Walking to Now Idea to hear Åbäke’s talk last saturday was when the first sign of the coming ice deluge appeared. We thought it might be warming up, that spring was coming, but we were wrong and things have escalated to point where it is now snowing outside, my toes are freezing and there is a growing puddle materializing under the front door where the umbrella is hanging from the handle.
The talk at Now Idea was by UK based design collective Åbäke. Maki and Kajsa took turns drawing on rolls of paper while talking about ‘Dent-de-leone‘ – a small publishing house for artist’s books. Hiroshi, the owner of Now Idea, recorded the event via Ustream (you can see it above).
Åbäke are confusingly simplistic. Making actions, doing actions, recording actions, designing actions in a way that mimics real life. If it wasn’t for their sense of aesthetics you might not say what they are doing is artistic at all. This is really the thing that got me most excited about their talk—the potentiality of not creating work which references/represents anything; where everything is an opportunity for content generation—coming to a place where there must be no lost opportunities for design, even if that means designing life itself and repackaging it as ‘valid content’. What it says to me, and it is a good, even dangerous thing to say and something i believe in, is that there is a happy potency latent in all actions; a potency for design (even though that sounds incredibly unfashionable and stupid). Is there even room for design in other peoples actions too? Is there room for design in terrorism, sleeping, murder and walking through the rain?
“I had a dream yesterday that I was trying to pick up a big stone. It was among the other grey and white stones along a river. Trying to hold onto it, I squeezed it with both hands. As soon as the stone felt the slight pressure of my fingers it popped; exploding like a clump of dirt thrown at a road sign from a passing car. I wanted to hold one of these stones by the river, big round stones.
I saw another stone and picked it up, again the sand passed through my fingers. Wet sand. But this time I noticed that some residue remained. A tiny ball, made of quartz, sand and glass shards. It was resting in my palm. As I went on picking up stones and having them burst and crumble the cumulative residue slowly grew and hardened into a new and complex stone.
This is how things could be. Visitors to Tokyo find themselves trying to hold onto something solid. Artless orienteers; ticking off personal lists of sites that correspond to their ideal image of the city. But you can’t choose your own projection of the city; it wont be held; it passes through fingers; it leaves you with whatever residue it chooses. In Tokyo there is no center, no horizon (literally), and no space or time for understanding what you are seeing with anything other than the simplest prototypes. Which is why you can’t hold onto anything, only bits, shards, and after long enough, perhaps a crystalized conglomeration of something.”
Text for a magazine from Melbourne on ‘Ways of seeing Tokyo’.
“But he possessed certain innate talents which Khor himself was willing to recognize; he could charm away bleeding, terror and rages, and he could cure worms; bee’s obeyed him because of his light touch. Kalinych was closer to nature whereas Khor was closer to people and society; Kalinych never liked thinking things out for himself and believed everything blindly, whereas Khor had reached a high pitch of irony in his attitude to life. He had seen much, knew much and i learned a lot from him.” From Ivan Turgenev’s ‘Khor and Kalinych’, his first short story. Turgenev’s short portraits of Russia’s rural poor are hypnotizing. Photo is of a high area on the old road from Hakone to Tokyo taken on December 26th 2009.
Yesterday Martino Gamper cooked lunch at Now Idea Bookshop. It went for four hours and i enjoyed it. Gamper is the man from the ‘Total Trattoria’ and ‘100 Chairs in 100 days and its 100 ways’ books. He was helped by the Maki and Kajsa from Abake and it was all chaos and limited space. After eating in the sunshine, with fresh air and easy talk, i had a strong desire to sleep but i’m sure that would have been rude. Sleep is usually hard to find but when it comes knocking uninvited in the middle day it is my body’s way of thanking me for eating a proper meal with nutrition. While i was leaving i noticed the selection of recommended publications which Hiroshi has put up in the shop. Jeff Burch’s small booklets were on display. Jeff is a good friend (and snorkeling enthusiast) from Sydney, his publishing house is called ‘The Spring Press’ and it releases documents and sounds; a real labor of love, and worthy of praise as one of Australia’s most important independent labels for it’s very high production standards and amazingly restrained sense of ‘content’.
Jeff recently sent two albums he recorded in the mail. One is of his solo work: lots of metallic ringing and unrhythmic clanging, coupled with natural melodies that wane between the tense and the familiar. It’s a good release. But he recorded it almost two years ago and i think he might be a bit tired of it now. Jeff also plays in ‘Songs’ with three other people; they are making Australian music critics happy. A band of unrepentant modernists who are maybe just a little bit jaded. While many other bands are trying to find the ‘new’ sound between old genre’s and musical anomalies, Songs are semi-content to extrapolate from what they consider to be modern music’s highpoints: the Flying Nun golden era and New York no wave. It’s not often you can describe a band as equanimous, so i am going to enjoy saying that Song’s are genuinely equanimous. I think they actually sincerely want to make ideal pop music. It’s simple and strong music.
Video of Bruce Russell from Jeffs Blog (HERE). Bruce is a member of the Dead C—seminal New Zealand noise from the late 80’s—and will soon release a solo album on Jeff’s label. Bruce sounds like a farmer; lots of bad jokes and self-deprecation. It is all brilliant.
This is the sunrise, from the first day of 2010. Some New Zealand friends in Tokyo (Cathy, Andrew, Andre and Ellie) hired a van and filled it with futons. Hannah and i joined them at the last minute. We watched the sunrise with the boot up, out on a headland in Chiba. People amassed and clapped and prayed as the sun came up; there we many people, maybe hundreds. The futons were an ingenious idea, but the metal van got so cold that i was able to fully recall the sensations i felt the last time i almost froze. That was in the middle of Russia, riding a train from Kazan to St. Petersburg with a broken heater and a double layered window where one layer had been smashed by delinquents (aka ‘gypsies’) en route. It got down to -45 Celcius. Two old people took pity and put their blankets over my brother and I when they left for their stop. Being uncomfortable does wonders for the memory. I read somewhere recently that children used to be beaten when an important or notable event took place, in case the children were required to recall the event in court. I will never forget the first day of 2010. Although, it didn’t actually get that cold over New Years Eve—probably only about minus one or two, but my body temperature plummeted against the metal; half frozen, unable to fully fall asleep or fully wake up i remember intensely fantasizing about hot cans of coffee in each of my pockets.
The back of Naoko Higashi, Zine’s Mate project manager and extremely nice person. From Papersky’s first FOOD CLUB event at Lucas and Kaori’s very old house.
Today I am writing about food for a new magazine from Melbourne called Condiment (LINK HERE). It is edited by Chris Barton and Jessica Brent, two people doing good things in Australia. The writing is quite slow. It began as an interview with Yoyo, who runs Vege Shokudo in Koenji and also VACANTEEN at the VACANT gallery space in Harajuku. Two of the cities best temporary restaurants. Then I found some journal articles about the conceptual underpinning’s of 7-Eleven and everything changed. Here is a pull out paragraph from the upcoming article:
“The first convenience stores, in America, sold bread, milk, eggs and ice. There is no room for desire with such a utilitarian inventory. But In Tokyo there is only desire when it comes to food. Toshifumi Suzuki makes sure of that. He is the CEO of 7-Eleven; global head of the world’s largest chain of convenience stores. For Suzuki, desire is what his company runs on. Need is not necessary. The point is to give people what they want before they knew they wanted it; to preemptively fulfill eating desires. To achieve this with the highest chance of success, 7-Eleven staff are involved in heavy sessions of ‘knowledge creation’ where they discuss the forecasting of human desire, it is openly tactical and strategic, even going to point of attempting to ‘systematize’ customers unknown tacit knowledge – to help them “externalize deep layers of personal reflection.”
Most of the claims in that text came from ‘Knowledge Creation in the Convenience Store Industry: Seven-Eleven Japan’ by Ikujiro Nonaka. The more i read about Suzuki, the more he turns into a monstrous guru. His plans are nothing short of global domination of the psyche. Photos from the McDonald’s in Nishi-Shinjuku.
That top one looks like a fake documentary. A few pained faces trying to convincingly express relatively simple ideas. It’s good. I came across it while researching Len Lye for AAP, which also led to a new book about him called ‘Art That Moves’, published by University of Auckland press in November of last year. I read the introduction. Lye is one of New Zealand’s most important artists (despite living in England and New York for much of his life). He worked with motion: kinetic sculpture and early animation. There are a couple of his early films on Youtube, some of which supposedly doubled as advertisements. Like in ‘Trade Tattoo’: fluttering shapes and colours, the antithesis of torpidity, and then some text about the British postal service appears. It’s amazing how dominant Lye’s visuals are compared to the squeaky promotional shout out; no Fortune 500 company would grant such a jolly latitude these days. The Royal Mail funded experimental films under the guise of the ‘G.P.O. Film Unit’ from 1933 – 1940. “Kinetic art is the first new category of art since prehistory”, said Len Lye in 1964. He felt that movement played an essential role in modernist art, but was neglected and sidelined, never granted it’s rightful place in the limelight, due to financial constraints and the lack of interest from the art world. Maybe he is just a little bitter that his kinetic theme park never got built, which is understandable.
Photos by a stranger. From a listing on Craigslist for a Sayonara Sale in Shimokitazawa. Almost all foriegners in Tokyo are transients which means that when it comes time leave (visa expired, contract expired, deportation) they resell the contents of their house as a ‘Sayonara Sale’. I don’t really know why, but i check the Sayonara Sales almost everyday, compulsively. Sometimes you see the same television or bicycle reappear two or three times. Once someone was giving away a Sugar Glider – those little possums with the wings. We tried to take it, and had even named it and found a cage, but it was given away a couple of hours before we were supposed to pick it up.
A few years ago I used to work with kids doing workshops in Tokyo. Some friends, Mejunje from Argentina, will be coming to Japan soon to run kids workshops this April, Hiromi Yoshii Gallery in Tokyo is also beginning kid friendly art programs and I just (very behind the times) ran across the Tezuka’s Fuji Kindergarten (see HERE for a good article). All of a sudden i have come in contact with many people who are thinking about ways to engage children. Historically Europeans seem to have been the most articulate and imaginative at engaging children; Bruno Munari has to be credited as the king of child workshops, with Reggio De Emilia and Montessori coming in second and third. American’s educators don’t really seem to have the same authority. But that might change. Video’s above from ‘Songs of Higher Learning’.
Mike Parr is an Australian performance artist with a spoiled arm; one of the most accurate bodily interlocutors from the antipodes. I like what he produced, especially the fact that he was producing strong body performances during the seventies, began drawing in the eighties and then returned again to body based performances in recent times. I think there is space for body work. He tests his own physical limits: living in gallery for ten days with only water, nailing himself to a wall for 30 hours and broadcasting it over the internet, stitching his face together. And taking 100 breaths through paper self portraits and suffering the resulting oxygen deprivation; “i was wondering if i could just sort of breathe them onto my face”. I like all of this a lot. But isn’t it a bit crass and vulgar for the 10’s? Not that the nineties have all the rights to self destruction, but there is something surprisingly dated about waste, including the waste involved in damaging yourself. Maybe this is part of the tension that makes the work interesting. I am now thinking of Parrs’ small mutilated left arm. He was born with that arm, it holds sway as an attention seeking physicality, staking prime psychic locations and drafting unique schema for him to view the world through; how could his work not involve physical damage? Accuracy, even false accuracy, is more important than timeliness. Mike Parr will participate in the 3rd Moscow Biennale taking place this year. Video of Mike Parr explaining his show at the Sydney Biennale, video of another man called Mike Parr explaining something and video of another man called Mike Parr kicking a football.
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.