The
RAPT! symposium
a wandering wrap-up of ideas
surfaced
catalogue
essay for Volume 2 of RAPT! 20 CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS FROM
JAPAN, Tokyo/Melbourne, 2007
Articulating contemporary Japanese art
The RAPT! symposium was a rare opportunity to open up some in-depth critical
dialogue concerning the artworks that were at the time or had been installed
across the Melbourne galleries. Having digested the works well to the symposium,
I was eager to discuss my impressions of the work with the artists, curators
and curatorial advisors from Japan.
Indeed, such a nexus of gathering so many of the artists, curators and researchers
connected with this wide-ranging project was an important culmination of the
RAPT! conceptual premise. Merely grouping and exhibiting the art was not the
project's primary focus. In place, a strategic immersion in a multi-voiced
mass of Japanese artists' perspectives was envisaged as a platform across which
a foreign (Australian) audience might traverse. This interconnectivity of points
between artists constituted the complex and compound matrix that made the whole
RAPT! project a dense and uncompromised venture.
Discussing contemporary Japanese art
At
the RAPT! symposium, the Japanese curatorial team reiterated
their catalogue statements. This was followed by two
presentations by Taro Igarashi and Kyoji Maeda, each
of whom had presented papers at the Japan Cultural Centre
in Tokyo as part of the project's research development.
For
the Melbourne symposium, Igarashi reprised his "Japanese
Architecture from 1955" slide talk - an informative overview
of how Japanese architecture progressively negotiated
the relation between surface and form over the last half-century
by transforming the former into the latter. Precise illustrations
demonstrated the clear resonance between Japanese allusions
to classical and modernist formations, proving again
how Japanese visual discourse is a dialectic of fabricated
covering and shaping. The pivotal notion of Murakami's "Super
Flat" was engagingly positioned as part of this continuum,
leading Igarashi to cite ways in which architecture has
since refined the idea of flatness to encompass a range
of illusory projected depths and optical dimensions.
The
second presentation was different from the one Maeda
originally delivered in Japan. His slide talk "The Culture
of 'Model' in Japanese Art" articulated the fascinating
idea of kata (model) culture, wherein a strain of Japanese
fixation on replicating form and style as therapeutic
recourse has grown in cycles of popularity in Japan.
He pivoted his theory on the recent success of the book "Tracing
the Narrow Road to Oku" by 17th C haiku poet Basho - where
people trace the kanji characters and effectively 'write
over' the author's manuscript. In positioning this in
lateral connection to the revered 18th C traditionalist
painter Ito Jakuchu - who in fact 'traced' much of his
work from existing Chinese scrolls and was included in "Super
Flat" - Maeda offered a refreshing theoretical escape
option from the Eurocentric ideas of originality.
Considering
contemporary Japanese art
Having
read Maeda's paper earlier, I took the opportunity outside
of the symposium to discuss his idea of kata in relation
to the phenomenon of The Ventures in Japan. An American band,
The Ventures were the first instrumental guitar band to instigate
the trend in instrumental rock following the wild success
in the US of their amateur home-recording of "Walk Don't
Run" (1962). They inspired hordes of American 'garage bands'
who replicated the naïve simplicity of The Ventures'
sound. The Ventures' success prompted the release of a series
of "Play Guitar With The Ventures" albums, where their songs
were broken down into modular permutations (drums with bass,
bass with first guitar, both guitars together, etc.) so that
young hopefuls could copy these models of instrumental combo
music.
Perhaps
because of this methodology, The Ventures became very
popular in Japan - and continued to remain surprisingly
popular for decades beyond their drop in the US charts
following the British Invasion of The Beatles post-1964.
Throughout the 70s and 80s, Japan hosted Ventures' replica
competitions, where Japanese bands formed as copies of
the Ventures' model, and then competed in replicating
the unique Ventures' sound - judged by none other than
members of The Ventures themselves. Maeda's idea of kata
clearly relates to his chosen line of analysis concerning
Jakuchu, but it also connects to much else in popular
Japan - from 80s garaju culture (fans making 3-D plaster
model kits for the replication of anime characters) to
90s manga doujinshi (fan copies and parades of famous
manga titles). In this sense, kata is more about voicing
than mere tracing; more about becoming than mere copying.
Traversing
contemporary Japanese art
The notion of kata certainly points away from the persistent - and limiting - notion
that Japan is a 'mix' of the postmodern with the premodern. Such a structural
syntactical binary does not allow for issues of modulation, cross-talk and
generative feedback: types of production and generation which are independent
of processes of binary separation.
While
much of the works exhibited in RAPT! could be considered 'post-Super
Flat', the interpretation of a binary opposition to Murakami's
well-noted internationalist incursion through his Super
Flat manifesto equally limits a deeper understanding
of contemporary Japanese art. Neither Kitada nor Maeda's
papers systematically reject Super Flat, yet they did
extend ways of considering Japanese ocularism and formulation
in directions that circulated differently from the specific
flux of Murakami's friction against Western notions of 'flatness'.
This slight distinction is important because current
western comprehension of Japanese art history has been
deliberately problematised by Super Flat (of course,
through Murakami's conscious tactics).
Considering
the persistence of Super Flat as the predominant measure
for Japan's so-called postmodernism, my reading in the
symposium of RAPT!'s 'post-Super Flat' orientation proposed
the following distinction. Super Flat work generates
a 'posterized' experience. One can encounter the bold
and stark impact of Super Flat works' presence at a remove - either
from a physical distance or through mediarised reproduction - and
still digest the works' phenomenal power. Much of the
work exhibited in RAPT! oppositely functions and performs
by drawing one ever inward to their flat pictorial plane.
Time and time again, I was drawn to a nose-depth away
from the actual surface of the works, to discover that
only at such a threshold did I become fully immersed
in their expansiveness.
From
Asako Narahashi's floating seascapes to Hirofumi Katayama's
distilled vectorscapes to Nobuya Hoki's dense brushscapes
to Yuken Terayama's discreet treescapes to Kazuna Taguchi's
disorienting facialscapes to Shiro Takatani's inverted
skyscapes, I felt immersed within an 'n_scape' - not
a 'landscape' as we know it, but a plane of enviromentalised
consciousness which I find unique to Japanese pictorialism.
This is not to normalise all these works under one rhetoric,
but to feel the distinct vibrations and frequencies of
time and space which inform their multifarious constructions.
How
Japanese art constructs its 'view through a window' has
very little to do with how we in Australia have been
hamstrung by European modes of perceiving the land before
us. While this is readily perceivable in centuries of
traditional paintings from Japan - epochs across which
nary a single brushstroke can be related to anyone from
Turner to Cezanne - residual sensibilities of such an
enviromentalised consciousness imbue even contemporary
Japanese art in complex ways. This is the locus of RAPT!'s
complexity.
Ghosting
contemporary Japanese art
After the symposium, Igarashi spied me holding a copy of Tsutomu Nihei's manga "Blame" (1997) - a
work that I find especially evocative of the psychic mindscape of disaffected
gamer otaku. Igarashi reminded me that Nihei trained as an architect and was
in fact included in the original "Super Flat" exhibition of 1999. Obliquely
referencing the existential angst of cyborg ghosting in Masamune Shirow's seminal
manga "Ghost In The Machine" (1989), the central character Killy of "Blame" is
a physical ghost of sorts, interred in a virtual world impressively rendered
by Nihei's mind-boggling pen-work, which I now see has been influenced by architectural
draftsmanship.
In
the symposium discussion, Igarashi had raised the idea
of 'ghostliness' being a unifying quality of much of
the artwork he had seen in RAPT!'s Melbourne installations.
I actually had felt the same sensations - especially
after seeing the 'ectoplasmic narratives' of Reiko Shiga's
dreamscapes which profoundly captured her personal interpretations
of people's dreams shared with her during her Brisbane
residency. From her ectoplasmic remnants of dreams to
Tomoko Koike's fantastic shimmering sketches of fictitious
journeys into private consciousness to Rei Naito's evocation
of absent materials in emptied rooms, 'ghostliness' certainly
resonates within much of the RAPT! work. Mr. Maeda also
noted the quintessentially ghostly nature of the photographic
medium, and that indeed much of the work in RAPT! in
some way interpolated the granular recording of the real
and its muted transferral into the imaged.
For
me, so much of Japan investigates what could be termed
an 'optical epidermalism': a form of illusory sheathing,
gloving and skinning where things are 'second-skinned'
by a tight yet malleable surface which contorts and swells
while signifying a range of modalities and tonalities.
Thus the symposium wrapped (to use film production parlance),
with the lingering suggestion of ways to continue traversing
the terrain schematically outlined by RAPT!'s engagement
with an impressive range of artists and their equally
impressive work.
Written
one afternoon in an Italian café, Sydney, November
2006.
