From Landscape to Ecology: Notes on the 'Interrogating Ecology' Panel

BY MIA PARNALL

Ecology is a slippery term to define, being at once a figure of space; a mode of thought; a field of study; a politics. Even more so in the context of Japan's 1970s, in which the word itself, as the loanword ekorojī, left little foothold for interpretation within the trails of etymology. After the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which appeared in translation in 1964, it acquired status as a movement of resistance. Yet beyond this, ecology was the figure of radical relationality required to think through the structure of a changing world, and the subjects, phenomena, processes possible within it.

On 9th/ 10th December 2021, scholars from North America, Japan, South Korea, and Europe gathered virtually for the winter panel event of CCJ's Interrogating Ecology project. Organised by art historian Nina Horisaki-Christens of Columbia University, the December panel consisted of eight research presentations followed by a two-hour live discussion, addressing a decade in Japanese history whose unique weft of networks of media, international commerce, industry and state power had perhaps been underestimated in its relevance as a case study of, and as a historical exercise in, ecology.

The 1970s began with the creation of the Japanese Environment Agency in 1971, and carried the weight of the high-profile environmental disasters of the 1960s, such as the Minamata incident, on its shoulders.  However, it also reflected the renewed philosophical and sociological interest in 1970s Japan in metaphors of space. Appearing in Japan sometime in the 1960s, the term 'ecology' (エコロジー) was from the outset not limited to describing the conservation of organic nature, but as the introduction to the panel detailed, reflected 'a systems-based perspective' on the processes and entanglements that constituted contemporary society.  Just as for philosopher Félix Guattari in his seminal Three Ecologies, the framework of ecology itself breaks down the dualism of 'culture' and 'nature,' to describe a structure in which human and nonhuman systems (living or not) are inseparable in their symbiosis.

Such a close relationship between human society and its environment has its predecessors in Japanese thought: Tetsurō Watsuji's well-known philosophical text Climate and Culture (1935) sought a theory of Japanese subjectivity rooted in the country's meteorological conditions, and in the 1970s, the discourse on 'landscape theory' or 'f ūkeiron' pioneered by filmmaker Masao Adachi and critic Masao Matsuda, focusing on what they perceived as the ruling spatial metaphor of the then-modern world. 'Landscape' embodied a civic space encoded with the covert operations of state power, describing the vacant appearance of certain towns whose regional idiosyncrasies had been flattened by industrial and commercial projects. The life of the human being within the regime of 'landscape' was one set against both impervious wall and dangerous void, providing no foothold to its disaffected inhabitants.

Ecology, too, is intimately related to the metaphysics of dwelling. Yuriko Furuhata (McGill University), speaking on the panel, traced the roots of the word to the ancient Greek ‘oikos’, meaning ‘home.’ Like climate and landscape, ecologies describe structures of national belonging, but instead, those in a constant and dynamic state of production. An ecology describes the plurality of relationships between humanity and its cultural surroundings, accounting for multidirectional flows of influence produced by daily social, metabolic, and economic exchanges with them. This is vital to consider in an era when human beings are just as much situated within a technological milieu - the environment of mass media - as a physical one. Although the paradigm of landscape is a potent figure for alienation within national space, reconfiguring space as ecology accounts for the daily infringements, the intimacies and invasions, suffered within a mediated world.

The reality was that state power in Japan's postwar society was embedded within a tangle of regulatory technology and surveillance apparatus. The second wave of ANPO protests in the early 1970s led to an increased attempt to surveil activists, for example, with suspected members of anti-government groups, from the communist Chūkaku-ha to the student-led Zenkyoto Revolution Committee becoming targets. These security networks and their suppression of activism formed the bedrock of huge commercial-national events like the Japan World Exhibition in Osaka in 1970 (known as Expo ’70), yet also the destruction of agricultural communities such as those whose homes would later become the airfields of Narita Airport. To view systems of state control as ecologies gestures toward the complex machinery operating beneath the benign 'landscapes' of civic space, as well as advocating a decentred, localised view of their deeply permeating material effects. Yet ecologies also provided a formula for solidarity, as nodes of resistance such as the Jishu Kōza also took the form of ecosystems. Set up in 1972, this was a nationwide network of environmental groups, functioning like a switchboard of planned resistance. Ecologies of societal management and of resistance existed simultaneously, each exploiting the other's sites of weakness and thus potential renegotiation.

The bipartite structure of the Interrogating Ecology panel was informed by this duality within ecology. Firstly, there were contextual presentations from three separate scholars: case studies from culture, media or industry at large that served as avenues into the sociohistorical topography of the 1970s. Drawing on Karl Marx’s idea of 'metabolic rift', Yuriko Furuhata (McGill University) discussed the disjunct between an increased use of biological metaphors within modernist civic architecture of this period, such as Metabolism, and the often ecologically harmful side effects such rhetoric concealed and justified. Takeshi Kadobayashi (Kansai University) examined the experimental television documentary “You Are…”, whose crew featured some of the prominent members of the contemporary avant-garde, as a reportage-style investigation into the mediated expressions of identity and selfhood of the everyday residents of Tokyo interviewed about their hopes and dreams. And Takuya Tsunoda (Columbia University) turned to industry film, identifying analogies between real-life infrastructure and structures of meaning within the production of cinematic material. Tsunoda used the example of Takeji Takamura's 1950s PR film about the construction of the Sakuma Dam to illustrate how, like the dam's control of water, the infrastructure of film channelled and controlled information like a material resource.

These presentations highlighted three interlinking ecologies, comparable to those distinguished by Guattari, by which urban Japan and its subjects were shaped in the 1970s: Furuhata explored a material ecology of architecture and industrial processes; Kadobayashi an ecology of desire, and its use in the taxonomy of social identity; Tsunoda an ecology of cinematic representation. All gestured toward an expanded definition of technology as something rooted in the processes of extraction, mining and optimisation of resources, both natural resources such as fossil fuels or water, and the human resources of desire, attention, and information, which in the 1970s increasingly became raw materials of tangible value to both commerce and the state. Illuminated by these contextual frameworks, the remainder of the presentations turned to the contemporary arts. Franz Prichard (Princeton University), Haeyun Park (Seoul University), Nina Horisaki-Christens (Columbia University), Tomotaro Kaneko (Aichi University of the Arts) and Julian Ross (Leiden University), discussed six image-makers respectively – Takuma Nakahira, Norio Imai, Fujiko Nakaya, Erize Watanabe & Kayoko Ueda, and Seiji Onishi. The artists in focus worked across various media, from Polaroid photography to inflatable sculpture, actively conscious of the cultural and material ecologies in which each medium was embedded.

Artistic media, like ecologies, are not simply inert materials nor tools but discursive entities, each bearing its own complex legacy of material and cultural interrelationships. Indeed, the whole evolving history of a medium's functions and conventions inform the reception of its units of meaning in the present. This includes, for example, the colonial legacy of photography's anthropological origins, which Franz Prichard examined through Takuma Nakahira's images of Okinawa, as they grappled with the aesthetics of ethnography and tourism. Similarly, Tomotaro Kaneko described an exhibition by student artists Kayoko Ueda and Erize Watanabe that was staged within the space of their own home, confronting the legacies of both the oikos and the art institution as two nests of cultural production. Yet these same media, particularly newer media such as television, carried not only historical baggage but were also situated within 'live' networks of communication and information transmission. Haeyun Park looked to multimedia artist Norio Imai’s ‘rerouting’ of the circuitry of televisual media, interrupting its circulation of images through remediating them as analogue photographs. Indeed, however seamless or totalising they may seem, these tangled ecologies of media contained loci of disruption and critique.

This ongoing, if wavering, faith in the possibility of institutional critique was perhaps in part to thank for the eloquence of the 1970s as a historical moment for the study of media. A belief remained among artists in the 1970s in the possibility of mapping networks of cultural and technological hegemony; of hunting out the lacunae in their operation. These methods advanced accordingly as the systems they intervened in became more covert in their operations, with media artists attempting to detect and represent the invisible flux of these electrical forces through the sensible world. For Nina Horisaki-Christens, the growing desire of art to represent, or to directly make visible, 'processes of feedback’ in the 1970s went along with an interest for video art practitioners in the organic: artworks by Fujiko Nakaya, Shigeko Kubota and the Taj Mahal Travelers all engaged with analogies between video and the recalcitrant ‘medium’ of water and its power to make visible sensitive phenomena. Julian Ross, too, was concerned with the 'physicalisation of the immaterial' in his discussion of the 1960s' phenomenon of 'Air Art.' He described projections of cinema onto inflatable surfaces as spectacles that 'revealed the porosity between film and other media in [their] exploration of the interface between air and light.’ With the example of balloon film, Ross reconsidered cinema as not only a medium of reproduction but a quasi-sculptural substance composed of materials (air and light) that participated in the metabolic networks of an organic world. These artists investigated the subtle body of the mediated world, recording and revealing the web of unseen materials and processes from which both social and physical reality was secretly composed.

This conception of the artist as alchemist or technician owed a debt perhaps to the influence of Marshall McLuhan, who enjoyed some popularity in Japan of the late 1960s and '70s. McLuhan theorised electronic media as quasi-elemental substances – ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ substrates in which the human subjects of the mediated world were dissolved, and which the model artist would, in learning the laws of their operation, become able to manipulate. In this way, the creation of art increasingly became a form of geomancy, and the artist no longer a mere onlooker, but a more active investigator of the structure and components of the world. Architects such as the Metabolists shaped the built environment according to organic laws; artworks, such as the fog sculptures of Fujiko Nakaya, reproduced natural phenomena directly. The distance between art and nature, historically held in the chaste relationship of mimesis, was collapsed by these analogies between the processual nature of media art on the one hand, and organic or environmental processes on the other.

Within these states of flux, however, a sense of materiality often prevails, through which artists recuperate a reality lost through interpermeation with its mediatised representations. For example, in Fujiko Nakaya’s plans for a video work on a dammed river in the 1980s, she incorporated interviews voicing citizen’s desires to preserve a nearby boulder destined for destruction, a potent metaphor for the hiccups of resistance provided by human testimony in the face of potential erasure, be that by the flow of time, or the crush of homogenising infrastructural projects. Similarly, Takuma Nakahira's photographs of detritus 'broke up' Okinawa's landscape into illegible fragments, unable to be sutured into a comprehensive vision. The camera here produces not visual facts, but what Prichard called ‘interrogative intensities’ that stem photography's flow of visual information.

The artificially dammed river is a potent metaphor for the perception of landscape in the era of landscape theory, threatening to literally engulf all singularity, as is the glazed vista of generic seashore which might form a postcard for Okinawa. The stubborn irreducibility of the material objects documented by Nakaya and Nakahira refracts and ripples not only the circulatory media systems, but also the totalising landscapes which attempt to incorporate them. Japanese postwar society is often spoken of as a 'kanri shakai' or managed society, and while landscape is the prototype of the managed environment, ecology, in its resistance to homogeneity, is its antithesis. Management occurred across various fields, from the surveillance apparatus tracking human activity by mapping urban space, to the rural space 'managed' into national parks, land for development, or sentimentalised representations. The work of the artists discussed in the panel sought to counter the production of power operating through this transformation of environment into representation. Their ecological methodologies worked to dismantle the machine of landscape: deconstructing and de-territorialising these reified spaces through the possessive, the personal, and the specific.

Unlike maps or landscapes, ecologies are systems whose units – be they bodies, devices, or locations - are interlinked but heterogeneous, rather than unified by a singular vision. To deconstruct such systems in the war of art against landscape, as the title of the Interrogating Ecology panel suggested, acts of 'interrogation' were equally a crucial strategy. Landscape's quality of impenetrability was one of the most frustrating obstacles identified by theorists, artists and activists - indeed Matsuda himself wrote of landscape theory's martyr, the disenfranchised serial killer Norio Nagayama, that “the only way Nagayama Norio could tear through [the] landscape was to pull the trigger.”[1] Like a police barrier, the impervious shield of landscape could produce only reactionary violence.  A landscape reconfigured as ecology, however, contains sites of renegotiation. Ecologies are networks of interrelations, enabling artists to employ strategies of interruption - of rivers, television networks, communications systems  - over confrontation. This was perhaps uniquely possible in the ‘70s, when the sense of possibility and emphasis on action that defined the 1960s still remained, yet was outgrowing the confines of their dialectical method. It was by these blind interventions into their trajectories that artists of the 1970s continued to map the pathways of these systems; an impetus which perhaps waned in later decades, when the apparatus of societal management became more and more dispersed, ambient, and thus impalpable.

Existing as a live event - a temporary, web-based inquiry never designed for permanent documentation, the Interrogating Ecology project did not stray from its interrogative ethos. Implying a mode of inquiry that is spontaneous and nonteleological, inter-rogation - to ask between - is the action of thought most suited to understanding the complex entanglements of ecologies; these maps of interrelations, of the in-between. Interrogation as a historical methodology is critical and fragmentary; favours the power of the utterance to disturb and provoke over the authority of the constructed narrative. Caught between the 1960s' 'season of politics' and the glitter of the prosperous '80s, the liminality of the 1970s as a historical period calls out for such a strategy of asking-between. The Interrogating Ecology project remained true to its name: mirroring the attitude of the artists it platformed, it was a welcome intervention.  

 [1] Masao Matsuda, The Extinction of Landscape (new expanded edition), Koshisha, 2013, p.17, quoted in Hirofumi Sakamoto, ‘Animation as Landscape Theory’, 2021.

Mia Parnall holds an MA in Film Studies from King's College London, and now resides in Tokyo. Interested in the intersection of the elements and technology, her graduate dissertation was entitled Rotten Sun: Georges Bataille & the Solar Encounter in Japan's Postwar Avant-Garde Cinema.