the 2007 Kobe Biennale

24Nov09

November 23rd was the last day of the 2009 Kobe Biennale, which I went to visit last week.  The Biennale is held at the waterfront site of Meriken Park, under the shadow of Kobe’s famous Port Tower and right next to the Maritime Museum.  Because Kobe is historically a port city, the organizers of the Biennale decided that the best way to mount the exhibition would be to build a temporary village from shipping containers.  I’m a huge fan of shipping container architecture, so I was especially excited to visit the exhibit and see how the re-purposed cargo spaces were used the first time I visited the Biennale in 2007 with my friends Joe and Angie.

The 2007 Kobe Biennale featured 45 award-winning works of art mounted in shipping containers in addition to displays featuring ikebana, works by disabled artists, a display of ceramic art, and art made by and for children.  The works of art varied widely in terms of idea, execution, and aesthetic effect but all of them were interesting and posed as their own enclosed worlds that  served to open up enjoyable spaces for thought and encounter.  The piece featured at the top of this entry — consisting of two mirrored panels that come to a point to create a space of unending reflection — is called “Infinite Planet” (無限の惑星) and is by a group from Ishikawa called Star in the TENTEN (天々星組).  The piece pictured above is by Song Junnam and Yoon Cyongsu and is called “Kobe People.”  Here’s what the artists have to say about this piece: “I am a foreigner who lives in Japan. It’s not rare in Kobe. Usually, I’m a minority, but in this work, I fill it up by the photographs of the foreigner’s faces, who are living in Japan. Through the encounter of foreigners living in Japan, who are also neighbors, I hope you can sense yourself, the foreigners, and Kobe.”

Several of the containers had ikebana on display.  The theme at work here was “future ikebana,” and many of the arrangements were truly incredible.

This piece, by Akihiro Kumagaya and Eisuke Tachikawa (熊谷彰博 and 太刀川英輔) was really fantastic.  It consisted of a mostly bare container painted white on the inside, which a few desks, chairs, and banks of red markers scattered around.  The entryway was constructed from pieces of red plastic so that when you looked through them into the container you (in theory) wouldn’t be able to see what was written on the walls.  All of the writing in the container was produced by guests at the Biennale, who were supposed to write down important thoughts, or perhaps childhood memories.  It was incredibly fun to add pieces of text to the jumble inside the container, and to spend time walking around and reading what other people had written.  This piece is listed as being untitled on the official 2007 Kobe Biennale site, but I remember it being called “What’s Your First Memory?”

This work, simply titled “Zebra,” (しまうま) is by Shibata Michiri (柴 田美千里).  There’s something deeply uncanny about walking through a container filled with stumpy zebra torsos.  I almost felt like I was walking through a zebra snuff film.  But at the same time there’s something funny about this piece, as if it were the punchline for a joke that you’ve forgotten the set up for.

This piece, by an artist called ONOYOTONN (小野養豚ん), a name that means “pig-farm,” was one of my favorites at the Biennale.  Here’s what ONOYOTONN has to say about the piece, which is called “A Herd” (群):  “I grew up on a pig farm and have made many works with pig motifs. With the theme of ‘encounter’, I embodied pig-herding images playfully. I mass-produced mini-pigs so that the container is full of them and enjoyed in the space.”  The pigs were made from some kind of wax, and a few of them had fallen from the walls and the ceilings by the time that Angie, Joe, and myself made it to the Biennale.  Because of the scattered nature of the pigs there was almost a sense of massacre about the place, and standing inside an area so full of pink fleshiness made me feel a little bit like I was standing inside a piece of intestine.  Or perhaps a bit as if I were trapped inside a sausage.

This piece — a webwork of glowing white tubules in a container with mirrored walls — made me feel like I was inside some kind of strange futuristic alien spaceship, or perhaps standing in a scene that never made it into the Matrix series.   The piece is by Ryosuke Sai (宰井良輔) of DOLPHIN KICK (ドルフィンキック), which is one of the best names for an arts-oriented design group that I can think of.  In the photo above you can see Joe, in the process of snapping this self-portrait.

Here’s Angie standing in front of a chalkboard that was completely covered with a single, extensive, set of of mathematical operations.  Across from the chalkboard were several wooden school desks equipped with paper and pencils so that you could sit down in front of the board and work up as much abstract calculation as your heart might desire.  So far, so normal.  But what you can’t do is sit at the desks without also sitting on an open ceramic toilet, the only seats in the place.  This is a piece that makes you think about the relationship between abstraction and bodily functions, and our inability to escape from our animal nature, no matter how hard we might try.  The piece, called “Animal Expression,” is by Yamashita Ryuuji          (山下竜司) and this is what he has to say about it: “We, human beings, using various materials, escape from the genus named “animals”, against reality. Even if it was impossible.”

This piece by Florian Claar, called “Symphonic Light Chamber,” is meant to sculpturally imitate the structure of 18th-century symphonic compositions.  I’m not sure that the piece ended up having that particular effect on me, but as a gloriously futuristic sculptural space I thought it was fantastic.  In fact, it felt very 2001 to me — up to and including the final transition in which you step through the circular entrance at the rear of the container and into a black void full of tiny pinpricks of light:  “The thing’s hollow—it goes on forever—and—oh my God—it’s full of stars!”

This beautiful work is composed of more than 2,500 letters and characters from different languages from around the world.  The colorful writing is illuminated from behind, and walking into this room is a bit like walking into an abstracted conversation in which you’re hearing bits and pieces of the entire planetary population talking at once.  This piece, by Noriko Shiozawa (塩澤徳子), is called “Koto-no-ha” (こと‐の‐は), which is an older Japanese word for “language.”  Shiozawa-san was kind enough to give her permission to allow the photograph above to be used as the cover for the UNESCO Jakarta Annual Report 2008.

This piece, by Hans Schohl, was called “General Cargo Celestial Mechanics” and consisted of several beautiful kinetic sculptures that were illuminated so that long shadows would be cast on the walls of the container.  The sculptures — similar to models of planetary rotation — reminded me vaguely of Aughra’s observatory in The Dark Crystal.

There were far more works at the 2007 Biennale than Joe, Angie, and I were able to see in a single day, and many of the really amazing pieces that we did manage to see weren’t the kind of works that show up well on film.  If I had had the opportunity, I would have visited the Biennale over the course of several days, slowly moving from work to work and taking plenty of time for coffee, relaxation, and clearing the head in between.  I might even have taken some time to watch the sun set from the top of  Kobe’s Port Tower, instead of watching the sun set inside of a container, as beautiful as that in fact turned out to be.  The piece above, called “koyomi,” is by Daiichi Shichino (七野大一) and it simulates sunset and moonrise by projecting slowly moving images of light at the end of a container in which a long reflecting pool has been constructed.  Inside the container, the images of sun and moon are reflected across the pool which quietly ripples and undulates from localized vibrations within the container.  All very dark, quiet, slow, and beautiful.

Filed under: Japan, Kansai, architecture, art, culture, design, exhibit, festival   |  1 Comment
Tags: kobe, festival, sculpture, exhibit, 神戸, design, art, artwork, graphic design, 2007 Kobe Biennale, shipping containers, exhibition, biennale, ikebana, 無限の惑星, Infinite Planet, Star in the TENTEN, 天々星組, Song Junnam, Yoon Cyongsu, Kobe People, future ikebana, Akihiro Kumagaya, Eisuke Tachikawa, 熊谷彰博, 太刀川英輔, Shibata Michiri, 柴田美千里, Zebra, しまうま, pigs, wax pigs, ONOYOTONN, 小野養豚ん, A Herd, 群, Ryosuke Sai, 宰井良輔, Dolphin Kick, ドルフィンキック, Animal Expression, 山下竜司, Yamashita Ryuuji, Florian Claar, Symphonic Light Chamber, installation, 塩澤徳子, Noriko Shiozawa, Koto-no-ha, こと‐の‐は, Hans Schohl, General Cargo Celestial Mechanics, kinetic sculpture, Daiichi Shichino, 七野大一, koyomi, 生け花

honeyland and alienation — a cartoon rhapsody

18Nov09

Múm’s video for Rhubarbidoo (off Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy, their latest album) is one of the most re-enchanting videos that I’ve seen for a long time.  If, as Max Weber has argued, Enlightenment rationalization, especially as it manifests itself in the bureaucratized capitalism of Western society, results in a disenchanted world where we are locked in an “iron cage” of social alienation and meaningless production, surely the 20th-century fascination with fantasy, science fiction, and the imaginative worlds brought to life by animation effectively functions as a kind of antidote.  Rhubarbidoo is the work of Jason Malcolm Brown and Aya Yamasaki Brown, a pair of illustrator/animators who seem to specialize in re-enchantment.  Their Overture project is just as otherworldly and beautiful as Rhubarbidoo and also foregrounds a represented natural space inhabited by creatures that are not of this world and yet, in their alien guises, somehow end up appearing as natural as nature itself.

Early 20th-century animation is rife with the idea of bringing things to life — not only inanimate objects like household objects or urban spaces, but also nature itself in a special kind of re-animation where life is brought back to life.  Disney’s 1932 cartoon Flowers and Trees is a perfect example of this type of animation.  It seems fair to wonder whether or not the deep fascination with nature evinced in these early animations is actually symptom of a society that is rapidly becoming so urbanized and industrialized that direct contact with the natural world has become a thing of the past.  In this case the ability of animation to bring this world to life as ’second nature’ is deeply ironic since it’s an artifact of the industrial revolution — the toothed-gear — that allows for the existence of the stop-motion technique in the first place.  There are more sophisticated readings of this dynamic that are possible as well, of course.  Marx would probably say that what we see when we see cups and saucers singing in Disney animation is the voice of alienated labor expressing itself in another register; the Adorno and Horkheimer of Dialectic of Enlightenment, on the other hand, might view the re-animation of nature as a kind of mystificatory screen that serves to block the fact that the animistic stage of society is long since dead and instead there is only the fact of nature as a purely objectified resource for human exploitation (including the pleasurable exploitation of nature in its cartoon form).

MGM’s Honeyland is a fantastic case study for the idea that animation that seems to be about natural space is actually about the social unconscious that’s at work behind the scenes.  The cartoon begins as a kind of pastoral idyll; the bee society is figured as a classic rural community with an economy based on cultivation and gathering.  By the middle of the 1850s, however, the mechanization of agriculture had already started in the United States — the McCormick reaper, the threshing machine, and a practical mowing machine were all in use well before even the invention of the horse-drawn combine in the 1880s.  By 1935, when Honeyland was made, agriculture in the U.S. was, for all practical purposes, fully industrialized.  The kind of rural life envisioned in the cartoon — a life of pleasant labor and natural bounty — was already nothing but a nostalgic fantasy.  This nostalgic fantasy, however, can’t maintain itself and soon we’re introduced to a second fantasy — the hive as happy factory.  At this point the (worker) bees are still depicted as deeply content, and they obviously have a large amount of autonomy and free time for pleasure.  It’s toward the end of the cartoon, when the spider attacks, that the social unconscious reveals itself in a manner that’s a bit more sinister.  What started off as a pastoral idyll has now devolved into industrialized militarism — the bees are controlled en masse via the electronic call of the centralized public announcement system and form themselves into single living klaxon within which all individuation has completely disappeared.  This may seem like a stretch, but perhaps it’s not as much of a stretch if you consider that the rationalization of industrial production has its roots in the standardized manufacture of interchangeable rifle parts.

All of these anxieties about the role of human agency within the highly commercialized and industrialized landscape that we’ve erected around ourselves and come to inhabit are at the forefront of this brilliant montage that combines scenes from the Fleischer Studio’s 1939 animated version of Gulliver’s Travels and stock footage of the construction of what I think must be the World Trade Center buildings.  The way in which Rockwell’s video for Beholden juxtaposes the Lilliputians with scenes of the construction of the WTC raises the question of whether or not we have, in fact, created something that we can’t control.  The image at the end of the video is the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 treatise, Leviathan, which argues for the total control of (a willing) society by an absolute sovereign.  Ending the video with this image makes clear that the question being raised is one of control and sovereignty; as a society we may have the ability to construct wonders, but in the end isn’t it those wonders that control us?  Clearly there is another version of Weber’s iron cage at work here.

Of course, it would be ridiculous to subscribe to the view that somehow all attempts to re-enchant the world are, in the final analysis, nothing but an empty compensation for the fact that the disenchantment of the world we know has been made complete.  There are always gaps and fissures where enchantment can happen, despite the pessimism of theorists like Weber and Adorno.  The excess in homo ludens will always escape, at least partially, the clasp of the iron cage.  The force of play and invention, the possibility to explore and investigate new social potentialities and possibilities, is at least as much of a feature of any creative work as our inability to escape the social unconscious that must inform it in at least some way.  The playful space of vegetable fantasy in Rhubarbidoo is one form that this type of exploration may take, but another form that may be more directly useful for raising questions about the type of society that we might someday want to become can be found in lengthier works of animated fantasy and speculative fiction.  Although it’s not a particularly incisive film when it comes to unpacking the deep-seated contradictions of society as we know it, René Laloux’s 1973 film Fantastic Planet does a remarkable job of thematizing the human propensity to resist totalizing systems of control, while at the same expressing the force of the imagination at play in the form of the wild and surreal images that explode across the alien landscape presented in the film.

This video for Múm’s song “They Made Frogs Smoke ’til They Exploded” is by Ingibjörg Birgisdóttir, and it embodies the idea of play in deeply interesting ways.  Firstly, the video is about child’s play and as such is as much about violently exploratory creative destruction as it is about the wonder of discovery.  Childhood feelings of powerlessness — of literally being overcome and torn apart by overwhelming emotional states — are expressed through images of disembodied limbs, bodies being opened up and bleeding, and animals that are both menacing and at the same time objects to be cut open and destroyed.  The play expressed in the first part of the video is dark and indicates thetransference and acting out of violent emotions onto a creative stage that’s filled with blood and crumpled paper.  And yet, as with all childhood imaginings, the cat that loses its head is able to be magically stitched back together and return to life.  The crux of this video, for me, is the sequence with the child holding up the drawing of a swan.  The image of the swan is filled with swathes of brilliant color at the same moment at the child’s teeth fall out, precipitating a full-scalerain of teeth.  The dream of teeth falling out is, of course, classically supposed to indicate a fear of the loss of control.  And yet, at the same time, the falling out of baby teeth is one marker of our entry into adulthood.  In this sequence the creative and wild imagination of childhood, including all of the horrors that come along with it, is represented as the necessary basis for the move to aesthetic maturity.  After this scene the types of creative images that appear are much more benign — flowers emerging from the swan’s mouth, leaves filling the soul-space of a child, and paper that turns into butterflies that fly away.  Perhaps the most delightful aspect of this video is the use of common classroom materials — those things we mostassociate with childhood and its attendant confusions and power struggles — as the medium through which the question of childhood imagination is realized.  It may be the case that as a whole our society has veered far from any real contact and understanding with nature — we may have become too good at making frogs explode — but there’s a second nature at work in all of these videos, a second nature that demands a space for play and exhibits an irrepressible desire to resist the final isolation of total alienation.

Filed under: animation, art, cinema, culture, film, history, music, nature, philosophy, society, technology, video   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: nature, Múm, animation, consumerism, imagination, fantasy, science fiction, exploration, capitalism, alienation, Rhubarbidoo, cartoons, re-enchantment, disenchantment, Enlightenment, Enlightenment thought, Max Weber, iron cage, industrialism, Jason Malcolm Brown, Aya Yamasaki Brown, natural world, Disney, Flowers and Trees, Adorno, Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, alienated labor, Honeyland, bee society, social unconscious, American farming, industrialization of American Farming, hive as factory, industrial militarism, social control, Rockwell, Beholden, Gulliver's Travels, Lilliputians, montage, Fantastic Planet, homo ludens, play, invention, totalizing systems of control, They Made Frogs Smoke 'til They Exploded, Ingibjörg Birgisdóttir, childhood, creation, creative destruction

autumn viewing at enkoji temple

08Nov09

Enkoji temple (圓 光寺) is one of the nicer places to go for autumn maple-leaf viewing.  The temple was founded as a place for scholarship and learning in 1601 by Tokugawa Ieyasu.  It was originally in Fushimi, in the southern part of Kyoto, but in 1667 the temple was moved to its current location near the base of Mt. Hiei.  Enkoji has several gardens featuring beautifully sculpted maple trees and there’s a walking path that will take you through the temple graveyard and then up a hillside behind the temple complex where you can find some stunning views of Kyoto.  The buildings and gardens at Enkoji are perfectly laid out with the idea of ‘the view’ in mind.  At every corner, everywhere you turn, there’s a bit of framed visual splendor ready to catch your mind and slow it down.  It’s a place that, finally, demands that you notice everything — and everything you notice is quiet, beautiful, and somehow absolutely to the point.

(All photographs featured were taken during November of 2007.)

Photo information, by order of appearance, including camera, lens, and film type:

1) Voigtlander Bessa-L, 15mm Heliar, Kodak 400UC.

2) Voigtlander Bessa R2A, 35mm Ultron, Fujifilm Velvia 100.

3) Voigtlander Bessa-L, 15mm Heliar, Kodak 400UC.

4) Voigtlander Bessa R2A, 35mm Ultron, Fujifilm Velvia 100.

5) Voigtlander Bessa-L, 15mm Heliar, uncertain film type.

6) Voigtlander Bessa R2A, 35mm Ultron, Fujifilm Velvia 100.

7) Voigtlander Bessa R2A, 35mm Ultron, Fujifilm Velvia 100.

Filed under: Japan, Kansai, culture, history, nature, photography, religion, travel   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: 15mm Heliar, 35mm Ultron, autumn, autumn colors, beautiful views, Bessa R2A, Bessa-L, brilliant color, Buddhism, Buddhist, 秋, 紅葉, Enkoji, Enkoo-ji, fall colors, film camera, garden, Japanese garden, Kyoto, maple leaves, maple trees, maples, photography, rangefinder, temple, Tokugawa Ieyasu, Voigtländer, 圓 光寺, 徳川 家康, 京都

autumn swordsman

06Nov09

Hachidai shrine (八大神社) is right next to Shisendo, and is most famous because of it’s association with Miyamoto Musashi, one of Japan’s most famous swordsmasters. Supposedly he came here to pray before the epic battle with the Yoshioka school in which he single-handedly consigned an entire branch of the school to oblivion.  Here’s how Wikipedia tells the tale:

Musashi challenged Yoshioka Seijūrō, master of the Yoshioka School, to a duel. Seijūrō accepted, and they agreed to a duel outside Rendaiji in Rakuhoku, in the northern part of Kyoto on 8 March 1604. Musashi arrived late, greatly irritating Seijūrō. They faced off, and Musashi struck a single blow, per their agreement. This blow struck Seijūrō on the left shoulder, knocking him out, and crippling his left arm. He apparently passed on the headship of the school to his equally accomplished brother, Yoshioka Denshichirō, who promptly challenged Musashi for revenge. The duel variously took place in Kyoto outside a temple, Sanjūsangen-dō. Denshichirō wielded a staff reinforced with steel rings (or possibly with a ball-and-chain attached), while Musashi arrived late a second time. Musashi disarmed Denshichirō and defeated him. This second victory outraged the Yoshioka clan, whose head was now the 12-year old Yoshioka Matashichiro. They assembled a force of archers, musketeers and swordsmen, and challenged Musashi to a duel outside Kyoto, near Ichijoji Temple. Musashi broke his previous habit of arriving late, and came to the temple hours early. Hidden, Musashi assaulted the force, killing Matashichiro, and escaping while being attacked by dozens of his victim’s supporters. With the death of Matashichiro, this branch of the Yoshioka School was destroyed.

Because of the association with Musashi, Hachidai has — in addition to a very prominent statue of Musashi — a variety of Musashi-related paraphernalia on offer, including a special goshiun stamp that features Musashi in full attack mode with both katanas blazing.

In any case, Musashi aside, Hachidai is a small but beautiful shrine and is well worth a side trip on a visit to the more famous temple sites of Shisendo and Enkoji; the autumn colors are lovely and it’s a good place to take a break from the aesthetic purity of Buddhist gardens for a moment and take in a bit of swordsman-style kitsch.  Hachidai itself is dedicated to Susano-o no Mikoto, god of storms and the sea, though it really does emphasize the Musashi connection above all else.  Here’s the English text of the sign out in front of the shrine:

This shrine was established in 1294, with “SUSANOHNO-MIKOTO” as the main diety.  Known as “Northern Gion,” people pray here for Happiness, Success in business, studies and marriage etc.  Miyamoto Musashi, Japan’s greatest Swordsmaster defeated the Yoshioka school nearby at “Sagarimatsu” after praying at this shrine.  Preserved here is a section of the famous “Sagarimatsu” pine, under which they fought.

You can see Musashi standing under the Sagarimatsu here, in this dashing portrait of the swordsman in all his youthful vigor.

On a trip to Kyushu several years ago I also had the opportunity to visit Reigando, the cave where Musashi completed the famous Book of Five Rings just before his death.  It’s a much more solemn spot than Hachidai, and also well worth a visit.

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Tags: defeat of Yoshioka school, duel, 須佐之男命, god of storms, god of the sea, Hachidai, Kyoto, Miyamoto Musashi, Musashi vs. Yoshioka, Reigando, Sagarimatsu, samurai, Shinto, shrine, Susano-o no Mikoto, swordsman, Yoshioka Matashichiro, Yoshioka School, 八大神社, 宮本 武蔵, 京都

autumn leaves at shisendo

05Nov09

Since autumn is here and the maple-viewing season is almost upon us, I thought I would drop a few seasonally appropriate posts.  These shots were taken a few years ago on a trip to Shisendo temple (詩仙堂) that was taken together with the lovely Ohta Ikuko.  Shisendo is especially famous for its maple trees, which flame on in the most amazing colors in late November.  The temple was established in 1641 by Ishikawa Jozan, a poet, scholar of Chinese classics, and a landscape gardener.  Apparently Jozan fought alongside Tokugawa Ieyasu in his battle against the Toyotomi clan, which then held Osaka Castle.  The name of the temple — which can loosely be translated as “great poet temple” — is associated with the 36 portraits of classical Chinese poets (painted by Kano Tanyu) that were displayed in the main room of the temple.

Photo information, by order of appearance, including camera, lens, and film type:

1) Voigtlander Bessa-L, 15mm Heliar, Kodak 400UC.

2) Voigtlander Bessa-L, 15mm Heliar, Kodak 400UC.

3) Voigtlander Bessa R2A, 35mm Ultron, Fujifilm Velvia 100.

4) Voigtlander Bessa R2A, 35mm Ultron, Fujifilm Velvia 100.

5) Voigtlander Bessa-L, 15mm Heliar, Kodak 400UC.

6) Voigtlander Bessa R2A, 35mm Ultron, Fujifilm Velvia 100.

Filed under: Japan, Kansai, culture, history, literature, nature, photography, poetry, travel   |  2 Comments
Tags: 紅葉, Kyoto, 京都, temple, Buddhism, autumn, maples, changing of the leaves, fall colors, fall, poet, Buddhist temple, Shisendo, 詩仙堂, Chinese classical poetry, Ishikawa Jozan, Kano Tanyu, autumn colors, 狩野探幽, maple leaves, 石川丈山

a nickle bag of animation

29Oct09

Here’s a selection of five videos that have caught my attention recently, all of which are well worth watching.  It may only be a nickel bag of animation, but as far as I’m concerned there’s so much sugar here it might as well be a dime.

This is the first decently reproduced Tabaimo video that I’ve been able to find on line.  It was presumably aired on Vermilion Pleasure Night, a Japanese television show that combined comedy and animation.  This short video is called “Japanese Kitchen” and I’m not sure whether or not it’s a segment from Tabaimo’s larger installation piece, also called Japanese Kitchen, or whether it simply has the same title and deals with the same themes.  Tabaimo has a way of making everydayness seem deeply uncanny, and this piece is no exception.

History of the Main Complaint is a piece that examines the question of white culpability in relation to the violent history of apartheid-era South Africa.  It was made shortly after the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee and it thematizes not only the act of excavating the submerged memories of South Africa’s violent history but also the question of what might constitute the proper cure for a state that has such a history of a violence and repression engraved literally into the body itself.   The pun on “complaint” is key here — a complaint is not only a physical ailment, but also the voice of those repressed South Africans who had been denied treatment for their suffering during the long reign of the apartheid state.  William Kentridge employs an animation technique that is perfectly in keeping with the thematic claims that he materializes in this work; using only charcoal he sketches a primary scene and then erases and overlays this primary scene in order to create motion.  However, the marks of the previous stills are never completely rendered invisible and their presence functions as a persistent trace of origin that can never be completely forgotten.  Just as the traumatic history of  apartheid-era South Africa can never be fully suppressed, so the marks on Kentridge’s pages never fully disappear under the onslaught of new production.

This OOIOO video was made by Shoji Goto, an incredible graphic designer and the husband of founding OOIOO member Yoshimi P-We.  Shoji, who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a few times, is an incredibly nice guy and is responsible for most (if not all) of the cover art for OOIOO’s releases.  It’s art that matches the OOIOO aesthetic well — a kind of imaginary cosmic pre-Jomon tribal pantheism as filtered through a dozen psychedelic effects circuits and viewed through a thousand-sided prismatic crystal ball.  I’ve seen OOIOO live several times now, and each time was an experience of total transportation.  You can download a more high-fidelity version of this video here.

I don’t know much about Metric, but this particular song sounds like the most fantastic Breeders number that never made it to wax.  I also don’t know much about Deco Dawson, except that he’s a young Canadian filmmaker and the director of this video.  There’s nothing particular new, startling, or revelatory about this video, but somehow all the elements cook together perfectly and I have to admit to being more than a little smitten with it.  Check out the Deco Dawson site for information about his films, as well as links to a vast library of fantastic early work that’s suspiciously reminiscent of Guy Maddin’s style.

Finally, here’s a little rarity that I stumbled upon entirely by accident.  It’s a Tadanori Yokoo version of the ChimChimChiree song from Mary Poppins, apparently from 1966.  I don’t know any more about it than that, but it’s pretty early Tadanori and it actually reminds me a lot of the work that Heinz Edelmann did for Yellow Submarine.  Of course, Yellow Submarine came out in 1968 so there couldn’t have been any direct influence on this animation.  Maybe it was something in the water.

Filed under: Japan, animation, art, cinema, culture, film, history, music, scraps and bones, video   |  2 Comments
Tags: animation, apartheid, たばいも, チムチムチェリー, charcoal animation, charcoal drawing, ChimChimChiree, chimney sweep, chimney sweep song, Deco Dawson, History of the Main Complaint, Japanese Kitchen, Mary Poppins, Metric, OOIOO, Shoji Goto, South Africa, Tabaimo, Tadanori Yokoo, video, video art, William Kentridge, 後藤 章治, 横尾忠則

masonna

28Oct09

Masonna (マソナ) is the name that Yamazaki Maso uses for his incredible one-man noise attack unit.  Along with Merzbow, Incapacitants, and Jojo Hiroshige (of Hijokaidan fame), Masonna is one of Japan’s most famous noise artists.  Masonna uses a variety of electronic devices and instruments to create shrieking walls of feedback and violent waves of distortion as he yelps and screams over the top.  In interviews Maso-san has said that what he’s trying to do with his noise unit is to summon the most extreme intensities of rock music and release them all at once in a single sonic attack of enormous magnitude.  The photo at the top of the page was taken at Alchemy Records, where Masonna works, during a tour of America-mura’s vast horde of underground record stores that I took with Andee, of San Francisco’s Aquarius Records, and his friend Josh.

Masonna’s live performaces are famous for the incredible energy that he releases as he jumps around the stage wildly, screams and stamps on his equipment, and rolls around as if possessed.  He often hurts himself during his performances, which are so extreme that they often last only a few minutes.  The special solo performance show that I saw as part of the 20th anniversary celebrations at Namba Bears lasted all of four minutes because Maso-san ended up injuring his knee as he was leaping through the air while swinging his microphone in circles.

The show may only have been four minutes long, but it was a four-minute monument of all-out sonic assault.  Listening to Masonna’s music is like hearing the screaming sounds of circuits as they die in a fiery conflagration, or perhaps the sounds that a wildly screaming coven of witches would make were they all somehow speaking through shorted microphones channeled through mixing boards stuffed solid with cyclotrimethylene trinitramine.  Or perhaps like the shouts of a cosmic alien intelligence beamed straight into your head, but too fast and intense to comprehend.

In addition to his numerous side projects and his work with the psych-garage group Acid Eater, Masonna often plays collaboratively with other musicians.  I saw a great show at Osaka’s nu-things featuring Mani Nuemeier of Guru Guru fame on drums playing with an all-star cast of Alchemists including Masonna (on analogue synthesizer), Jojo Hiroshige on guitar, Kakinoki (from Garadama), and Yoko Takano on bass.  One of the very best collaborative shows I’ve seen, however, had to be the duo of Masonna (on analogue synthesizer and vocals) andKawabata Makoto (of Acid Mothers Temple fame).  Makoto’s ripping, psychedelic guitar work and Masonna’s tripped out space-synth and shouting worked together to create a beautiful warped forest of sound that distributed itself as a slow motion explosion.

Listening to Masonna at home, on headphones, is a totally different experience than seeing Masonna perform life.  The disortion, feedback, and sonic intensity is all the same, but without the energy of the live show I find the noise attack to be strangely calming, almost trancelike.  After a while, Masonna Vs. Bananamara, an album that Masonna recorded in his room while he was still living at home, almost comes to sound like chattering insects shrieking in a language that might be piercing at first, but then starts to become familiar, as if with just a bit more exposure it might soon be possible to understand exactly what they’re saying.

Masonna’s Spectrum Ripper at UbuWeb

Kawabata Makota at the Japanese New Music Festival

Filed under: Japan, Kansai, Osaka, music, performance, video   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: Alchemy Records, ジャパノイズ, マソナ, collaboration, harsh noise, Japanese noise, Japanoise, Makoto Kawabata, Masonna, music, noise, noise musicians, performance, show, Yamazaki Maso, 山崎 "マゾ" 卓志, 河端 一

garbage quintet: a suite of images featuring flotsam, jetsam, and dead fugu

22Oct09

Photo information, by order of appearance, including location, camera, lens, and film type:

1) Himeji coast, Voigtlander Bessa R2A, 75mm Color-Heliar, Fujifilm Superia 400.

2) Himeji coast, Voigtlander Bessa R2A, 75mm Color-Heliar, Fujifilm Superia 400.

3) Takarazuka mountains, Voigtlander Bessa R2A, 35mm Ultron, Fujifilm Provia 100.

4) Himeji coast, Voigtlander Bessa R2A, 75mm Color-Heliar, Fujifilm Superia 400.

5) Toyonaka-shi, Voigtlander Bessa-T, 50mm Nokton, Fujifilm Natura 1600.

Filed under: Japan, Kansai, daily life, photography, scraps and bones   |  3 Comments
Tags: ocean, 35mm Ultron, rangefinder, Voigtländer, photography, pond, coast, Bessa-T, 50mm Nokton, Bessa R2A, garbage, trash, waste, fugu, dead fish, ふぐ, casette gas sun, aerosol, can, rope, baseball, analogue film, 75mm color-heliar

CARDBOARD and アホな走り集

19Oct09

It seems like I’m stumbling across all kinds of great video objects lately.  The first of today’s features include an amazing piece of animation in which strange creatures and robots painted onto cardboard come to life and inhabit the Dutch cityscape.  The video itself is the graduation project of Sjors Vervoort, and the soundtrack is by Steven Aerts.  Originally gleaned from Boing Boing, and a nice bookend to the pieces by BLU and David Ellis that were featured on this site yesterday.

The second video is called アホな走り集 (basically “Collection of Idiotic Running”) and I don’t know much about it except that it features music by Nujabes and incredibly slow motion silly-running (including a cameo by a sumo wrestler).  It kind of reminds me of a much more entertaining version of some of Bill Viola’s more recent work.  Passed on to me via my cousin, the brilliant Annelise DeVore.

Filed under: Japan, animation, art, culture, funs, music, scraps and bones, video   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: animation, アホな走り集, CARDBOARD, cardboard animation, Nujabes, robots, Sjors Vervoort, slow motion, slow motion running, stop motion, strange creatures

COMBO and MUTO — revolutionary urbanism with a spraycan

18Oct09

BLU, the Bologna-based street artist and wall-art animator, has recently teamed up with David Ellis, a Brooklyn-based “motion painter,” to produce the animated work COMBO, an amazing piece of urban re-inhabitation that imaginatively brings dead urban space back to life through the use of paint and stop motion.  In the opening sequence of COMBO, a pile of scrap wood is dropped into a well, which then becomes a mouth.  The mouth digests the wood, a face appears, and twin spires of fire exit from recently opened eyes.  This is clearly a visual representation of a kind of imaginative awakening, an awakening fueled by the detournement of the non-space of everyday urban existence into an artistic space of play and encounter.  BLU and Ellis are like the mouth of the well, digesting the raw material of the space around them and converting it into a dreamspace that overwhelms the dead container from which it has originated.  In a way, the work of BLU and Ellis fits right in with Guy Debord’s idea of revolutionary urbanism:

Revolutionary urbanists will not limit their concern to the circulation of things and of human beings trapped in a world of things. They will try to break these topological chains, paving the way with their experiments for a human journey through authentic life.

COMBO and MUTO (an earlier wall-animation by BLU) are nothing if not experimental works that have the aim of bringing the city back to life by breaking open spaces for a new awareness of the urban order that surrounds us.  In both MUTO and COMBO there are moments where bricks are pushed out of walls and animated life pours from the holes that are left behind.  This is reminiscent of the famous Situationist International slogan, “Sous les pavés, la plage!” (“Beneath the paving stones — the beach!”), except that in this case the beach is the imagination unleashed in order to turn spaces of alienation into spaces of procreation.    

Filed under: animation, art, culture, funs, society, video   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: alienation, animation, Beneath the paving stones — the beach!, BLU, COMBO, David Ellis, dead space, detournement, Guy Debord, imagination, la plage!, motion painting, MUTO, non-space, revolutionary urbanism, Situationist International, Sous les pavés, stop motion, street art, urban geography, video, wall-art animation