Poster, silkscreen, 1030x728mm
Kawasaki City Museum
The Kawasaki City Museum is currently showing an exhibition titled "Kiyoshi Awazu Retrospective: Re-Reproduction" (through 3/29), and I was appointed moderator for a symposium on the theme of "citizens, Awazu Kiyoshi, and the museum of the future" on Friday, March 27. Panelists will be Sakai Tadayasu (Director of Setagaya Art Museum), Hamada Goji (Director of Aomori Contemporary Art Center), Fudo Misato (Chief curator at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa), Nakajima Takeshi (General Planning Bureau, City of Kawasaki), and Hirai Naoko (Curator at Kawasaki City Museum).
Born in 1929, Awazu taught himself the techniques of graphic design, and in the 1950s gained some fame for his posters for theatre performances and movies. He was immensely active also outside the realm of design however, cultivating relationships with artists, musicians, filmmakers, theatre people, architects; painting in oil and watercolor, making prints and sculptures, taking photographs, shooting movies, and building stage sets and movie props; drawing manga, publishing and editing magazines, doing art performances, authoring texts, and engaging in dialogues — and there are no doubt quite a few things I forgot to mention. Anyway, he was involved with artistic work in an extremely broad range of genres. Although he wasn't operating much on an international level and didn't really cooperate a lot, I would go as far as to call him a Japanese Andy Warhol or Jean Cocteau.
Poster, offset, 1030x728mm
Kawasaki City Museum
What is particularly noteworthy is his consistently contemporary approach. The (Japanese) title of the exhibition is borrowed from a remark by Akasegawa Genpei, and it summarizes perfectly the methods of Awazu and his contemporaries, putting into practice what in philosophy everyone from Benjamin to Baudrillard were understanding as the "age of reproductive art". "In a way, we departed from the total cultural situation of fake reproduction. […] Such things as originals no longer exist," he put it himself (in a conversation on "design and poetry in the age of reproduction" with novelist/poet Tomioka Taeko in 1974). At the same occasion, he claimed that "rickety, disjointed reproductions have a stronger presence than sophisticated ones." In fact, there are countless examples of "rickety, disjointed reproductions" in silkscreen and offset printed works.
Poster, silkscreen, 728x515mm
Kawasaki City Museum
The issues Awazu personified are very current and stimulating. Tradition and innovation, original and reproduction, intention and coincidence, art and design — and above that, the aforementioned crossover artistic work. He pointed out as often as he could the importance of mixing genres and cultures. For example, "I have always believed that new forms of culture emerge out of collisions of different cultures. […] The mutual stimulation of different elements generates new cultures." (From "Design wo hajimete kara", included next to records of the above-mentioned conversation in "Cruising around designs", published in 1982 by Gendai Kikakushitsu.) In the era when Awazu was active, artists from different genres were mixing and generating "new forms of culture ", and it was in fact a time when also the beneficiaries (audiences) were actively appreciating culture in a similarly crossover fashion.
Poster, offset, 728x515mm
Kawasaki City Museum
In this sense, I think this upcoming symposium takes place at the right time and place. "Time" refers not only to the short period during which public museums have adopted the administration assignment system, but also the time in which, in a greater art historical context, museums and art-related systems are pressed to review their rules and regulations, and in addition, a time of stagnating crossover activities of both artists and beneficiaries. The "place" is the Kawasaki City Museum, the opening of which Awazu was deeply involved in, and at once a non-western big city disconnected from the mainstream of art. I'm planning to ask the panelists, a bunch of people working at the forefront of art and culture, what they consider to be Tokyoesque art today. "Tokyo" here does not refer to the Japanese capital of metropolitan Tokyo alone, but to the megalopolis that also includes Kawasaki, or even to the homogenized Japanese (if not East Asian) urban structure at large.
In early March I went to see five art exhibitions, five stage productions, one design exhibition, and two talk events. I attended some events' opening receptions, and others I saw on a weekday at noon, when not many general visitors were present. Be that as it may, at none of those events I found the slightest trace of a crossover approach, which is a clear regression from the times in which Awazu was most active.
Poster, offset, 728×515mm
Kawasaki City Museum
At the opening reception of the "Yanagi Miwa: My Grandmothers" exhibition (on 3/6 at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography) I met several people from the realm of performing arts, but I guess that was only because the Tokyo Performing Arts Market was held next door at the Garden Hall. On the first day of "in-I", a co-production/co-performance by Akram Khan and Juliette Binoche, the venue (Theatre Cocoon) was crowded with film people, but considering Binoche’s stardom, that surely falls under exception. Even though Romeo Castellucci’s "Hey Girl!" (3/11 at Nishi-sugamo Arts Factory), a piece incorporating Jan Van Eyck’s self-portrait in an odd way, and themed on (among others) the line of sight, offered some inspirational material for the art crowd, including the question why Van Eyck and not Velazquez, but nonetheless, I noticed only theatre people in the audience. Port B’s "Sunshine 63" was a uniquely fun "walking performance" inspired by the Tokyo Trial, taking place in groups of five participants each, which made it impossible to categorize. However, I haven't heard any response from outside the realm of performing arts so far.
In the article "Tokyoesque Art" that I posted here about a year and a half ago, I wrote about museums' internal cross-disciplinary attempts. However, what is really desirable is the establishment of a center-less network of cultural and artistic expression as a whole, including museums, which triggers "collisions of different cultures". In other words, the important thing is what happens OUTSIDE the museum, whereas the museum should of course provide a driving force for crossover, cross-disciplinary artistic expression. At the symposium, I want to find out whether the museum is capable of assuming such a leading role.
Ozaki Tetsuya / Editor in chief / REALTOKYO