noboru
tsubaki: genre jumping, fluxus and hybrid influences in japanese culture
Japanese
artist Noboru Tsubaki was recently international artist in residence at the Govett-Brewster
Art Gallery in New Zealand. Tsubaki cannot be described as someone who works in
one medium: he has worked with large scale outdoor installation, interactive networked
media, robotic sculpture and on community cultural projects.
"A
giant 34 metre long locust is attached to the side of the Yokohama Grand Intercontinental
Hotel. Is this a scene from a yet unreleased fantasy movie? No, this is one of
the exhibits to be shown in the Yokohama International Triennale of Contemporary
Art…" so said the City of Yokohama about Tsuabaki's project 'Insect
world.' A 34 metre (110 feet) long sculpture is no mean feat - how was it done?
Disney provided the capability - the insect was an inflatable. This comes at some
cost: Tsubaki and collaborator, philosopher Hishashi Murio took out a loan from
a Japanese bank. They rent out their locust, and are gradually paying back the
loan.
Locust?
The locust or grasshopper chirps in the permanent summer of childhood. Truly international
they are ubiquitous yet personal in this sense of memory. For Tsubaki and Murio,
'Insect world' lives on, long after the 2001 event that facilitated it's creation.
The artist and philosopher do not even see the object as a conventional 'work'
of 'art,' but rather as a portent of fundamental change - a new OS of the world.
The insect survives; it mutates; and it has now changed visual form and parasitically
invaded this article [1].
In
'Space Geezer Akira -- Enjoying an Electronic Body' the audience in teams of three
"breathed human emotions into networked animated characters, giving that
character human feelings and expressions." Utilising the software Houdini,
(developed by Canadian company Side Effects Software, Inc.) participants experience
some of the concepts behind the programs controlling electronic characters. For
Tsubaki the point of all this was to counter the deepening sense of isolation
felt by many in today's society - the sense of "living next to each other
without coming into contact." The project also aimed to cross one digital
divide - the participating audience was targeted to older people, who are often
excluded from computer evolution, isolated by the barrier of needing to acquire
knowledge in order to take part in this kind of event [2].
'Penta'
is a large scale five legged robotic vehicle designed and programmed under Tsubaki's
direction, to traverse terrain and clear land mines. The work is one of a number
of individual projects that started as one show - 'UN Boy' and is now part of
a larger 'UN' project scheme, which includes several applications. This is a mimicked
UN organisation, a critique of the UN that meets in Brussels, and Tsubaki's version
comes complete with anti Bunker Buster Cluster Bomb clothing monograms. The 'UN
Boy' installation included a red wall covered with real life fake automatic rifles
and machine guns - a critique of the UN's Peace Keeping Forces who ironically
are often armed to the teeth.
Meanwhile,
in New Zealand this year, the artist organised 'Radical Carbon,' a Fluxus style
event where the audience were participants in a day of making charcoal bamboo,
on the waterfront of New Plymouth. Twenty temporary kilns were used and specific
instructions had to be followed in regard to making the charcoal. A potential
use for this charcoal would be to filter water in places where water purification
was needed but money, equipment and expertise precluded water filtration plants.
Not required in New Zealand but that was not the aim; rather the day was aimed
at facilitating social interaction by arranging groups of people around a process,
that took up a large part of the day [3].
Contextualising
this activity is straightforward in each instance but complex when taken together.
The links to Fluxus in 'Radical Carbon' will be apparent to many; - the interplay
between audience and participant; the lowering of hierarchy between artist, organisers,
audience and participant; the extension of the concept of 'art' to a place where
the border to 'reality' is blurred; and the event took place outside of the confines
of 'the white box' of gallery space. Partly motivated by artistic activism, the
umbrella 'UN' project has lineage to the Fluxus activism and play with identity,
traceable to Duchamp's 'Fountain.'
Robotic
media falls within the genre of human and machine, a genre explored extensively
in 20th century art and film making, from the Futurists to 'Robocop.' 'Space Geezer
Akira' falls within the new media context of gaming, arising out of side-show
shooting alleys, the pinball machine and 'Space Invaders' interacting with character
based, many ended story telling such as the 'Dungeons and Dragons' books. The
insect on the side of the Intercontinental Hotel is an inflatable, a pop strategy
directly recalling the work of Claes Oldenberg.
None of these contexts
however, constitute a signature, in the way that pop artists and Fluxus events
had a signature. It is not as if Tsubaki has a name for super-scaled monstrosities
and stays there; nor does his work remain solely within genre of new media gaming;
and neither does the accrual of knowledge around making robots mean he sits within
the genre of human and machine; and it would be unfair to locate all his work
solely within the performance/conceptual genre exemplified by Fluxus.
What
is apparent is a fluid relationship between theory and practice. This fluidity
allows for switching between standing genres of art. This praxis is more akin
to following 'a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable,
and has multiple entranceways and exits' [4]. It is a praxis predicated on multiplicity
and perhaps consequential to reflecting on the twining of multiplicity and nonlinearity
endemic to computer based media.
Genre
switching is neither new nor specific to Tsubaki. Australian Susan Norrie's 'Undertow'
mixed genres of: fiction - Orson Wells' Kafka based 'the Trial,' archival and
government service footage, home movie, and documentary, within a single art work.
Dane group Superflex use a company identity to represent themselves, and undertake
projects in the visual arts, music, design, as well as aid development projects
based around a biogas plant and counter multinational economic strategies.
It
is not to the West however that an interrogation of lineage in genre jumping leads.
Gutai, the seminal artists group of post WWII Japanese art, traced a line running
from abstract expressionism through to performance, before late 50's performance
and happenings developed in the US. When Time magazine visited the Gutai group,
the journalist, expecting to see abstract expressionism, was instead shown three
painted chickens. Atsuko Tanaka, who made the important work 'Electric Dress'
in 1956, a dress made of multicoloured flashing light bulbs, was also a painter
of abstract paintings and creator of intricate drawings.
Whilst
Japanese art history goes some way to providing a background to Tsubaki's practice,
the hybrid state of Japanese culture needs to be considered. As WJT Mitchell observed
in 'ArtForum' in March 1995, Homi K Bhabha's concept of hybridity has made it
clear that cultures must be understood as complex, multiple sites of intersection.
This is very clear in regard to Japanese culture, where adoption of cultural practices
is historical: Buddhism arrived via China from India, and the impact of Chinese
language on Japanese is well known. In the late 1800's a process of deliberate
cultural intersection with the West began.
The
great building programme begun in the Meiji era, typically thought of as a Western
penetration of Japan, was literally skin deep: the internal structure of the walls
was Japanese [5]. So rather than being simply Western due to external appearance,
the architectural solution was a hybrid. A second period of substantial cultural
interchange occurred after World War II, starting with American occupation, followed
by the adoption of US business practices and techniques in the 1960's, leading
ultimately to leadership in microtisation and technology. It is perhaps better
to say of the Japanese adoption of Western practices that this was a highly selective
process.
Over
the period of the Western intersection, roughly 1880 to 1980, Japanese cultural
influences flowed back across the cultural membrane to the West: there are clear
examples such as the Japanese influence on the Impressionists, crafts influence
in the form of ongoing 'Japonisme,' trinkets such as the Mikado, architectural
developments such as the shell structures Kenzo Tange, Zen Buddhism, the invasion
of sushi and the supremacy of Sony to name a few. The Arts, finance, culture and
religion: sites of intersection and overlap, and not resilient and impervious
storehouses of nationhood.
"Hybridity
produces new forms of authenticity and is inherent in processes of social and
cultural dynamics in which various cultures confront each other" wrote the
authors of an architectural conference on the theme of hybridity [6]. Sites of
intersection and overlap generate not simple children of two parent cultural influences,
but a so-called third cultural space, with it's own sense of unique authenticity.
Aspects of the 'parent' cultures are apparent, but a sense of contingency generates
unique solutions to issues that arise as time progresses.
Bhabha
[7] wrote that authorized power in a hybrid culture does not "depend on the
persistence of tradition; it is resourced by the power of tradition to be reinscribed
through conditions of contingency and contradictoriness…" Contingency
and contradictoriness, rather than being evidence of cultural impurity and degradation
might now be seen as aspects of hybridity as vital as any other cultural energy.
There
was a developmental strategy to Tsubaki's 'UN' project, an evolutionary approach
based on contingent development from a smaller starting point. A creative system
was erected around what began as one show. As Tsubaki said "my wish as an
artist, a radical and active dreamer, is that through this project the spirit
and skills of Japanese charcoal makers… would help reconnect our divided
world." In this system, the 'UN' project takes "on a physical presence
in the real world." Contingency with Tsubaki extends to crossing genre boundaries,
manifesting the same theme, but sometimes in differing genres of art.
What
might first appear contradictory, the creation of work in alternate genres by
the same practitioner, might in the context of Japanese work at least, be viewed
as the manifestation of hybrid cultural energies. Against a background of multiplicity,
the multiple genres explored by Gutai can perhaps be understood more clearly as
not only the result of post WWII angst, but also a consequence of deeper cultural
flux. These forces, united around a reflective approach to contemporary practice,
live in Tsubaki's work.
Notes
[1].
This paragraph, including the final point, is largely a paraphrasing of 'Invasion
from Insect world' http://www.diatxt.com/06_e.html accessed 21/9/04 which is also
the source of the quotes.
[2].
This paragraph is also largely a paraphrasing of material found at Art Tower Mito's
site http://www.arttowermito.or.jp/art/akira.html accessed 21/9/04, also the source
of quotations and other references to the work 'Space Geezer Akira.'
[3].
For the record, 'Radical Carbon' also consisted of an activist installation, which
considered knowledge across cultural boundaries - what do Japanese, Bangladeshi
and New Zealanders know of global warming?
[4].
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press. Page 21.
[5]
See Buntrock, D. (1996). 'Without modernity: Japan's challenging modernization'
in Architronic, http://architronic.saed.kent.edu/PDF/v5n3/v5n3_02.pdf accessed
28/9/04.
[6].
Europan, (2001). Europan 6. Available:
http://www.europan.nl/europan6/euro6_alg_e.html
accessed 8/10/02.
[7].
Bhabha, H.K. (1994). The location of culture. London: Routledge. Page 2.
