#Majella Munro

[kanjukutadashi]

Postwar Conference: GROUND ZERO, Panel 2 / 22.05.14

[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