Sunday, February 19, 2 PM
Vox Populi, 319 N. 11th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19107
Collaborative Cataloging Japan (CCJ) is pleased to collaborate with Vox Populi Gallery to present an artist talk by Japanese artist Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver. As part of CCJ’s Japanese Expanded Cinema research thread, recently launched with grant support from the Andy Warhol Foundation, Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver will introduce, to a Philadelphia audience, his conceptual and performative film explorations of the late-1960s.
Born in 1947 in Japan’s Shiga-prefecture, Gulliver began making art in the mid-1960s during high school. Drawing from a vocabulary of theatrical performance and instructional happenings, Gulliver and his peers formed two artist collectives in 1967—Remandaran and The Play—whose understated street-based performances interacted with the public in Kyoto and Osaka. Upon moving to Tokyo in the late 1960s, Gulliver began a series of conceptual experiments in film. While Switch (1966–67) and Watch (1966–67) called to attention the interaction between gestures registered in the film and the surrounding context of the screening event, Film (1967) and Screen (1967) emphasized the physicality and materiality of the medium itself. These projects culminated in Cinematic Illumination (1968–69), an ambitious installation of eighteen automatic slide projectors, which projected words and washes of color upon audience members who were immersed within a large-scale, 360-degree environment.
Sunday’s programming will also feature a lecture by Dr. Erin Schoneveld, Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Haverford College, who will further contextualize Gulliver’s practice through an overview of the historical and cultural context of experimental aesthetic production in postwar Japan, and will touch upon a broad field of art and cinema that has been defined, in part, by the histories of the Gutai, Jikken Kobo, and Fluxus movements, and a rich legacy of experimental and narrative filmmaking that developed during the Japanese postwar period.
This event is supported by a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation.
Image: Films for Cinematic illumination, 1968–69, 16mm films on paper. ©SAGYO, Tokyo
Born in 1947, Shuzo Azuchi Gulliver is an artist working in the mediums of sculpture, prints, photography, performance, and installation. Gulliver was involved in experimental performances and events that marked illustrious Japanese 1960s event-based artistic practices, most notably with his involvement with the collective, Play. His work has been frequently shown in the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, U.K., and other Western European countries, as well as in Japan.
Erin Schoneveld is an Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, where she teaches courses in modern and contemporary Japanese art, cinema, and visual culture. Dr. Schoneveld earned her BA in East Asian Studies from Brown University and completed her MA and PhD in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania. Her current research project on the Taishō-period art and literary journal Shirakaba (White Birch; 1910–1923) has received support from the Japan Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Henry Luce Foundation.