ArtAsiaPacific’s 2009 Almanac is out (LINK). It is enormous, covering a dizzying amount of terrain across its 250 odd pages (including a very interesting and ambitious essay by Japanese curator Yuko Hasegawa on the insistent gaze towards nature which arose during the late 00’s).
Late last year i spent six weeks researching the artistic output of Australia and New Zealand in 2009 for the Almanac; two separate review pieces compressing a years worth of contemporary art policy, funding, exhibitions, fairs, museum shows, and controversy into eight pages. The image above is the first page of the New Zealand review. Some of the people i researched were very confusing and I am going to talk about those people over the next few days in an attempt to validate that confusion.
Photos from our Christmas day in Hakone; Hannah walking out into the open air sculpture museum, glazed pre-coffee eyes, a family of puffer jackets, and a magic black egg cooked that adds seven years to your life. The winters here are just shadow, another shadow, another shadow. The kind of shadows that stretch out, obfuscating any sense of time. Everything is always beginning; it’s a whole season of extended invigorating mornings that only pass into afternoons as it begins to get dark. A pleasing season. I knew a old Russian man in New Zealand. He told stories about working on a mine in Siberia and being so cold his eye’s would start to freeze. Each small detail and sensation was over explained; trying to fully invoke any residual sensations. But any invocation is illusory, it is impossible to simulate the full gamut of stuff going on when you are really cold and outside and alive.
LINK. “If we are the ones who know the universe, then who knows us? This type of questioning leads to an inevitable procession all the way back to the “Ultimate Observer” or “Ultimate ‘I’”. While contemplating this infinite stretch, Dunne pondered whether a universe plagued by such a problem could be considered rational. In his own conclusion, Dunne offers that the universe is completely rational except for the Ultimate Observer, who is the one making the picture. For Dunne, one can never discover or explain this Ultimate Observer completely.” Quote from Adam Crabtree at ‘Survival of Bodily Death’, An Esalen Invitational Conference May 22 to 27, 2005. (Yes, that Esalen – the ones who release books with inspired titles like ‘Touch the Ocean: The Power of Our Collective Emotions’). Quote refers to J.W. Dunne’s conception of an Infinite Regress (?). Dunne’s ‘An Experiment with Time’ is about time actually being serial instead of linear; the past present and future all happening at once. Dunne claimed that our dreams regularly predict the future, but that the future is so banal we don’t don’t realise the significance of what we are seeing. Who else in the 1920’s had the nerve to declare the future would be banal? Precognitive nihilism.
Rafaël Rozendaal takes research chemicals. His sister takes photos. Their grandfather took control of Brazil, as president. Rafaël is one of the worthwhile artist’s taking the post-ASCII art world seriously. He makes plastic images for browser viewing; sharp, facile, endless, and often very nice to play with. Along with his work, his site also mentions that he took 2-CC while living in LA. Research chemicals are those which are unscheduled, unregulated, and untested by the higher authorities and are generally not covered by law. However 2-CC was covered in the ‘Phenethylamines I have known and loved’ book where it is listed a mild hallucinogenic, unless you snort it, when it becomes a harbinger of death according to someone on the Russian “bluelight.ru” forums. It’s a prescient warning to internet artists all over the world – Please be careful; snorting 2-CC just leads to brain haemorrhage:
“Our friend knows a lot about research chemicals and also has a lot of them… So we all decided to take some 2-CC having tried 2-CI and 2-CE and 2-CD…We all ate 30 mg. oraly, however my boyfriend perfers to put things up his nose… So he instead of eating it, snorted 30 mg…By the second seizure we called the ambulance, and he was rushed to the hospitol. After about 11 hours of being in the emergency room, he started to gain concience, and was gonna be okay. They kept him in the hospitol for about a week so that they could make sure his brain stopped bleeding, and so that he wouldnt go into any random seizures. It was a while before we touched any drugs… Especially hallucigans… Now the only thing we do is K, weed, and the occasional pill…”
Video of Rafael jumping into the turgid waterways of Venice. His show opens at Takura Someya this Saturday. http://tsca.jp/
Midori Araki. Website HERE.
Nakako Hayashi’s jumper X Midori Araki’s chair. From a visit to Midori’s house the other day for an interview going in the upcoming issue of one of my favourite magazines, Apartamento. Takashi Homma took photos for the interview; one especially good shot was of Midori’s photogenic but timid cat. While we were drinking tea Midori told us a story about her neighbour – Tadanori Yokoo. He rides a Mamachari around the neighbourhood to and from his studio. To get his attention before she knew him Midori placed a huge Yokoo poster in her window facing out to the street. Just so she could be sure that in a neighbourhood where he went unnoticed, he knew she knew.
Sabu Orimo played a show the other night in Koenji. He played three bamboo Shakuhachi; one was almost five feet long, which i thought was a bit excessive. His new album just got ‘Tip of the Tongue’ at Volcanic Tongue, (which is a notable thing in some circles) and he also got talked about on a Shakuhachi forum: http://shakuhachiforum.com/viewtopic.php?id=4155&p=1. People from that small community argue amongst themselves about how authentic an improviser he is. I think it might be hard for practiced individuals to understand why someone would put so much effort into playing an instrument both poorly and passionately at the same time (it’s basically cheating isn’t it?). The video above is of a Jewish man playing a Shakuhachi in his home. Someone comments on the video – “very peaceful lovely home”, to which the Jewish man replies, “thanx!”.
Screenshots from last nights film, Victor Erice’s ‘The Spirit of the Beehive’, 1973. Erice only made a handful of films, all slow, visually rich and evocative, which is maybe why he gets compared with Terrence Malik a lot (the guy who made ‘Badlands’, ‘Days of Heaven’ etc). Maybe he should also be compared with Apichatpong Weerasethakul (but not too much). It was the best film of the year so far. In fact it made all of last years films seem not so good; mainly because it was so effortless and deft. It was also a bit luxuriant. That’s a relatively horrible word to use to describe a film, and i would normally avoid the luxuriant in favor of the uncooked and the inexperienced, but Erice’s luxury seemed sincere and very honest (something to do with the rich and velvety film stock). It had good faces too.
Back from holidays, 
. These are photos I recently took (including scan lines!) of Momofuku Ando, the Karl Lagerfield of junk food. Momofuku Ando invented Cup Noodles. In some circles he is known by his charming “english” name – ‘Matt’, and he even has a museum near Osaka devoted to his contribution to humanity. Ando is dead now. During his life he was awarded ‘The Order of the Rising Sun’ by the Emperor, and in death his funeral doubled as a promotional vehicle for a space ready zero-gravity version of Cup Noodles. Photos from a video interview with Matt at the “It’s a tasty world” show held in Miraikan Science Museum. Art directed by young designers, Megumi and Hiroi from ‘Assistant’, the show gives you an idea of what Disneyland would be like if it had been built by Mexican perceptual psychologists.
“As far as the eye could see stood tall, magnificent palm trees, entire groves of them along the horizon, growing thickly, without interruption. I also saw lakes-yes, enormous blue lakes, with animated, undulating surfaces. Gorgeous shrubs also grew there, with wide-spreading branches of a fresh, intense, succulent, deep green. All this shimmered continuously, sparkled, pulsated, as if it were wreathed in a light mist, soft-edged and elusive. And everywhere-here, around us, and there, on the horizon-a profound, absolute silence reigned: the wind did not blow, and the palm groves had no birds…i began to drink…But as i felt my thirst subsiding, and the madness within me dying down, the green vista began to vanish. Its colors faded and paled, its contours shrank and blurred.” Written by a favourite writer – Ryszard Kapuscinski about the effects of extreme dehydration in the Sahara. Photos from a trip to ‘Sportsworld’, an abandoned theme park in Izu.
Phil Niblock, New York based minimalist composer, at a lecture/performance in Musashino Art University. Here he is slightly confused, telling a long rambling story about a bus and some noodles in response to a short question. Great performance though – it was the long endurance style microtone minimalism which he is known for, but a little bit shorter than his infamous 6 hour long solstice performances each year. At the performance in Musashino he actually fell asleep about an hour into the showing of one of his video’s of people working in rural china from the 80’s.
Some unused photos from Papersky article on Sento. That specter in the steam is Shusetsu Tachibana, most likely he is the last Sansuke in Japan. He is washing the back of the Sento’s oldest customer Sugiwara-san. Sansuke is the name given to those who wash and massage others in public baths. That means you pay him to wash your back. I gave it a try for the article and at first it was unsettling to be washed and massaged by an old man while you’re naked, but by the end i was completely transported. You’re left with that feeling of paradoxical weightless weight; supremely heavy tiredness coupled with a euphoric relaxation. The act of washing like that is service at the highest level, it’s religious and spiritual. At the end of the day he is basically just copying Jesus. Amazingly the owner of the Sento let me take photos in the baths while the cleaning was going on, hence the steam fogged lens.
That’s a photo of Lucas Badtke-Berkow taken the other week just before his breakfast. Lucas runs Knee High Media with his wife, Kaori, out of a wooden prewar house in Tokyo. He is the original creator of Planted and Tokion Magazine (before it was onsold many times and eventually became not very good). Tokion was monumentally significant to me in New Zealand, it helped in positioning Tokyo as a, if not the, relevant global city. That was in the late 90’s. Tokyo’s youth culture has changed a lot since then – currently floating in a state of confused inertia following on from a hyperbole laden acceleration into the modern cultural melee. Lucas also changed too, he got older, got humbler, and got more restrained and rigorous in making magazines. He just relaunched PaperSky Magazine tonight at the Now Idea Gallery. PaperSky is one of Japans first contemporary travel magazines, but it’s also just a collection of things Lucas believes in and enjoys, which keeps it honest and always inquisitive. I think it’s also the only travel magazine in the world to use geometric savant Buckminster-Fuller’s Dymaxion map, and possibly the only travel magazine to feature a short horror story.