adrian's blog

Yoko Ono, Voice Piece for a Soprano (1961)

A round of applause for the quite superb retrospective of Yoko Ono currently gracing Louisiana near Copenhagen, Denmark. The show, of course, is hardly needed as further proof of her power and importance, but nevertheless it adds new weight to her name, especially the excellent catalogue. The exhibition, curated by Ingrid Pfeiffer, originated in Frankfurt, and will head next year to Krems and Bilbao.



I was happy as I've not had the chance to see a big show like this before. All the classics were there, breathtaking in their purity and simplicity, certainly some of the greatest conceptual art ever made: Instruction Paintings (1961-2), Painting to Hammer a Nail (1961), Vocal Piece for a Soprano (1961, "Scream at the Sky", etc), Cut Piece (1964), Grapefruit (1964), Mend Piece (1966), Sky TV (1966), Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting (1966 -- the one where John Lennon met her), Air Dispensers (1971). Classics all. Air Dispensers were recreated, and it was amusing how nobody apart from me seemed to take the instruction to "get involved" seriously. I was delighted to leave with my two kroner plastic "air capsule by Yoko Ono" as a souvenir and piece to own.

The emphasis was on older works. There was a sense of stasis after the incredible dynamism of the 1960s. Her work was always much better when she avoided objects entirely. Still, Vertical Memory (1997) impresses, as an atypical piece of confession about distant, imperious or abusive men in her life (mostly doctors). It is rather like a work by Sophie Calle. Also powerful is We Are All Water (2006): 100 bottles of water of famous people on a shelf, which is a curiously ethno-centric sampling of names -- very Western, very white, and very New York-centric, a quite basic choice mostly of famous artists and cultural icons, like an undergrad liberal arts college course about civilisation or culture. I could only find two Japanese names in the list: Hideki Tojo (Japanese prime minister during World War Two) and Tatsumi Hijikata (avant garde founder of Butoh).



Outside in Louisiana's lovely gardens, a Peace Tree (1996) received all our dearest wishes (my message: いっしよに).



The show also offered a generous sampling of Ono's artistic collaborations with John Lennon, particularly video works. It is clear that she was the teacher and he was the pupil.



Yet the big auditorium room full of Ono's rock music records and videos only really underlined how absolutely lousy she was as a pop musician. Recruiting their son, Sean, for recent tours hasn't seemed to help much either. At the same time, her influence certainly inspired some of Lennon's greatest moments.



Not, admittedly, Unfinished Music No. 1 -- Two Virgins (1968), which I listened to for the first and probably last time at this exhibition. I guess you had to be there. But a year later they were making the transcendental John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band LP, a truly mindblowing recording that contains music more raw and honest than almost anything ever made before or since. My favourite here was a clip off Top of the Pops, about 1970, with Lennon and Ono in freshly cropped radical chic haircuts and fatigued denim, John pounding out an incredibly funky and visceral "Instant Karma", and a blindfolded Yoko holding up cardboard signs for "smile", "peace", "hope", "breathe" etc -- with her microphone apparently turned off.

http://www.eyeneer.com/video/rock/john-lennon/instant-karma-0

Anyway, hats off for Yoko Ono -- and after so many years of struggle and pain, all smiles now as the crowds and the adulation simply roll in.

Yoko Ono, "Half-a-Wind Show: A Retrospective", Louisiana, Copenhagen, 1 June - 15 September 2013.

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

Hiraku Suzuki and Takehito Koganazawa's "Panta Rhei" (Everything Flows) at Talion Gallery in Nippori, Tokyo was one of my highlights of 2012, so I was happy to hop on Eurostar this week to catch Suzuki's talk about his work at Daiwa Foundation in London. Although hugely nervous about his public appearance, Suzuki delivered a fascinating talk about his "alternative archeology" and the show "Excavated Reverberations" that has been running at Daiwa from 21 March to 10 May 2013 .

http://www.dajf.org.uk/exhibition/excavated-reverberations-by-hiraku-suzuki

Hiraku Suzuki (b.1978) is a hugely popular cult figure in Japan with a background in experimental music and street art performance. As a recognised contemporary artist -- one of a group of mid to late 70s born "after the gold rush" artists that I have written much about -- he has developed very fast in recent years, extending his visibility to several prestigious international residencies and shows. At Daiwa he put the accent in his talk on its roots in a fascination with archeology dating back to his childhood. Citing Indiana Jones, he recounted how he used to visit the vacant sites of Jomon excavations in Kanagawa, where he grew up, to dig up his own fragments -- of ancient pottery, perhaps, but also old foreign coins, bits of plastic, old rubbish. The process captured his imagination, as one underlining that the real world also contains other hidden layers, unknown things, dormant under the surface.



In a sense, this process has become his dominant modus operandi throughout his career, a process mostly applied to the act of drawing. Suzuki talked animatedly about his attempts to "expand the field" of drawing, with ordinary paper an excavation site for remembered signs and images drawn out of everyday observations and experiences. His central work thus became his hugely successful GENGA series, which appeared as a book published by Kawade Shobo in 2011. The title refers to a word play between the words "gengo" (language) and "ginga" (galaxy), with "genga" also meaning primal or original pictures. In this work, Suzuki draws his own lexicon of signs and hieroglyphs -- which take anything from two months to two seconds to execute -- which echo as much his own phenomenology of place (cities, landscapes, travels) as (pre-)historical archetypes and trans-cultural psychological subconscious. Hence drawing becomes a kind of "alternative archeology".

Suzuki illustrated this particularly effectively (I thought) via explaining how, for example, he used fragments of asphalt to create new sculptures in natural forms such as ammonites (reminding us that right up close, in microscopic detail, the glass and concrete artifice of the city is also composed of ancient natural minerals and crystals); or how he might take a small element from an everyday piece of signage in the street (a Japanese road "stop" sign), then re-cycle it as a new element of his lexicon. In other installations, he has taken familiar signs and re-projected them on gallery walls, so they take on almost mystic significance. In the book GENGA he chose about 1000 of these images as entire self contained language of line drawing. Behind him at the talk, these signs appeared as a constantly shifting set of animated drawings in a video made from the GENGA work. Also on display, were the spectacular "ammonite" spirals of silver hieroglyphics seen at Talion -- obvious commercial works that illustrate the power of Suzuki's formidable technical control with lettering.

As the new work at Daiwa shows, there has been a marked shift in Suzuki's work, under the influence of a recent residency at Chelsea art college. Suzuki has tried to dig deeper in his process by tracing natural patterns of light, as well as the shapes of antique objects, re-projected now in silver paint as (photographic) "negatives" or "reverberations" of these lines and shapes. It is primal art that evokes the first "negatives" of hands painted onto walls in Paleolithic caves. The process also evolved from his first experimentations with sand cast sculpture, producing aluminium plinths on which his ever-morphing "glyphs" appear. There is a purity and simplicity to this work -- and a clear personal evolution -- but it will be interesting to see if he keeps his audience as he moves further away from the street and performance art associations that made him such a hit at the 2010 Roppongi Crossing.

The event at Daiwa ended early, so I was also able to trundle across town on London's creaking underground, in time to catch the opening at the Japanese art focused ICN gallery in Shoreditch.



From 2-25 May 2013, it is showing Nagoya based conceptual artist Seijiro Niwa (b. 1967) who, in a series of striking installation and photographic works, explores the phenomenological conumdrum of how consciousness (i.e., vision) is both "in" and "outside" the world -- producing objects not seen by anyone ("Ankyo") and objects visualisable only by a blind artist ("Mesashi").

http://www.icn-global.com/gallery/exhibition/2013/seijiro_niwa.html

I chat with the artist and a friend about his education in Aichi with the legendary Professor Hitsuda (who taught Yoshitomo Nara, Hiroshi Sugito and many others). Niwa will make a public talk about his work at ICN on Saturday 4 May 2013 at 2pm.

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

One lonely Berlin hotel room. One weary artworld nomad, who has seen everything. 9pm, Sunday night. A knock at the door.


WELCOME TO SNACK HATOBA

It's Ohitori Snack Hatoba!! Two mamas, Ayumi and Ayaka, a mobile dinner and drinks, the smallest dining bar in the world, an intimate evening à trois recreating the atmosphere and conversation of a small back street refuge, and a three way one-time-only art "performance" that has left me wondering why all art cannot be this beautiful, slow, sincere, involving ... and utopian.

http://www.facebook.com/SnackHatoba

Snack Hatoba is an art project/series founded by Are You Meaning Company -- Ayumi Minemura, a social/relational artist -- and performance artist, Ayaka Okutsu, in Berlin in 2011. Both have been involved extra-curricular in restaurant and catering jobs while making their way on the ever-freewheeling Berlin Japanese art scene. They had the idea of combining their interest in social staging and self-aware performance by creating Snack Hatoba, an occasional dining bar, in which they recreate -- nostalgically and imaginatively (since, they say, neither of them has ever been in one) -- the atmosphere of an authentic, old style Japanese dining bar, presided over by two tolerant, discrete, and sympathetic "mamas".

I have written before about Ayaka Okutsu's sometimes wrenching and physical performance work before, in a round up of the Japanese Berlin scene. Okutsu is a UK educated artist who has been in Berlin about five years.

http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/hCHn9Xu6LofPQ7EAiJaN/

Ayumi Minemura, meanwhile, has been in Berlin a little longer, and is a graduate of Zokei University from its golden years in the late 1990s, a period of experimentation that produced among others Koki Tanaka. With Are You Meaning Company, her perfomance unit, she continues to pursue a gentle relational art practice, often creating events and locations that bring people together and provoke reflections on space, identity and communication -- whether between couples or between strangers. Recently she has moved more to video work, leaving behind the object-based works with which she started out.

For most of its existence, Snack Hatoba has been a public event, a bar set up at parties and openings. It has been a big success in the Berlin art scene, and progressively they have honed their stage and performances with clever decor, costumes and persona, and a genuine warmth of atmosophere that has welcomed allcomers to their calm "port" in a stormy world. Too successful, perhaps; they say, that it was becoming too much like a regular bar, where they just served people. The point, of course, is talk; up close and personal, something not so easy in parties, although it would be fun to get guests to act out different roles and personalities at the bar.


AYUMI MAMA AND AYAKA MAMA

So, from this year, Snack Hatoba also exists in a new, miniature, personalised version: Ohitori Snack Hatoba. The bar is portable, with the table, lights, decor, food and drinks packed into two rucksacks. The mamas will come to your room, and set up the bar for an evening.


MIZUKI ENDO, GANGSTA STYLE

Their first guest was curator, writer and rice farmer, Mizuki Endo, who dressed in the specially provided costume, looked suitably gangsta-style. The talk explores various domains of personal psychology and history, with a personally tailored menu of choices to guide the subjects. I was the second guest. I had helped with a jazz soundtrack, and was able to offer a dimly lit, anonymous (and lonely) blue hotel room as the perfect backdrop. We squeezed the bar into the corridor near the bathroom, got into our costumes. Food was served, and drinks poured. I made my first choice -- "the Jungle of Life" -- and the talk began ...


PERFORMANCE ...OR THERAPY?

... Three hours later, I was waving goodbye, bowing and thanking the mamas as they left to slip out of the hotel. They had just smiled at the receptionist when they came up, and they left equally un-noticed. The experience is personalised ... and personal. We found ourselves drifting from role play to something more honest and intimate. In fact, as we discuss later, the concept is somewhat caught between self-conscious performance and quite open therapy. The talk was three way, we laughed a lot, and I was as much a part of the work as the two mamas behind the bar. Maybe we discovered a thing or two. But more strikingly, there was the sense of surreality happening there and then in the banal reality of a hotel room. A delicate, trusting and very gentle balance, however unlikely and unreal. I felt completely honoured to be there. A moment of beauty in an ugly, generic place. Very special. A utopian moment in everyday life.


TIME TO GO HOME

The next morning the receptionists were all smiling. One of them came over to me at breakfast and asked (auf Deutsch) if I would please come and answer some questions at the reception after. Uh-oh. But no, it was nothing; I just needed to clear a payment on the first couple of nights. When I got upstairs, the last of the food containers and beer bottles were gone. It was if nothing had happened (or, as Ayaka joked later, I had just had a sad night in with a take-away and a six pack). I began to wonder myself if I had just dreamt everything.



ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

With all the Japanese art historical celebrations in New York surrounding the recent Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant Garde show at MoMA and the current Gutai show at the Guggenheim, it may now be time to start posing questions about the history of Japanese contemporary art after the watershed of the Osaka Expo of 1970. Meanwhile, the accompanying collection of primary documents for the MoMA show covers the period to 1989, also begging the the question: what about 1990 and after? Three of the editors - Michio Hayashi, Kenji Kajiya and Fumihiko Sumitomo - provide a short postscript of the period 1990-date, with some of the key elements; it is a skeleton for future reseach. My book from last year, Before and After Superflat: A Short History of Japanese Contemporary Art 1990-2011 also tries to provide the outline of a narrative that now should be explored in more detail.

All of which suggests the current Japan Foundation show in Seoul, Re: Quest - Japanese Contemporary Art since the 1970s may be an important moment in the definition of this new art historical agenda.

http://www.jpf.go.jp/e/culture/new/1302/02-02.html

It is one of the first Japanese retrospective shows to clearly pose its comprehensive selection from 1970 to the present day in art historical terms. All of the familiar names are included, but it is indeed interesting to read the concept statement by the head of the four-strong curatorial team, Tohru Matsumoto, who is the Deputy Director of the Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art.

In it, he traces the roots of the 1990s and 2000s in the 1970s and 80s, periods which reflected both immense sea changes in global contemporary art and an insistence on the particularity of conditions in a Japanese context. I quote:

"The 1970s deeply reflected the modernist ideals of Universalism. Its vocabulary and methods were applied to explore psychological and social domains in the 1980s. The following decade saw young artists to begin adopting a completely new perspective: they started viewing Japanese culture as if they were foreigners. Then from the 2000s it came to a new generation of artists who sought to present the daily life of a highly diverse and complex society in films and installations. Looking back, we realize just how far we've come.

Despite all these developments, only a few art exhibitions that aim to trace and survey historically the art works of the 1970s and '80s have been organized -- in Japan, at any rate -- in the last few decades. This may be another sign of globalism. Meanwhile, interest in contemporary art of Japan and other Asian countries -- that is to say the modern, or contemporary, art that developed in parallel to Western art -- is in fact growing ever stronger worldwide, partly due to the international success of artists such as Kusama Yayoi, Lee Ufan, and so on.

Is there such thing as Japanese contemporary art history--history in the sense of a sequence of events and transitions? If so, to what extent, if at all, is this local history connected to the world art map or the radical changes that have shaped art history in the rest of world? These are questions that have guided the development of this exhibition aimed at taking a fresh look at Japanese contemporary art from a historical perspective."

I detect the strong influence in some of this of one of the other curators of the show: Yukie Kamiya, the chief curator at Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, whose international experiences and career in Europe, North America and Asia in the 1990s and 2000s has made her an authoritative interpreter of the contemporary scene in Japan. The shows she has overseen at Hiroshima since she took over in 2007 have provided a systematic base for the historical evaluation of the most recent decades in Japan (she also influenced my narrative greatly).

Perhaps not easy to recommend that every one head over to Seoul after New York, but let's hope that some of the same energies that have so spectacularly galvanised the post-war Japanese art historical scene in the US will carry over into later periods in this history.

More information on Before and After Superflat: A Short History of Japanese Contemporary Art 1990-2011: http://www.adrianfavell.com/BASF.htm

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

Welcome to the house:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3bKwygQ4rA

I wish I could be in Tokyo for Art Fair Tokyo later this week, particularly to see Shai Ohayon's latest revolutionary act with his art gallery THE CONTAINER, that has been shaking up the Tokyo art scene since it opened its full metal doors in a hair salon in Naka Meguro in 2011. At AFT 2013 he will be presenting three separate bodies of work by Tokyo based Jack McLean (AKA "The Sad Clown"), Israeli-born Gil Yefman, and the young Japanese radical household collective Shibuhouse. At the opening/preview on Thursday 21 March (4-9pm), Shibuhouse will DJ and serve their party staple Japanese Curry, while Jack McLean does a subversive performance of his Sad Clown act with his Accumulated Sound of Idiocy team.

Since my interview with Shibuhouse during their HOUSE 100: VILLAGE residency at THE CONTAINER last summer, I have continued a long discussion with their master thinker Keita Saito about plans to put the house up for sale. That is, selling this extraordinary concept -- five years of this large group of young Japanese creatives living together in one house in the most expensive neighborhood in Japan, dividing everything 20/25 ways, living, laughing and partying non-stop -- as a bona fide art work. So here it is now on sale at Art Fair Tokyo: Owner Change (2013) -- the title of the piece -- with documents consisting of a property description, floor plans, photographs and property buying documents.

Here is what you will be buying:

http://shibuhouse.com/

Everything here can be yours. The "most lost of the lost generations", as Saito puts it. Shibu-ya now. A houseful of hands, minds and bodies that has literally turned the predicament and condition of a generation into a teeming, living, emergent, ever-changing artwork.

A bargain at 250,000,000 YEN, I'd say. In reality, priceless.


House Moving (2010), Courtesy of The Container, Tokyo (*)

(* Clothing extra. There may well be other legal complications, but buying a house is never straightforward. Good luck.)

My interview with Shibuhouse:
http://shibuhouse.com/1933

Previous blog about Shibuhouse:
http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/EmvNMksZWJI2DxbGRy4n/

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

Dear artworld friends,

Happy year of the snake! I have been compiling a contents and index for all my blogs since summer of 2009. This one is number 135. I will make the contents and index available soon -- it will be basically an encyclopaedia of Japanese contemporary art during this period.

Just a few words to wrap up 2012. Funny year, and I don't mean "ha ha". I suppose the "highlight" was waking up in Hakusan on August 5th to find I had 45000 hits overnight on my blog -- and the wrath of Yoshitomo Nara all over Twitter, not to mention the scorn of various other leading figures in the Tokyo art scene. I address the issues here: http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/9wL3d8W0aOtiDQqBlzxu/

Is the Tokyo artworld ready for real and honest critical writing rather than curatorial fluff? My book, Before and After Superflat, came out in April in English. Obviously, until it exists in Japanese, it will be hard to know... My inside ethnography of the Tokyo art tribe has also so far been largely undervalued and misread by a number of foreign reviewers. I take greater encouragement from the inspiration my viewpoint has brought to younger Japanese artists and critics, themselves frustrated by the complacent power hierarchy in Japan today -- with thanks especially to Tamura and Keita Saito, for their vocal support. With art leaders as smart as this in the next generation, there is not too much to worry about.

True highlights of the year, included...

Erina Matsui's brilliant "Sunrise" in Kurashiki: http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/DUyG5wZnN0EoiROLfr3k/

Toshihiko Mitsuya's "Structural Studies" in Berlin: http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/hCHn9Xu6LofPQ7EAiJaN/

The unstoppable antics of Chim↑Pom: http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/3H0v9ZNKRbCASgdUPcYo/

The emergence centre stage of SHIBUHOUSE, with great work by curator Shai Ohayon: http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/EmvNMksZWJI2DxbGRy4n/

"End of War in the 2010s" at eitoeiko: http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/mBqdPN7oChMlZXxsLbuR/

Some sublime "in the country" moments at Echigo-Tsumari (thanks to Julian and Miwa), especially at Hibino's asate village, and the BankArt refuge: http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/TEWFw2HMUSun3tgGxzqf/

& The artworld event of the year at Mizuma, the Matsukage Wedding Party: http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/VkK2Co3J9wrUH1iOBGZb/

There were also excellent shows I failed to write about, notably: Hiraku Suzuki and Takehiko Koganezawa's "Panta Rhei" at Talion Gallery; Hiroshi Fuji and Peter Bellars at 3331 during the summer; Rinko Kawauchi at SYABI; Satoru Aoyama's "Man Machine" at Mizuma; Midori Mitamura in Tokyo and Berlin; Mai Miyake in London; the group show and catalogue "Meguro Addresses"; and Tadashi Kawamata at BankArt (which I missed, aarrgghh!!).

And four great shows, I was able to review, bookended the year:

Hideki Nakazawa at The Container: http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/rf1sUdiA60aVLWRvjcZM/
Makoto Aida at MAM: http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/AGuYBOno0K8hZbyvNimg/
Lieko Shiga at Sendai Mediatheque: http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/hlIApXvyYV9tP8Oi7Efu/
Tadasu Takamine at Mito: http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/KBipvdVRgYQwFJWea3xA/

See you in 2013!

as ever, yours truly
adrian

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

I hesitate before adding one more piece to the growing stack of writings about contemporary art in Japan after the earthquake. While it is inevitable that the events of March 2011 will end up being a brutal punctuation mark in all histories of Japan of this time, it is a little depressing how the topic has already become such an academic industry, including numerous articles and papers on "new" art and artists since the disaster(s).

It is a little too easy as a byline. It is not that Japanese contemporary art suddenly got interesting after the tsunami or nuclear meltdown. It is more wise to say that everything that was most significant and interesting in Japanese contemporary art from the late 1990s through the 2000s -- Shingo Yamano or Fram Kitagawa's experimentations with public art; the community/social art investments of Yukinori Yanagi, Tsuyoshi Ozawa, Masato Nakamura, or Yutaka Sone; the emergence of new young political voices in the shape of Chim ↑ Pom or shibuhouse -- was already happening well before 2011. The disaster and the change in environment in Japan perhaps made it more visible, more obviously the "true" story of Japanese art since 2000 after the demise of neopop and "Cool Japan". But framing everything in terms of the disasters threatens to smother the art before and after the events.


HOME-FOR-ALL, VENICE ARCHITECTURE BIENNALE 2012

There are perhaps important practical distinctions to be drawn here between art and architecture in relation to the disasters. Contemporary Japanese architecture was also pioneering a new era well before March 2011, but we should not be surprised that the same architects exploring new ideas about sustainability and post-growth development, or new relations between buildings and natural environments, quickly got to work in the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake. They saw it as very urgent to engage in a struggle to advance progressive ideas in the face of urban planners and public bureaucrats who just wanted to start again by repeating all the mistakes of the past. Architects such as Toyo Ito have led the way in reflecting upon how the towns and buildings washed away that March might need to be different in future.


TOYO ITO

When I went to Venice for the 2012 Architecture Biennale, I spent nearly half the first day there poring over the designs and documentation of Toyo Ito's "Home-for All" in the Japanese pavilion.

http://www.jpf.go.jp/e/about/press/dl/0760.pdf

This profound, warm and humanistic reflection on the purpose of architecture in the 21st century was a deserved winner of the Golden Lion, even if it was certainly helped by a sympathy vote for Japan. "Home-for-All" posed the stark question: what relevance or purpose can architecture have in the face of natural disasters such as the Tohoku earthequake, tsunami and nuclear disaster at Fukushima, which devastated numerous cities in the north of Japan in March 2011? In collaboration with three of Japan's rising young architectural stars -- Akihisa Hirata, Sou Fujimoto and Kimiko Inui -- the resultant installation about the new buildings they imagined for the flattened city of Rikuzentakata, meditated on how these elite, theory-driven architects struggled first with the project but then found a purpose for themselves through simple, everyday interaction with the homeless locals dealing with catastophe in their lives.


FOUR ARCHITECTS TALKING

In accompanying reflections, Ito, his young associates, and particularly the local-born photographer, Naoya Hatakeyama, posed painful questions about the pretentions of modernism in art and architecture in the face of a brute "reality" that smashes lives, dwarfs and threatens to render meaningless any and every creative endeavour. Ito's organic designs for buildings to help rebuild the flattened city of Sanriku, also graced the post-apocalyptic show News From Nowhere by Korean artists Moon Kyungwon and Jeon Joonho, one of the big highlights at last year's Documenta.

http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/NvT2gu5dwR10A4j6Xxkr/

These straight-up questions can, of course, be posed even more starkly about contemporary art, which cannot even offer to "build a home" for people whose livelihood has been destroyed. The potential frivolity and self-indulgence of art was immediately on trial. Artists could put their works up for auction sale; they could paint overblown allegories; or they could struggle to adapt their methodologies to the new times. Some such as Tsuyoshi Ozawa and Ichiro Endo have found sparkling new meaning for their characteristic creative processes in these situations (blog from June 2011).

http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/0NukOMi9jWBVv8pXLKRe

The recent group show, Artists and the Disaster - Documentation in Progress at Mito Tower brought together some of the most interesting responses.

http://arttowermito.or.jp/gallery_en/gallery02.html?id=331

Nearly two years on, we may now have a reasonable sense of which artists managed to say the most. I have recently written about Tadasu Takamine's subtle but damning reflection on the social fallout of the Fukushima disaster.

http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/KBipvdVRgYQwFJWea3xA/

And there is little doubt in my mind that critics and historians will recognise one of the most profound exhibitions of this strange era -- by turns disturbing and moving -- as Lieko Shiga's Rasen Kaigan, the young photographer's new community art work that was unveiled in its definitive version from November to January at the Sendai Mediatheque. This work will, for obvious reasons, be indelibly associated with the tsunami. But it is no simple post-disaster art.



For images and information:

http://www.liekoshiga.com/main.html

http://www.art-it.asia/u/admin_expht/wWRLD9b7tzcOypQGjBdA

For sure, there is an incredible story here. As Shiga foregounds the story in her accompanying documentation, and it has been written about eloquently by others (*), I can be brief here. After creating some of her previous series Canary while on a residency in Sendai, in 2008 Shiga decided that she wanted to delve deeper in to the social and historical context of Tohoku. A native of Aichi, she found these northern provinces cold and mysterious. She planned a big questionnaire survey in which she would try to explore the hidden stories and psychic landscape -- the darkness and light -- of this world, where she felt an alien. While exploring one day the barren coastline near Sendai airport, she found a pine forest in the flatlands near the coast, and nearby a small, isolated settlement, called Kitakama. She literally wandered into this village, having decided in a moment's "coup de coeur" that it was here that she must live and work. The village was mostly old people, a population of about 320. After asking around, and getting various permissions, she was able to agree with them that she should become the local village photographer, using as her atelier a mobile home she installed in a clearing near the sea. For the next three years she lived among these people, making herself useful; photographing families and events, documenting everyday lives, and eventually also taking on the service of making the last funeral photographs for the old people.



As she changed from being an alien to being a villager, Shiga was able to develop her ideas for a new series of works. The results are kind of psychogeography of the hidden stories and places of this extraordinary yet ordinary Japanese location. Shiga essential stages her photographs as dramas; playing around with the people, natural environment, or everyday objects, she follows a process will lead her to a photo as which the ordinary becomes very strange; building up to this moment, she is able to exteriorise and objectify something that is more like a fragment of a dream or nightmare in her own mind. The photos are huge blow up prints, that she stands on easels: portraits, objects and landscapes that are part of some unknown story. They use dramatic colour, and overwhelming contrasts of darkness and light; there is often something alarming or uncanny in them; simple light, filter and staging effects are used to create drama from simple mechanical means; it is a kind of primitive personalised cinematography.

At Sendai, about two hundred photos were arranged in a swirling pattern, inviting you to wander as you wished, according to a map that laid out a kind of inner psychic terrain of zones. The Ito connection is that all this has taken place in his masterpiece building; the 5th floor of the sublime Sendai Mediatheque. It is not an easy place for an exhibition: a glass house with huge open plan floors and trunks like metal bamboo running through each floor from ground to roof. The emphasis is on flow, visibility, openness, communication; the opposite of mystery or the occult. Shiga's solution was to leave out all display walls, and not even to block off the backroom office and workshop. This allowed the floor to be flooded in light during daytime from all sides; the lightness outside makes the forest of photos feel like pockets of darkness; it is a little claustrophobic, and the natural response seems to be to wander intellectually, and try to make sense of zones, locations and spacings. As it is early afternoon when I arrive, Lieko tells me I must must stay until dark, when the Christmas lights will be on in the boulevard, and the room will become a haven of light against the dark outside. She is right; the change in atmosophere is amazing; suddenly the room becomes warm, as the photos become dramatic sources of light; luminosity seeming to come out of each one, you become fixated on one image after another; but it is also now that their occult mystery starts to make itself felt.



The swirling pattern is a maze with no set path, but it inevitably draws you to the centre. Here are the iei; photographs of the deceased, who stare out at you through sightless eyes. Around them are mystery stories, enacted with old people; in one, for example, a couple walking through a discoloured pond in mist, looking back one last time at the viewer. In other zones, there are landscapes of beaches, or strange nightime shots of the forest; a whole cluster of stones are painted white at night; there are even black photographs in which almost nothing can be seen. There is almost nothing specific to the location, or which shows what subsequently happened to it. Maybe the map is the author's mind; something like Haruki Murakami's psychic landscape in Hard Boiled Wonderland. It is uncanny, spooky even. As look from one image to another; from strange portrait to white stones, you start to see faces -- ghosts -- everywhere. We are not standing in a forest of photoboards. We are standing in a graveyard.

It is hard to equate the apparent morbidity of the work -- which occasionally dips into a kind of David Lynch gothic -- with the ever laughing, bubbly Lieko, who talks excitedly about every aspect of the production process of the photos and her life in the village with me. With Rasen Kaigan she has become a writer too; the November show was prefaced in the Spring by a series of ten lectures, now published, where she tells the whole story of the village and how she came to be there. There is also talk of a novel based on her experiences.

The new work is a new stage in her life long exploration of how photography can help her overcome the sense of irreality in the world she has had since she was young; help her feel that her body and life in the world are real, that there is connection and community with others. Photography saved her from the extremities of self-inflicted pain or exertion she would use to physically prove that she was real. Her new exhibition is wrapped in clouds of poetry and philosophical thoughts. These parts of the communication are difficult and subtle; we have a long conversation in which Lieko explains how the title of the show, and its kanji, do not actually mean "spiral coast" (its translation) in any simple way. The visuals will, I think, continue to be her most immediate strong point; the cinematographic talent she has for drama, the ability to arrest impossible and bizarre imagery out of live effects and moments of intuition that allow no digital trickery.

That's her style, but what interests me most is her method. This is, for me artwork almost as pure ethnography. I am an ethnographer; my book Before and After Superflat about the Japanese artworld is a book about the stories of a tribe, written by an alien observer. Shiga has used ethnography to take her to a deeper truth in an everyday Japanese social world where she also felt an alien. She found a location, made an entrance; used tools of surveying, mapping, interviewing and archiving; she established a role for herself as a participant observer, building trust, relations, and meaningful connections. She became an insider in the village while remaining outside: some of her lectures are about the self-reflexive process of working out what exactly she was doing there; others describe the complicated ethics of this work, the way she learned about things she was not allowed to see or touch. The work is also ethnographic in the way she herself also undergoes change and constitutive self-transformation as she becomes a villager. Like any good ethnographer, she felt impelled to show her work back to those she had made her subjects; she has incorporated the views of the villagers, and the lecture series became like a long crit session in which the villagers made suggestions to "even up the balance". At this "open studio", they made a god shrine to protect everyone involved. Lieko says she wanted to get the work out of herself, distance it more this way. What is perhaps surprsing is how much the villagers so willingly become part of her psychic explorations; they too have used the photography to face up to hidden and disturbing mysteries within.

Ethnographers often try to investigate the worlds of others by asking people how they do something not why. Sometimes it is difficult to explain why we might be doing something; but we show someone how we do it easily, naturally. Shiga desribes this as the "world before the why society"; she escaped the need for scientific objectivity by becoming part of the "how" of the village. It took, literally, years. Rasen Kaigan is the pay off. Her method accessed what we might call the soul of Tokoku, as well perhaps as her own; her life in the village was her only way to make sense of her life and next steps as a photographer.

Ito's immaculate silver and white tower is perhaps an oxymoronic place for such dark and primal art. Yet buildings have do much more than stun us with their beauty, or illustrate the latest fashionable idea in architectural theory. They have to provide everyday functions, be safe and confortable environments, and sometimes withstand disastrous shocks. Sendai Mediatheque, despite literally being a glasshouse, apparently rode through the 9.0 magnitude earthquake at 2.46pm on March 11th 2013, providing safety and haven for those inside. A much viewed internet video takes us back there to that terrible moment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53JEfrBD-kg

A few minutes later, a terrifying wave rolled over large parts of the Tohoku coastline, wiping out numerous towns and villages, including the scruffy disconnected settlement of Kitakama near Sendai Airport and its 60 or so houses. Shiga's atelier was one of many sites washed away, although fortunately she was away from the area at the time. What's left now of Kitakama?, I ask Lieko.

It's mostly just sand, she says. Some of the old shrine is visible; most people have moved any remains away from the cemetery. There are a few remains of buildings. Some people have been dumping trash there, or using it as an improvised car park for the airport. Everything Kitakama was is gone forever.

How many perished on that terrible day is a difficult question. Old people passed away before March 11, and others since, Lieko says. Everyone is mortal. Her show is not "about " the tsunami. All of these stories she found were there anyway. She lost her own personal possessions, but her photos were safe in an archive in Tokyo. After the disaster, her story merged in to that of the community; she went to back to the village to help with the clear up, and set about trying to find and restore the archive that she had been making at the community centre. For many of the villages it had become a repository of their own memories. Her own photographic records of the village life, meetings and festivals had also been at the community centre. Miraculously, she found one volume nearby in the sand; another some way down the canal amonst some rubbish. She was able to restore and scan these works. A small documentary exhibition at Kunst Werke Berlin in August 2011 documented this dramatic return to the village, and her search for the remains of the atelier in the pine forest.

At Sendai, there are the lectures and there will be a catalogue; but Shiga's other "work" from the show is not, formally, art: it is a yearbook of a village that is no more. A book of life, and a book of others, in which Lieko is only the (anonymous) village photographer taking ordinary photogaphs. There are meetings and celebrations; there are a lot of old people talking and drinking, a few of happy children in festival costumes; some tender shots of the pine forests and locality around. It is banal; colourful yet dreary everyday routine life in small town Japan. I feel this may even be the greatest work Shiga made in Kitakama, although maybe that is the sociologist in me speaking, not the art writer.



Lieko Shiga is featured in Artist File 2013 at NACT, Tokyo, 23 January - 1 April 2013.

(*) See also Aveek Sen in ART-iT: http://www.art-it.asia/u/admin_ed_columns_e/aF2GjI3BPgw0vM15pDXo/?lang=en
I also recommend Ashley Rawlings' interview for Tokyo Art Beat from 2008: http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/2008/10/ghosts-in-the-lens.html

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

Art Forum has just published online my review of "Tadasu Takamine's Cool Japan" one of three huge highlghts from my recent visit to Japan (the others being Makoto Aida at MAM and Lieko Shiga's "Rasen Kaigan" at Sendai Mediatheque, which I will write about shortly...)

http://artforum.com/picks/section=world#picks38656

300 words is tough for a review, so as always here is the longer original version.
Please enjoy!

"Tadasu Takamine's Cool Japan"
Art Tower Mito
1-6-8 Goken-cho, Mito-shi, Ibaraki 310-0063 JAPAN
Dec 22 - Feb 17

Observers of Japanese contemporary art often complain about its apparent lack of political content, particularly in relation to the activist art scenes in other Asian countries. The combined disasters of March 2011 have, however, inspired a new engagement amongst both younger and established artists that reflect a growing political discomfort in Japan.

"Tadasu Takamine's Cool Japan" is perhaps the best realised reflection yet on the consequences of the catastrophic nuclear meltdown at Fukushima. Takamine is a veteran of the 1980s agit-prop performance group Dumb Type, whose theatrical pieces challenged dominant Japanese stereotypes, social exclusions, and nationalist self-conceptions. Here, he vigorously seizes the stage at Mito -- a provincial town to the north east of Tokyo that may still be seriously affected by radiation from the disaster -- to propose a thoroughgoing critique of what he calls the "Japanese syndrome". Parodying the asinine self-branding of Japan launched by the government in the 2000s -- which helped take artists Takashi Murakami and Yoshitomo Nara to worldwide fame -- Takamine's installations form a sequence of cumulative rooms that first celebrate, then question, then tear apart national platitudes. His point is that the everyday slogans, images and conversational habits that Japanese use to reinforce social solidarity and stocism in the face of adversity, also unconsciously reinforce repressive moralities and political passivity. In one room, spinning mirror strips in a flashlit darkness spell out hyogo -- everyday expressions of encouragement learned in school by all Japanese that reproduce unthinking political identity. In the next, they are contrasted with posters made out of the babble of anonymous internet communications, in which ordinary Japanese have found an outlet for similarly thoughtless xenophobia or commercial branding. Prefaced by these warnings, we are then taken into the central room of the show, in which on three video screens young associates of the artist act out dialogues that Takamine has gathered through real life discussions with shop and café owners in different parts of Japan since March 2011, including a local residency in Mito last year. Emphasising the subtlety of typically "Japanese" conversational habits and physical interactions, we watch with growing alarm as the sketches reveal how ordinary Japanese have been able to distance themselves from victims, and deny to themselves and their customers the menace of radioactive food products, while accepting the benevolence and safety of a power source produced with great danger in earthquake prone locations. The quiet suppression is contrasted bitterly with voices and singing from the last room, recorded at some of the recent anti-nuclear demonstrations in Tokyo.

The whole show thus visualises a quiet but determined anger. Sculptural casts of ordinary Jaanese stand soberly in each room observing precedings. Walls of newspaper cuttings demonstrate how legal action against nuclear construction has been repeatedly shot down in the courts. And, in a long and sober penultimate room, with a mausoleum like ambiance, the display documents the nearly 2000 nuclear tests made worldwide since 1945; a historical timelime which cradles a long series of family photos of the typical Japanese "nuclear family". The political is personal: near the exit door, we realise this is Takamine's own family history, as it ends in a photo from one of his earlier celebrated works, the photo series about his marriage to a Korean woman. Here, he echoes social theorist Shunya Yoshima's recent denuciation of the "umbrella" of post-war "nuclear sunshine" that has powered the capitalist Japanese dream, while cementing its compliance in the shadow of American domination.

Takamine handles heavy material with playfulness, conscious of the power of both space and interpersonal interaction. Congratulations are owed too to curator Mizuki Takahashi -- one of the most significant rising names in Japan -- who stages a seductive fairground atmosphere; drawing us ever deeper into entrapment as we push through forests of plastic barrier tape to encounter, each new, surprising room. The real Japan we discover is far from "cool", but the reassertion of politics in art is a refreshing and challenging mix. This show also re-iterates the reputation Mito once had as the leading site of avant garde work in Japan, something which -- along with a visit to architect Arata Isozaki's masterpiece design -- makes it well worth the 90 minute trek by train north of the capital.

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

Bijutsu Techo today publishes its Jan 2013 special edition on Makoto Aida. I am delighted that it includes a feature article I wrote, my second essay on the Mizuma artist currently enjoying his time on the 53rd floor of the Mori Tower. I am pleased to publish here the English original of the translation. The title of course comes from The Smiths.

Amazingly, my original blog on Aida, written in from Jan 2010, is still picking up around 1500 hits a month: there is a school of Aida out there for sure. I include a link to my original text at the bottom of the new essay. As always, please enjoy!


Aida Makoto: The World Won't Listen?


Aida Makoto's difficult international career poses the question of whether any contemporary Japanese artist can pass into the Japanese pantheon of world class artists without the affirmation of gaisen kouen: the triumphant "return performance" after success and recognition abroad. In one way or another, with minor variation, it's the same story for Ono Yoko, Kusama Yayoi, Kawara On, Sugimoto Hiroshi, Morimura Yasumasa, Mori Mariko, Yanagi Miwa, or Nara Yoshitomo. All grew bigger via international affirmation. Even the recognisably home grown genius of Gutai or Hi Red Centre, has required sanctification by international museums, curators and academics before it was taken truly seriously in Japan. It was a route to stardom systematised, of course, by Murakami Takashi in his frankly cynical Art Entrepreneurship Theory.

Is Japan able to choose its own heroes? Aida is, uniquely perhaps, a recent Japanese contemporary artist of world stature whose fame lies solely in processes internal to the nation. During the 1990s and 2000s his reputation has risen steadily in Japan. It has been a long wait for a big retrospective, and the corporate sponsors are still too uncomfortable to back his vision, but there is little doubt in the minds of leading art writers and curators that he is an important artist of the post-war period, and perhaps the greatest artist (of several) to emerge during the 1990s. But internationally there is very little to say about Aida's career. He has had a few small shows here and there in the US and Europe; some respectable academic attention among specialist Japanese studies scholars; and made a minor splash as a manga artist (for Mutant Hanako) in France. He had, essentially, a miserable time -- as an artist -- during his fated stay in New York on the ACC program in 2000. Your Pronunciation is Wrong! (2000), the performance of Aida protesting against the English language in the streets of New York with his ex-pat Japanese friends, is funny but also a little sad. His works are frequently anthologised in cultural studies books about Japan, but there is practically no place for Aida in any of the serious mainstream global curatorial discourse.



His biggest moment was the showing in 2003 of A Picture of an Air Raid on New York City at the Whitney show The American Effect about anti-Americanism, which created a minor controversy, as well as some discomfort for the curator, Lawrence Rinder. New Yorkers, two years after 9/11, were just a little too sensitive about the idea of an angry Japanese painting glorifying an imaginary bombing of the Manhattan skyline; though few seemed to note that the importance of the work really lay in its uncanny date of production (1995-6). Aida's ironic nationalism, both stylistically and thematically, is easily lost on self-styled "cosmopolitan" Western audiences unless they have a very high degree of specialisation in Japanese history and culture. It is also often thought his over-the-line representations of Japanese male fantasies and "otaku" obsessions are a little too weird.

We need to examine these assumptions a little. Aida is a conceptual artist and his entire career has been a long dialogue with international conceptualism as much as his Japanese sources. In spanning all kinds of media -- with technical brilliance -- from nihonga and oil painting to video, performance and outrageous installations, as well as his effects as a teacher and art intellectual, he is the consummate all-rounder contemporary artist. Can it all be a fault of Japanese provincialism that the world won't listen? Are there aspects of his work too far behind or too far ahead of global fashions?

It is worth remembering that the Young British Artists (YBAs) were every bit as nation-specific as the young Geidai artists of the 1990s (which included Aida, his Showa 40 nen kai partner, Ozawa Tsuyoshi, as well as Murakami, Nakamura Masato and Sone Yutaka). The two art movements moved in parallel, producing two global superstar artist-curators very similar in the roles they occupied, if not their style -- Murakami and Hirst -- as well as equally vibrant scenes.

Aida is often compared to the Chapman Brothers, who used shock tactics, raucous humour and historical referencing in a similar way. When Dinos and Jake were paired with Aida at Lonely Planet at Mito by curator Kubota Kenji in 2004, not surprisingly, they all got on like a house on fire. Unlike Aida, though, the Chapmans grace the Saatchi and Pinault collections. But is Aida's War Picture Returns series (1995-9) any more shocking or confrontational than the Chapmans' dioramas of Nazi monstrosities in Hell (2000/2008)? Or are Aida's Edible Artificial Girls (1999-2001), his very Japanese solution to future food shortages, more toxic to good parental taste than the Chapmans' mannequins of young children with genitalia on their faces in Tragic Anatomies (1996)? If it were all a matter of taste, Aida's caustic irony should have easily found a smart and radical left field audience by now in the West, alongside Gilbert and George and Maurizio Cattelan.



It must be more a question of understanding. Simple touristic knowledge of Japan never includes awareness of its raucous popular humour: the stand-up comic slapstick and older traditions of warai that Aida mines. Still, the immense humour of his A Video of a Man Calling Himself Bin Laden Staying in Japan (2005) does not require much more than subtitles; nor, really does the acute social pathos of his frequent reflections on homelessness. The parts of Aida that have been refined, energised and further developed by the art group Chim ↑ Pom -- whom he has influenced decisively -- can easily make sense internationally.

On the other hand, there is a perverseness in Aida regarding translation which ensures a certain distance. His notorious refusal to communicate in English reached a peak during the Yokohama Festival in 2001, when he provided a dictionary in the exhibition in case foreigners needed help. Meanwhile, when his pornographic wartime manga, Mutant Hanako -- so powerful and disturbing on many levels to Japanese viewers -- was shown in San Francisco in 1995, it was translated with a comically rough soundtrack by actors. This complex gambit pointed to a real problem in the very concept of global art, which Aida has consistently highlighted in his work: translation is not the artist's responsibility.



It matters when we look at early work like Azemichi (A Path Between Rice Fields (1991) to know that it is not just a near-obscene piece of schoolgirl fetishism, as well as a peaceful evocation of satoyama in a Japanese rural landscape. We need to know it is a quotation of the nihonga classic by Higashiyama Kaii (1950) which symbolised the way forward for Japanese art against Western (i.e. American) hegemony in the post-war period. His recent video work, Art and Philosophy II, shown to great effect at the Showa 40 nen kai show in Düsseldorf in 2011, further comments on the dilemma with razor sharp sarcasm.

In a closed room, on three simultaneous video screens, Aida performs, in costume, a live painting on glass by three “typical” German, French and English artists. As they paint, a typical “national” style work appears, while each of Aida’s characters mouth philosophical and art theoretical statements in the appropriate language -- each with a terrible Japanese accent. The German artist, intense and erratic, seemed to be some kind of Anselm Kiefer figure, filling the screen with heavy and lumpy brown paint. The French artist, romantic and fey, dabs impressionistically at the screen, while smoking a Gaulloise. The Anglo-American “English” artist, meanwhile, starts out as an Oxbridge gentleman quoting Wittgenstein and painting geometric abstractions. By the end he has turned into an angry postmodern theorist, painting obscenities, and we are thinking of Damien Hirst.

There is a message here for young Japanese art students. Just look how meaningless all those Western art theory references have become. Why are you reading Hal Foster et al and their empty philosophy? Perhaps a better association for Aida among the YBAs would be Tracey Emin; difficult, perverse, emotional, funny, impenetrably British. At least Aida gets to look a little like her in his transvestite photographic work, Self Portrait: A Girl of Sea Breezes (1989).



The reference in the video work, as in many others, is to Kant: the 18th century Prussian philosopher who laid out for all time the universal sources of beauty in human judgement. The 20th century, starting with Freud and Nietzsche, ending with Foucault and Said, was supposed to have made this kind of naïve belief in the transcendental sublime impossible. Yet global curators marched all over the planet during the 1990s and 2000s, armed with their clever post-colonial theories, but in practice assuming a facile universalism, in which they could recognise, select and put value on works in every country, after a just few interviews with key art world figures. They showed how Empire could miraculously be married with Multitude to make one great global art Commonwealth: here today, tomorrow China, the day after tomorrow, India, and the day after that, Switzerland. Thankfully, Aida has never been understood by these curators; he has not been colonised. He is not so much a nationalist, as obdurately resistant to such global processing. He always speaks of this as a kind of self-defeating mechanism: the last laugh of an apathetic continent; the monument for nothing.

The 135 days at the Mori Art Museum may not make a huge difference to his international reputation. The foreign visitors will come in and be amused, or puzzled; they might recoil in distaste. But, for once, Mori Art Museum has put on a show that has not required benediction from New York, Berlin or London. And, meanwhile the world is changing. The global era of the 1990s and 2000s is over; nations and their perverse, peculiar cultures and misunderstandings will just not go away. Aida paid little attention to the fashions of the global era, and so now stands as a much better guide to what has happened in and to Japan since 1990. We can now see his work clearly. He is perhaps Japan's first great post-global artist.



My essay (Jan 2010): "When Will Aida Be Famous?"
http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/iSt4DGaQ1C9xv5rgpHuB/

Adrian Favell is Professor of Sociology at Sciences Po, Paris, and is the author of Before and After Superflat: A Short History of Japanese Contemporary Art 1990-2011.

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com

Just a few days left in Tokyo to see some amazing art works from the 1990s: Hideki Nakazawa's small retrospective, "Systems and Methods in Hidden Functions" at The Container in Naka Meguro.

Nakazawa, the artist, has been an influential but singular presence in Tokyo art world for more than two decades. He first emerged as a talented graphic artist in the context of the pulsating 1980s Tokyo scene in graphic arts. By 1990 he was also established as an art writer for Bijutsu Techo on global conceptual trends. In the early 1990s he entered an alliance with some of the brilliant young Geidai artists about to change Japanese art forever; his ideas contributed to the effervescence of the group, notably the Hi Red Centre homage/parody Small Village Centre, the ad hoc performance group which united Nakazawa with Ozawa (Tsuyoshi), Murakami (Takashi) and Nakamura (Masato). Long before the days of Illustrator and Photoshop, he embraced the possibilities of computer technology in contemporary art, transposing his graphic art into a new on-screen generated genre that was discussed as Baka CG (Silly Comuter Graphics)(*1). In a brave new world in which artists could no longer technologically compete with the immaculate skills of graphic designers, the conceptualism of his heta uma (clumsy or low skill art) had to be answer (at least until the success of Yoshitomo Nara made a more expressivist version of heta uma credible again).


ESSAY ON INVISIBLE FUNCTIONS DURING INSTALLATION

The central piece which fills Shai Ohayon's industrial alternative white cube -- a tin can gallery located inside a hipster hair salon -- is from this earlier period in Nakazawa's work: "Essay on Invisible Functions" from 1996. It is, extraordinarily, a cartoon machine, fronted by what looks like a steam age vintage personal computer. For years it was installed at the ARTPIA, Nadiya Park in Nagoya; the last couple of years it has been languishing in a children's museum in Sasayama; a new lick of paint, and a bit of rewiring, and Nakazawa's 3D vision has been reborn again as a gloriously funny and absurdist art work. Pressing the choice of words on the computer screen causes -- by some "invisble function" that we never know -- classic Nakazawa-style Baka CG images to pop up on the screen. Silly voices also accompany the words or expressions. You are composing a poem on screen, except there is also a degree of unpredictability. Words are mostly correlated with images and colours, but sometimes random things splash on to the screen. Effectively you create your own digital painting, before it gets wiped clear for the next visitor.




SCREEN SHOTS FROM ESSAY ON INVISIBLE FUNCTIONS

In his notes for the show, curator Shai Ohayon argues: "It may look like a retro video game, but Nakazawa's associative use of language examines the conceptual, functional, and pictorial interrelationships of text and image as explored in the most recent critical theory". There is an eloquent thread here to some of the most important long term international trends in conceptual art.

I met with Nakazawa during the summer to discuss the show he was planning. After a delicious teishoku lunch in one of my favourite small places near Yotsuya, Nakazawa insisted on taking me for coffee at an old school kissaten nearby for further discussion. I hypothesised that his deliberately clumsy engagement with these now dated technological forms was a kind of intentionally anachronistic appropriation of fast moving techniques and possibilities that artists inevitably cannot stay abreast of. But Nakazawa resisted my interpretation, insisting that the antiquity of the technology or some kind of nostalgia was not the point; a new version of the machine could in theory be made with newer technology. "Essay in Invisible Functions" was, in other words, a work of conceptual method not form; a meditation on the invisibility of the relation between signifier and signified, and one which heralded his sharp turn towards a more ascetic, systematic practice from 1997 on.

Soon after the word machine was produced, Nakazawa's art took a new direction: towards the "Methodicism" he would formalise as a manifesto in 2000. From 1997, Ohayon has thus selected two of Nakazawa's original methodicist paintings, "Letter Coordinates Type Painting", Nos. 1 & 2. These are glowing light boxes, displaying a grid into which kanji and kana have been placed in systematic fashion. The kanji can be read, while the kana are upside down; in No.1, for example, the kanji have been selected according to a standardised linguistic ordering related to the basic Chinese elements. But meaning or form is not the point; they are rather exercises in a particular method replacing the usual pixel-like "data" of colour, so that we must indeed re-imagine these works as paintings; albeit "pathologies", as Nakazawa calls them, in which the neutral perfection of Chinese character codes taken from the Japanese Industrial Standard, has replaced the emotional "pleasure" caused by colours.


LETTER COORDINATES TYPE PAINTING NO.1

The "Letter Coordinates" works are nonetheless beautiful works, that look stunning in the Naka Meguro space. They were once displayed with works by the celebrated Chinese/New York artist Xu Bing, but the concept is quite different. Nakazawa invites us rather to view painting as a "structured arrangement of data", rejecting "the sensualist immersion in pleasure that exploits the lack of foundations in the arts". By introducing his own alternate method, he places himself at the moment of the formation of a "new genre." Here I quote from an early essay by Akira Tatehata on Nakazawa, which succinctly captures the intellectual drive of his work.

Nakazawa trained as a doctor and retains his boffin-like aura. In person, though, he is warm and funny, as well as inspirational. Parts of my book Before and After Superflat would have been impossible without his advice and encouragement; his own Contemporary Art History: Japan (from 2008) was a crucial reference for me, in its eloquent attempt to situate the 1990s in the longer history of Japanese modern art and its always difficult relationship with global trends. We must thank Shai Ohayon for reminding us of these semi-forgotten treasures from that amazing period in Japanese contemporary art. And I urge everyone to get down to the quiet streets of Naka Meguro and see Nakazawa's classic works before they get unplugged again.

Notes

*1. Nakazawa's story about the origin of the idea is that the phrase "Baka CG" was first coined and introduced by artist Gabin Ito in BT at the end of the 1980s. BT editors Kiyoshi Kusumi and Kenichi Arai (a.k.a. Noi Sawaragi) shouted "Baka CG!!" when they first saw photos of Nakazawa's CG works in January 1990. Nakazawa adopted and advocated the term, and over time became the artist most associated with the idea.


BAKA CG

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com