What country is Hong Kong? Hong Kong was an island. Hong Kong will become part of China. MAP Office has decided to present Hong Kong is, with the intention of clearly addressing the specific characteristics of this unique city/territory, which is in a state of perpetual transition. Offering a platform to reveal a hidden urbanity, breaking…
In an influential account written in 1986, a prominent British historian Timothy Garton Ash described Central Europe as “territory where peoples, cultures, languages are fantastically intertwined, where every place has several names and men change their citizenship as often as their shoes, an enchanted wood full of wizards and witches”. This evocative characterization challenged the…
A close examination of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC)’s 1964 stop in Tokyo allows for a better understanding of how mutually significant this encounter was for the Japanese avant-garde and Cunningham and his close collaborators Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage. John now feels that the time is propitious for Merce to undertake not only…
In this seminar Nelson Brissac reviews artists’ interventions into the city of São Paulo as part of his Arte/Cidade project, and reveals some of the issues that characterize its inhabitants’ everyday experiences and perception. Touching upon the 2014 World Cup and Brazil’s widespread urban protests, Brissac introduces extraordinary artist projects by Vito Acconci, Rubens Mano,…
In this interview, the artist Anna Bella Geiger explores the development of her production from early neo-figuration and her “visceral” works, to more experimental tendencies from the late 1960s onward. She talks about photographs taken on the subway during her time in New York City, works that engage unusual mediums such as bread bags and…
In addition to autonomous pieces of music, the Experimental Studio at the Polish Radio in Warsaw produced incidental music for radio broadcasts and soundtracks for movies and TV.
These two texts, one by a well-known artist, the other by an eminent critic—both Tokyoites—, first appeared in Japanese in 1963 and 1968, respectively. Each provides a colorful account of interactions between artists from Tokyo and New York in the ’60s, and both present Japanese reflections on American art at that time. Here the texts…
Eight years ago I was told the story of two Chinese coolies who had escaped to the Peruvian Amazon, founded a village called El Chino, which means “The Chinese,” and begun a small tapioca business before vanishing mysteriously. I grew curious about what the Chinese were doing in South America, let alone, the rain forest.…
Listen to 23 music compositions created at Polish Radio Experimental Studio by both the foreign and local composers. Starting with Kotoński’s Study, the first autonomous piece of music for tape produced at PRES in 1959, the presented selection leads through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
“Would you have participated in this activity if it was truly revolutionary?” The Poema Colectivo 2014 project invited a group of artists from Mexico to create a new “collective poem” for today based on the 1981 project Poema Colectivo Revolución. Each invited artist was asked to nominate another friend to join the project. With many thanks…
“American art that lost its glory” was the way Shinohara Ushio summed up Twenty Years of American Painting, an exhibition sent to Tokyo by New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1966. Just two years earlier, Shinohara had been an enthusiastic “imitator” of American artists, copying works by the likes of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and…
Was Robert Rauschenberg’s 1964 visit to Tokyo a case of cultural exchange or of cross-cultural discommunication? The question is central to this account of Gold Standard, a “combine” that Rauschenberg created during an event at Tokyo’s Sōgetsu Art Center in November of that year. Originally planned by the critic Tōno Yoshiaki as a public interview…
