art in action

Hi Red Center Dropping Event performance at the rooftop of Ikenobo Flower School Headquarters in Tokyo, 1964

While in Poland I visit Raster Gallery which in collaboration with Taka Ishii Gallery form Tokyo presents Japanese performance art in a nutshell. The exhibition takes its cue from an intense period of artistic and political activity at the end of the 1950s, a breakthrough moment for the history of avant-garde art in Japan and the time when entirely new forms and art strategies appeared. In that period The Gutai group develops their world-first performances based on Pollock's action painting and French Informel shifting the painterly images from canvas into actions and thus liberating art from traditional formats. Spring of 1960 in Tokyo was marked with protests against the ratification of a treaty between Japan and the U.S., lasting several weeks and resulting in the death of one of the demonstrators. For artists, who took part in the them, those events were an impetus to develop increasingly radical activities in the public space going beyond Gutai's ideas of formal experiments in favour of real action - actions of a deliberate, provocative nature, based in socio-political contexts.  Those actions took on the character of both intricately planned street interventions, as with the Hi Red Center group, and ritual performances in galleries and in the public space realised by such groups as Zero Dimension (Zerojigen).

Collective Kumo, A Happening on the Street, 1970

All those time and movements were trailed by Minoru Hirata, a photojournalist who not only documented the performances given by groups but also took part in them. In a highly suggestive way these photographs document one of the most unusual and original episodes in the history of avant-garde Japanese art, which retains its inspirational power to this day.

 Nakanishi Natuyuki, Clothespins Assert Churning Action, street performance for Hi Red Center event, 6th Mixer Plan, Tokyo, May 28, 1963

Few decades later young generation of Japanese artists is taking up the idea of blending art and reality through performative actions and projects in the public space. In the works of Ei Arakawa, Yuki Okumura and Koki Tanaka there is a discernible echo of the avant-garde actions which are proof of the intensive efforts of young artists to rebuild this scattered artistic tradition. Presented side by side, the photographs of Minoru Hirata and the situations, films and documentation of Arakawa, Okmura and Tanaka serve as an intriguing and inspiring point of reference for a debate on the subject of the temporality and efficacy of performance strategies, various forms of activity with regard to the physical and political urban space, as well as with regard to the history of art.

 Ei Arakawa, Peaceboat Revisiting MRTA, 2009, DVD, 3'26"

A reenactment of selected scenes from his earlier performances. Arakawa invited a group of friends and acquaintances he’d met on a 1996 sailing trip around the world to participate in actions in and around the gallery space. The group acted out a series of staged tableaus that were filmed and presented as “live stills” at the exhibition, along with photographs that were blown up to large format black-and-white Xeroxed reproductions. Arakawa’s playful approach to video documentation is indicative of his conviction of the singular, temporal nature of performance art and the relationship it generates between the artist, performers and the public. In this project he touches upon the issue of repetition, documentation and ephemeral acts of performance through a subversive perspective, establishing a distinctive form of retrospective - one that takes on a new, independent life of its own. The title of the film references his 1996 voyage across the ocean, as well as the MRTA (Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement) occupation of the Japanese Embassy in Lima, two events that took place at the same time.

Yuki Okamura, Synchronized Sneezing, street performance, 2012

How many sneezes occur in perfect synch everyday at different locations on Earth? is a site specific manifestation of Okamura's ongoing series Synchronized Sneezing. The present work was created in Warsaw and is a kind of absurd demonstrations that takes performance to the the next level - action which is realized in the imagination of the viewer.

Koki Tanaka, Simple Gesture and Temporary Sculpture, 2008/2012, HDV Video, 3’26”

The video is one of a series of works by Tanaka that serve as a record of filmed actions enacted by the artist. The action is set in the street and within interiors both public and private. Japan's representation at the 2013 Venice Biennale, explores the private and public space, arranging and documenting brief, straightforward situations. Basic gestures and objects set up by the artist in an inverted or somewhat absurd order that breaks up the logical scheme of things. "Reality is made up of abstract things and moments", sums up the artist in one of his texts, leading the public onto an alternative reading of the world around us.

video: silver wheel

Jinkken Kobo, Ginrin (Silver Wheeel), 1953

Founded in 1951, with the nuclear shadows of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still looming and the Aliied occupation and its attandant austerity measures just winding to a close Jikken Kobo )or the Experimental Workshop) ushered in a new era of the Japanese culural lanscape. Jikken Kobo has been compared to Black Mountain College and the Independent Group as one of the three most influential collaborative groups of the 20th century. But, exactly 60 years after their first concert, Jikken Kobo’s activities remain largely unknown. The group consisted of 14 core members whose specialities were particularly wide-ranging, encompassing choreography, musical composition, lighting design, various fine art practices, poetry, engineering and criticism.  Although they were known for their experimental and collaborative approaches, the members of Jikken Kobo divided themselves into roughly two camps, both of which mixed Western influences with Japanese perspective: the art section (which comprised Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, Shozo Kitadai, Hideka Fukushima, Hideo Yamazaki, Naoji Imai, Kiyoji Ohtsuji, and Tetsuro Komai) and the muscis section (which comprised Kuniharu Akiyama, Toru Takemitsu, Hiroyoshi Suzuki, Kazuo Fukushima, Joji Yuasa, Takahiro Sonoda, and Keijiro Sato).  Like the artists of the Bauhaus and groups like Experiments in Art and technology (E.A.T) subsequently, the members of Jikken Kobo were interested in integrating new industrial technologies into their elaborate trans-disciplinary performances and events. For example, they experimented with new forms of electronic music and produced the world's first synchronized audio slideshow (with the help of technicians who would eventually incorporated under the name SONY). In 1955, a number of Jikken Kobo members participated in the production of the film Ginrin (Silver Wheel) as promotional material for Japanese bicycle industry. Ginrin's hypnotically spinning, disembodied bicycle wheels echo Marcel Duchamp's ready made Bicycle Wheel (1913). Both advertisement and reverie, the film embodies the technological and cultura optimism that accompanied the rapid expansion of the Japanese economy following the hardships of the second World war and postwar occupation. The film is now on show as a part of Ghost in the machine exhibition in New Museum N.Y.

Related articles: frieze, spoon&tamago

project room: Shinro Ohtake

Located in Kassel's Karlsaue park Shinro Ohtake's installation for dOCUMENTA (13) Mon Cheri: A Self Portrait as a Scrapped Shed takes its title from an out-of-business snack bar in Uwajima, whose neon sign Ohtake found 10 years ago. Artist attached it to the prefabricated shed filled with objects and materials accumulated in different countries. At the core of the shed are huge scrapbook representing artist life's work and series of sound collected over the course of year that are activated by the movement of audience. The shed operates like as a living self-portrait accumulating and shedding different materials in the same way that we preserve and jettison memories and therefore it reflects the conditions of humanity in the 21st century.

As we read in official guidebook to dOCUMENTA (13) Shinro Ohtake has developed new visual language in Japanese contemporary art that responds to mass-media imagery, underground music culture, and the urban environment. His divers activities include writing, noise music, and several architectural projects. Recycling everyday materials like neon signs, poster, photos and images from various publications, products, countries and eras, as well as other discarded items, he organizes them into assemblages that address the intense physical and temporal processes that affect how things are perceived, understood, and remembered. The approachh is rooted in his Scrapbooks, a series begun in 1977 that now comprises 67 books filled with cutouts from vintage comics, packaging, and other ephemeral that he edits together with maps, ticket stubs, flyers, CDs, newspaper clippings, and photographs. He subsequently integrates these with drawings and paintings, transforming the books into sculptural objects. Ohtake had his first solo exhibition in Tokyo i early 80s. and in 1985 was the first Japanese artist to show at ICA in London. He has since presented major retrospectives in Tokyo, Fukuoka, and Hiroshima. In 2009, Ohtake created a functioning bathhouse for Benesse Art Site in Naoshima, an architectural project that expands his practice of combing found materials, painting, and drawing in multilayered, engrossing composition into an experience of a whole environment.

exhibition: the transfinite

In 'The Transfinite', Japanese artist and composer Ryoji Ikeda utilizes the digital building block of binary codes to display human’s captivation and bewilderment with technology. Filling the massive 55,000-square-foot exhibition hall with his video and sound installations, Ikeda created an immersive audio-visual environment at the Park Avenue Armory in New York’s Upper East Side. As one walks into the hall they encounter a 45-foot-tall, 60-foot-wide vertical screen, where Ikeda has projected barcode-like black-and-white lines, which pulse to an audio component that is being dictated by binary codes (programmed by the artist). The other side, also a screen, displays the inner workings of the installation, showing digital renderings of both the binary codes and the programming used to create the light projections on the opposite screen. Many viewers were awestricken by the work, approaching and examining the hypnotizing light and sound patterns, as though encountering something from a foreign universe. continue reading.

history: voices of mono-ha

Nobuo Sekine, Phase-Mother Earth, 1968

Mono-ha refers to a group of artists who were active from the late 60s. to early 70.s using both natural and man-made materials in their works. The aim of Mono-ha artists was simply to bring mono-things in an unaltered state, which had previously been nothing more than components of artworks to the attention of the viewers. Usually translated rather awkwardly as school of things, which is misleading since Mono-ha works were as much about the space and the interdependent relationships between things and space surrounding them. The name Mono-ha is actually more of a label applied to the fairly loose group of artists. Ideologies were not necessarily shared by all members of Mono-ha, so it was not a coordinated movement as such. Roughly speaking, Mono-ha is thought of as centring around Nobuo Sekine, Lee Ufan, Katsuro Yoshida, Susumu Koshimizu, Koji Enokura, Kishio Suga, Noboru Takayama and Katsuhiko Narita. The emergence of Mono-ha has its roots in many social, political and cultural factors of the 60s. and to trace its origins in detail is a complicated matter. However, the moment that is most often viewed as Mono-ha’s starting point came in October 1968 with Sekine’s creation of the work Phase – Mother Earth in Kobe’s Sumarikyu Park for the First Open Air Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition. The work consisted of a hole dug into the ground, 2.7 metres deep and 2.2 metres in diameter, with the excavated earth compacted into a cylinder of exactly the same dimensions. continue reading.  

Kishio Suga, Limitless Situation (Window), 1970, installation view at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto.

Although it marked a major turning point in Japanese postwar art history, the work of the Mono-ha artists remains surprisingly unknown. The exhibition Reconsidering Mono-ha held at the National Museum of Art, Osaka (2005) and What is Mono-ha, held at Beijing Tokyo Art Projects in 2007 were the last efforts to address Mono-ha’s role in the history of Japanese contemporary art. Recently Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo has been trying to revive it presenting works of its prominent member, Kishio Suga. The exhibition is composed of photographs of archival outdoor installations and more recent works and it has been accompanied by the river-long interview with the artist. Outside Japan Hirshhorn Museum organized Requiem for the Sun: The art of Mono-ha, exhibition at Blum & Poe gallery in L.A. which follows Lee Ufan, probably the artist the most associated with the group and group retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum last summer. So it looks like Mono-ha is regaining its place in world art history next to American Minimalism and Italian Arte Povera.

open secret

2011, August 28th. A worker points a finger at a monitoring live camera in Fukushima nuclear plant

Last August an unidentified worker at the Fukushima No.1 nuclear power plant appeared on a live-to-air webcam pointing an accusatory finger directly at the camera. The video was then placed in internet and caused a lot of consternations as to the identity of a radiation-suite clad man and his message? Even Cabinet Office Parliamentary Secretary Yasuhiro Sonoda was drawn into the speculations. Recently the controversial video has been included in the first solo show of Kota Takeuchi hosted by XYZ collective in Setagaya, Tokyo triggering the assumptions that the finger pointing worker might have been the artist himself. There are few evidences behind, the 29-year-old Takeuchi appears to be about the same height and build as the suspect and he happened to work at the same nuclear plant at the same time as the video was shot. But he refuses to acknowledge it was he who did the pointing. Whether or not you write that it was me is your decision, and one for which you will be responsible, he said during an interview for Japan Times. Why would he want to do it? Granted he was not happy with the working conditions under which workers laboured in the power plant what he express in his daily blog from Fukushima but was it enough of a reason? Or was it something different? An homage to Vito Acconci’s Centers (1971) or was he interested in the way visual imagery in the public domain can sway communal consciousness?

Whether the mystery finger-pointer is the artist himself or not is still arguable. One thing is sure, the person in the video did a great job hiding his identity and that is what became a theme of the exhibition. Kota Takeuchi graduated from Tokyo University of the Arts, Department of Intermedia Art in 2008 and ever since he participated in few shows including 'Social Dive' in 3331 Arts Chiyoda and BANKART Studio NYK in Yokohama.

who can say that we should not live like dogs?

Shuji Terayama, Butterfly, 1974



















courtesy the Terayama Museum

Questions were an important methodology for Shūji Terayama (1935–1983), whose striking creative work exists in a liminal space between fact and imagination. Terayama's career recalls an eerie tale of Japanese folklore in which a face shifts to become a different face. An acclaimed filmmaker, poet, radio and stage dramatist, essayist, photographer and horseracing tipster (with no less than eight volumes of commentary to his name) Terayama was, in the words of theatre critic Akihiko Senda, 'the eternal avant-garde'.

In an era when Japan's underground was reaching a fever pitch, Terayama was a crucial player in a complex network of creative expression, encompassing such countercultural legends as singer Akihiro Miwa, photographer Daido Moriyama and graphic artist Tadanori Yokoo. The show at Tate is a tribute to this 'many-headed' artist and centres both on his astonishing film and video work and his trailblazing shifts through varied media and performance. It also includes a symposium on Terayama's transmedia work and a live cinema performance in the Turbine Hall. Terayama always made work that was interrelated, often producing visionary and unexpected outcomes in whatever his chosen form.

Complete programme details on www.tate.org.uk.