adrianfavell

[adrianfavell]

BOOK REVIEW: David Elliott, Art and Trousers: Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Asian Art

Who wears the trousers in contemporary art? As this beautifully produced collection of thirty-two essays demonstrates — design is handled by the top drawer UK designer, Jonathan Barnbrook, known for his stunning art book work with Damien Hirst — in the 1990s and 2000s, it was undoubtedly the roving global curator. The optimistic, expansive post-1989 era, which now seems so distant in the era of COVID and global lockdown, was a golden age of curation that enabled a select few, energetic, self-made artworld individuals to literally roam the planet, selecting artists and making art history, with sweeping new narratives and frameworks of popular and elite culture. Knitting together high art theory, an eye for radicalism, and a canny sense of commercial taste in a neoliberal era, they pieced together stunning portfolio careers with long CVs listing directorships of major city museums, the captaining of biennales and dozens of complex international exhibitions.

David Elliott, in this sense, is surely one of the emblematic figures of the era, and, as this book underlines, someone who perhaps merits as much attention for his curatorial achievements as more obvious global superstars such as the ubiquitous Hans Ulrich Obrist or Hou Hanru. The history of the trouser in Asia — which symbolises the hegemony of what Elliott calls the ‘self-righteous masculine character of Western colonization’, but which has inter alia also stood for gender emancipation, and subaltern workers’ revolt — is the loosely worn organising thread of this ‘purposefully rambling’ collection. It epitomises Elliott’s central focus in this selection of his own lifework: of how contemporary art from Asia can be staged as a gripping, ongoing dialogue between tradition and modernity, played out in the careers of global contemporary artists from the region. Drawing on his involvement in both major collective shows and smaller individual retrospectives, Elliott powerfully talks through the lives and works of artists situated in particular political histories, building up a comprehensive view of the alternate pathways to modernity and nationhood that can be charted in, respectively, India, China, Japan, Turkey, southeast Asia and post-Soviet Eurasia. His skill and erudition as a curator is apparent throughout.

Elliott trained as an academic historian, but the pugnacious impulses of an anarchist punk rocker also shine through in this volume. The ease with which he tackles these vast topics would defy many academic specialists. Indeed, this protean, interdisciplinary Renaissance reach was the prerogative of the global curator figure of this era, and one wonders whether this kind of intellectual ambition can survive a post-global world, in which more dour and sober specialisms have reasserted themselves within predictable academic boundaries. While not neglecting the obvious relevance of post-colonial themes in this work — there is the occasional nod, say, to Frantz Fanon or Edward Said — Elliott generally has little patience for the scholastic theoreticism of the many curators who take their cues from the high table of art theory, presided over by arch figures such as Hal Foster. There is barely a whiff of French theory or de rigeur Marxism here — although amusingly Elliott does claim possession of the term ‘alterity’ (minus Lacan), while admitting it was ‘not a word I used’ at the time. No Nicolas Bourriaud or Okwui Enwezor he, then, although it would be interesting to ask what a Venice Biennale curated by Elliott would look like. Something like this book, it might be imagined: an often riotous celebration of art and politics, as a vibrant, technicolour world turned upside down and inside out, with as many women featured as men, and tradition and modernity jumbled up against each other, as irrepressible voices from the Global East and Global South edge themselves towards independence from Western colonialism.

This is to summarise Elliot’s distinctive signature modus operandi: the physical juxtaposition of scholarly well-grounded traditional artefacts with the subversive and dissonant voices of the contemporary, packaged for a ravenous, large public. This was something seen at its best at, for instance, his virtuoso opening show for the Mori Art Museum, ‘Happiness’, in 2001. Such shows, given the resources and backing of an institution such as this, showed just what he could do as a curator. As also does the narrative here detailing the complex collaborations and international relations negotiations involved in funding and gaining political clearance for the line of groundbreaking shows he put on in Oxford, at what is now Modern Art Oxford, in the 1980s and early 1990s, which presented serious, elaborated narratives of contemporary art from India, Japan and China for the first time in the West. His range has, in fact, extended well beyond this — including shows modestly not listed here, such as his involvement as co-curator in the extraordinary ‘Africa Remix’ of 2004. In a relatively short tenure at Mori, with the family’s backing, he initiated countless projects that had both serious art historical impact but which also transformed an essentially vanity corporate project into a major tourist destination. Throughout his career, his influence has worked from a peripheral, underdog position not aligned with the dominant, elite influence of curators wielding the institutional power of the Tate, the Pompidou or New York’s MoMA.

Indeed, the importance of the early shows at Oxford, on India (1982), Japan (1985) and China (1993), have perhaps not yet had their art historical due. Emphasising, in each case, history, politics and contestation, they were vital in opening up new readings of the art history of each culture, but also in the more basic sense of establishing a contemporary Asian art not lost to archaeology and the fetishism of the pre-modern, nor conversely the view that these parts of the world had nothing to offer except pale simulations of the Western modern. Elliott’s pioneering moves at the more modest Modern Art Oxford have been overshadowed by others’ later work — notably Alexandra Munroe’s rather more tepid survey of Japanese post-war art in ‘Scream Against the Sky’ (1994, at the Guggenheim in New York), or Obrist and Hanru’s tours of Asian art in ‘Cities on the Move’ (1997–1999). Arguably these shows packaged their subjects in a tidier developmental view, ready for American consumption, and thus were much more effective in putting commercial value on their selections — perhaps most notoriously as seen in the gold rush in auction prices for Chinese contemporary art that followed the global curators’ work.[i]

While always scholarly, Elliott does not ever really go in any depth into these more reflexive sociological issues about the (competitive) global artworld in which he was such a key player during these years (an epoch detailed brilliantly by Sarah Thornton in her Seven Days in the Art World, written at the height of the global boom).[ii] Notably, although he jabs at the ‘panjandrums’ of the art world at one point — the ‘art critics, academics, art dealers, collectors and some artists’ who have kept Western interests at the heart of contemporary art’s globalisation — Elliott typically treats artists themselves with reverence: they are always geniuses articulating the deep strata of their historical era. Thus, we do not get much sense of how their selection and presentation by curators such as Elliott has contributed, as it does, to the ‘two economies of world art’.[iii] A curator such as Elliott plays a vital role between the two: adding academic weight via museum prestige and catalogue discourse (the first ‘economy’), while at the same time operating in a space close to the commercial market (the second), often in collaboration with gallerists and dealers. Only occasionally does Elliott stop to reflect on this dual dynamic that ‘makes’ the art historical fame of major artists: for example, in the somewhat sceptical reflection here on the paradoxical career of the self-made activist hero, Ai Weiwei; or the punchy New York show on contemporary Japanese art, ‘Bye Bye Kitty!!!’ (2011), in which he explicitly sought to counter the overwhelming commercial strategies marketing infantilised pop art for global markets, that had been so effectively established by Japan’s most famous international contemporary artist of the 1990s and 2000s, Takashi Murakami.

On the whole, Elliott’s own preferred artists are given more serious intentions, with strong and iconoclastic figures to the fore. His obvious joy at working with many of these names is apparent throughout the many shorter profiles that follow the reproduced essays from major collective shows. The tone is never academic and dry. Rather, Elliott vaunts their ribald and provocative freedoms, as artists engaged in playing with traditional vernacular forms that take the work outside the singular Western, modernising narrative. This might be referenced by the opening figure of the book: by Thai artist, Chatchai Puipia, in which a chubby figure with spiritual golden mask peers upside down from under a wide open anus; or, in his frequent celebration of Japan’s notoriously bad-boy art hero, Makoto Aida, here self-portrayed on page 13 wetting himself abjectly in front of a gaggle of Japanese schoolgirls. It is no accident perhaps that Elliott’s favourite trousers reference in Western art would appear to be the clowning commedia dell’arte figure of Pantalone, the greedy and lecherous stock figure that provides uncomfortable mass entertainment.

Elliott’s eye is roving rather than encyclopaedic. This is a beautiful gazetteer of contemporary Asian art, well referenced in history and its decentred account of the modern, but there is not extensive evidence of the utterly meticulous local travel and documentation that anchors the most important review of Asian art in Asia, the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, led by Raiji Kuroda. Kuroda’s work at Fukuoka,[iv] not directly referenced, would indeed offer a more substantial base for the alternate, political view of Asian art presented here; another would be the vital work by Sydney-based art historian, John Clark. At Mori, Elliott was able to work with an outstanding team of younger curators — including names such as Mami Kataoka, Takashi Azumaya, Mizuki Takahashi and Eriko Osaka  — and was backed up as co-director by the influential Fumio Nanjo. It was a remarkable instance of a foreign curator, without an extensive previous Japanese pedigree, taking on a hot seat built on global finance — a building empire — and effectively shifting the high culture orientations of the host society, as the museum achieved importance for the family as a credible epicentre of contemporary art. Indeed, Elliott’s most important achievement with the Mori family was, from the beginning, to insist that the new Roppongi Hills edifice had to be a real art museum as such, in line with other major international institutions. In fact, Tokyo had struggled to compete in the eyes of the global art world, with Hong Kong, Shanghai, Guangzhou in China, or even its counterpart in South Korea, Gwangju. The Mori Art Museum changed that. He tried to repeat the same feat in Istanbul at the Istanbul Modern, with a revisionist view of modernity and local politics, with less success. Perhaps thankfully, he escaped that political hot spot, operating in more recent years as a curator at major international biennales in cities around the world.

Now over 70, Elliott shows no sign of letting up in his good-humoured ambition. This book documents and testifies to a career that would be the envy of more institutionally fixed figures. Rather, Elliott embodies a character in Thornton’s vibrant artworld, living out her analysis of contemporary global art as the rock n’ roll of the 1990s and 2000s; with the career of a roving global curator that much more exciting than the dull and worthy work, perhaps, that colleagues were doing at the bastions of national art power. From Oxford to Tokyo and back — via Stockholm, Kiev, Tashkent, Istanbul, Sydney, Berlin — it has surely been a good life.

David Elliott, Art & Trousers: Tradition and Modernity in Contemporary Asian Art is published by the ArtAsiaPacific Foundation, 2021, 368 pp, 640 colour plates, ISBN 978-0989688536

Published in Third Text, Online Book Reviews, 15 February 2022

http://thirdtext.org/favell-art&trousers

[i]  See Lotte Phillipsen, Globalizing Contemporary Art, Aarhus University Press, Aarhus, 2010

[ii]   Sarah Thornton, Seven Days in the Art World, Granta, London, 2008

[iii]   See Malcolm Bull, ‘The Two Economies of World Art’, in Jonathan Harris, ed, Globalization and Contemporary Art, Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2011, pp 179–190

[iv]   See Raiji Kuroda, Behind the Globalism: Sketches on Asian Contemporary Art 2009–2014, gram Books, Toyko, 2014

[adrianfavell]

The View from Global Britain (a small Island off the North West of Europe, sailing North-by-North-West towards an unknown destination)

Later, when he reviewed the strange sequence of events that led to the breakdown of order and the reversion of the high rise residence to a state of near primitive excess and violence, Dr Gove concluded that it might all be traced back to that one day...

A sickly, swollen orange early morning sun squinted pallidly through the chemical haze over the East End of London’s Docklands. Gove reached over casually from his balcony chair to pick up one of the three books lying on his coffee table. It was a warm day already at 8am outside on the apartment balcony:  he had not bothered to change out of his boxer shorts and T-shirt. A well thumbed classic Penguin edition of George Orwell’s Collected Essays and Journalism Volume 4, lay on one side of the reclining beach style chair, that was his usual morning professional treat before the driver arrived. It was marked with pink post it slips on the pages of the essay ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’. Underneath, was a glossy, less well read edition of translated selections from Michel Foucault’s 1970 College de France Lectures on Governmentality. But the book he perused over the top of his red designer Ace & Tate glasses – which he had bought on the last trip to Amsterdam – was a cherished copy of Roger Scruton’s The Philosopher on Dover Beach. An opera lover, the strains of one of Wagner’s Rings could be heard from his Danish Bang & Olufsen state-of-the-art stereo system inside. Funnily enough, he had seen it live together with his friend, rival and now boss, Johnson, and their now ex-wives in Germany, only a few weeks before D-Day, all that time ago. He congratulated himself once again on the purchase of the Segafredo coffee maker, as he drained the content of his third nespresso of the morning, pausing only slightly to feel the slight twinge of pain that followed in his chest. If only he were George Clooney, he thought, wryly.

Such was the cool clarity of his thoughts, that he barely stirred as a scream was heard from the Branson Mansion above him on the 255th floor of the monstrous tower block he lived in. This state of the art tower occupied mainly by high ranking government officials such as himself, or top end CEOs such as Branson, was one of two similar twin towers – “The Rock” across from “The Edge” – that commanded the entire festering zone wasteland of the former Docklands, north of Greenwich. The high rises were impregnable silver fortresses, self contained with sporting facilities, state of the art cinematic entertainment, and a high end shopping mall, that also functioned seamlessly as child care and schooling facilities for families, and contained all other essential services. The building was equipped with two helicopter landing pads that usually were high enough to clear the low lying cloud of pollution which mostly separated the social classes. Below the towers, under ground level society, was an interconnected underground elite parking facility, that led directly out on to the national freeway grid. His quizzical blue eyes lifted up momentarily from the pages of the philosopher Scruton elucidating a point about Edmund Burke, as a large dead dog thrown from above, flew past the balcony and down, a further half kilometer or so, before crashing through the roof of one of the dozen White “Go Home Immigrants” hostility vans parked there. There was a small commotion among a group of female cleaning service workers arriving for work, apparently Polish, from the distant sound of their foreign voices in the silent city morning. There were still irregularities in the population, he surmised.

He shifted his body with discomfort, however, when he noticed that one or two drops of a rabid red froth from the half decapitated dog had landed on the page of Scruton’s text. He lay the book aside to make a note on a pad that Branson would have to be asked to leave the country.

Gove had been around as a shadowy governmental advisor in the Santiago and Buenos Aires of the 1970s; you sometimes knew when it was a time for a change. These were places he had learned his trade. He recognised though that for all its rationality, violently capturing, torturing and then dumping by helicopter these “nowhere” types in the Thames Estuary was no longer a viable option in the England of the Twenty First Century. Yes, they were a fifth column. These cosmopolitan, nomadic, “transnational” intellectuals and their rich compatriots, who shared a hypocritical nostalgia for the free moving global planet of their youth; a few were still EU sympathisers and internationalist terrorists. Still, he smiled wryly, there was no going back to the River Plate during the heady days of the 1978 World Cup. Even for a criminal like Branson, it was not a practical option. Well, he’d made damn sure that his superior Mrs Thatcher wash her hands of any responsibility for anything her old friend, General Pinochet, had done. And it was true that after, his comrade General Galtieri had returned the favour to the dear Iron Lady, who had been in a tough spot herself in 1981. What they devised was the courtesy of a staged, “low level” invasion of the Falklands Island, that had proven a pioneer of a new brand of simulacra wars (“good for politics, good for business”, a military showcase “win-win-win” all round) that independent islands could engage in to maintain autarkic economic dynamism and electoral support in an now entirely protectionist world. Those were the stuff of international relations today, but always dangerous of course given the hardware, sometimes even nuclear, involved. Protest was usually muted among any remaining “Remain” activists or (so-called) “global” protestors. There were still plenty of academic sanctuaries abroad for renegade university academics, and Branson would be easily “persuaded” – with the right threat –  to take a one way ticket to New York or Los Angeles; places where enclaves of humanitarian CEOs still grumbled together in secret societies about the policies of supreme leader Donald Trump.

He wondered about the scream, though, and idly flicked on the telescreen that was partly masked behind a reproduction of a Kandinsky print on the dining room wall. The Party spokesman was celebrating loudly another victory for the People, that had been delivered that morning, like clockwork, with monotonous weekly regularity. The magic numbers: 52% for Leave, 48% for Remain; a weekly plebiscite delivered electronically by a large, government owned public opinion survey company, Big Big DATA Inc. The weekly vote stabilised the ongoing national need to adjust the population – for example, by removing persons of certain foreign extraction – to deliver the correct mathematical proportion that had been adjusted to represent the exact optimal mix for a definitively binding democratic result (the formula went): “democratic outcomes in divided societies which had decided to resolve their differences by a simple direct Yes/No method”. It was also one reason why they could not go on more strongly with the policy his previous boss Mrs May had devised. The “Go Home” Immigration vans and deportation squads (the “weekly hostility” she called it), particularly targeted at the heavily Europeanised university academic population. Too many deportations and the Remain vote (“Remoaners”, he chuckled) might be too quickly depleted.

The screen changed to an image of a man in a red tie, the officially employed Opposition Leader that Gove himself had hired in one of his occasional, but nonetheless regular, strokes of genius. The annoying man on screen swiftly changed the topic as always to a passionate denunciation of the poverty conditions of white working class voters. What a national shame it was, he said, they had been forced to live now for several decades of austerity gentrification and slum clearance, that had left nothing much of most major cities in the kingdom except mile upon mile of concrete wreckage underneath the sporadic, tree like growth of these huge, shiny residential blocks. Most of these had been built by shady Shanghai and Istanbul owned corporations that had been offered bi-lateral franchise access to the Island, in spite of other barriers to World Trade.

He went back to his laptop writing, a new proposal for entirely consolidating a nationalisation of the national game, which he had loosely imagined as an evolution of the Eton Wall Game. An architect of the national curriculum that had expurgated any traces of “global citizenship” from the education of Engand’s youth, Gove’s influence over the last years had extended to all areas of national culture where some sort of withdrawal from the previously established global or international practices needed to be conceived. Sport was his new brief. The idea had first come to him while watching the World Cup of Summer 2018: the brilliant combination of young British Black and White talent – Ali, Lingard and Kane – that had combined to score goal after goal against foreign allcomers – Japan, Columbia, Sweden – before unfairly succumbing to evil European refereeing against Croatia in the semifinal. As all the newspapers had said, in that hot and heady summer after the first Brexit vote, all future troubles were forgotten as England had united, and seemed to throw away all bitterness and caution in celebration, drinking, cheering, loving and kissing; the white St.George red cross fluttered everywhere over a happy and unified multi-racial land.

Indeed, as economists made clear, the date of January 31st 2020 was the demographic turning point. D-Day, it was called now, a national holiday; Independence Day, being the other major national festival on 23rd June. D-Day, Gove had argued, was the date at which Britain’s international and foreign population was at its optimal peak of absorption into a wholly national economy. The doors could be clanged shut on freedom of movement, but also on trade and industry, since Gove and his colleagues had devised a failsafe scheme to enable Britain to slowly transform all of its internationalised practices into distinct, diverse, incompatible alternatives, that would by their difference and originality, be highly innovative, rich in IP, and world beating. They would however have no compatibility with the outside; of little moment, given the huge backwater of an empire the Island still could call upon. This left a problem of course, for Britain’s national sport and greatest global export, football. This had necessitated Gove’s creative intervention, adapting the Eton Wall Game. He chuckled again at the thought of his heroes Ali, Lingard and Kane, mucking in with the boys, down in the scrum next to the wall, just as Gove, Johnson, Cameron, Goodhart and their idol Orwell had all done as youngsters.

This was still a white paper, for now, and the nation had continued to rely on bi- and multi-lateral agreements and some irregularities to allow the open labour market for the Championship League. It was true: it had more Italian and Portuguese football managers, and more star African players than ever. And yes, it was an exception to the nation’s stringent anti–immigration, zero foreigner policy. A mere “anomaly” , he had called it on Question Time.

What economists and demographers had also discovered though in 2016 was fateful. A now legendary paper by a demographer called Coleman, its framed original folio at the entrance to the British Museum, had shown that if population trends continued – with freedom of movement and immigration – the original White British population would become a minority by 2070, amidst mixed marriages, higher immigrant child birth rates, and (far) too many “people of colour” among foreign-origin migrants. Gove was analytic enough to recognise these populations had been sources of the extraordinary boom years of the 1990s and 2000s, but had been the one thinker with the foresight to see that the door had to be shut in June 2016, if Britain was ever to integrate all these human resoruces and become an independent island again. The People was called upon, and dutifully delivered its 52%. The answer was naturalising, rigorously, everyone on the Island at that moment in time – whether they wanted it or not. That was the key although it would be havoc for the weekly referendum that he knew was needed to maintain the 52% plebiscite of democracy over the Remain vote – hence the further statistical tricks and legal exclusion – and “disappearances” out to sea, if necessary.

They were well on the way to creating a new British population, however, which was remarkable for its multi-racial “super-diversity” (it was called) and yet could maintain stably what another economist, Collier, had calculated as England’s uniquely 80% English DNA national origins, traced back to the Magna Carta. Freedom and Rationality could grow again on this soil.

It was of course on that day, 31st January 2020, that England unveiled its secret plan to escape from Europe, at the cliffs of Dover: making use of the decaying tunnels abandoned by Eurostar and roll-on-roll-off transportation companies, the government had motorised the white cliffs, using a clever combination of nuclear and wind power, that in fact would enable a significant geological shift to begin to move the Island (henceforth capitalised) in a North-by-North-Westerly direction towards the Atlantic. The colony of Ireland would be merged again, as it collided with the British Isles, and a Scotland somewhat reduced -- natural shrinkage caused by damage to its exterior north west coastline buffered by the rough merging and the seas as the Island moved implacably in the direction of Greenland. The South East of England became the only temperate part of the Island as it moved out to sea, further driving up housing prices.

And so on that day, the TVs were all re-set to Telescreens and Party news only, and the new People’s Democracy began. Gove’s slightly lazy left eye almost welled with a gin soaked tear, as he recalled the first judder and grinding geological movement of the Island at the Dover coast. On the cliffs, all the major national dignitaries and leaders had gone to celebrate the occasion. Yes, the Island was moving in the sea, and it had been followed by the slow, at first imperceptible descending of a mist, then an ever thicker fog, which cut off all visible trace of the receding continent across the water. As had been planned, telecommunications and internet networks were disrupted to come under strict territorial control again, and the Island had its independence back. News footage of Lady Diana’s funeral had been used as the first broadcast, to set the right tone. The people cheered wildly, underneath the white and red cross flags, across the nation – the true World Cup spirit back again – as it headed out, impregnable and forever undefeated, towards the icy waters of the North West Atlantic....

*****

It may only have been synchronicity, but at that very moment in a liberal arts college in Southern California, Dr Wong, a young Asian Amercian academic put down her laptop, and reached for a lemonade. The book on her table was a new edition of Gayatri Spivak’s collected essays. The palm trees over the boulevard swayed lightly as a sweet breeze blew in from the desert.

She finished the final sentence of the draft of of a paper for Global Text, which proposed the theoretical framework for the creation of a new interdisciplinary field of occidentalist area studies, “England Studies”. The topic had strangely never been tried before. She had made her name as a post-doc in cosmology, studying black holes (like Steven Hawking, she used to joke), but had switched briefly but brilliantly to zoology during the first five years of her teaching career, making a cutting contribution to contemporary Japanese cultural studies, writing about its remarkable population of otaku and cosplay database animals. However, publisher interest in this well known remote but inaccessible East Asian Galapagos fantasy island lost somewhere in the Pacific, had been waning for some time. Were there not other black holes to discover? One day at the gym a new idea came to her. Why not somewhere in Europe instead of Asia, as a next career move? – especially since the EU had become such a historical curiosity, since its demise. After all, nobody could now quite work out what on Earth anyone had been thinking when they dreamed ludicrously of “European Community” or – and this one really took the grand prix – “European Citizenship”!!. What hilarious and zany times those European post-war “trentes glorieuses” had been!

Yet, ten years on from Independence Day, it seemed that Britain (as it was sometimes still referred to, in academic circles) had moved far enough away from mainland Europe into the upper ocean streams of the Atlantic – somewhere between “Greenland” and “Iceland”, which already had fields devoted to them – to allow for a new field of Area Studies, however challenging the remote fieldwork there. An Island, no doubt with its own strange, unsustainable, close-to-extinct creatures, practices and ideas, like 3G phone technology before the iPhone.

This would surely get her tenure, or even an outside job offer on this year’s market, certainly good enough to allow a fresh negotiation with her Department Chair, she thought....

  ADRIAN FAVELL

Berlin, 9 Dec 2018, early AM

with apologies to J.G.Ballard (1930-2009)

[adrianfavell]

Radicalism in the Wilderness

BOOK REVIEW

[expanded version of review published in Japan Times on 26/02/17]

Reiko Tomii (2016) Radicalism in the Wildnerness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan. Boston, MA: MIT Press, pp. xviii+293

Reiko Tomii’s profound, yet accessible, study of 1960s avant garde art from Japan offers an answer to a perennial problem in the appreciation of Japanese culture. So often international observers rely on the perception that culture from Japan is “exquisite” or “cool”, without knowing how or where to place it in international currents. Japan indeed often represents a clichéd parade of the exotic, weird and plain off-the-wall. At the same time, avant garde movements, seen to be delayed copies of trends which started in London, Paris or New York, have often been ridiculed as derivative—as infamously happended to the pioneering Gutai group of artists, when their works were first compared alongside Jackson Pollack in 1958. The apparent craziness of Japanese avant garde gestures also frequently baffles, its throaway ephemerality and  “vanguard extremism” foregrounded for amusement: all those 1960s artists with a predilection for dangerous group stunts, often in the nude...  The well known critic Yoshiaki Tōno once said in frustration that this was like forever equating its avant garde artists to wartime kamikaze pilots.

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Reiko Tomii’s mission is to retrieve these misunderstood visionaries from the “abyss of history”. For many years, she has been the leading figure of a New York-centred network of art historians (PoNJA GenKon) working to establish the reputation of avant garde fine art from Japan in the post-war period. As an independent writer, educator and curator, she has been involved in many of the key translations of contemporary Japanese art writing, and some of the most important exhibitions in the city. In her own work and those around her, she has marshalled the flowering of understanding about Japanese art from the 1950s and 60s in particular. Radicalism in the Wildeness reads like a lifework, many years in the gestation. And, although it may seem to be on a specialised topic, its argument holds a very broad significance for the global study of culture.

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Tomii cuts to the heart of the dilemma of how we are to understand what she calls the “contemporaneity” (kokusaiteki dōjisei) of Japanese works: striking and original art that was similar yet dissimilar to more renowned innovations taking place at around the same time in the US or Europe. They were neither really in advance nor behind, but with careful reconstruction of their relations, can all be placed correctly as part of global innovation, through a comparative and transnational exposure of  what she calls “connections” and “resonances”. Sometimes real networks and direct translation of ideas can be found; and sometimes, rather, related discoveries of global import were being made synchronously in local places, in different parts of the world. The history she writes is of the 1960s, when events in culture and politics were momentous everywhere, with a heightened globility intensified by growing linkages. She is proposing, in effect, a model for the study of  global transactions and undercurrents, which can work to decentre the Eurocentric tendencies of conventional art history, while underlining a historical lesson of understanding the global as happening at once and variously in multiple, distinct locations. At the same time, the Japanese embraced a conception of “contemporary art” (gendai bijutsu) in the 1960s, that was ahead of the notion “contemporary” being adopted in the US and Europe. 

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The book is built around three particular case studies of artists, among the lesser known in the pantheon of post-war Japanese art. These vivid presentations are a masterclass of art historical writing in their precise documentation and narrative unfolding. The first, Yutaka Matsuzawa, was a philosophically minded conceptualist whose purpose as an artist became clear when he had a vision about art needing to “vanish the object”. After the suspension of the famous Tokyo avant garde art show, the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, in 1964, he went on to to staging exhibitions of invisible art works in remote locations. Next up, The Play, were a 60s collective in the Kansai region who coalesced as a group to devise a mode of working outside art instutions with absurdist performances. In a famous piece they all rode together on a styrofoam raft shaped like an arrow down river from Kyoto to Osaka. The third, GUN (Group Ultra Niigata) experimented with a Japanese variant of land art. The cover of the book shows their work in a mountainous part of Niigata, spraying colour in a snow field out of borrowed farmer’s pesticide equipment. Each of these artists and groups took their radical reaction to the constraints of mainstream society and culture out into the wildnerness of rural Japan.

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This idea of “wilderness” as a key characteristic of Japanese contemporary art plays a central role in Tomii’s argumentation. It refers to those who have often worked in rural locations outside of institutionalised forms and channels of recognition, far from metropolitanTokyo. It also speaks of the wilderness of working in the absense of any viable commercial form of making a living—it is this which leads to the ephemerality and physicality of contemporary art gestures, in what Tomii calls the chronically under-commodified environment of Japan, compared to highly self-conscious performances of Euro-American conceptualism when it took a break from lucrative gallery shows. It is also the wilderness of Japan in relation to the world’s art centres and powers.

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How much these artists fulfill the promise of “radicalism” in the title is sometimes harder to grasp. Unlike, say, the much celebrated Genpai Akasegawa who fell into long running conflicts with the authoriries for his work, such as his model Y1,000 note, these artists were rarely political in a direct sense. The leader of Gun, Michio Horikawa, posted a black stone to Richard Nixon in 1969 (which was politiely received), and printed fake zero en postage stamps with the prime  minister’s face. But on the whole, these artists shunned the political activism of the time, and steered well clear of any grounded social engagement of the kind nowadays so widespread in Japan. Tomii sees this as a strong point: that their interventions, as art, now restored to the canon, have lasted so much longer than the futile violence of 60s and 70s radical leftists. At the same time, their absurdist gestures were accused of being “bourgeois art”.

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Tomii’s writing works as handbook of contemporary art history references, but more connections might be made with the long standing post-colonial literatures in historiography, philosophy and sociology, which have long wrestled with issues of “provincialising” the West, or revealing the power of “glocal” cultural forms. Tomii, in effect, proposes an addition to these “decolonial” models and it would be good to see her work rightly placed at the heart of intense current debates on the idea of thus studying “Asia as Method”.

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For all their iconoclastic edge, the 1960s pioneers were absorbed into Japanese museum presentations in the 1970s, and they have received some wider appreciation in recent years. Matsuzawa’s famous Psi Zashiki Room was recreated for visitors at the Yokohama Triennale 2014 by artist-curator Yasumasa Morimura. The Play have recreated their work in Paris, and attracted the attention of international curators such as Tom Trevor.  GUN’s rural work, which remains a little more obscure, was a precuror to the Echigo-Tsumari art triennale, which takes place in the same region. Tomii’s rigorous “amplification” of these figures puts them back into a “decentred” canon, “regrouping” post-war Japanese art as among the most extraordinary production world wide.

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Over-emphasising this art historical point, though, would be to limit this book to specialists. Beautifully written and structured, Radicalism in the Wilderness is a book for any culturally literate reader interested in questioning how to study regional art in its correct international context. As it is discovered, it will surely receive wide attention: as a central contribution to post-colonial work re-assessing ideas of centre and periphery, and a very-likely-to-be classic contribution to global cultural studies.

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Adrian Favell

http://www.adrianfavell.com

[adrianfavell]

Kyun-Chome

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Time to reactivate a LTERNATE f UTURES – and a good place to start is Kyun-Chome’s (キュンチョメ) recent show Ain’t Got Time To Die with Art Action UK at the South London independent art space Deptford X. I’ll be blogging more regularly as I limber up for work on the upcoming book project, Islands for Life: Contemporary Art and Architecture in Post-Growth Japan, which has recently received financial support from the Toshiba International Foundation and now has a timetable for completion (March 2017).

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It was my first visit to the space in this transitional neighbourhood a stone’s throw from Deptford High Street market, in one of the few remaining pockets of “real” London amidst all the global city hype (and Brexit bullshit). At least, while joining the West African shoppers on the Saturday afternoon bus along from New Cross Gate, it looked like the Venue night spot was a tacky as ever, and the local pubs just as dodgy also, albeit opposite a heavily refurbished Goldsmiths’ College.

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A pleasure to find there another well curated choice by Kaori Homma in what has with first Hikaru Fujii, then Komori and Seo, and Yoi Kawakubo last year, become a strong series – albeit perhaps tied a bit too much to the theme of remembering 3/11—Fukushima (I say that only because, in context, Japan perhaps faces even more serious issues in terms of population decline and general political stagnation than its dangerous dance with nuclear power and seismic disaster). Kyun-Chome, whose disturbing name is formed from juxtaposing two onomatopaeic terms meaning (very roughly) “butterflies” (in your stomach) and “doom”, have been receiving a lot of attention in Japan recently. Forming after the triple disasters of March 2011, the duo have won the Okamoto Taro prize (2014), and the high praise of Chim ↑ Pom leader, Ryuta Ushiro (in a recent annual wrap up edition of Art Review), who has been teaching them at Tokyo’s legendary alternative art school, Bigakko. I detected them to be quite close in spirit and lineage to the Tokyo-based collective Shibuhouse, so was not surprised to discover that they had also been taught by the inspirational Showa 40 nen kai member Hiroyuki Matsukage.

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The art mission was enough to draw Eri Honma out of life as a salaried employee, and her partner Nabuchi out of a six year stint as a hikikomori recluse obsessing in his bedroom over manga. Their work mainly consists of video recordings of “radical actions” they have performed to highlight discomforting aspects of contemporary Japan and its increasingly repressive political environment. They are not averse to a bit of Chim ↑ Pom style bad taste either. At Deptford X, most striking was a video of passers-by skipping with a rope held by the duo, that they had actually retreived hanging from a tree in the notorious mass suicide site Jukai (Sea of Trees) near Mount Fuji. When a chubby salary man in a suit gleefully starts jumping in time to the rope you don’t know whether to laugh or swallow hard. More obviously humorous but nice and direct was a video of sleeping dogs on the street in Thailand dealing with being awoken brutally by a “world alarm” clock. Don’t let sleeping dogs lie, I suppose is the message. Others refer directly to the no-go area of Fukushima laid waste by nuclear pollution. There is Eri walking on a beach pulling a yellow “Warning: Do Not Enter” tape across an empty sea front. And perhaps their best work here: a video in we watch and listen to old people who have lost homes in Fukushima being introduced to photoshop technology which allows them to wipe away,  change or rebuild a photo of their old street. Rather than tragic memories, the exercise elicits a sense of excitement and fun as the old people learn to use a new technology they have never seen in action before, while opening up about their harrowing experiences.

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These are well poised and precise needles with which to prick the increasing conformist tendency in Japan to forget and screen off reality from itself (Hey—have you booked your cosplay costume for the Olympics yet?). The mood was sombre, then, at the talk show event in which Jason Waite, the co-curator with Kenji Kubota of last year’s Don’t Follow The Wind (which I promise to write about sometime!) and independent curator Ele Carpenter, of Arts Catalyst, talked with Kaori Homma about the uncomfortable past, present and future of nuclear pollution, waste and devastated lands, oceans and soils – in Japan, Europe, everywhere. No-one still knows in any sense just what the damage of March 3/11 was; not least on the national psyche – of young people, particularly, if the laughter in the dark of Kyun-Chome is any indication. This is not heavily theorised “political” art, but it is an important continuation of direct if quiet political protest and activism among young Japanese artists since March 3/11.

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ADRIAN FAVELL

http://www.adrianfavell.com

[adrianfavell]

Undercurrent of Anti-Modern Performance Art in 1960s Japan by KuroDalaiJee

With Art Action UK/Kaori Homma, Adrian Favell and I have organised this talk by the maverick art historian/curator KuroDalaiJee (a.k.a. Kuroda Raiji). Please join us for this rare occasion in London to hear him discuss anti-modern performance art in 1960s Japan. Big thanks also to Ele Carpenter and Hiroki Yamamoto for extending their support during our logistical procedure.

Art and Politics in Japan: The Legacy of the 1960s Undercurrent of Anti-Modern Performance Art in 1960s Japan by KuroDalaiJee A Talk by Art Historian and Curator KuroDalaiJee (Kuroda Raiji) Saturday 28 May 5-7pm DeptfordfordX, 9 Brookmill Road London SE8 4HL Free/Donation, RSVP: https://goo.gl/XLa0os As part of Art Action UK’s ongoing programme exploring art and politics, we are holding an early evening talk event with art historian and curator KuroDalaiJee (a.k.a. Kuroda Raiji) to introduce and discuss the legacy of the highly politicised and controversial performance art of Japan in the 1960s – work that has been a great influence on younger generations of politically active artists in Japan. Kuroda is one of the most renowned curators of contemporary art in Japan, and a leading expert on the political art of the post-war period across East Asia. As a curator, he has regularly co-curated since 1999, the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, the most important selection of contemporary Asian art in Japan. The discussion will introduce work discussed in his book Anarchy of the Body (grambooks, 2010), leading to further questions about the historical relevance of the 1960s to political art movements and art action in Japan now – particularly in the post-3/11 era – and to Kuroda’s critical perspective on globalisation and Asian contemporary art, presented in his collection of essays Behind the Globalism (grambooks, 2014). The discussion will be introduced and moderated by Adrian Favell, author of Before and After Superflat: A Short History of Japanese Contemporary Art 1990-2011 (Blue Kingfisher, 2012) Organised by Eiko Honda, independent curator, overseas curatorial fellow of the Japanese Agency of Cultural Affairs, and Kaori Homma, Art Action UK. Image: Zero Jigen, Ritual at Hosei University, Tokyo, 1971 Courtesy of Kato Yoshihiro

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Hideki Nakazawa Talk: Podcast

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Thanks to Keith Whittle for posting a (good quality) recording of the Hideki Nakazawa book talk Art History: Japan 1945-2014, which took place at SOAS, London on 26 January 2015 (photo above is from the Paris event in the same week at INALCO which I also organised).

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Welcome by Kristin Surak, SOAS

Introduction by Adrian Favell

TALK AND PRESENTATION BY HIDEKI NAKAZAWA

Discussion by Kiyoko Mitsuyama-Wdowiak

Audience Q&A

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The recording runs 1:50 and can be found here:

http://keithwhittle.org/blog/contemporary-art-history-japan-a-book-talk-by-hideki-nakazawa/

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Last week I had an unexpected chance to speak with Miyazaki Keita, the young Japanese artist soon to be based in London. He was in town for his first solo presentation Post-Apocalypse at the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation. There and then, we discussed thoughts behind his practice. The...

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Future Islands?

August 1st I am moving to the University of Leeds, where I will be the new Chair in Sociology and Social Theory. On Thursday October 1st, Ill be giving my inaugural lecture for the School of Sociology and Social Policy. Let me know if you are interested in coming along. Here is the talk:

FUTURE ISLANDS? MOBILITY, CREATIVITY AND DECLINE IN POST-GROWTH SOCIETIES

As the UK contemplates closing its open borders to the EU, it would do well to think about the fate of the former East Asian powerhouse, Japan. Newly appointed as Chair in Sociology and Social Theory, Professor Favell’s inaugural lecture will explore parallels in the demographic, political, economic and cultural trajectories of these two awkward island nations, focusing in particular on the dynamics of internal and international migration among young workers in the creative economy.

The UK’s creative boom years since the mid 1990s have drawn substantially on the aspirational trajectories of young and talented migrants to the country, many free to move there as European citizens. London as a regional hub city triumphed massively over Paris and elsewhere as the hottest destination in Europe—for all kinds of artists and creatives. At the same time—and despite the burgeoning of mobile creativity as a core ideology of education and professional ambition—social mobility has been increasingly blocked to natives amidst growing polarisation and inequality, with the arts sector notably becoming less accessible to young creatives of a non-elite background. Similarly unbalanced towards an illusion of growth monopolised by a global city capital, “post-growth” Japan has in the same period seen serial lost generations of surplus young native talent fleeing the country, even as restrictive xenophobia limits international relations and migration flows with neighbours. Yet, post-2011, it offers hope as creativity has become decoupled again from economy, in favour of a more reconstructive, albeit inward, welfarist and community-based orientation of the arts—both in terms of mobile careers and substantive aesthetics—addressed to the country’s steep demographic decline and vulnerability to natural disaster.

Setting an agenda for interdisciplinary comparative research linking the arts, critical theory and the social sciences, Favell will discuss how the fate of Japan may not be so distant to the UK if it chooses demographic shrinkage, regulation of free movement, and national cultural isolation. And will we see a similar flight of creative talent away again from London, as the city passes its peak and young artists choose to invest their personal and conceptual ambitions in alternative cities or declining backwaters?

http://www.sociology.leeds.ac.uk/events/2015/future-islands-mobility-creativity-and-decline-in-post-growth-societies

[adrianfavell]

My talk next week at Harvard University

[adrianfavell]

*At the end of November 2014, I had a privilege to visit my friend and artist Hirasawa Kenji’s studio in London. There and then, he talked me through his work and constellation of thoughts. Below is a short essay I recently put together on his practice in response to the conversation we had.

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‘Sometimes I think, somehow I’ve come rather a long way.’

This is what the author of this book says in its afterword. He is not referring to the distance of the travel he has made to each centre and many corners of Asia but to the fact that his pursuit of ‘contemporary’ visual practices that...

[adrianfavell]

HIDEKI NAKAZAWA TALKS IN LONDON AND PARIS

I am organising two talks with the Japanese contemporary artist and art writer Hideki Nakazawa. These will take place on 26 and 28 January respectively in London and Paris. Full information on the London event, sponsored by Japan Foundation, here:

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http://www.jpf.org.uk/whatson.php#733

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At the London talk we will be joined by Kristin Surak of SOAS and art historian Kiyoko Mitsuyama-Wdowiak.

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The events take place after the re-publication of a revised and updated version of Nakazawa's Contemporary Art History: Japan, first published in 2008. 

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Nakazawa has had a big influence on my work and its great to be able to help organise events on what will be his first ever trip to London.

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The talk in Paris will take place in amphitheatre 5 at INALCO, Paris 75013 with art historian MIchael Lucken and art writer Sophie Cavaliero

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Book available from Art Diver online at: http://artdiver.moo.jp/dx/?p=37

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[adrianfavell]

100 MORE MOMOSHIMAS

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Which book have you read that most inspired you to think about a better future?.As part of my ongoing research into rural art projects in "post-growth" Japan, I am collaborating with curator Eiko Honda (http://curatingcuriosities.tumblr.com/) on a communication project for the upcoming exhibition "One Hundred Ideas on Tomorrow's Island", part of artist Yanagi Yukinori's Art Base Momoshima.

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http://100moremomoshimas.tumblr.com/

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Momoshima is a small volcanic island in the Japanese Seto Inland sea, not far from Hiroshima. Formerly a residential village for about 3000 people, many of whom worked in the heavy shipping and transportation industries in the region, it now has a population of about 550, with over 67% of the island now over 65 and almost no children.

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Our project, "100 MORE MOMOSHIMAS" is a virtual and exponential library of books for the future, to help the work on the island, chosen by a network of friends, colleagues, anonymous doners, and especially older residents of the island who we also interviewing (over 67% of the island is over 65; there are almost no children living there). . We ask you to send us via the "submit a book" link on the site an electronic photo of a physical book (by Instagram, or uploaded jpg), plus any "utopian" thoughts on why this book might help us.

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The project was in part inspired by a photo (attached) taken in the (collapsing) village hall of the island: a small help-yourself library shelf for the residents. Behind it on the blackboard a monthly tally of the shrinking population is being noted.

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As I know you love real books, please "donate" one! Any language ok & please feel free to forward to anyone you think might also have some good ideas.

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adrian www.adrianfavell.com

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MORE INFO

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You can read a recent talk (with lots of images) I gave about the Art Base here: http://www.adrianfavell.com/islands2.pdf

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+ Momoshima Art Base website here: http://artbasemomoshima.jp/index_e.html

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go to our site to "submit a book": http://100moremomoshimas.tumblr.com/ .

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Free "help yourself" library in the old Momoshima village hall. In the background is a chalk board where a tally is kept of the island's population (556 this month and falling)

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ISLANDS FOR LIFE

I have just published online the full text of my Weatherhead East Asian Institute lecture at Columbia University (23 April 2014): Islands for Life. Click on the title here or below for access to the pdf file with images (best viewed in something other than Chrome apparently). You can also still download the talk and following Q&A here (about 1 hr 20 mins long).

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Here is an abstract of the talk:

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Islands for Life: Artistic Responses to Remote Social Polarization and Social Decline in Japan

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Contemporary Japan, nearly 25 years into its long, slow post-Bubble decline, is emerging as the world's leading laboratory of the "post-growth" society: in at once its economic, demographic, political and cultural dimensions. While any growth and dynamism is located in Tokyo and a short list of other cities, its peripheral regions are suffering extraordinary shrinkage through ageing populations and disappearing industrial production. Among the most dramatic versions of this story can be found in the symbolic heartland of Japan's inland sea, where numerous industrially despoiled volcanic islands, house extremely old and isolated populations in genkai shuuraku type settlements with little or no hope of sustainability by conventional political or social intervention. It is here that a number of ambitious, ostensibly utopian, artistic projects are engaging in interventions based on a creative economy logic to revitalise, sustain or at least soothe places which seem doomed to die out. Focusing on the long term work of the artist Yukinori Yanagi in Seto -- both his residency and copper factory conversion (Seirensho, 2008) on Inujima and his new "Art Base" on the former orange producing island of Momoshima -- my presentation will reflect upon how such art projects are way of imagining the future of post-growth societies, with comparative relevance far beyond Japan: offering welfare and community to isolated ageing residents; practical engagement for the "lost generation" young artists who join these projects; and proposing radical ideas for low energy lifestyles, which recycle abandoned public and private building, and reconnect locals with outsiders. These projects provide a quiet space for both backward looking memory of the boom years and reflection about alternative futures: a "small good thing" emerging from the avant garde, in a country still ruled by mainstream politics and business oblivious to the disaster it is leading the country towards. 

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I will present a new, shorter analytical presentation on the subject to the upcoming PoNJa GenKon conference in New York on 13 September 2014.

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ADRIAN FAVELL

www.adrianfavell.com

[adrianfavell]

THEORY OF TEMPELHOF

Utopian Thinking from a Single Case Study*

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On the walls of Berlin’s U-Bahn stations, there is a large city map. Amidst the expanse of grey matter that makes up the sprawl of the city, to the south of the centre, there is a huge green hole: the former Tempelhof airport. Thinking of this as a brain scan, with the city as a self-organising process as theories of emergence suggest, Tempelhof looks like an anomaly, or malignant growth. 400 hectares of wasted urban space; a mortal threat to the functional city.

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The fascists developed the airport as a statement of power and modernity; it was in its time the biggest hub of mobility in Europe. The long curved main building, with its spectacular cantilevered roof and oversized yellow stone facades, was the longest building in the world. It then stood for liberty during the Berlin airlift of the 1950s, and until 2008 airline passengers could thrill at landing in the middle of this battered city and watching people cooking or making out through the apartment windows as the planes landed.

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Now, it is an airport no more; a dead airport, with what’s left of its luggage belts, EU entry signage, and fleets of airplanes -- one vintage Vokker out on the tarmac -- all strictly simulations. The land encompassing the two runways and service roads is a huge empty park, mostly concreted, grown over with grass and a few trees. In 2010, Berliners took back the space. Now they come here to play; to walk their dogs, race on roller skates, kiss and hold hands, or imagine the future of post-growth cities, while scanning the urban horizon; to do whatever they want, with no presuppositions, on land that is -- or could be -- close to zero developmental value.

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Before the city and developers really move back in, there is a utopian moment; a quixotic investment of people in this massive pure urban space. Unfillable halls and hangers for open activity; in which the culture and the content is irrelevant. Things that can be done, which have and make no value, in a space in which almost whatever you do can have no impact upon it -- it is already so ruined with tarmac, rubble and industrial waste -- and where it is almost impossible to imagine any activity or construction that would be big enough to fill even a tiny part of it. It is utopian space, purposeless. Use-less. Devoid of material value. They gave it a name: Tempelhofer Freiheit. The last free urban space in Europe.

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A dead airport in a dead city; or, rather, an anti-airport in an anti-city, because the people are still here, playing, after the functional city has disappeared. The architecture lost its function and freed its form, as the ruins of the future. We can now imagine this airport space, this anomalous growth at the heart of a new anti-Berlin. Circling the perimeter of the park, we can imagine how many of these other buildings we see on the horizon -- factories, carparks, shopping malls, gas stations, schools, universities, government buildings -- may no longer function as they did; they too could be ruins, with the people in them playing not working; the cars on the freeway are going nowhere, and small gecekondu (overnight buildings) built of wooden, tarpaulins and founds objects, grow up on the grass in the spaces and shade of older concrete and glass constructions... One by one the architecture of the functional city is disappearing as the urban economy slides slowly into decline, moving towards a steady state entropy in which everyone is able to live and play, but the functions of the old, growth-driven, developing city atrophy and wither away. The anti-city in which everyone is now an architect ...

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Why here? Why Berlin? It is important to think about the rationale of the single, selective case. We scan the world and its cities for single examples and selective vignettes that might show us the way in urban theory. Berlin, for example, is the key to understanding why Japan -- and its 100% paved over urbanism in decline -- is the closest thing we have to the future. The world and its cities present us with near infinite diversity of forms -- no single models. Only the hazard of specific conditions and conjunctions of history, geography and place could have produced this anomalous hole in the middle of the city. Through the hole we see the future; before the developers move in again.

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The utopian visison of Tempelhof, of course, is just that; the real plans for the space include some apartments and a public civic facility (a public library), which will redefine the space in a way at once humdrum and controlled. What they will build will be like Potsdamerplatz is now: an ersatz Berlin, albeit smoothly functional. No doubt someone will think it a good idea to give Starbucks a franchise. Re-development will seek to absorb Tempelhof whole back into the functional city. Dissolve the abnormal growth. But such a plan may literally be bankrupt; this kind of medicine never wins the battle, it only holds off the inevitable for a while. The only parts of Berlin which feel real now are the unfinished building sites -- shabby advertising hordings, mounds of broken concrete, and weeds growing through the cracks -- where the city is still becoming; the finished developments feel void, a generic global city that is Berlin no more.

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The challenge of post-growth is to see negative development as qualitative progress. Deflation of value towards zero as productive. Societal output as tending towards stasis (what is often called entropy). Culture as nothing but empty, random content and play. We are left with the empty relics of a former civilisation: as anomalous and pointless as an ornamental graveyard, chateaux of the dead, rising up like some absurd gothic playground. Let us start our walk together here...

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With thanks to Marta Rodríguez, architect -- and Julian Worrall, for ongoing conversations.

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*Re-published from ART-iT online / 25-09-14

http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/8PN7XOR4zJewtcVdBAG5/

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ADRIAN FAVELL http://www.adrianfavell.com

[adrianfavell]

THE UTOPIAN PROMISE OF POST-TOHOKU (2)

Natsumi Seo & Haruka Komori

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Along with the social and relational turn in Japanese contemporary art heralded by the choice of Koki Tanaka at the Venice Biennale last year, architecture has moved centre stage in discussions over the society's responses to the disasters of 2011—and to its post-Bubble condition generally. Accordingly, part of Majella Munro's talk, discussed in my previous blog, was devoted to the artistic significance of Toyo Ito's Homes for All project, the Japanese entry at the Venice Architectural Biennale of 2012, particularly the participation of photographer Naoya Hatakeyama. I have previously discussed this project here.

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In discussion after the talk, London based independent curator Eiko Honda, who also attended the event that evening, made a clear point about the problems involved in interpreting the real effects on the ground of such projects. As she suggested to me, we should be careful not to read off the successful implementation of utopian ideas from the aspirations put on show in the pavilion or the catalogue discussions. There is basically a sociological question here, which can be put to almost any of the currently fashionable regional and island based community projects which bring art to the community (i.e., to Echigo Tsumari, or Setouchi and others).

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As there was no time allowed for Q and A after the talk, it was not possible to hear Munro's response to this issue. It came up after reflection about the work of two much younger Japanese artists, Haruka Komori and Natsumi Seo, who have recently been showing their exhibition Something Sad in the Scene at Husk in Limehouse as part of the Art Action Residency programme, based on their work in the devastated town of Rikuzentakata (the same as Ito's project for Venice). I joined a meeting that Eiko Honda had scheduled with them and project director, Kaori Homma, a few weeks before. Unlike the young (st)architects involved in Ito's project, Komori and Seo didnt just fly in for short installments to develop their community intervention. Instead, they went completely native turning effectively into local residents and activists in order to develop the video work, poetry and drawings that they presetned as their reflection of the post-tsunami dilemmas of recovery. As Honda also pointed out to me, the two artists were quite sceptical about the actual success of the wooden tree house Ito and associates had constructed in the town. It had became a mecca of sorts for visiting researchers, but feelings about the house among residents of the town are mixed. Local organiser, Mikiko Sugawara, who featured so centrally in Ito's narrative of how ideas for the hourse were developed in consultation, has been the locality's main channel for participation in the project, so much has depended on personal relations of residents with her.

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Komori and Seo's long residency, which started a month after the disaster and is ongoing, poses the question again of what is the most central part of the artwork. It cannot only be the works on display, or even the documentation after the fact. The works I saw were fairly simple and sweet reflections on the pathos of the location and the events it has suffered. What is perhaps more interesting is the ethnographic dimension: exactly how these two young artists went native and gained the locals trust and affecton. Both of them in fact took on work with local shop owners who had lost members of their family in the disaster. It can be related directly to the methods developed by photographer Rieko Shiga, discussed in the essay I wrote about her work Rasen Kaigen at Ito's Sendai Mediathèque last year (linked again here). Exit from the field may prove as difficult as entry, when the two have to go back to their regular careers (one of them, Komori, still has to finish her studies at Geidai-Toride). They have accordingly set a time limit on the residency of March 2015.

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Art Action UK: Support Japan was set up by Homma with Tokyo sociologist Yoshitaka Mouri and curator Meryl Doney to enable the annual residency for young artists responding to the disaster. It has been one of the many NPO type initiatives that have sprung into action after the Tohoku earthquake. A guide to these can be found throgh the extensive documentation of the Tohoku Planning Forum Christian Dimmer and colleagues at Architecture for Humanity Tokyo. It is an unusual initiative to be found in Britain, though, and Komori and Seo have certainly seized the imagination of the good sized audiences that attended their events in London.

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ADRIAN FAVELL

www.adrianfavell.com 

[adrianfavell]

THE UTOPIAN PROMISE OF POST-TOHOKU (1)

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A 24 hour "lock-in" show by rising star Koki Tanaka at London's ICA last week was the occasion for a talk by Tate curator Majella Munro on "Sharing a Disaster with Others: Contemporary Japanese Art and the Utopian Promise of Tohoku".

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Offering an overview of current trends in Japanese contemporary art, Munro built up towards an analysis of Tanaka's Precarious Tasks series, of which the London show was the 9th. Tanaka, she argued, has been developing an art practice which puts into action small scale community cooperation initiatives, based on bringing together a number of people under confined circumstances to enact unusual or strange tasks which foreground the need for individuals to forge links with each other to accomplish their goals. Closely connected to his widely praised show at the Venice Pavilion at last year's art biennale, Tanaka -- currently a resident of Los Angeles, so at some remove from the disasters in Japan and their unfolding -- has developed this as his own "political" response to the Tohoku events.

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Starting from a long quote from my book Before and After Superflat about Tsuyoshi Ozawa's Happy Island work (discussed here), Munro presented an analysis of several other artists responses to the disaster. These included Chim↑Pom's works from Pika in Hiroshima to Real Times, Ki-Ai, and their latest installations at the Taro Okamoto museum in Tokyo, and photographer Naoya Hatakeyama's contributions to Toyo Ito's Homes For All project in Rikuzentakata.

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Curatorial work and commentary has certainly converged on the kind of ideas I presented in the later chapters of my book: that the post 3/11 moment has seen Japanese contemporary art move on significantly from the era of neo-Pop and Superflat, with a recognition of a different, parallel current, emphasising social interventions and relational work, often in relation to regional Japan's parlous economic and demographic condition. I have criticised elsewhere (here) the tendancy for all this to be punctuated by the 2011 disasters. In fact, the alternate current has been visible since the late 1990s at least, and we need to recognise the influence of pioneering artists such as Yukinori Yanagi, Shimabuku, Tadasu Takemine, Ozawa (above) and Yutaka Sone in this story, as well as art producers such as Fram Kitagawa and Tadashi Serizawa.

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Certainly, there is a sense in which Tanaka's evolving practice and its now much clearer social/political content points towards an alternate way in which artists might imagine new political movement in a post-political era. These are soft and gentle interventions (to echo some of Midori Matsui's earlier ideas), offering a re-building of community and involvement for a world in which aesthetic engagement (albeit with widespread disgust for "neo-liberalism") has replaced an involvement in discredited, cynical party and protest politics. What I don't see is a direct return to the 1960s radical political tradition in Japanese contemporary art: in which, as William Marotti has detailed in his recent book, Money, Trains and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan, leading artists and art units were closely involved in direct political protest (i.e., ANPO and its aftermath) and repressed by an aggressive state (particularly the case of Genpei Akasegawa). Surely the politics now is quite different to the politics then. In discussion after the talk, Tanaka pointed out to me that his experiments in social form are not always successful in their cooperation effects: they often reveal painfully how difficult it is for different people to "come together", and can be dissonant or conflictual.

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In all, though, it is very encouraging to see these quite particular Japanese study related themes now being explored by curators at major global institutions, and Munro's bigger project on "Close to Nature: Japanese Artists and the Environment, from Hiroshima to Fukushima", looks fascinating, as it sets the recent post-disaster events in the context of the kind of longer post-war trends in Japan that have occupied commentators such as Shunya Yoshimi and Noi Sawaragi. 

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An A-Z Index to all my previous writings on this subject (and others) can be found here.  

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ADRIAN FAVELL

www.adrianfavell.com