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Join us in the Spring Panel event for Interrogating Ecology project, with Dr. Haeyun Park, Seoul National University; Dr. Tomotaro Kaneko, Aichi University of the Arts; Nina Horisaki-Christens, Columbia University; Dr. Franz Prichard, Princeton University; and panel discussant, Dr. Michio Hayashi, Sophia University.
This event is hosted by the Mary Griggs Burke Center for Japanese Art at Columbia University. The event will be held on May 14th, 8pm in New York / May 15th, 9am in Tokyo/Seoul.
This is the first public event in the year-long Interrogating Ecology project led by scholar Nina Horisaki-Christens, and supported by CCJ. This event will be followed by a research development period over the summer and fall, and will conclude with a second panel, workshop, and screening events this winter. In addition, the research will be accompanied by new digitizations of moving image works and research materials related to the project.
Interrogating Ecology is made possible in part with a grant from the Asian Cultural Council to advance international understanding through cultural exchange in the arts. The Asian Cultural Council advances international dialogue, understanding, and respect through cultural exchange activities that support individual artists, scholars, and arts professionals in Asia and the United States.
Panel Abstract:
1970 in Japan marked a shift from rapid economic growth, industrialization, and urbanization to a reckoning with the new order of the information economy, the managed society, and environmental pollution. If 1970 opened to cheerful preparations for Osaka’s Expo ‘70—indicating Japan’s emergence as an economically, technologically, and culturally advanced world power—by December of 1970 a series of high profile environmental pollution incidents necessitated a special Diet session to enact fourteen major anti-pollution bills.
Within Japan’s art scene, the artist-designed pavilions of Expo ‘70 represented the culmination of artistic experimentation in technology, projection, and eizō (the mechanically-produced image) that had taken place in association with terms such as kankyō geijutsu (environmental art) and intāmedia (intermedia). The discourses around kankyō and eizō of the late 1960s were a challenge to institutional art, taking art out of museums and into discos and stadiums while helping audiences cope with the image saturation of high capitalism and the information economy. Yet Expo ‘70 saw the larger systems of social conditioning and the commodifying logic of capitalist accumulation subvert the critical aims of many participating artists. In its aftermath, artists approached the urban media environment anew, employing reproductive media through a more ecological lens to recognize and interrogate their own place within the systems of media, capitalist consumption, and managed social reproduction. This panel presents investigations of 1970s works by four Japanese artists—Hori Kosai, Nakahira Takuma, Nakaya Fujiko, and Yamanaka Nobuo—that use photography, film, video, and sound recording media to investigate the conditions of 1970s Japan through this new ecological lens.
Presentation Descriptions:
Beyond the Screen: Yamanaka Nobuo's Experimentations with Moving Image
Haeyun Park
On a summer evening of June 1971, artist Yamanaka Nobuo projected a 16mm moving image of the Tama River in Tokyo onto the murky surface of that same industrially polluted river. This riverbank event, entitled Projecting the Film of River on the River, was followed a year later by a new projection of the same film. This time the moving images were cast through the glass door of Tamura Gallery, allowed to spill out onto the streets of Tokyo’s Nihonbashi district. Yamanaka’s work illustrates a growing tendency among Japanese artists in the early 1970s to take up film as the material for their work and to exhibit them in galleries and in the outdoors, which led to the creation of a new category of “moving image as fine art,” distinct from the tradition of “film as cinema.” This approach was partially born out of a critical reassessment of the multi-channel moving images that had been turned into a crowd-amassing spectacle during Osaka’s Expo 70. This paper demonstrates how the shift in the site of screening for film—from the confined spaces of the theater out into the natural and urban environment—fundamentally altered modes of spectatorship and the possibilities of the moving image.
Dismantling Environment: Hori Kosai’s “Report” series
Tomotaro Kaneko
This presentation considers Hori Kosai’s 1973 performative sound work series Report as a critique of the Japanese avant-garde and Environmental Art (kankyō geijutsu) movements of the late 1960s. At the height of Japan’s postwar rapid economic growth period, Japanese avant-garde artists used combinations of performance, technology, and immersive environments to expand art beyond traditional exhibition venues and into urban daily life. The trajectory of Inter-media and Environmental Art practices from the 1966 exhibition From Space to Environment to Osaka’s Expo 70 saw artists drawing on emerging technological media and interactivity to challenge genre boundaries and address the intensification of image culture within the urban environment. However, the spectacular, immersive pavilions of Expo 70 revealed how these strategies could be co-opted by the corporate and national entities to serve the ends of social management in the emerging consumer lifestyles of the new information economies.
Critical of what he saw as a capitulation of avant-garde artists to state and corporate power, Hori served as chair of Bikyōtō (the Artists Joint-Struggle Committee) during the student movements of the late 1960s, and actively protested Expo 70. His subsequent turn to technologies including the tape recorder, typewriter, and video in works including Report thus begs investigation. Drawing on Hori’s writings of the early 1970s and performing a close listening to the original sound recordings of Report, this presentation will demonstrate how Hori reoriented the discourse around environment (kankyō) to criticize the merging of art into life, instead proposing the dismantling of both.
Nakaya Fujiko’s Ecological Video: Resisting the Japanese Information-Polluted Archipelago
Nina Horisaki-Christens
Writing in 1974 about why she felt it important to publish a Japanese translation of Michael Shamberg’s infamous DIY video handbook Guerilla Television, Nakaya Fujiko draws a parallel between Japan and “Media America,” referring to the island nation as an “information-polluted archipelago” (jōhō kōgai resshima). In this single term Nakaya encapsulates her vision of the inextricable nature of media and natural ecologies, tying the pollution problems of rapid postwar industrialization and urbanization to the highly managed structures of the media systems that flourished in 1960s Japan. While Nakaya has been well recognized internationally for her water-based environmentally responsive fog sculptures, the key role that she played in the development of early video practices and media critique in Japan has gone under-recognized. By revisiting the first decade of Nakaya’s video practice through the context of 1970s Tokyo and contemporaneous developments in her fog sculpture series, this paper will delineate Nakaya’s integrated understanding of the concept of ecology. It will demonstrate how her video works, while drawing inspiration from models of natural science and incorporating increasingly explicit natural imagery, were unequivocally intended as a form of resistance to the increasing systems of economic control and social management found in the jōhō shakai (information society) and the kanri shakai (highly managed society) of 1970s Japan.
Itinerant Ecologies: Takuma Nakahira’s Naked Eye Reflex 1974-1983
Franz Prichard
This paper seeks to elaborate the novel ecological horizons of Nakahira Takuma’s writings and photography between 1974 and 1983. Having already departed from both his celebrated Provoke work and his engagement with the radical theorization of landscape (fūkei-ron), this later period finds more itinerant drifts through the environmentalized visuality of Japan’s urban and media ecologies in Nakahira’s critical writings and photography. I trace Nakahira’s deepened interrogations of photographically mediated forms of exchange with material reality through the development of what he described as his “naked eye reflex.” Exploring the ecological contours of Nakahira’s pursuit of “a permanent revolution of the gaze,” we traverse an entanglement of seeing subjects, material realities, and nonhuman subjectivities exposed together in the photographically mediated acts of seeing. This paper takes a renewed look at Nakahira’s changing praxis across three key moments (and discrete modes of work); the 1974 museum installation Overflow (Hanran, in the exhibition Fifteen Photographers Today, at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), the 1977 essay collection Duel on Photography (Kettō shashin-ron, with the photographs of Kishin Shinoyama), and the 1983 photobook A New Gaze (Aratanaru gyōshi). I delineate the ways these three moments of Nakahira’s work make sensible novel forms of thinking, envisioning, and materializing the conditions of possibility for an ecological approach to the visual cultures of the late 1970s and early 1980s in Japan, and beyond.