Japanese trans-gender art director, photographer and costume/performance artist Pyuupiru’s Planetarium series, all hand-knitted without patterns …

‘Disappearances – an eternal journey’ by Shinji Turner-Yamamoto – read here.

“Turner-Yamamoto’s installation comprised fossil materials – 400 million year old CORAL collected during a recent artist residency at Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, LIMESTONE (fossil rock in which the shells of sea dwellers are cemented in a solid mass, the CONCRETE floor of the exhibition space created from burnt limestone), and GYPSUM (deposits formed by ancient lake and sea water and collected by the artist and SiTE:LAB team from Grand Rapid’s gypsum mine) to comment on the ubiquity of fossil material in our everyday life—from the oil, coal, and gas we use when we drive, heat our homes, or cook.”

Kishin Shinoyama didn’t only shoot nudie twins in black & white, he also for instance did this wonderful early print campaign for Issey Miyake … in 1969!

Photos by Shinoyama Kishin

In 1993 Jaques Derrida curated Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, an exhibition at the Louvre of prints and drawings featuring depictions of blindness. In the coinciding publication, he considered blindness in art and the relationship between visibility and invisibility. A drawer cannot see at the same time both the thing in the world that is being drawn, and the drawn lines on the page. “Doesn’t one have to be blind to one or the other? Doesn’t one always have to be content with the memory of the other?” Derrida asks, concluding that “From the outset, perception belongs to recollection.” Since drawing is always instantaneous, always from memory, always a gesture made in the dark – the artist must be blind in order to draw.

In the same year as the exhibition, Derrida applied similar thinking to photography, images made directly from lightness and darkness, in an essay that was published in Japanese in the journal Shincho, with the title Aletheia (a Greek word meaning something like ‘unforgetting’ or ‘the state of not being hidden’, which Heidegger in the early twentieth century used in developing his concept of the disclosure or ‘unconcealedness’ of things).

Responding to a series of black & white images of the actress Shinobu Ōtake in a photobook by Japanese photographer Shinoyama Kishin, Derrida in this article makes some illuminating observations about the dark side of illumination, and the reversibility of seen and unseen. “Visibility itself is invisible, it is thus dark, obscure, nocturnal and it is necessary to be blind to it (immersed in darkness) in order to see,” he says, and continues, “Nothing is more black than the visibility of light, nothing is clearer than this sunless night.” On the reversibility of light and dark, he comments on  “the photographic ‘negative’ to be developed, the always possible inversion of the projected image, the nudity of the body unveiled by the veil itself which calls for and suspends desire …”

Attempting a deconstruction of the light-dark binary in a specific photo (showing Ōtake’s head and bare shoulders in dramatic Carravaggesque tenebrism with the English title Light of the Dark - see below), Derrida equates photography with skiagraphy – ie. ‘writing with light’ as ‘writing with shadow’ – and asks of the image, “Why does it appear not only to come out of and proceed from the night, as if black gave birth to white, but also to belong still to shadow, to remain still at the heart of the dark abyss from which it emanates?”

(The article was recently published for the first time in English in The Oxford Literary Review Vol. 32 No. 2)

Hiroshi Senju is famous for his large paintings of waterfalls executed in the nihonga (Japanese-style) tradition with mineral pigments on mulberry paper. Here are some alluring human-free photographs of a new museum dedicated to his work in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture. The building is by Ryue Nishizawa of SANAA, who does wonderful things with untreated concrete, curved glass and natural light.

The metaphor of light for knowledge runs deep in our everyday language: ‘bring to light’, ‘enlighten’, ‘see the light’, ‘dim understanding’, ‘shadow of doubt’ etc. But too much illumination can leave us imperceptive, as indicated by the notion of being ‘blinded by the light’. The sun’s great paradox is that while it allows all seeing, we can’t see it directly; and if we do try to look at it we damage our eyes (which, incidentally, Plato referred to as the most ‘helioform’ and thereby most divine of the sensing organs). For her acclaimed series The Sun (2005-), Rika Noguchi has used pinhole cameras to visualise the solar body’s obfuscating effects on the eyes of its mortal Earth-bound observers. She currently has a solo show at Izu Photo Museum in the foothills of Mt Fuji (until March 2012).

The above photographs are the result of Naoya Hatakeyama being commissioned to document the razing of Zeche Westfahlen, an old coal mining town in the Ruhr District of Germany, in 2004. Best known for his human-less images of undergrounds, mining towns and explosions on limestone quarries, Hatakeyama has an exhibition called Natural Stories showing at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography until December 4.

Photos from the 2011 Big In Japan events – performances by Fuyuki Yamakawa, Kyozin Yueni Dekai, Yuko Kaseki and OVe-NaXx with live visuals by onnacodomo. Doors open at 6pm tonight at 1000 Pound Bend in Melbourne for the final installment of this year’s program. 361 Little Lonsdale St. Free and open to the public.

Also featuring video art by Keiichi Tanaami, OVAR, Tetsushi Higashino, Kato Tsubasa and more …

by Tetsushi Higashino

Referring to his work as ‘Unproductive Production Activity’, Tetsushi Higashino says his primary concern lies in our relationship with the insignificant. Screening at this week’s Big In Japan events in Sydney and Melbourne is his new omnibus video work featuring a box entering a castle, the artist turning himself into a futile air circulating system, and toilet paper resisting rectilinearity.

Big In Japan 2011 is happening at Paddington Town Hall in Sydney on November 15 and 16, and at 1000 Pound Bend in Melbourne on November 18 and 19. More on Tetsushi’s art here and here.

OVAR (Origin of Visual Audio Research) is a new collaborative duo formed in Tokyo earlier this year by two guest artists from the 2010 Big In Japan program – sound artist Mamoru Okuno and Kentaro Shimura of SHIMURABROS. The first work by OVAR, FCN001 ver.1-3 is being shown at Yuka Tsuruno gallery in Tokyo (as part of the Lumen・Sonus・Memoria show, which is on from this week until December 10), and as part of the video art exhibitions I curated for the 2011 Big In Japan events in Australia next week (November 15 and 16 at Paddington Town Hall in Sydney and November 18 and 19 at 1000 Pound Bend in Melbourne).

What we call motion pictures are actually, as we know, made up of many still pictures. Starting with the fact that most contemporary film achieves duration by using twenty-four frames to make a second, the artists constructed this disorienting video work from twenty-four still photographs. With a repeated sequence of stilted movements back and forth between different vantage points on the same scene, it attempts to visualise a multidimensional perception of time and duration that goes beyond the arrow of past-present-future.

The score is constructed from four tracks of sound (a field recording in the woods, a piano recording, and two digital sound files) which were switched on and off in every possible combination (2 x 2 x 2 x 2 patterns). Mamoru explains that since he and Kentaro do not believe in ‘pure random operation’, they experimented with various combinations of the audio and visual components, inserting subjectivity into the predetermined formulas by selecting patterns based on personal sensation.

Kyozin Yueni Dekai, OVe-NaXx, Fuyuki Yamakawa, onnacodomo and Yuko Kaseki are Big In Japan 2011. This year the events take place at Paddington Town Hall in Sydney (November 15 and 16) and 1000 Pound Bend in Melbourne (November 18 and 19). There will also be another exhibition of new video works from Japan, art installation by Marian Tubbs, and live performances from Pia van Gelder and Chronox. Doors open at 6pm, first acts at 7.

“You are still thinking in terms of a life with a real face. The mask does not deceive and is not deceived. How about putting on a new mask, turning over a new leaf, and starting another life?”

(The Face of Another, Kōbō Abe)

This is my fifth post in a row on the world famous architect Arata Isozaki, and I’m still avoiding saying anything at all about his actual architecture. Reproduced here are stills from the The Face of Another (1966), the third in a series of excellent films by Hiroshi Teshigahara (after Pitfall and The Woman in the Dunes) that were based on novels by Kōbō Abe and scored by the avant-garde composer Toru Takemitsu. Isozaki designed the absurdist sets …

The Japanese spatio-temporal concept of ma suggests a gap, opening, delay or silence. It can be understood as a demarcated in-betweenness in space or time. A room, being the space formed inside walls, is ma. A pause in music, as the gap delineated between audible notes, is also ma. The ideogram for ma (間) comprises the character for ‘gate’ or ‘door’ (門) enveloping the character of ‘sun’ (日) – in this sense it refers to the interval between things, from which light can shine through. Whether the gate is formed by objects in space or sounds in music or actions in the Noh theatre, its opening is the interval that allows the experience of ma, whereby the intangibility of light reveals itself from the nothingness framed between two tangible points.

In 1979 Arata Isozaki curated an exhibition at Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York called MA: Space-Time in Japan. Earlier that decade, the New-York-based Japanese video artist Takahiko Iimura had created several abstract films exploring ma (namely his Models series of 1972, and MA (Intervals) of 1975-77). The two would later collaborate on MA: Space/Time in the Garden of Ryoan-Ji (1989), a meditative video work that transfers the carefully choreographed experience of time and space at the ryōan-ji temple’s 15th century dry garden, into cinematic space-time.

The sixteen-minute film is framed at the beginning and end by fixed shots of the garden – these being the tangible brackets (the gate) within which the interval of ma will be given form. The rest is comprised entirely of slow tracking and zooming shots of the immovable stones and the negative spaces created where they aren’t. As the camera’s eye slowly and steadily scans the breadth of the rectangular garden, and penetrates its depth, we are made aware of how temporal progression relies on space and spatial progression relies on time. The mechanically standardised temporality (computer-controlled tracking and zooming) means that solid objects aren’t privileged over the space that contains them or the space that is created by them. According to Isozaki’s reading of ma in pre-modern Japan, “space was perceived as identical with the events or phenomena occurring in it; that is space was recognised only in relation to time-flow” (MA: Space-Time in Japan, exhibition catalogue).

Photographs I recently took at ryōan-ji in Kyoto:

Incubated cities are destined to self-destruct

Ruins are the style of our future cities

Future cities are themselves ruins

Our contemporary cities, for this reason,

are destined to live only a fleeting moment

Give up their energy and return to inert material

All our proposals and efforts will be buried

And once again the incubation mechanism is reconstituted

That will be the future

On show at the new Misa Shin Gallery in Tokyo until the end of this month are early works by Arata Isozaki, including a series of etchings, his Incubation Process model of Tokyo (1962) (below), and a large-scale silkscreen print of his Re-ruined Hiroshima (1968) (above). Also on the wall in the first image below is the model of the inflatable concert hall he is currently working on with Anish Kapoor for Tohoku.

My two previous posts were about Isozaki’s compulsive fascination with destruction and decay. In the early 1960s he had pictured layered cities with platforms for living suspended above classical ruins and highways weaving between crumbling Doric columns. When Incubation Process was shown in the 1962 Metabolism exhibition This Will Be Your City, it was captioned with the less-than-utopian poem cited above. He was weary of the Metabolists’ optimism about the future and recalls (in an interview with Rem Koolhaas in his new book Project Japan), “they had no skepticism towards their utopia; they represented only a form of progressivism.”

Also in 1962, Isozaki published his infamous text City Demolition Industry, Inc. in Japan Architect magazine, where he constructed a schizophrenic split between being a city planner/architect, and being a killer. The article (which is reprinted in Project Japan, where Koolhaas says he considers it one of the most interesting texts ever written by an architect) is an enigmatic rumination on the running theme that construction in its full sense is always destruction as well …

“The movement called modernity relies on the faith that the wave can go on forever. Often a telos (utopia) is constituted in order to speed up the wave. But it ends when the telos is fulfilled—an accomplishment in itself, but also thermodynamic death. Therefore, construction, if it is simply aimed at a certain telos or design, will subside. Any move toward design is brought back to a macro equilibrium upon its completion, that is, termination and death. In order to maintain a city as a living entity, construction and destruction should be performed together, at the same time. A living organism is sustained by the systematic death of molecules, though such an organic procedure cannot be applied to a city. Instead, violent blows, like an earthquake, or gradual destruction like the spread of pollution—things which cause much pain to living organisms—are inherent in the life processes of a city. In the context of urbanism, it is time for us to face this inevitable aspect of the becoming of a city. After all, construction in its full sense is always destruction as well. […] In the realm of construction, the dynamic process should include not only building but also constant decomposition and dissolution, just as the mechanism of sustaining life includes the programmed self destruction of genes as its sine qua non.” (Arata Isozaki, “On Ruins”, Lotus International n.93, June 1997)

Images ©MISA SHIN GALLERY

“Once the buildings collapsed, the meaning that used to organize urban space instantly vanished, and the elements of both structure and symbol were reduced to sheer materiality. Signs disappeared and all became substance. The composition of buildings, whose substance had been carefully hidden in order to smooth the flow of urban activities, was now revealed in its bare materiality. As objects fell from the hierarchy of significance they occupied in the construction, debris formed everywhere, amorphously battleground, devoid of meaning. Forced out of the loop of urban signification, the buildings faced us, stripped naked.”

(Arata Isozaki)

In 1995, the Great Hanshin Earthquake caused the collapse of 200,000 buildings in Kobe. Never one for knee-jerk optimism, Arata Isozaki, as commissioner of the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale the following year, decided to represent the state of contemporary Japanese architecture by showing ruins:

The architect Katsuhiro Miyamoto (who lost his own home in the earthquake), had proposed to the city of Kobe that their monument to the catastrophe be made by piling up the rubble in the city centre. Responding to this idea, Isozaki shipped architectural debris from the actual disaster site to Venice, to be piled up in the Japan Pavilion. He also lined the walls with Ryuji Miyamoto’s photographs of destructed buildings in Kobe (some of them reproduced above) and said: “I thought that returning to the point at which all construction is nullified, and using such a reference as a springboard, could make possible the planning of future construction.”

Seven months have now passed since the Great East Japan Earthquake, the first major disaster since Kobe in ‘95 and the most powerful earthquake to have ever hit Japan. The tsunami that came after it flattened cities and towns along four hundred kilometres of Japan’s coast; sweeping away homes, schools, hospitals, highways, trains and airplanes, and leaving behind twenty-five million tons of debris that will take years to deal with. Reproduced below are eleven photographs I took around Kesennuma, Rikuzentakata and Ofunato in Tohoku last month.

All Isozaki quotes are from his essay ‘On Ruins’, which was distributed at the 1996 Venice Architecture Biennale and reprinted in Lotus International, June 1997. More in Isozaki’s ruins here and here.

“It is neither nature not art – traditionally, ruins have not only collapsed, the have been overrun by a nature they no longer exclude. It is neither past nor present: it is a past that has never been present, a presence that is not of the present it inhabits. A ruin is a distempering of times, that puts time out of joint. Ruins are persistence, insistence, survival. The word suggests more than a continuance of existence. Sur-vive­ names a kind of ‘over-living’ – living on, living beyond one’s time – and thus is also a kind of anomaly or scandal. A ruin has always gone beyond or retreated from the death and decay to which it bears witness. Ruins in fact hold death at bay: having undergone a first, pseudo-death, the process of decay seems now to have been arrested in them. Ruins are a kind of annealing of the mutability to which they testify. There is nothing but mortality in ruins, but it is too late for them to die, they are too old, too ruinous. …”

Steven Connor on ruins

Arata Isozaki was fourteen years old when WWII ended. With post atomic bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki razed to the ground and large portions of every other city in the country destroyed by fire bombing, he was devastatingly aware of the impermanence of architecture and instant destructibility of cities. Throughout his career as an artist, theorist and architect, ruination would become his unlikely leitmotif.

Working under Japan’s great modernist architect Kenzo Tange in the 1950s, Isozaki declined an invitation to be part of Metabolism, the futurist architecture group that formed in 1960. Though he would share ideas and collaborate with the Metabolists throughout the ‘60s, Isozaki maintained a clearly stated conceptual distance from them. He was opposed to what he saw as their simplistically linear model of time and progress, feeling the need to propose more complex models of temporality. Recalling his hesitation in the face of the Metabolists’ optimism and his desire to inject some doubt into it, he said recently in a recent interview with Rem Koolhaas (in the new book Project Japan) that it seemed “they had no skepticism towards their utopia; they represented only a form of progressivism.” For him, truly ‘metabolic’ architecture would accept its inevitable auto-destruction in the cyclical flow of time.

Isozaki was on the advisory committee for the major Metabolism retrospective currently showing at Mori Museum in Tokyo. In the first room of the exhibition is a recreation of Isozaki’s photomontage Re-Ruined Hiroshima (above), where images of crumbling Metabolist megastructures are superimposed onto the blasted landscape of postwar Hiroshima, intended as a reminder that even the most magnificent techno-futurist cities will one day be ruins. It was part of an installation Isozaki set up at the 1968 Milan Triennale, where twelve curved panels with Shomei Tomatsu’s panoramic images of devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were accompanied by the work of musique concrète composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. (As part of the ’68 movements, hundreds of students occupied the venue and prevented the public from ever seeing it – burgeoning political radical that he was, Isozaki remained sympathetic.)

Isozaki’s rendering of his own Tsukuba Center Building in ruins, 1983

As the opening quote from Steven Connor suggests, all ruins are in a sense already superimpositions of the past onto the present, and Isozaki was not the first to build on this temporal paradox by ruining the future. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Hubert Robert’s picturesque paintings of the Louvre ravaged by time were followed Joseph Gandy’s marvellous picture forcing the brand new Bank of England into ruin – a curious commission from the building’s architect Sir John Soane.

In his article A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic (published in Artforum in 1967), Robert Smithson (who liked to quote Vladimir Nabokov’s statement that “the future is but the obsolete in reverse”) recounts walking around his suburban hometown in New England finding ruins in reverse: “This is the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’ because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built.” For a more recent example of artists picturing the future retrospectively ruining architecture, earlier this year the Danish collective SUPERFLEX’s film Modern Times Forever depicted Stora Enso, the iconic Alvar Aalto building in Helsinki, slowly degrading over 240 hours. The film was projected for ten consecutive days and nights on a screen next to the actual (indifferent and enduring) building.

For Isozaki, having been faced with such drastic material destruction as a teenager, a building’s ruin was always already contained within it, haunting us from the future. This might bare some superficial resemblance to Albert Speer’s Ruinenwerttheorie or ‘theory of ruin value’, whereby the First Architect of the Third Reich persuaded Hitler that new buildings be designed to decay into graceful forms resembling classical ruins. But Isozaki’s visualisation of the ruins that were to come wasn’t an attempt to colonise the future, it was aimed at disrupting the projected teleology of his contemporaries. Rather than a propagandist pre-emption and absorption of decay as part of a monumental building’s design, his ruination indexed his cynicism about the linear futurist utopia that Metabolism was incapable of.

Read my article ‘Metabolising Past Futurism’ for Frieze Magazine #145 here.

Below is an installation shot from the disastrous exhibition Isozaki held at the 1996 Venice Architecture Biennale – more on that here.

From the fecund Osaka underground : Afrirampo drummer Pikacyu + twelve female friends =

モンモントゥナイト or ‘monmontonight’ (femalemasturbationtonight) …

Above these words is a Comme des Garçons wedding dress (AW1990-91) made from fabric lining. Below is a hooded bride at a Shinto wedding, and below that is Comme des Garçons SS2012 – unveiled in Paris last week, photos courtesy style.com. Then there’s the Russian stratovolcano Maly Semyachik.

The Japanese architect Shigeru Ban is well known for his innovative use of recycled cardboard paper tubes to quickly house disaster victims. He provided emergency refugee shelters for post-civil-war Rwanda, as well as to the homeless after Japan’s Kobe earthquake in 1995 and the 2010 Haitian earthquake. He is currently working on a cardboard tubing cathedral for post-disaster Christchurch, and his Container Temporary Housing project for Onagawa in Japan was recently announced.

The Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11 left half a million people displaced. In Onagawa, 3,800 of the costal town’s 4,500 homes were severely damaged or completely destroyed, and for this area Ban’s firm proposed pastel-coloured multi-story housing made from stacked shipping containers and steel frames that could be quickly erected, as pictured below. Furniture and cooking equipment is being donated by MUJI, and the grounds surrounding the homes will provide the residents with a market and library. Provisional housing like this often ends up going to waste, but Ban is determined that these transportable units will be reused for future disasters.

Currently under construction on the town’s baseball field, the 188 homes are set to be completed on October 15. Future residents are currently sheltered in a nearby gymnasium where Ban installed cardboard tubing partitions as an immediate intervention after the earthquake (pictured above). Since the March disasters, he has set up over 1,800 individual partitions for homeless Japanese families, all funded by donations: the Container Temporary Housing project is receiving government funding, but donations for Shigeru Ban’s relief work are still needed and can be made to the following bank account:

Bank: The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, Ltd.

Branch: Higashi Matsubara Branch

Account Name: Voluntary Architects Network

Account No: 3636723 (Futsuu)

Swift Code: BOTKJPJT

Bank Address: 5-2-18 Matsubara, Setagaya, Tokyo, Japan

If you make a contribution, you are asked to send your contact details to van[at]shigerubanarchitects.com so that you will receive updates on the project.

The eye is an orb, an aquatic jewel with an aqueous humor lens.

The earth is an orb, an aquatic jewel washed in oceanic tides.

Between these two watery spheres, we place another: an aquatic jewel of glass.

Connected right behind your eyeballs, your brain generates consciousness. Through the watery spheres of your eyes, your consciousness projects upon the world as its screen.

This installation is modelled after your relationship to the world. The world just happens to be around.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, 2011

A special exhibition from Hiroshi Sugimoto at the 2011 Yokohama Triennale has his optical glass sculpture Five Elements (2011) erected between our watery eyeballs and his seascape photograph Lake Superior, Cascade River (1995).

Also on display here are meteorites, including this fine specimen that was one of several meteoric iron fragments discovered in 1838 in modern day Namibia. Nearly solid iron with minute traces of other elements, these would in the mid-twentieth century help to accurately establish the age of the universe (4.5 billion years) in accordance with the Big Bang Theory.

In the last room is the same pairing of Sugimoto’s electricity-photography experiments with the thirteenth-century sculpture of the Japanese god of thunder that I wrote about for the Sydney Biennale last year. As part of the Yokohama Triennale, the photographer / antique dealer / curator – who is now turning his hand at sculpture, architecture and traditional Japanese performing arts – also directed a Bunraku production and designed the sets for a Noh performance.

Sugimoto’s movements across and between temporalities including pre-modern Japan, the global contemporary and the pre-historic cosmos indicate a continuous exploration of continuity, and an approach to history and time as, to borrow Michel Serres’ handkerchief analogy (in Conversations on Science, Culture and Time), “folded and crumpled” rather than “flat and ironed out”.

I’m under elevated train tracks in Yokohama’s Koganecho district, barely sheltered from a passing typhoon. The wind is loud and warm, the sky looks low enough to touch. My pen is broken, my feet are soggy and the air smells deliciously of carpentry. This is where Kato Tsubasa is building the base of his latest plywood structure, a replica of the lighthouse that was lost at Fukushima in the March disasters.

Tsubasa has over the last decade been constructing to-scale replicas of buildings and rooms for his ‘pulling down works’ where he gathers groups of people to, well, pull down the works. See video documentation here. What interests him is the collective thinking and manual labour required for these simple de-structive accomplishments that are too big for one man.

The artist conceived of this new work while he was making regular trips to Fukushima after the nuclear blast, as a volunteer to help sort and clear the detritus. With his assistant Yukari Hirano (also a chef, carpenter and chiropractor), he will relocate to Fukushima at the end of this month to finish the tower using wood gathered from the debris there. The plan is then to engage the local communities to pull the lighthouse up – a communal act of ‘pulling up’ rather than the ‘pulling down’ Tsubasa has become known for, which he hopes will offer a sense of physical union and symbolic regeneration.

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Plans for an inflatable elastic mobile concert hall by Arata Isozaki and Anish Kapoor have just been announced. Starting in the spring of 2012, Ark Nova will bring free music and theatre performances to various locations within the devastated areas of Tōhoku.

“… it is the mask that has acquired a body” - Watsuji Tetsurō (Mask and Persona)

Between 1987 and 1999 Irving Penn photographed over two hundred and fifty Issey Miyake garments, never deviating from his formula of empty white backgrounds and frontal lighting that emphasised the pure geometric forms of the clothes. Miyake adhered to a self-imposed rule to never attend the photo shoots, and Penn never went to a Miyake fashion show – such was their respect for each other’s work. A new exhibition at 21_21, the Tokyo design museum directed by Issey Miyake, looks back over the relationship between the fashion designer and the late photographer, and the legendary images that resulted. The entire wall of the atrium space in the subterranean concrete Tadao Ando museum is covered in Ikko Tanaka posters from the archives while in the main room a seemingly endless procession of larger than life figures is projected on a thirty metre wide screen, resembling a silent infantry of hilarious beautiful aliens.

‘A Record of the Wind’, ‘A Weighing Machine After the Rain’ and ‘3pm When the Shadow Crosses the Border’. These three 1972 photographs by Genpei Akasegawa were kindly sent to me by my friend Leiko in Osaka, in response to my article on Hyper Art. Thank you!

“I can play your profile … I wonder how your nose will sound.” (László Moholy-Nagy)

Shrewd new sound sculpture by rising star Lyota Yagi. You can see+hear them in revolutionary action here. Balls of cassette on modified cassette players. Yagi’s work often brings him back to the tangibility of analog sound technologies: I included his melting ice ‘vinyl’ records in last year’s Big In Japan exhibitions in Australia, and since then he has also located audio information in the microgrooves of human fingerprints. The Sound Spheres were recently included in a group show in Budapest, where Yagi made this eight minute video condensing seven days.

And, here’s what Wikipedia has on the Musica Universalis:

The Music of the Spheres incorporates the metaphysical principle that mathematical relationships express qualities or ‘tones’ of energy which manifest in numbers, visual angles, shapes and sounds – all connected within a pattern of proportion. Pythagoras first identified that the pitch of a musical note is in proportion to the length of the string that produces it, and that intervals between harmonious sound frequencies form simple numerical ratios.

In a theory known as the Harmony of the Spheres, Pythagoras proposed that the Sun, Moon and planets all emit their own unique hum based on their orbital revolution, and that the quality of life on Earth reflects the tenor of celestial sounds which are physically imperceptible to the human ear.

In the 17th century, Johannes Kepler, also influenced by arguments in Ptolemy’s Optics and Harmonica, compiled his Harmonices Mundi (’Harmony of the World’), which presented his own analysis of optical perceptions, geometrical shapes, musical consonances and planetary harmonies. According to Kepler, the connection between geometry (and sacred geometry), cosmology, astrology, harmonics, and music is through musica universalis.

From the editors of OK Fred comes a new bilingual magazine about cities and built spaces, Too Much. Published in Tokyo, the first issue had articles on buildings by Japanese cults, depression, experimental physics, non-monumentalism at SANAA, skateboarding as urban practice, scarves, and Nicola Formichetti.

The recently launched second instalment had been delayed by the Tōhoku earthquake/tsunami and Fukushima crisis. Half a year after those natural and man-made disasters, the new issue is poised to speak to the present as it considers the role of architects and the future of urbanism. Topics covered include: shelters, neon lights and Tokyo’s new nightscape after the power cuts, Paolo Soleri’s desert city that doesn’t exist, the history of urban planning (or lack thereof) in Tokyo, and the process of sorting debris in the tsunami inundated zone around Motoyoshi. There’s also interviews with artists Tomoo Gokita and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and a 40-page lift out of photographs by Takashi Homma. Keep eyes out for this intelligent and good-looking new publication of ‘romantic geography’.

With our present awareness, the arts we have known up to now appear to us in general to be fakes fitted out with a tremendous affectation. Let us take leave of these piles of counterfeit objects on the altars, in the palaces, in the salons and the antique shops. These objects are in disguise and their materials such as paint, pieces of cloth, metals, clay or marble are loaded with false significance by human hand and by way of fraud, so that, instead of just presenting their own material, they take on the appearance of something else. Under the cloak of an intellectual aim, the materials have been completely murdered and can no longer speak to us. Lock these corpses into their tombs. Gutai art does not change the material but brings it to life. Gutai art does not falsify the material …

So begins the Gutai Manifesto, written by Jiro Yoshihara in 1956 (English translation here). In the late 1940s, Gutai co-founder Shozo Shimamoto had started aestheticising holes in stretched canvases (see here), emphasising the corporeal contact made between painter and painting (incidentally, Fontana was developing his Cuts around the same time in Italy).

Pictured here is Gutai artist Saburo Murakami’s action work at the 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition in Ohara Hall, Tokyo, in 1956 (below is a reconstruction of the same work in a Gutai retrospective at the 2009 Venice Biennale). Concerning himself with the physical reality of the painter’s canvas, his bodily intervention complicated the relationship between art production and performance.

The Gutai Group’s work around Japan in the ’50s and ’60s anticipated later performance art, happenings and conceptualism in the west, and they had an especially formative influence on the Fluxus movement. They were explicitly concerned with the materiality of art (gutai means ‘tangible’ or ‘concrete’) and, by extension, its material degradation. The manifesto continues:

… what is interesting in this respect is the novel beauty to be found in works of art and architecture of the past which have changed their appearance due to the damage of time or destruction by disasters in the course of the centuries. This is described as the beauty of decay, but is it not perhaps that beauty which material assumes when it is freed from artificial make-up and reveals its original characteristics? The fact that the ruins receive us warmly and kindly after all, and that they attract us with their cracks and flaking surfaces, could this not really be a sign of the material taking revenge, having recaptured its original life? …

Outdoor clothing designers Setsumasa and Mami Kobayashi built this weekend retreat in the Chichibu mountain range northwest of Tokyo from locally harvested larch wood and removable fiberplastic walls. The ‘platform for living’ (not to be referred to as a house) runs on solar energy and has electricity, hot water, wifi, iPads and other bare necessities. The yellow not-quite-geodesic dome tents are the bedrooms. Photos by Dean Kaufman via Dwell.

Revelation in concealment: These new ‘built up objects’ by the wonderful Tappei Kaneuji are currently on show at Sydney’s Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, along with several works on paper.

Photos courtesy Roslyn Oxley9

Digitised fragments of the pre-www Comme des Garçons magazine Six that have made their way onto the www via The Clark and this fine archive.

The most poetic word combination in English, according to Shimabuku, is “fish and chips”. His video work of that name (see below) documents a potato encountering a fish in the ocean – a meeting orchestrated by the Kobe-born Berlin-based artist because he felt compelled to allow the two beings to interact in their natural states before being battered and fried beyond recognition, as human food.

The work reminds me of Francis Ponge taming and tenderising his potatoes in angrily boiling water: “My potatoes, submerged down there, are shaken up, knocked around, abused, drenched to the marrow. The water’s fury probably has nothing to do with them, but they suffer the consequences – unable to get out of this situation, they find themselves profoundly changed by it … If their form survives (which is not always the case), they have become soft and tender.” (The Voice of Things).

Another poet of the mundane, Shimabuku shares with Ponge his concern for ‘mute objects of expression’. His work over the past decade has come from an urge to knock down barriers of communication, either by simply relocating things or by animating the inanimate: for Born as a Box he put a speaker inside a cardboard box so it could assert, “I am a box, I am happy that I am a box,” on loop.

He takes it upon himself to open up contact between things that are otherwise inaccessible to each other. For his famous project Then, I decided to give a tour of Tokyo to the octopus from Akashi, he took an octopus from a small costal town of Japan and showed it Tokyo’s star tourist attractions. In another work, he took a fish out of the water and exposed it to a sunrise (see below).

For Cucumber Journey he took a boat from London to Birmingham, turning what could have been a two-hour trip by train into a two-week journey, the exact amount of time needed for his jar of cucumbers to pickle and be shared amongst his fellow passengers. A similar sense of anti-efficiency formed the basis of his project In Search of Deer, where he cycled around a deer-free region in Japan looking for deer. Again, this became an exercise in relational aesthetics where the formation of new friendships along the way formed the work.

Watch a video interview with Shimabuku at Tate Liverpool here and read about his Moon Rabbit work at Dia Art Foundation here.