A week has passed since the devastating Tohoku Pacific Earthquake and Tsunami that struck northeastern Japan March 11. With the ensuing nuclear crisis at Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, these events have taken a great human, economic and spiritual toll from Japan - a toll that is still as yet incalculable, and may remain so for the foreseeable future. Yet as has been made evident through both news coverage and personal daily interactions, even a catastrophe of such wide-reaching and unprecedented impact has not shaken the fundamental humanity of the many affected people. We have received and sent numerous contacts from and to friends and colleagues in our broader professional community, and take strength from the many expressions of composure and sympathy that have been exchanged in these trying days. While this will certainly be recorded as one of the worst disasters in the recent history of Japan, it also has the potential to be remembered as a triumph of dignity, compassion and spontaneous collective resolve. We at ART iT are discussing ways in which we can use our media platform to contribute to recovery efforts, including but not limited to the raising of money and other resources for charity. And while it is easy to question its significance in a time of crisis, we feel that continuing to think critically about art and its associated issues is no less a contribution to working beyond the circumscribed perspective of self-preservation. It is for this reason that we plan to proceed - to the best of our abilities - with already scheduled thematic and timely content, while also reporting on the responses of artists, architects and other creatives to the effects of the disaster.

We extend our most profound sympathies to those whose loved ones and homes were lost in the earthquake and tsunami, and thank our local and international readers for their continued support and understanding.


- The Editors



Emergency closures in Japan (galleries and museums)
Ways to contribute to earthquake relief

Issue 8: TEXT




Perhaps the most efficient means of communication yet invented by humans, text is also inherently saddled with confusion and contradiction. When commentators wring their hands about contemporary knowlege spinning out of control with the circulation of virally reproduced and distorted digital information, we should all pause to recall that as the genesis of recorded history, text is the original quotational artifact - text is always out of context - and that maybe our latest neuroses are simply a reiteration of past anxieties.

Thinking about how, with its durability, text inevitibly exists beyond the control of situational environments (perversely, the source of its efficiency), this issue of ART iT addresses the theme "Text," both sampling from a post-conceptual generation of artists who incorporate text in the visual realization of their works, and also exploring the idea of text as a metaphor for how we decode and encode the world around us. Collectively, the works of this issue's featured artists underscore how the convenience of text involves suppressing our anxieties about the impossibility of communication.

We begin the issue with a three-part feature interview with Yutaka Sone, the Los Angeles-based artist known for his inscrutably beautiful sculptures in marble and crystal who incorporates writing and sketching into a daily practice that distributes significance equally between eternal art objects and momentary memoranda/ephemera-as-poetry. In keeping with the theme of text beyond context, we also include a five-part "dossier" of short conversational encounters with Berlin-based artist Danh Vo, who presents different combinations of found objects together in installations that tease out the marginalia of both personal and transnational histories. Each encounter in the dossier addresses a specific aspect connected to Vo's ideas about his work, but is presented solely as an artifact, without any framing information.

We also correspond via email with artist, filmmaker and writer Miranda July, whose latest film The Future has just premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival in Utah. In this correspondence, July discusses how in her works across disparate media text consistently appears as a "disembodied voice" that draws readers into unexpected performative situations.

Forthcoming are an interview with artist Tadasu Takamine to clarify how two wall texts introducing and concluding, respectively, his current solo exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of Art engage with issues of institutional critique, and the latest essays by regular columnists Dan Cameron, Hu Fang, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Noi Sawaragi, Minoru Shimizu and Kyoichi Tsuzuki.


- The Editors

Issue 7: RETROSPECT 2010




Who knows how the year 2010 will be remembered in art history. A number of events may stand out as having been immediately significant - with its controversial use of reperformance, Marina Abramovic's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York at the start of the year, for example, may have even changed the way institutions approach the idea of representing history itself, while with its unveiling in London in October, Christian Marclay's latest video collage, The Clock (2010), was instantly recognized by many as a masterpiece. But we simply don't yet have the perspective to determine the ultimate significance of this young artist's debut solo show, or that ambitious new exhibition's launch (and in Japan, we had not one but two such exhibitions this year, the Setouchi International Art Festival and the Aichi Triennale).

However, what makes art so dynamic and invigorating is that it has never been about a history, singular, and has always created space for histories, plural. Wherever there is a consensus, art is always finds a contention. Wherever there is a center, art is always seeking out the margins. Every artist, every community, every institution, every city, every country has a history, a context of before and after. Maybe every year has its own history too.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we will bridge the divide between 2010 and 2011 by thinking about what it means to look back. Rather than producing a best-of list, we have asked our regular contributors to offer us memories, incidents that for whatever reason continue to shape how they see the world of the present. Based in cities across the globe, some traveling more than others, the contributors to "Things Worth Remembering 2010" collectively offer up a poetic and meandering tour through the year in art.

In a feature interview, we sit down with Christian Marclay to discuss The Clock and how it relates to his broader practice of visual and sound collage. Combining thousands of film clips featuring clocks and watches for every minute of a 24-hour day into an endless loop, the work is a fully functional time-telling device, while also serving as an analysis of narrative film editing techniques, an archive of international movie stars famous and unknown from across different points of their careers, and a gateway for viewers into their personal memories and experiences of cinema.

Additionally, we have asked two special contributors, Massimiliano Gioni and Jens Hoffmann, for complementary views on the year just passed and the year to come, "Retrospect/Forecast 2010-2011."

So often co-opted by the forces of convention, history has a bad name in some circles. But we should never forget that to remember is to enter into a dialogue with the memory of the future; a performance of the present, looking back is necessarily to look ahead.


- The Editors

Issue 6: Primitive Technology




If the medium through which an artwork is realized is a necessary condition of that work, what happens when technology makes new kinds of previously unimaginable artworks possible? Conversely, what happens to the temporal field of technology when it enters the timeless realm of expression? What is the historical legacy of the new? While technological development has continued to expand the potential for artistic experimentation, it seems that there is actually a limit to what technology can offer art. More than a half-century after the introduction of unprecedented new technology to the inventory of artistic media, it seems possible to conclude that it is the art that shapes the technology, and not the other way around; art is the container of its medium.

Unfolding over the next month, the November issue of ART iT builds upon this train of thought to enact an archaeology of the relations between art and technology, and the many inversions in those relations that have occurred from the post-war period to the present. In our two-part feature interview, we talk with Peter Fischli and David Weiss about their anachronistic approach to making works in materials such as clay and polyurethane foam, and how they are driven by the schadenfreude of manual copying in the age of mechanical - and digital - reproduction. In a short interview, Seoul-based media artist Yeondoo Jung explains how his misuse of technology has led to a unique series of photographs and videos, while in a special contribution, Barbara London, the pioneering curator of new media art at New York's Museum of Modern Art, reflects on the years she spent corresponding and collaborating with Nam June Paik.

Forthcoming contributions include media art and music specialist Christoph Charles writing about Katsuhiro Yamaguchi's groundbreaking experiments with technology and performance over the course of a career that began in the 1940s, and curator Tsutomu Mizusawa on the activities of the short-lived post-war period collective Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop, 1951-57), of which Yamaguchi was a member, as well as artist Peter Coffin's revelation in On Record of how and why he built a functioning flying saucer.

Additionally, we present the latest essays from regular contributors Dan Cameron, Hu Fang, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Noi Sawaragi, Minoru Shimizu and Kyoichi Tsuzuki.


- The Editors

Issue 5: LITERATURE




If literature is the art of the written word, it is also the art of reading. Whatever the intentions of their authors, books ranging from novels to memoirs, critical texts, political and philosophical treatises and even religious tomes are at their most dynamic - their most engagingly protean, contradictory and capricious - when they take on life in the minds of their readers, and then add new insight into the world that surrounds us. A good read, a profound read, inevitably evolves across time and space. Nowhere is this other vitality of the written word more apparent than in the field of contemporary art, where in recent years artists have rediscovered the potential of literature as a mechanism for reflection on the manifold dimensions of interpretation and the participatory experience.

Over the course of the next month, the October 2010 issue of ART iT explores the role that literature serves as a reservoir for artistic ideas and experimentation. In a double feature, the photographer Naoya Hatakeyama discusses the origins of the term "literary photograph," used as a pejorative in photographic circles in Japan until the 1980s, as well as the ways in which discourse shapes perception, while the conceptual artist Cerith Wyn Evans addresses his fascination with translation and the differences between hypertext and quotation. Additionally, in her special contribution on Enrique Vila-Matas, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster weaves together the intersections between reality, fiction and the act of reading in the works of the Spanish writer.

Forthcoming contributions include Calcutta-based writer and editor Aveek Sen's meditation on images inspired by literature including Jeff Wall's reconstruction of a passage from Yukio Mishima's Spring Snow and Francis Bacon's triptych inspired by TS Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes, and the artist Sora Kim's production notes on a new video piece, Abstract Reading (2010), currently on view in a solo exhibition at Atelier Hermès, Seoul, featuring actors reciting passages by authors Maurice Blanchot, Italo Calvino, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Luis Sepulveda.

We also present the latest essays from regular contributors Dan Cameron, Hou Hanru, Hu Fang, Noi Sawaragi, Minoru Shimizu and Kyoichi Tsuzuki.


- The Editors






Related:
8 Rules for Writing Fiction: Heman Chong on Influence and Appropriation

Issue 4: ARCHITECTURE




Established in 1980, the Venice Architecture Biennale is at once among the most prestigious architecture exhibitions in the world and yet something of an afterthought compared to its more pedigreed sibling, the Venice Art Biennale. This is partly reflected in the fact that the architecture exhibition has for much of its life not been a biennial at all, instead alternating between intervals as short as one year and as long as five during its first two decades.

It's tempting to speculate that this may stem from some innate resistance among contemporary architects to being boxed into an institutional framework. After all, one of the great concerns of architecture of the late 20th and early 21st centuries has been to challenge conventions of plan and program. Yet, as the architectural avant-garde seeks new ways to navigate the increasingly complex terrain between science, aesthetics and agency - and the one-time incubator of the avant-garde, the international expo, has inclined ever further towards techno-promotional spectacle - the exhibition as medium for idea-driven experimentation, communication and experience has the potential to be of more importance than ever before in determining the shape of the humane environment.

Coinciding with this year's 12th Venice Architecture Biennale, ART iT devotes its September 2010 issue to an assessment of the role that exhibitions play in contemporary architectural practice. In a four-part special feature, we interview the artistic director of the Biennale, Kazuyo Sejima; her partner in the firm SANAA, Ryue Nishizawa, who is also exhibiting in the Japan Pavilion; and two emerging architects participating in Sejima's curated exhibition, Junya Ishigami and Sou Fujimoto. We also launch the issue with an essay by photography curator Judy Annear on the work of another Biennale participant, artist Thomas Demand, and its relation to real architectural space, as well as Hans Ulrich Obrist's meditation on the legacy of Japan's post-war Metabolist group of architects in the latest installment of our ongoing series of correspondences between Obrist and Hou Hanru, Curators on the Move.

Forthcoming over the course of the month, we will present documentation of recent projects at Venice by one of the great innovators of contemporary exhibition practice, Rem Koolhaas / OMA*AMO, while architect Naohiko Hino provides a long-form review of the recent exhibition on world's fairs, international exhibitions and theme parks at Centre Pompidou, "Dreamlands." A short interview with New York-based artist Mika Tajima touches upon the cubiclization of modern life and the corporate aesthetics of "environmental enhancement panels," and Paris-based artist Oscar Tuazon contributes a delirious text on the deconstruction of French furniture. Additionally, we feature the latest columns from regular contributors Dan Cameron, Vasif Kortun, Noi Sawaragi, Minoru Shimizu and Kyoichi Tsuzuki.


- The Editors

Issue 3: CINEMA




Cinema as activism
Cinema as archive
Cinema as behavior
Cinema as collage
Cinema as construction
Cinema as duration
Cinema as economy
Cinema as entertainment
Cinema as experience
Cinema as identity
Cinema as index
Cinema as language
Cinema as memory
Cinema as moving image
Cinema as music video
Cinema as narrative
Cinema as plastic


If not exactly dead, cinema is certainly not what it once was. Images move differently now - primarily through digital media - and as Hollywood producers and distributors are all too aware, the habitus of cinema increasingly resembles an artifact from a past age. Or rather, it suggests a way of relating to ideas in time and space that is still inscribed in the medium of film, but no longer an essential part of its reception. While the industry itself will undoubtedly continue into the foreseeable future, to look at cinema today is to confront a reflection of how the dimensions of social engagement have changed over the past century.

Over the next month, the August 2010 issue of ART iT further develops this train of thought by addressing the theme CINEMA. In the cover interview, Deputy Editor Andrew Maerkle finds that although Berlin-based Singaporean artist Ming Wong is best known for his appropriation of international films in making his videos and installations, the resulting works engage equally with the performance of language, constituting a conceptual rhyme effect between originals and adaptations. As befits an artist interested in multiple reflections and visual couplings, this interview is complemented by two essays that analyze Wong's work from different perspectives: Singapore-based curator Adele Tan outlines the various contexts informing his artistic development; and Beijing- and Guangzhou-based writer and curator Hu Fang explores different themes that recur across his works.

In the short interview, Bangkok-based curator Gridthiya Gaweewong corresponds with filmmaker and artist Apichatpong Weerasethakul about how he balances two similar but different practices and how culture in Thailand is affected by the country's current political instability. Special contributions include artist Shinro Ohtake's wide-ranging indexical survey of Tokyo in the age of cinema - a personal recounting of the tumultuous post-war period when cinema was a powerful vehicle for both foreign influences and new, homegrown modes of expression in Japan - as well as photographer and editor Kyoichi Tsuzuki's ode to the fleeting epoch of the three-minute laserdisc karaoke short film, which was replaced with the onset of server-based, streaming karaoke by generic video-scapes that are randomly matched to any song.

Forthcoming: Sean Snyder ON RECORD; Olga Bryukhovetska on redefining dispositif in film theory; Trond Lundemo on moving-image installations and the problem of quotation; Aveek Sen on the intersections of poetry and identity in the exhibition "Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh"; and the latest columns from regular contributors Dan Cameron, Doryun Chong, Vasif Kortun, Noi Sawaragi and Minoru Shimizu.


- The Editors

Issue 2: CHINA



With its extraordinary transformation over the past decade, China's contemporary art scene has become the focus of intense international scrutiny, featured in numerous publications and surveyed by a multitude of large-scale exhibitions in cities worldwide. Corresponding to this hype, China has emerged in international discourse as both a utopia and a lawless borderland, its art market often seen as holding untapped riches - all it takes is education! - while its art practice is frequently made an emblem of the cynicism and collusion endemic to a bubble environment. Yet there is a hint in both these extreme views of the reflection of a self-regarding gaze: "China" may tell us more about the conditions for international contemporary art than it does anything about itself.

Unfolding over the course of the next month, the July 2010 issue of ART iT picks up this train of thought by addressing the theme CHINA. However, far from attempting to counter prevailing distortions with a more precise vision, we consider China as a metaphor, a site of projection for the aspirations and anxieties informing contemporary art today. As such, this issue takes a digressive and diversionary approach toward its subject matter.

In the cover interview, Deputy Editor Andrew Maerkle interviews British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien about his recently completed multichannel installation Ten Thousand Waves (2010), which was shot primarily in China, and how it relates to his previous works and post-colonial theory, while in a complementary essay, Gao Shiming, one of the curators of the 2008 Guangzhou Triennial, "Farewell to Post-Colonialism," untangles the problematics of spectatorship inherent in the work.

In this month's short interview, Shanghai-based conceptual artist Xu Zhen covers topics ranging from "Middle Eastern Art" to questions on the ethics of art making. Special contributions include the writer and curator Hu Fang's speculative essay on the relations between society and cinema in China today, "Das Kapital of the Senses," as well as architect Naohiko Hino's comparative analysis of Chinese and Japanese urbanization.

Pushing further into the realm of metaphor, Calcutta-based writer and editor Aveek Sen revisits the poetry of Emily Dickinson through an essay on Roni Horn's exhibition of mixed-media works, photographs and sculptures, "Well and Truly," at Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria. For ON RECORD, the Austria-born artist Jun Yang explains the origins of the recently launched Taipei Contemporary Art Center. And in the latest installment of ART iT's ongoing correspondence "Curators on the Move," Hou Hanru replies to Hans Ulrich Obrist with a call to preserve the intimacy between artist and artwork - a relationship that is threatened by the very system that supports contemporary practice in Asia, the market.

Alongside thematic content, we also present the latest columns from our regular contributors Dan Cameron, Doryun Chong, Vasif Kortun, Noi Sawaragi, Minoru Shimizu and Kyoichi Tsuzuki, as well as updated exhibition reviews and art-related news coverage.

It's tempting to interpret "China" as representing a minor crisis in internationalism today. As the monoliths of generations past slowly crumble, China is both a monolithic artifact of nationalist worldviews and, with its dynamic influx and outflux of capital, labor and ideas, an unignorable vision of a piecemeal future. What does it mean to be international, to engage with things that are beyond local? As the diverse opinions presented in this issue suggest, part of that entails finding new significance in the fragmentary, the out-of-context and the untranslatable.


- The Editors

Thoughts on Art HK 2010




A topic that has been on my mind recently is the concept of provinciality. Often used pejoratively to describe a state of unsophistication and limited perspective, provinciality seems increasingly relevant in the current era of globalization. For it is precisely at this moment of intensified global exchange that we are confronted not with our own worldliness but with our own provinciality. One could argue that international survey exhibitions such as documenta and the Venice Biennale and art fairs such as Art Basel and frieze, for all their worldly scope, are ultimately provincial affairs, reflecting the specific concerns and interests of their localities. And one could say that it is ultimately through the successful negotiation of its inherent provinciality that a local event can achieve international significance.

I was reminded of this train of thought by the recently completed third edition of the Art HK art fair. By all accounts the fair was a success. Dealers from all the major regional centers including Beijing, Hong Kong, Jakarta, Manila, Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Taipei and Tokyo were included in the fair alongside those from places like Brussels, London, New York, Paris and Zürich. Major local and regional collectors were out in force: although most of the fair's participants reported sales, the number of collectors present from outside the region was relatively negligible. The word is out: Art HK has been anointed Asia's art fair and one can expect an exponential growth in interest in the event in the year-long interval until its next edition.

But as the fair continues to evolve, it seems reasonable to question whose provinciality it serves, partly because Asia itself comprises a broad patchwork of diverse provincialities. For example, Japan has a history of avant-garde and conceptual art extending to the early half of the 20th century, while Chinese contemporary art is generally considered to start with the generation of artists who came of age on the cusp of the 1980s and Australian contemporary art occupies an ambivalent position between the Euro-American canon and local developments. Will a regional market respect these and other provincialities, or is it in the market's interest to exclude "untranslatable" difference? Are we faced with the prospect that what many assume to be the best thing for contemporary art in Asia - the emergence of a regional market - may also be something akin to an ecological disaster?

This scenario is not necessarily as hyperbolic as it may initially seem, as the absence of strong nonprofit spheres in many countries in the region (excluding galleries for or associated with private collections) means that there are few alternatives to the market. And one has only to look at the film industry, as well as the collective sigh of relief when an auteur like Apichatpong Weerasethakul took home the Palm d'Or at this year's Cannes Film Festival, to understand what a degrading effect market globalization has had on creativity in cinema.

The future, of course, lies not with the fair organizers, who have done their part to create a forum for exchange, but with the market's true constituents, the commercial galleries and individual collectors. They have the power to shape the market in their own image, although this requires initiative and self-organization. From the large amount of figurative, overtly saleable work on display at Art HK, it seemed that the dealers were rather complacent to let the market shape them. Without more point-to-point dialogue, and the nurturing of audiences that can appreciate diverse and unpredictable forms of expression, the success of a clearinghouse art fair in the region could result in a resetting of the clock on contemporary art in Asia. These broader issues, already under discussion for many years, gain added urgency now that Art HK is clearly worth taking seriously.


- Andrew Maerkle

Issue 1: COMMUNICATION



ART iT was founded as Japan's only bilingual contemporary art periodical in 2003, and moved to an exclusively online platform in 2009. The past year's experience has provided the editorial staff an opportunity to think deeply about the nature of online media. Despite its many benefits, the Internet can be viewed as part and parcel of the unprecedented consumerization of developed societies. Most online content may be free, but the Internet's emphasis on constantly updated and repackaged information habituates its users to a mindset of pure consumption, the digital exchange of 1s and 0s distilling relationships, ideas, experiences to essential numerical values. Is there still room in the society-as-Internet-as-marketplace for articulate, in-depth thought?

With that question in mind we are relaunching the ART iT website with a new format and design that will focus on long-form artist interviews, essays by leading Japanese and international curators and cultural critics and a series of hybrid oral-textual documents, ON RECORD, in which artists discuss the ideas and influences that inspire their works. We also welcome the renewal of an ongoing correspondence between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru, "Curators on the Move," that originated in the publication's print edition.

Structured loosely around the theme COMMUNICATION, the inaugural relaunch edition of ART iT looks at how we communicate with each other as well as how the world communicates with us. In the cover interview, Deputy Editor Andrew Maerkle interviews Wilhelm Sasnal about the role of intuition, history and the landscape in shaping his paintings and films, while in a complementary essay art historian Akiko Kasuya considers Sasnal’s work in the context of contemporary art in Poland.

In this month's short interview, Aki Sasamoto elaborates on the relationship between her installations and performances, which often coexist in the same space, but move at different literal and metaphorical speeds. For ON RECORD, Heman Chong discusses the intertwined anxieties of influence and appropriation, a topic closely related to the artist's extensive referencing of literature and film in his conceptual art practice. In "Curators on the Move," Hans Ulrich Obrist answers the question, "How has the Internet changed the way you think?" - originally posed by John Brockman's Edge initiative. And in a special contribution, Senior Curator of Photography at the Art Gallery of New South Wales Judy Annear connects the activities of artist Takayuki Yamamoto, who teaches children the paranormal art of spoon bending, and the new media collaborative exonemo, who use streaming video to cross, and complicate, barriers in time and space.

We also introduce our monthly contributors, who will each write essays about current issues and events that reflect their personal concerns: Dan Cameron, (Prospect New Orleans and Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans), Doryun Chong (Museum of Modern Art, New York), Vasif Kortun (Platform Garanti, Istanbul), art historian and curator Noi Sawaragi, art critic Minoru Shimizu and the photographer, writer and independent publisher Kyoichi Tsuzuki.

While we will continue to provide readers regular news and reviews articles, the relaunched ART iT is designed for the long duration. In this sense, it is appropriate that the new website has its origins in a question, because long after all the answers have been found, it is the question that remains.


- The Editors