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