do you feel exhibiting in Japan now after the nuclear crisis at Fukushima?

NM: It's an ongoing issue with my work, not only now with Fukushima. Hiroshima still exists; the problems of Hiroshima still exist. It's not something we can say is in the past. And it's not only to do with Japan, it has to do with so many other parts of the world that are using nuclear energy. Unfortunately, it happened here. Of course we all know about exactly what happened, but every time something like this happens, or even if it's just a test, we all should be particular about protesting. I think the only way is to protest.
Now, with the networks we have through Facebook and Twitter, we are able to harness many people on the side of protest. In India in 1998 when they did the underground testing in Pokhran, Rajasthan, what was not reported in the papers was that the villagers there started to have skin problems. They are a silent group of people who have no voice. They are the downtrodden, the dispossessed, and to give these people a voice, especially in a place like India where there is so much poverty and they don't have that voice, is very necessary.
In our part of the world, the propaganda is that nuclear power is a deterrent, which sounds so paradoxical. We didn't have a disaster, but we could have. This is a powerful potential that we have to combat in every sphere if we believe in humaneness.


ART iT: In Japan now, everyone is aware of the possibility of radiation exposure, and we're paying attention to what we eat, where it's coming from, whether to go outside on certain days or in certain places. It can be a very tense, nerve-wracking bodily experience. This is also in a way what you create through your installations, by immersing the viewer into a disorienting situation. For you, what aspect does the body play in actually making the works, whether the paintings or the videos or the installations?

NM: It is ultimately the body that experiences. It's the skin that experiences emotion and keeps boundaries. It works in several ways. When it's something to do with India and Pakistan and that tense situation, it's not only the boundary line between the two countries, it's also the boundary of your skin, because ultimately it's the women who suffer the most. When there is any kind of aggression, it's the women who bear the brunt of it. And when there are nuclear tests done and if things go wrong, the children who are born must be cared for by the women. So I think it's important today to listen to women. To quote Yoko Ono, we have to listen to the pregnant woman. She's the one who will be giving birth to people of the world.






Top: Splitting the Other (2007), 14-panel painting environment, each panel 200 x 100 cm. Installation view, National Art Center, Tokyo, 2013. Bottom: Detail.


ART iT: And in physically making the works, does your own body guide you or play an important role?

NM: I started out not as an artist but as an illustrator for medical books, and now more than ever I think about the organs of the body as being able to speak. If you notice, in my works I have brains and kidneys and livers and all sorts of organs and bones flying around. The body is a composite of so many things. As young people we take for granted that this machinery works so well. It's amazing how many muscles the mouth uses when you speak or in the expressions of your face. But as you grow older you realize these things are slowing down and the organs speak to you, and when you listen to those organs, there are things being said that try to caution you. That's why I use those images as motifs in my work.


ART iT: Of course, the gestural marks in your paintings suggest the idea of internal organs or excretion or bodily fluids, but they're also painterly gestures in their own right.

NM: Yes. It works on two levels, on the level of mark making, but also on the level of reading into it an object or form of some kind. I have a lot of metaphor and quotes from other art forms and styles. People in Japan may notice the Hokusai images, but also at the beginning of Modernism in India there was a painting style called Kalighat. Under the British rule in India, the artists lost their traditional patronage and became very poor, so they started to make watercolors with an economy of means, and this started a whole new trend. If you were an Indian art historian, you would immediately recognize the Kalighat line in my work. I like the playfulness of the quote.


ART iT: You started using video at a relatively early stage of its popularization in contemporary art, and for you, both painting and video are used to filter influences from many different cultures. On top of this, you're turning paintings into projections and shadow plays as well. What is the relationship between painting and video for you?

NM: There was an exigency that pushed me toward making work that would address a larger public. In India, painting became a form shown in a white cube where a certain class of people would visit, but in order to address another kind of public, I thought video would work because people are used to montage. They see so much television and film that they read the filmic language better than they read the painted language. It's something you're going to see everyday, everywhere, and you crave to see it.
Exactly when the nuclear testing took place in 1998, I did a huge, four projection installation with 12 monitors in public space, Remembering Toba Tek Singh. It was only on view for 10 days, but everyday I had 3,000 people coming in and debating. There was a general euphoria that the nuclear testing was a great advance for India, but I had facts and figures in this work that contradicted the government line. I had shots from NHK television of what happened after Hiroshima - other people didn't know. I had a quote from a young Japanese girl who said, "My mother told me to hold on to a pillar if anything happened, and I braced myself against a pillar, but I don't know what happened - everything flew away." There's this very poignant voice speaking about her experiences in Hiroshima.
I had people almost coming to kill me because they thought that nuclear capability was the greatest thing that had happened in India - "We can combat Pakistan! We can kill them!" There was an aggressive violence that came out. This was one of the biggest reasons for starting video, it had nothing to do with the history of video in the West. Luckily for me I have good friends in the NGO world who had the best video equipment available. They were very kind to give me the equipment to use and to shoot.






Both: In Search of Vanished Blood (2012), six-channel video play with five reverse painted rotating Mylar cylinders, sound, 11 minutes.


ART iT: You mentioned the literacy of painting versus that of film. Certainly there are formats of narrative painting that exist in many traditions, whether it's East Asian scroll painting or Tibetan mandala or Western allegory, each with specific ways to progress through the visual elements to construct a narrative. What is interesting about your video installations is that the use of the cylindrical projections collapses this idea of schematic narrative. How do you conceive of narrative from across the paintings to the installations?

NM: Yes, it's almost Cubist. The thing is I'm also very interested in theatre, but I found that it was very difficult in India to travel theatre, whereas it's easy to travel video. The equipment is not cheap, but some way could be found, so I started to make video plays with performance artists. This worked really well for me. In fact, I made a piece in Fukuoka with a Butoh dancer, Hamletmachine (1999/2000), which has been shown in 17 countries and exists in a Japanese version as well. So this way it can really travel.
What you speak of is interesting because what I did in my latest work, In Search of Vanished Blood (2012), which was shown at documenta 13 in Kassel, is that every time you look some place else, you get another image and you get another emotion, and this for me is a very challenging and rich format to work with.
I would like people to be nudged into thinking, and this has that effect. What I noticed at Kassel was that people were seduced into entering - it looks quite magical - but when you come in and you listen, there's a whole other drama or some kind of holocaust taking place. And then people start to listen, what exactly is happening? I don't want it to be sloganeering, I want it to be poetic in one sense, and the quotes I found for use in this work do have that effect.


ART iT: But is it an attempt to break down conventional narrative structures as well?

NM: Sequential narrative is one kind of narrative, but in Asian traditions there have been different kinds of narratives. Continuous narrative is what I have in the series of paintings for Splitting the Other (2007), like a comic book where the character appears multiple times. There are traditions in our part of the world where these different kinds of narratives have already taken place, especially the mythic narrative, which is more of a circular narrative. It all depends on the vehicle and the subject. I'm only interested in the contemporary, but I do refer to the past to make a bridge for communication, because I think ultimately that's what it's about.

Pt II



Nalini Malani: Multiple Body, Multiple Voices

III.




Tara House, Kashid, Maharashtra, 2005. Photo Hélène Binet.


ART iT: Now your projects are getting bigger and bigger and taking on a broader social scale. I think it will be a test for your working style, because to date you have worked closely with clients and built on your own using local materials, not with mass production.

BJ: It's ok. The interest lies not in the material or the mass production. I point out again and again, however limited mass production might be, how can we find a space where we can express ourselves from as close to how we feel and what's fundamentally within us? Creativity is independent of mass production, independent of tradition, independent of Modernism. It's got nothing to do with any of that. It's just what you express. So when we get there we can deal with it. And we do deal with it. Even at the National Museum of Modern Art here in Tokyo, we've used materials like plywood that are mass-produced. It's the appropriate nature of how it's used, where it's used and in what combinations. It's finding the potential in every thing, every material, every system - a constructive creative potential. It's like sieving. We are doing a big project right now, for us, because it's about 2,000 square meters. You can say it's mass-produced in a certain way, but I don't see the difference.


ART iT: So no matter the country or project, you use what you can use and express. But maybe a bigger project means a bigger or more systematic way of working?

BJ: I think that's fine. It's only a problem when you give up your individual responsibility and put everything into the system and make the system responsible for your expression - and that's what the system was designed to do anyway, that's the default setting of a system.


ART iT: Do you have many younger Indian architect trainees?

BJ: There are young architects training with us from India, from Japan and from across the world. We also have many young artisans who are very good. Of the three carpenters who are here in Tokyo, the youngest is 27, while the oldest is around 30. They all offer so much depth. It's not that they only work in wood. They work in brass, wax, plaster, plywood - any material. Wood is difficult because it's a very precise material, not everybody can work with it. But the carpenters can do many other things because, relative to the precision of wood, other materials are more tolerant. That's the potential we found. It's not that they are used only as carpenters. They happen to be trained as carpenters, but they can work in any material, they can paint, work with cloth, do all of that.
In the case of the architect interns, they do not have training for working with their hands but they can speak English or other foreign languages. They can make drawings. It's a learning process. That's the whole idea that the formal education also has something to contribute. For example, communicating by email – that can be a simple contribution they do with us. That's the learning curve. They work from the skills they have and exchange them with the people working with them. A professional artisan goes through years of training starting from around age nine or 10, so by they time they are 20 they already have 10 years of experience, but when you have someone who has never held a saw until the age of 20, it takes time. But they can contribute even by taking photographs. The carpenters don't know how to use the camera, so that's a simple exchange right there.


ART iT: You are really open-minded and positive. I imagined before that you had made some kind of commune for yourself, but now I understand your idea was to have different people working together to find their own expression. It's a very simple process in a way.

BJ: Yes, it's simple, but it's also difficult. The difficulty is having trust. That's something that I've had to learn over several years. The trust is what gets tested. That's where we falter, and that's why we have systems, because a system operates on a lack of trust. I'm not against systems, but if you can incorporate it into what you do based on trust, then you can make it part of the process. You have to know and be aware that there's a limited capacity to what the system can understand. We all have limitations, and understanding the limitations within each other is where you build trust. That's when you give up control. To accept the limitations of the collective within each one, while also allowing them to be as they are, means you have to give up control. So how does one begin to trust, and how does one give up control? That's why I call it a dance, or aikido. It has to be continually adjusted on an everyday basis. It is constant. The body is always in movement.




"In-Between Architecture," Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 2010.


ART iT: I understand your stance. It sounds general, but why did you choose architecture, or why do you continue to do architecture?

BJ: I often say that I could be doing mathematics, or I could be doing music, or I could have been a doctor. It was just something that was intuitive to me. It can be very trying. Architecture is not an easy profession. It's something that I fell into naturally. You could use it anywhere else. You could be a weaver, like we visited just now. It's the same thing, no different. She happens to be a weaver, but they're doing exactly the same thing.


ART iT: I have visited India many times to see many buildings. The architecture of the 6th and 7th centuries is amazing. The country has a great history of architecture in a certain period, yet it seems the contemporary life of the people is removed from architecture as such.

BJ: Right, but if you look at the smaller towns and villages, the informal architecture might not agree with the aesthetic of how we've been conditioned, but I think they still have something in them that is carried forward, just like the carpenter's recognition of the temple roof as the wings of a bird. While it might not be brick and mortars and windows and doors, they are still able to capture this quality within them, whereas what we call formal architecture has lost that quality. It's been sterilized. You clean to the point where there's nothing left.
We have to regain that sensibility. We all have it. It's just that over time we carry so many other things that we've lost sight of it. All is not lost. Just three hours ago it was like we were in another world: in the middle of the mountains, it was raining, there was mist - everything was ok.

Pt I | II




Bijoy Jain/Studio Mumbai: Building Potential

II.




All images: Palmyra House, Nandgaon, Maharashtra, 2007. Photo Helene Binet.


ART iT: Maybe I misunderstood how you work. I imagined something like a community that works together to make a specific space, but it seems that everybody operates as an individual with their own role and vocabulary, and working and finding a way to join everything together is your process?

BJ: Yes, each one has their own self-expression or their own identity, but within that identity, they are also able to extend themselves to the larger group. It's quite a leap here, but I think part of what happened with the Industrial Revolution is that everything became more nuclear and singular. Often we can be extremely creative and singular, but to bring that creativity and singularity into a larger group is where we struggle now. I think there's far less resistance with Studio Mumbai because the sense of identity is so grounded that there's no conflict in being able to share it or participate. I think that's what forms a community, and that's what I understand as a community, not just living together. You could have 100 people living together, but if you don't share, it's not a community.


ART iT: When you design by yourself, you have your own vision, but when you work with a team, does it widen your vision?

BJ: It becomes more inclusive, but fundamentally the reason why we are collectively working together is that we are able to express the possibility of what is possible, and have faith and belief in that expression.
This is no different from the temple we saw today. People came together in the belief that this had a place in the world, and it wasn't a single vision, but it was an expression. For us it's about being able to express ourselves freely. We are not limited by a system or an environment. Even if sometimes there are things that are not available or are limited, it doesn't prevent us from having a free expression, and that's fundamental for determining what has value for us, and that's why we work as a group. The moment that stops, we have to figure out a different way to work, because at the end of the day it's important to be able to express yourself creatively and freely.


ART iT: How did you start to work like this? You said earlier that there was a gap where the workers didn't understand the drawing and you wanted to find a way to bridge that gap.

BJ: Usually in India when we build we work with a "contractor," but the contractors there are not professional builders like they are in Japan. I would reframe the term more as people who move man power, collecting 10 carpenters from one place, 20 masons from another, five plasterers from another. They know how to build through time and experience, but they're more like managers, clocking time and able to speak English or read and write - that's basically what qualifies them as a contractor.
What I found was that in the early part of the practice the projects we had proposed never got realized to their full potential. It had nothing to do with the materials, it had nothing to do with time or money or even skill. The only reason they were not fully realized was because there was no internal need for self-expression, and that was all because one person, the contractor, was interested in only one thing, which was the economy of making money. For me this is not a problem - I don't have a conflict with it at all. But it becomes a problem when that is the sole driving force, because it suppresses the expression and potential of everyone else who is participating.
It didn't cost any more, it didn't take any more time, and it didn't take any more material to do something where the expression was fully realized. All it required was a little more attention and love. It's like food. You can have two people standing next to each other in the same kitchen with the same ingredients cooking the same dish, but one could turn out completely different from the other. So at some point in the process we were all unhappy: the client, the architect, the builders. I felt it didn't make sense. I did three projects and it didn't feel right to keep entering into something that you knew was based in conflict, not on creation or being constructive.
Somewhere I got the idea: what if we could remove this one person, the contractor – not because that person intends it to be bad, but because the emotional energy is absent. Once I started working directly with the builders I saw there was potential, because where some links had not been connecting, we could now communicate directly. It was obvious, and that's how it happened.
I think in anything you have to gather a group of people who at some point agree collectively. You don't even have to have similar sensibilities. You can disagree, but somewhere there has to be a need for expression, and to do it fully. We've had people in our group who have had different points of view and not exactly flowed with the group, and sometimes that resistance is also important. It's like in politics, you need an opposition, but the opposition is also in some way working towards something that is common. It's like the warp and weft of a cloth, this weave becomes important in what we are doing.






ART iT: You commented on Japanese contractors. It's really like that on Japanese construction site. We talk a lot with the workers and decide the details with the workers. And the workers themselves have a high level of experience and craftsmanship. So it seems there are parallels between the working style of Japanese architects and of Studio Mumbai.

BJ: I don't have firsthand experience, but from what I've heard it seems to be that way. What I was trying to say earlier is that the contractors in Japan are professional builders, and contractors in India are not necessarily professional builders, and that's the difference I want to make: there's an understanding of how buildings are put together, and they know their profession, just like a doctor or a lawyer.
With the Indian contractors, given their position, their financial situation and the fact that they are able to use the money to move people, they are nothing but managers and they don't really have any empathy towards building. They could be selling cameras. What I have heard through friends of mine here is that it works in a way similar to Studio Mumbai. It's certainly not unique to us, especially with smaller projects. Naturally because of the finances and complexity involved, the bigger projects come with their own set of rules.

Pt I | III




Bijoy Jain/Studio Mumbai: Building Potential

SOLVING PROBLEMS THROUGH DESIGN
By Andrew Maerkle



Pompidou Center Metz. © Didier Boy de la Tour, courtesy Art Tower Mito.


ART iT: One of the commonalities that art and architecture share is the legacy of Modernism, which has spread throughout the world in diverse ways and often underpins the social expectations for what these fields can express and how they are understood. To begin with, how do you conceive of the social role of architecture today? Does the idea of architecture being able to shape a new man with new values interest you, or is it something you think about critically?

SB: I don't think that way, nor do I feel there is any legacy connecting what I do to Modern art and architecture. My education was different. Before we learned Le Corbusier or Mies van der Rohe, we had to study Palladio in order to understand the influence of Palladio on modern architecture, or we had to study Schinkel before Mies. History was a very important part of my education.
My feelings about my social responsibility as an architect are reflected in my activities. I was not satisfied with the role of architects working in order to visualize power and money through monumental architecture, so besides working for privileged people, I started my own NGO, Voluntary Architects' Network (VAN), working in disaster areas.


ART iT: Then, for example, do your designs for the Paper Partition System or the Onagawa Container Temporary Housing not visualize any kind of values?

SB: That is not my purpose. Simply I want to improve the living situation of the victims of disaster. Even though I have contact with people in government, they never listen to me, so the only possibility is to make something better to show them what can be done. It is essential to show them that they haven't been doing enough to improve the lives of the victims. I have to show them the bottom line of what can be achieved. You could say I visualize the bottom line of the government people.





Top: Container Temporary Housing, Onagawa, opening ceremony, November 12, 2011. Bottom: Paper Emergency Shelters for UNHCR, Byumba Refugee Camp, Rwanda, 1999. Both: Courtesy Shigeru Ban Architects.


ART iT: From the Paper Emergency Shelter in Rwanda to the different versions of the Paper Log House in Japan, Turkey and India, your designs for disaster relief projects appear to be extremely efficient, economical and humane. So it is surprising that they are not implemented on a wider scale, and that since starting your NGO the projects have almost been entirely funded by yourself and through private donations. For example, in Rwanda it seems that only around 50 tents were actually distributed.

SB: It's quite political. With Rwanda there was a change in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the replacement had different interests. Often with the UN all the policies and projects depend on the high commissioner, and when there is a change then unfortunately the projects under development are discontinued. But with Rwanda I was hired as a consultant working for the UN, whereas all the other projects were done completely pro bono through VAN.


ART iT: In terms of politics, you said you want to show the Japanese government that they can do more to improve the situation of the people in the disaster areas.

SB: Yes. The big difference is that when I'm hired by the UN, I have to follow their policy, or even governmental policies. But as soon as I create my own non-governmental organization, I can do whatever I want to do, without any regard for the government policy. That is the freedom of NGO activity. But I also have to do all the fund raising by myself as well.


ART iT: You started your career in the bubble period in Japan when public money was flowing into construction projects like regional museums and culture centers, as well as highways and other infrastructure, some of which were of dubious necessity. Did your experience of that period shape your ideas as an architect?

SB: I didn't have any working experience when I established my own office. Although it's true that this was the beginning of the bubble period, I didn't have any high-budget projects, only low-cost projects. At the same time the price of construction went higher and higher, so I had to come up with interesting ideas for making something inexpensive. Instead of making cheap buildings, I wanted to make an inexpensive building with new ideas or unusual materials. That was my approach. In any case I was not experienced enough to be hired on the major projects.





Top: Pompidou Center Metz. © Didier Boy de la Tour, courtesy Art Tower Mito. Bottom: New Headquarters for SWATCH, New Production Building for OMEGA. © Didier Ghislain, courtesy Shigeru Ban Architects.


ART iT: Now that you are in a position to design museums like the Pompidou Center Metz or major projects like the new Swatch/Omega campus in Biel, Switzerland, how do you approach such commissions? Is there a difference with your approach to disaster relief projects?

SB: Obviously the approach is totally different from the disaster relief projects, starting with the fact that I have to win the competitions for larger projects, whereas with disaster relief projects I create the project by myself and set the budget and raise the funds myself. Because I am paid for the big commissions, the financial situation is totally different.
However, ultimately the work is the same, which is to create a nice space and make a building within the budget. Also, the satisfaction I get is totally the same, whether it's a project for the privileged or for disaster relief.


ART iT: With museums, on the one hand you need to create a functional building, but you also need to create a space for community and for experience or even exploration. For example, the circulation of a museum can have a big effect on how people experience the art. What is your guideline for balancing these concerns in such a building?

SB: It's a good point that we have to make a balance. The functional aspect of the building has to be there – it's not something we create. This is the minimum necessity for any building, whether it's a residential building or a museum. But the community aspect, or the responsibility for community, is particularly important for a museum, especially for a public museum paid by tax money.
Only a small percentage of the public will actually go to visit the museum, especially if it's showing contemporary and conceptual art. In that sense the museum has to serve not only art lovers, but also the majority of the people who do not often visit museums. So an important aspect for me is how to make a community space that would be interesting even for the people who are not interested in contemporary art.
That's why in Metz I made a big "forum space," which by opening the shutters is free to be entered from anywhere and totally open to both the public and the outside. This kind of public space is very important, as you said, for the responsibility to society.


ART iT: Of course it's also important for art to be challenged from the outside. I think it's good for the art as well that people who don't like art might visit a museum simply because it offers an attractive communal space. But are you also looking at other museums and trying to experience them through the eyes and body of the art viewer?

SB: Yes. Especially when I was working on Pompidou Metz, everyone was talking about the Bilbao effect. The city of Metz is about the same size as Bilbao, and was similarly seeking an attractive building that could raise its international profile. However, I know that museum professionals and artists don't really like the building in Bilbao, because it's a very personal sculpture by the architect and not very functional. Instead, curators and artists seem to prefer industrial buildings that have been renovated, like Tate Modern or the Dia Foundation in Beacon. As an industrial building renovated into a museum, Dia:Beacon is very successful, and it was done without a famous architect. I know many curators and artists prefer this kind of space to Bilbao.
With Metz, I thought it would be a pity if I have to choose one of the two solutions, either an iconic building or a functional building. I thought it's important to have both. The building has to be attractive and interesting as architecture to provoke the general public, but it also has to be functional as a museum. So my main interest was how to achieve a balance between interesting architecture and the practical part of the museum. In that respect I believe Pompidou Metz was quite successful.




Nicholas G. Hayek Center, Tokyo. Photo Hiroyuki Hirai, courtesy Art Tower Mito.


ART iT: How do these concerns come together when you work on a commercial space, like the Swatch Group's Hayek Center in Ginza, for example?

SB: It is the same. My way of designing is based on problem solving. Normally the project itself has an existing problem, whether it's the budget or a difficult client or anything else, but also sometimes I have to make the problem by myself. There was an international competition for the Hayek Center, and although it was not asked for by the client, I created my own problem to solve through design. My proposal was totally different from the brief, which was to fit together eight boutiques from the different brands of the Swatch Group into different levels of the same building. But because land in Ginza is very expensive and the width of the building is very narrow, there was only room for one boutique to face the front street. I thought this was very unfair. So my problem was how to give the same street exposure to all eight boutiques at the same time. That's why I created the public passage inside the building with the eight glass showrooms, which also work as elevators to bring the customers directly to each shop. This design came from a problem that I created by myself. Whether it's a commercial or cultural building, I always look for a problem that must be solved through design.


ART iT: You also spend a lot of time involved in educating young architects. What kind of values do you communicate to your students?

SB: I'm not trying to communicate anything in particular to the students. They have to see what I do and learn naturally about an architect's responsibility to society. Simply, I always try to bring them with me to disaster areas and give them exposure to the world and different cultures, but otherwise they must learn on their own. That's the most important aspect of my education.


ART iT: Do they have a way to feedback into your ideas about how to create solutions to the disaster?

SB: No. Actually, they only do what I ask them to design. I don't expect solutions from them because they are not experienced enough.


ART iT: What is your interaction with the people in the disaster areas where you do relief projects?

SB: I get very good responses from the people. They really appreciate what I have done. When I was working in 1995 in Kobe I understood the terrible situation of what it means to be evacuated, and I knew this would happen again. I just continue contributing to relief efforts and trying to improve each time.




Paper Partition System 4, 2011. Courtesy Shigeru Ban Architects.


ART iT: What are you planning for your upcoming exhibition at Art Tower Mito? Obviously, Mito was affected by the March 11 earthquake and I'm sure there's a sensitivity to the situation there. How do you expect viewers to interact with what will be on display?

SB: I would like to make something different from normal architecture exhibitions. Normally you see many models and drawings, but I plan to show mainly big mock-ups of the buildings and the joints and the materials. I will also bring a full-scale mock-up of the container house to the museum courtyard.
I want to create an exhibition that could even be understood by children. They don't have to understand the architecture drawings or the theoretical aspects of architecture. I want to show them mock-ups, samples and materials, which should be easier for them to understand. Even for the general public who might not be interested in architecture, I want to show them the method of the building process. But I have to see the reaction of the people once the exhibition opens.


ART iT: You also curated exhibitions at the start of your career, and organized a retrospective of Alvar Aalto for the Barbican in London.

SB: Yes, because I started my own practice without any building experience, I had to start designing exhibitions before I could design buildings. That was how I learned and started my own practice.
With the Aalto exhibition I worked with my students to develop a further analysis of Aalto. Many of our findings were quite different from the existing analysis and criticism. In this way it was a very interesting project for the students and I to undertake.


ART iT: You say it's important even now to continue doing residential projects. Earlier in your career you made experimental designs like the Furniture House (1995) and the Wall-less House (1997). What are some of the ideas you are exploring in your current residential projects?

SB: In the exhibition at Mito I will unveil a new temporary housing system, although I cannot say anything about it until then. But if you look at the careers of the great architects like Aalto, Le Corbusier, Mies, or Frank Lloyd Wright, they continued designing houses until they died.
Designing houses is more difficult than designing museums. Financially, it's a disaster; you cannot make any money. But I think the great architects took advantage of designing homes as an opportunity for experimentation and to train themselves. Unfortunately many architects now stop designing houses once they become famous, because it's a pain to work with each client and it's financially difficult. I think it's important to find the opportunity to keep training yourself.


ART iT: Of course, in addition to the many fine houses and villas that he designed, Aalto also worked on the AA-System (1937-45) low-cost housing project.

SB: I actually only learned about the AA-System quite late. It's not really well published. It's a real coincidence that Aalto was inspired to work on this affordable housing project after the disaster of World War II.


ART iT: One of the unique characteristics about Japan is that even in an environment as dense as the Tokyo Metropolitan area, many people want to have their own land with their own home.

SB: As you know, in New York or Paris, nobody imagines to have their own land to make their own house. This is really the Japanese dream. I think it's very unusual that, even when they live in Tokyo, Japanese people still dream about this.


ART iT: In terms of producing a new space for living, what is a guiding principle you would like people to appreciate about the space of a home?

SB: Because of advances in technology and the opportunities of globalization, you might not need to live in one place, or you can be in one place while working with people in another, so our notions of living may be changing very soon. Maybe you don't need to own your own apartment, or maybe you continuously move from country to country. The lifestyle is really changing.


ART iT: How about urban community design? Is this something that interests you?

SB: I'm not so interested in the urbanistic point of view. I'm more interested in making products and houses and buildings instead of designing the city. I believe that a good city is made by individual buildings, not by designing the whole city. Beautiful buildings one by one create a good city.



Held at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito, the exhibition "Shigeru Ban - Architecture and Humanitarian Activities" opens to the public March 2 and continues through May 12.

Shigeru Ban: Solving Problems Through Design