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- Convenor:
-
Gunhild Borggreen
(University of Copenhagen)
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- Stream:
- Visual Arts
- Location:
- Torre B, Piso 5, Auditório 3
- Sessions:
- Thursday 31 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
The panel will discuss the need for new cross-disciplinary methodologies for new types of art in contemporary Japan. Using examples from recent Japanese art festivals, we propose a field study approach with attention to aesthetic as well as social dimensions of materiality and processes.
Long Abstract:
Since the 1990s, new types of contemporary art have emerged in Japan that emphasizes aesthetic as well as social values. Defined as aato purojekuto (art project), these new types of contemporary art forms are characterised as co-creative artistic activities that engage in local communities and pay attention to the art-making processes (rather than art as objects). Art projects are site specific, and artists communicate and collaborate with people of diverse social background as a means to use art for engaging in social fields outside art.
These new art forms in Japan call for new methodologies within the field of Japanese art history research. Such new methodologies must be cross disciplinary in order to not only examine and evaluate the aesthetics properties of the art projects, but also to investigate the social impact of art forms that intend to engage in social fields outside art.
This panel will focus on how art festivals such as the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale and the Setouchi Art Triennale are conceived and executed as part of a "revitalization" process in rural areas in Japan. Rather than focusing on the art festivals' reinvention of terms such as satoyama or machizukuri, we suggest that a "sense of belonging" may be located within the materiality and processes of the individual art projects embedded in the art festivals. We propose a field study approach, which includes significant attention to the materiality of artworks, natural surroundings, as well as human and object-based agency.
The panel will include three papers that represent different approaches to different types of art projects as a means to discuss the advantages and challenges of cross-disciplinary research. The first paper by Gunhild Borggreen and Anemone Platz will present a method of micro-level aesthetics and ethnographic analyses, the second paper by Katherine Mezur will present a performance research perspective, while the third paper by Emil Bach Sørensen proposes a theoretical concept for grasping the vitalizing potentials of art.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 31 August, 2017, -Gunhild Borggreen (University of Copenhagen) Anemone Platz (Aarhus University)
Paper short abstract:
Using recent art projects by Yokō Tadanori and the art unit Me as examples, this joint presentation will present ideas for new micro-level methodologies to analyse new types of project-based art forms that appear at the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale and the Setouchi Art Triennale
Paper long abstract:
This joint paper will begin by presenting some examples of art projects located in the context of two art festivals in Japan, the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale and the Setouchi Art Triennale. Yokō Tadanori's Teshima Yokoo House (2010) and the projects Completed Conjecture (2015) and Maze Town (2013, 2016) by the art unit Me are examples of how artists use existing houses and their surroundings to reinterpret the notion of "home" or "hometown". By transforming the materiality and surroundings of everyday objects and phenomena into "something else", the art projects highlights the potential of agency in materials, as well as in social relations and interactions.
We use these examples to present and discuss art research methodologies appropriate for the new types of art projects that appear on Japanese contemporary art scene these days. By including these examples of artworks from the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale and the Setouchi Art Triennale, we will argue for micro-level analyses that can embrace an aesthetic approach while also relating to the "social turn" in critical art theory. Both art festivals were conceived as a means to strengthen the cultural and social ties in rural communities in order to safeguard the region's attraction to tourists, newcomers, and long-term residents. Central to the idea of "revitalization" is the notion of "belonging" to a specific area or way of life, formulated in the festivals' reinvention of words such as satoyama.
While narratives of satoyama may work on a general level to attract regional, national, or international attention to the art festivals, we focus on direct encounter with the materiality of artworks, site and participants. Materiality and participatory processes are central for a micro-level methodology of fieldwork research that combines aesthetic analyses of the artwork with ethnographic observation and interview. By producing evidence-based empirical data on the impact of art on the local community with close attention to the artistic and creative processes as well as the aesthetic properties of the art project, it might be possible to explore the ways in which to create a "sense of belonging" through art.
Katherine Mezur (University of California Berkeley)
Paper short abstract:
The paper uses a specific performance work by the collective Nibroll and their collaboration with local citizens in creating a festival cart as a means to discuss the relationship between a sense of nostalgia for "countryside" and a contemporary "body with no sense of direction."
Paper long abstract:
Mezur will focus on how participation creates a sense of belonging to a place and time that may be from a real or fictional past. In this example, the artists and the participants and spectators share the fiction as real in their mutually imagined event. The performance work by the collective Nibroll, was a performed re-invention of a town's matsuri festival for its special town shrine. The festive carts and the shrine itself had fallen into total disintegration due to the poor economic conditions and the younger generation leaving the town. Over several weeks, Nibroll and the citizens invented a new festival that still honored their village spirits and ancestors, but could be managed with little funding and everyone involved. Instead of rebuilding the festival wagons, they used cars and bicycles, they built a makeshift shrine from donated objects and on the festival day, created a parade, performances, ceremonies, and food sharing stalls. This festival performance centered on the energy of honoring the place and its ancestors and the concept of ritual and offering.
This presentation juxtaposes the sense of nostalgia and longing for the fictional "country" side place/time on one hand and on the other the re-invention of new narratives of the pasts from collective voices: the visiting artists, the town citizens, and the Art/Place visitors. The key words of Nibroll provoke and compliment this presentation: "body with no sense of direction" and the emphasis was to use a "place that is not a theatre."
Emil Bach Sørensen (University of Copenhagen)
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents the theoretical concept of 'the aesthetic transversal' inspired by the geo-philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari as a framework for analysing the connections between humans and the material milieu of the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale.
Paper long abstract:
The overarching concept for the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (ETAT) throughout the years is that 'humans are part of nature'. It seems to be an essential ambition for the triennale to engage artworks as well as artistic practices in processes that explore and (re)vitalize transversal connections between humans (inhabitants, participants, visitors and people that relate to ETAT via media etc.) and the material milieu of the Echigo-Tsumari region in Niigata Prefecture. The aim of ETAT is to employ art in a transition towards more sustainable life forms - ecology, culture and economy being related aspects in this context.
Taking the transversal lines across the human, ecological and cultural stratum as its starting point this abstract has a double attention: It will address a handful of artworks at ETAT in order to achieve a topological and diagrammatic understanding of aesthetic means employed at ETAT. A particular attention will be given to a discussion of aesthetic materiality exemplified by the Midori no heya project, the Green Room Project, initiated by Japanese artist Sakao Kōichi in 2006. The Green Room Project located in outskirts of Tokamachi involves the local community as well as visitors in a process where traces of found objects from the surrounding milieu (cultural artifacts and organic materials as leaves) are included at the level of aesthetic composition via frottage; a technique where patterns and tactile textures are transported to paper or other media by rubbing.
The Green Room Project and other artworks at ETAT will be vehicles for thinking 'the aesthetic transversal': A new concept that responds to the overall ambition with the triennale. The geo-philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari - particularly Milles Plateaux - Capitalisme et Schizophrénie 2 will serve as a vital source for the outline of the aesthetic transversal. From the conceptual level of the aesthetic transversal the paper will contribute to aesthetic and anthropological discussions of vitalizing potentials of art in rural settings as Echigo-Tsumari.