POSSESSION/FORM
By Andrew Maerkle



Still from Glutinosity (2001), single-channel video installation. All images: courtesy Aernout Mik and carlier❘gebauer, Berlin.


Aernout Mik's meticulously staged, multi-channel videos explore the tensions between individual actions and collective order, hysteria and reason, and how these constantly shifting tensions never manifest quite where we assume them to be. Previous works have depicted the trading floor during a stock-market crash; the site of a bus accident; scenes of riots; but it's never quite clear to what degree these are enactments or whether they in fact record actual incidents. The videos are often subtly augmented by quasi-architectural modifications to the exhibition space that, in disturbing conventions of viewing, further blur the boundaries between fiction and reality.

What the works consistently communicate, however, is a sense of crisis, occuring at both an intimate, bodily scale as well as across broad social dimensions. ART iT recently met with Mik to learn more about how he balances a formal interest in behavioral situations with the potentially political message of drawing attention to what the artist describes as the intense bizareness of seeing normality and extremity going hand-in-hand.



I. When Walking is Walking
Aernout Mik on the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz, mimetic sympathy and form.


ART iT: You are known for videos exploring scenarios in which the rules of typical behavior collapse and reason and hysteria collide together. Thus I was interested to learn that you were deeply inspired by the Polish-born writer Witold Gombrowicz, who explored similar themes in his novels. What was it that attracted you to Gombrowicz's writing?

AM: I must say I haven't read Gombrowicz in 15 or 20 years, but it's true that when I started working in art I was very intrigued by the ideas in his writing: physical relations that are created between things, forms that are created through relationships, and this affinity for incidental relationships that gain meaning through repetition; also, the form denying force that is related to youth. All of this comes together in his central question; does the form create us or do we create the form?
What appeals most strongly to me about Gombrowicz, and what became a very active force in my work is what might be called a "traveling" from one object or person to the other through connections that are created almost by accident. This also happens in my work when the camera travels from body parts to objects and objects to other objects or when people assume each other's compulsive movements and emotions. There is an action of contamination or spreading out that becomes an independent force. This is a visual element in the videos, but viewers also experience it in the space as something that almost goes by itself toward them and affects them just by being there. The visual becomes a tactile thing.






Top: Still from Garage (1998), single-channel video installation. Bottom: Still from Softer Catwalk in Collapsing Rooms (1999), single-channel video installation.


ART iT: Many reviewers of your exhibitions mention this effect, how after leaving they experience reality almost as a continuation of the artwork.

AM: I often hear about this as well. In order to achieve an interaction that shifts between the fictional space and actual space, there's a kind of continuous trembling from one level to the other.
There's this beautiful scene that Gombrowicz describes in his diary, where he's in the tram and looking at the neck of someone standing in front of him. Then he realizes that he has been looking at the neck for just a bit too long. At that moment he is somehow trapped. The neck becomes something in itself. It separates itself from the body, connects with other necks and takes him on a road that he can't stop. Through his accidental gaze, the neck is in a way dismembered. It becomes something that, even if he wants to avoid it, he's already reacting to and is therefore dependent upon. That is a powerful thing, this independent force that connects things, that defines what's taking place and pulls you in its own direction.


ART iT: In that sense Gombrowicz's writing is less psychological than it is self-aware. He's observing himself from the outside, not the inside.

AM: Yes. The word dismembered is very strong for me. It's almost shamanistic. It's not about finding the essence of something or revealing its identity. It's a kind of observation of fragmentation that is not about being psychologically obsessed with oneself, but rather spreads out along the sensorial and cognitive networks we simultaneously inhabit, that constitute us. We are cumulatively a collection of body parts.






Top: Set photograph from Training Ground (2006), two-channel video installation; photo Florian Braun. Bottom: Installation view of Training Ground at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010; photo Jason Mandella.


ART iT: As you discuss this I see how these ideas play out in your video works, but how about your early sculptural installations? It seems there's a surprising continuity between the two periods. In installations such as Für nichts und wieder nichts (1992), you mixed diverse elements together in space such that they had a specific synergy, but that synergy was also somehow disturbing.

AM: There's a strong gap where my interest moved from an almost decontextualized physical presence in space to a super-contextualized presence in a clearly social collective body. But indeed in both cases there's a split in the space: it's no longer a continuous space. The affect between bodies and objects is approached in a very physical way. There are always jumps that make it impossible to experience the environment as a whole, even if there's a continuing mimetic chain between things. One body starts to develop a mimetic sympathy to another body, and begins to look like or behave like that other body, and then again with another body.
There's a film by the French filmmaker and ethnographer Jean Rouch, Les maître fous (1953), in which this is very much taking place. [Shot in Accra, Ghana, the film is a quasi-fictional documentary of practitioners of the Hauka movement, who mimicked the pomp and ceremonies of their colonial suppressors in order to gain their powers.] In the ritual there is a constant crossing of social boundaries, with the performers driven by the desire to overcome or subvert power hierarchies by assuming the energy of the suppressors through mimicking them. As with Gombrowicz, there is a mechanism of contagion or contamination.
I was really impressed by the analogy to some elements in my own work and decided to cite Rouch's film in my video Training Ground (2006), although I never explained this to the people with whom I was working. I like this idea in Rouch's film of the ritual, and of performance that is simultaneously extremely serious and intense as well as theatrical and artificial. As with Les maître fous, there is both a documentary and a fictional side to my work. There's a spontaneity or loss of control in the action that becomes documentary, but there's also still an obvious artificiality, even when I use found footage. They both seem to operate very closely together.


ART iT: I found this was also the case with the work Raw Footage (2006), made with discarded stock footage shot by international camera crews in the 1990s during the wars in Yugoslavia. One begins to doubt whether the footage is real, because in its utter banality it's far beyond what we're conditioned to see by the media. It becomes both fictional and yet more real at the same time.

AM: Yes. There's of course an aspect of making something more real by taking viewers out of their normal way of experiencing information. There's initially a kind of disconnection and then the moment you connect with the material, you experience it first as unreal, even though it is perhaps more real. The main two strategies of this work were to recover a time that is closer to a real time interval compared with how we normally consume information, and to include as well the unexciting off-moments in the footage that are normally cut out in the editing process. The "event" is no longer fully isolated in time and space, but surrounded by an equally important periphery.





Top: Still from Raw Footage (2006), two-channel video installation with sound. Bottom: Installation view of Raw Footage at Kunstverein Hannover; photo Raimund Zakowski.


ART iT: Do you often use source material, as in Training Ground and Raw Footage? Is that a regular part of your practice?

AM: No, not always. Of course I collect source material, but in many of the works I try to be a kind of amateur or generalist. I'm trying to relate to subjects in order to understand how they are set in our collective memory - not how they really are, but how we think they are, or the projections we make about them.
With Raw Footage, I did not study the war in Yugoslavia in particular, prior to making the work. When I was collecting the material, I didn't want to know exactly who is who and what is what. Of course there were many things I already knew about the war, and it wasn't that I wanted to deny them. But I wanted to see the entire situation freshly from a different perspective. I was interested in the structure itself of one group suppressing another, quite similar, group - they were all neighbors - and in a certain mirroring between victim and oppressor: the impossibility of distinguishing one and the other when all the borders collapse; the impossibility of deciding where the war is and where it is not. I wanted to articulate these uncertainties rather than to dissect and fix them into particular identities.
I had the feeling that when you're actually in these situations, you never know exactly where the war is. And in a sense, Raw Footage is not only about war, it's also about our whole world, and its ongoing conditions of uncertainty. As in Raw Footage, much of our lives actually consist of waiting and hanging around.


ART iT: But when you talk about not researching the specifics of Yugoslavia, isn't there a danger that you could turn the material into a purely formal investigation?

AM: I don't think it's formalist. I'm looking at what the material contains without starting from a symbolically loaded perspective. These imprinted categories paradoxically prevent you from connecting with what is taking place: there's a certain person standing somewhere and waiting for a while, or you see two soldiers walking to the front and the camera follows them a bit too long - again this recalls Gombrowicz - and the moment it's too long, it's no longer a situation of two soldiers only walking to the front, it becomes a video also about walking, and the walking is just the walking. That these two things, going to the front and just walking, are taking place at the same time is part of the intense bizarreness of what is happening. Extremity and normality are going hand in hand.
That's also why I tried to use the longest takes possible, in order to create through the rhythm of the piece the kind of rhythm that follows more the viewer's own experience of time. This is of course the exact opposite of how we normally get our information through the media, which is completely disrupted and disconnected, and can only be related to as a representation. I found that many people were emotionally touched after seeing Raw Footage, possibly much more so than if they had seen the actual news item cut from the same footage.

Part II. Group Erotics




Aernout Mik: Possession/Form

ERECT AS SIN
By Andrew Maerkle




Belts Couch (2004), black leather men's belts, iron, fabric, 55 x 160 x 200 cm. All images: Courtesy Monica Bonvicini and Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin.


Based in Berlin, Monica Bonvicini is known for works that critique prevailing Modernist values by reinventing iconic forms through unconventional materials. In particular, her use of metal chains and leather straps and harnesses - suggestive of S/M subculture - introduces a radically bodily dimension to the antiseptic functionalism of classic 20th-century design. In other cases, her smashing of the plaster partitions and glass panels that she incorporates into installations and sculptures, and her spraypainting of graffiti texts onto the walls of exhibition spaces, adds a more explicitly political dimension to her work, as an acting out of resistance to constructed environments and the principles they uphold.

In this four-part interview, ART iT discusses with Bonvicini topics ranging from the intersections between political commitment and artistic expression to the psycho-sexual dynamics of looking and the creative potential of broken language.


Index:

I. Always to keep a distance

II. I believe in the skin

III. Built to Ride

IV. Wallfuckin', Revisited

I. Always to keep a distance
Monica Bonvicini on the intersections between political and artistic expression.




BEDTIMESQUARE (1999), wood, white ceramic tiles, gravel tiles, drywall panels, air mattress, 60 x 400 x 360 cm.


ART iT: I'm interested in the idea of political expression and how we communicate political stances. Your works are often interpreted as advocating a feminist viewpoint and a critique of the Modernist male establishment, yet they also put forward a formal commentary on minimalist sculpture and architecture. In this context, do you see your works as being political statements?

MB: It's interesting you begin with this question because there's a new discussion about art and politics here in Berlin, partly triggered by the upcoming 7th Berlin Biennale [directed by Artur Żmijewski, who has made the political positions of artists a focus of his curatorial premise]. Before I answer, I would be thankful if you could tell me from your side: When is an art piece political? You mention that my work has often been quoted as being feminist, and apparently for you to be feminist is already a political statement.


ART iT: For me it's a broad interpretation, but political expression would have some kind of agenda; it would contain a message or critique that elicits an action or response. At the same time, I think there's a distinction between something that pushes against an existing social structure and something that critiques an artistic tradition such as Modernism. I feel that with your work you do both, for example, as in Bedtimesquare (1999), combining the form of a Carl Andre sculpture with a bed. I'm curious about how you balance these two concerns in your practice.

MB: I grew up in Italy in a very political climate, when there was still a lot of influence from the 1970s Left movement. In the 1980s it was not quite so radical, but when I was in high school I participated in many demonstrations, strikes, talks and other activities. I grew up thinking that there is no way you can do anything related to culture without being political. It was not until I moved to Berlin that I realized from meeting colleagues and other people that what was simply the Left for me was for them in fact a totally radical Left.
I also grew up with the idea that artists and cultural producers have a responsibility toward society and the public, and it was natural for me to think that way in terms of art. I initially studied painting for several years, then stopped. Maybe it was not such a conscious decision, but I felt that painting was a far too lonely activity, and that I couldn't make the impact I was seeking through paintings. Since then, my work has always involved other people. The year I studied in California at CalArts was also influential: art was thought in such a critical way that even if it was not explicitly political, it was very political.


ART iT: In Japan from the 1950s to '70s there was a very influential student movement, but such broad-based activism has now largely disappeared, perhaps related to the 1980s bubble economy and the subsequent economic crash. I am interested in your experience in Italy at the tail end of the student movement there. Can you discuss more the atmosphere and your influences of the time?

MB: At the time, the student movement was still very influential. Maybe because Italy is such a Catholic country, there was always this strange way of reading communism and embracing it more naturally than, for example, those who grew up in West Germany and had East Germany as the inescapable representation of communism.
In high school, my economics teacher was a radical Leftist who had studied sociology with Renato Curcio in Trento and would come dressed as if it were still the 1970s. I respected her for going around in these loon pants while everybody was making fun of her. She taught an ultra-Marxist interpretation of banking systems, and since then of course I know that every bank is institutionalized theft. And my German teacher was in the city center everyday collecting signatures to free the Brigate Rosse.
We read Das Kapital together, Lenin - I was in a Trotsky group for a while - it was a little bit romantic…I never had any heroes and don't believe in heroes, but the people I looked for had been "fighting for a better world," and all of them were in prison.
There's a sentence by Lenin I like and often think of when I work, saying that we have to be more radical than reality. I love that idea because it makes you ask yourself what it means, makes you question what reality is for you. Of course the reality I live now is totally different from the one I lived 10 years ago, and reality in general is changing so fast: is it possible to still be more radical? What does it mean? Are people going to understand it, and do I want them to understand it?
In the 1990s, every show had a "chilling space" with couches and videos, and that was exactly what I did not want my art to be. Sometimes art can be relaxing, but it doesn't have to put me to sleep.



Architecture is the Ultimate Erotic Act Carry It to Excess (2002), black spray paint on wall, dimensions variable.


ART iT: Then when you make a new work, do you necessarily intend for it to communicate a critique or agenda to viewers?

MB: It differs from work to work. Sometimes I like to do something without knowing what it will become. But whether it's an institution or gallery, if I'm working directly toward a specific show then of course I also think about the setting, the collaboration with the curators and the impact the work will have. This is especially so if it's an exhibition in a city I don't know - which occurs more and more frequently over the past decade - and I am not familiar with the audience.
When I started in the 1990s, Berlin was so small that I literally knew everybody in the art scene here. I knew what I wanted to do in order to address something that nobody else was addressing. There was a lack to which I responded, because I didn't find anything that really intrigued me and I realized I had to do it myself. Now, working internationally, it's strange to do a show without knowing the audience. Often the only person with whom you have contact is the curator, alongside some prior knowledge of the institution and its exhibition history.


ART iT: Does that situation necessarily depoliticize the work?

MB: No, but I often see that if I place the same work in different institutions and cities, the receptions will be different, and depending on the people the readings can go more in one direction or the other. People do not react only to the work alone; they also react to the museum or to the program of the curator. Sometimes it can be limiting, but it can also give you more freedom because you risk more in stepping into that situation.


ART iT: Would you say your youthful experience of radical politics in Italy has fed into an ethos that you apply to your art making, but is not something you're trying to historicize in your works?

MB: Yes. It's just a part of my education. In the 1990s I made a number of works based on gender theory, which at the time was heavily fashionable. From there I moved to work on fetishism. If you research sex and fetishism in space, then you have the Marxist interpretation, the feminist interpretation, the liberal interpretation. But I wouldn't do any work now on Marx or Che Guevara or something like that, just as I wouldn't do any work on actual politics. I'm not interested in what is in the newspaper now. I'm interested in what is in the books that are analyzing what was in the newspaper. I think it's important always to keep a distance.

Return to top



Monica Bonvicini: Erect As Sin

ART OF UPHEAVAL: 1924
By Natsuko Odate




All images unless otherwise noted: Performance still from 1924 at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, 2011. Courtesy Miwa Yanagi.



Best known as a photographer addressing images of feminity in a male-oriented society, Miwa Yanagi has over the past year produced a tea ceremony at Kyoto Art Center, Sakuramori; an interactive "old-maid" café as part of the interdisciplinary event Festival/Tokyo 10, Café Rottenmeier; and her latest project, the performance trilogy 1924, investigating the social and cultural impact of Japan's rapid modernization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Entitled "Tokyo-Berlin," the first part of the trilogy premiered this July at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, in conjunction with the exhibition "Moholy-Nagy in Motion." The second part, "Sea Battle," premieres this November in association with the 4th Yokohama Triennale; and the third part, "Machine Man," is scheduled to premiere in mid-2012. Inspired by the art and ideas of Moholy-Nagy as well as the artist Tomoyoshi Murayama (1901-77), who as leader of the 1920s-era experimental art group MAVO articulated a philosophy of "conscious constructivism," and the theatre producer Yoshi Hijikata, who co-founded the Tsukiji Shogekijo, considered to be Japan's first Modern theatre, the trilogy also necessarily deals with the aftereffects of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, which caused an estimated 140,000 deaths, and the similarities and divergences between that catastrophe and the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami.

ART iT met with Yanagi to discuss in greater detail her transition from art into theatre, as well as the ideas and references that fed into her conceptualization of 1924.



Interview:


ART iT: I thought we could begin by discussing your experiences leading up to the production of your latest theatre project, 1924 - your most ambitious such project to date. How did it come about?

YM: The 1924 project began with an invitation last year from the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, to produce a performance piece for the museum. When I learned that there were plans underway for concurrent exhibitions of László Moholy-Nagy and Tomoyoshi Murayama, I thought I could integrate elements from the artists' respective careers into a single theme, and began working on a scenario.
To be honest, at first it barely registered that my scenario begins right after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, with Hijikata's return from Germany and his establishment, along with Kaoru Osanai, of the Tsukiji Shogekijo, considered to be Japan's first Modern theatre. While riding the Trans-Siberian Railway on his journey home, Hijikata had stopped in Moscow to see a production at the experimental Meyerhold Theatre, founded by the experimental stage actor, director and producer Vsevolod Meyerhold. There is little extant documentation of Meyerhold's productions, but it's easy to imagine that they were completely different from the realist theatre Hijikata had seen to that point, and were the inspiration for his own theatre.
But I was stuck for a long time on how to develop the plot. I was just beginning my research when the March 11 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami happened, after which I experienced this sensation of time doubling upon itself, and reconsidered everything I had done to that point. So the direction of the project, and its focus on the 1920s, was strongly influenced by the museum program on the one hand, and the events of March 11 on the other.


ART iT: Can you discuss more specifically how March 11 led you to reconsider your ideas?

YM: This may be a bit of a sentimental way of putting it, but the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami prompted me to reconsider my entire life and history, an experience I think is shared by many others as well. Nuclear energy had somehow become accepted as a normal part of everyday life, but I was already a university student when Chernobyl happened, and having seen the effects of such a trauma I could have done more to resist that normalization. Now I feel I must apologize to coming generations for not having been more active.
Ultimately extreme cataclysms and atrocities prompt changes in awareness, and it's important to understand how these changes come about. For example, there was a long build-up to Japan's involvement in World War II, beginning with the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, and then the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, and then the events surrounding the Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937. I've developed an acute interest in understanding what happened in that process.







ART iT: This issue deals with the theme of revolutions, which we could think about broadly in terms of any major event that affects people's lives, and the accompanying changes in how we express and consider ourselves. Would you say Yoshi Hijikata and Tomoyoshi Murayama thought about what they were doing in such revolutionary terms?

YM: I think 1924 was in some sense a time of fulfillment. All sorts of changes in art and society were occurring in parallel. Artists genuinely believed they could lead a social revolution. Everyone was young, and was sustained by a sense of purpose that was based almost entirely on momentum. It was as though the blood was surging into their collective heads. For example, when Murayama went overseas to study he absorbed all at once everything from the Renaissance to Futurism, German Expressionism and Constructivism. Such overseas students somehow exceeded any normal capacity for retention of new information, although I'm not sure how well they digested everything they encountered.
Murayama was certainly the most composed of the MAVO group, since he at least made an effort to digest everything, and even wrote a number of books as a part of that effort. However, I doubt he will be remembered by history as an artist. He is recognized rather for his theatre projects and other activities.
I can relate to this image of Murayama slowly distancing himself from the field of art proper. He probably could not accept the vagueness of art, its primitive aspects. Attempting to synthesize everything he had learned, he ended up producing texts like "The End of Expressionism" and "The Limits of Constructivism," and that was it for him as an artist. Of course he would later revisit Constructivism, but that was more inspired by his Leftist sympathies than anything else. By the 1930s he had published manga comics, started working in animation and even contributed stories to the Japanese Communist Party's Akahata (Red Flag) newspaper. He was incredibly gifted. But even as good a draftsman as he was, it was not art so much as philosophy that attracted him. Maybe he simply grew tired of avant-garde posturing that negated the relations between art and thought, or felt it had no effectiveness.


ART iT: So, as with Murayama, does your gradual distancing from art through the pursuit of performance projects result from a similar sense of frustration or ineffectiveness?

YM: It's not that I feel there is something I can't achieve through art, so much as it is a case of needing to get outside of the white cube. In fact, more than an issue of space it's about the overall system of art, in that you need to get beyond the framework in order to see it clearly. Ultimately I felt alienated by the white cube. I've exhibited in numerous museums overseas with beautiful white cube galleries, but I never identified with - never felt integrated with - such spaces. However, doing a theatre project and working now in the black box has helped me to develop a new appreciation of the white cube. The whole project has gone really smoothly.


ART iT: Perhaps this is not the most sensitive way to put it, but with the Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami it seems many people have made themselves the protagonists of responses to the catastrophe. Can the same be said for the Great Kanto Earthquake?

YM: I believe so. In fact it could have been even more widespread. I think people were starting to feel uneasy about the formation of the modern nation state that had been progressing since the Meiji era, but all that was wiped away by the cataclysm. Some 140,000 people lost their lives; it was an extreme tragedy, but even so you have this sense that artists were somehow activated by it. It's not as if everyday life to that point had been completely harmonious and tranquil in the first place, so perhaps that exacerbated the cataclysmic effect of the earthquake.


ART iT: With the current situation, many people - particularly artists - have been questioning how they can respond to the catastrophe. Did artists following the 1923 earthquake also deal with such issues?

YM: Not really. I think they almost experienced it as a liberation from the restrictions they had experienced to that point. Taking advantage of the chaos that followed the earthquake, artists were able to pursue all kinds of projects they had previously been unable to realize. There were many new works produced, with the Murayama-led MAVO group particularly active. Due to the reconstruction efforts there was also a relaxation of building codes, so Hijikata was able to erect the barrack-style building to house his Tsukiji Shogekijo theatre. This situation of openness continued for several years. However, from 1928 on there were drastic changes leading to a reactionary period and a rapid decline in cultural experimentation, not exclusively related to increasing restrictions of expression as the government moved toward fascism. I'm still researching this phase of the history.


ART iT: Organized in 1988, the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum's "Japan in the 1920s" exhibition made a strong case that the 1920s were the height of Modernism in Japan. But to be honest it's hard to imagine that the current catastrophe will prompt the birth of a new spirit of initiative.

YM: I think it's partly because the modes of daily life then and now are completely different. We have been shaken awake from an everyday routine that has been steeped in deep peace. Ashamed of our previous passiveness, we are doing penance for ending up in this situation. The Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami has put everything into perspective. In 1995 the Great Hanshin Earthquake caused widespread destruction, but there was also a rapid reconstruction effort. Of course, my family home in Kobe was damaged and I never had the luxury of reflecting on the event in more abstract terms. But I feel the situation in Tohoku is more complex.







ART iT: Returning to 1924, working with artists from the past - and not limited to those from the 1920s - inevitably entails dealing with the male chauvinism of those eras. Having used women as the basis for all your art projects to date, how have you dealt with that situation?

YM: There were certainly not so many female artists at the time. In 1924, the usherettes are in a sense substitutes for myself. They were present from the very beginning of the creative process, but I've only recently begun to see their position clearly. They are narrators - spiritual mediums of a sort - rather than real people. They accompany the male characters, but do not become directly involved in the action. You might say that they're looking down from above at the men and their zealous crusades. There were actually female artists active during this same period, however few. There's the writer Fumiko Hayashi, the Russian expatriate Varvara Bubnova, and broader the feminist movement as well.


ART iT: I thought you were attracted by the image of these pioneering women, although of course the Taisho era also witnessed the "Modern Girls" phenomenon.

YM: The usherettes are in fact styled after the Modern Girl look. They were meant to represent a modern image, wearing their suits and speaking in the particular voice of announcers. However, there was absolutely no substance to the Modern Girl concept. The image of the Modern Girl in her Western skirt and hat, drinking soda in the Shiseido Parlor, did not communicate any background information at all about whether these were working women, whether they were married, and so on. Only the image itself became a representation of the era.
In that sense I wanted the usherettes to embody roles that were without substance, without even humanity. Icons without actuality, the Modern Girls had their standards of beauty determined for them by the media, and those standards were determined by the proportions and facial features of Western women. Ayao Yamana's illustrations are classic examples of this. Then once those standards were in place, they could be used to sell goods like cosmetics. The importation of the Western body coincided with Japan's attempts to take on the world powers of the time; the modernization of the Japanese body mirrored that of the country as a whole, although entering the war years the image of femininity shifted back to the dutiful wife and mother in her cooking apron.
I thought it would be interesting to combine the Modern Girl image with traditional crafts, which is why I turned to the format of kodan traditional storytelling. I don't believe there actually were any female kodan storytellers, but the craft itself was integrally part of the world of dandyism, and the stories were greatly popularized during the Meiji era. In that respect it is not so improbable to imagine a storyteller being in a museum. Prior to the establishment of museums in Japan - around the time of the domestic exhibitions for promoting industry - there was no practice of quietly looking at artworks. Rather, there was someone who would explain the works, regardless of whether these were oil paintings or tea ceremony implements. We know from exhibition pamphlets that such guides were present at exhibitions, but because it was an oral practice there is no documentation of what was actually said.
In 2012 when I realize the third part of 1924, I plan to go even further back in time to the Meiji era, exploring the phenomenon of panorama pavilions. There was a panorama pavilion for the First Sino-Japanese War set up in the grounds of Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. Taking Manchuria as their subject matter, the paintings in these pavilions showed Japanese people expanded horizons that they couldn't imagine in their everyday lives. It seems there were quite a number of artists who made such paintings. Then by the time of the Russo-Japanese war photographic panoramas became extremely popular. This is in fact material I had been researching prior to beginning work on 1924, and it was only because of Moholy-Nagy and Murayama that I warped forward to the Taisho era.


ART iT: I notice that all your performances seem to deal with artists. Is this intentional, and something you plan to develop further?

YM: I do not plan to work only with artists. I would like to branch out to any number of topics. It's just that I'm still going through a learning process of how to express myself through theatre.
This allows me to reconsider art from something approaching an objective distance. It's easy to compare the modernization of art and the modernization of theatre. In the case of art, the modernization was implemented by the nation. Okakura Tenshin and Ernest Fenellosa were both appointed to their positions by the state, and it was they who systematically sifted through and selected aspects of foreign visual culture to bring to Japan. Because Fenellosa was so talented, this can hardly be considered a misfortune for Japan, but the system itself has not changed at all since then.
The modernization of theatre was drastically different, driven by the private individuals and developed in a way similar to oral traditions without any particular discipline. This kind of grassroots development I find to be really interesting. In the case of theatre, people were taking impassioned, individual responsibility for introducing new approaches from overseas.




Poster for the performance trilogy 1924. Courtesy Miwa Yanagi.


ART iT: How about your own interest in new modes of expression? For example, when Hijikata saw Meyerhold's work it was his first ever encounter with abstract theatre. Do you have any desire to similarly produce something nobody has ever seen before?

YM: I'm not seeking that kind of newness. In fact I prefer realistic theatre. Of course I admire things like the Bauhaus Theatre Workshop and Oskar Schlemmer's Triadisches Ballett (1922), but I have no desire to emulate them. Even in an art museum, I'm following a somewhat conventional dialogic structure. 　
In that sense perhaps I am intractably not a Modernist. According to the literature, when Hijikata staged Reinhard Goering's Sea Battle (1917), nobody could understand a thing, because the dialogue was delivered too quickly, and included lists of words that made no sense whatsoever, and because the sound effects were too loud, and because of the three-dimensional stage, and all these other elements that the audience was encountering for the first time and which surpassed the limits of their understanding. In particular, the three-dimensional stage must have been shocking for audiences who had only ever seen stages with painted backdrops. With the audience leaving the theatre confused and silent, the only thing that could be said about the production was that it was new. Only someone like Murayama could respond to it with enthusiasm, although how much even he understood is unclear. Incorporating Sea Battle into 1924 as a play within the play, I have struggled with how to make the elements that I reference easier to understand. Staging Sea Battle today would not make any sense, and to do so is not my intent. I'm not convinced that things that confound understanding are necessarily shocking.