At an Archival Workshop at MoMA’s Queens facility in June 2012, Jon Hendricks, MoMA’s Consulting Curator for the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, ruminates on the status and categorization of Fluxus works in the museum. I think that we are missing the art for the trees. Throwing things into preconceived categories obscures potential experience…
The psychedelic and darkly fantastic posters of Yokoo Tadanori cross the boundaries of art, design, and politics. Yokoo studied illustration in correspondence school and started his career as a graphic designer and illustrator at a printing company and a newspaper. He also worked as a printmaker and painter, and through his posters he quickly won…
The Sogetsu Art Center and the Matter of Printed Matter: The Sugiura Kohei / Yoko Ono Bean Sprout Invitation Beyond identity and difference there is the realm of the undifferentiated, indifferent, arbitrary, banal, nondescript, uninteresting, unremarkable, non-identical, and non-different.” 1“Jenseits von Identität und Differenz liegt der Bereich des Undifferenzierten, Indifferenten, Beliebigen, Banalen, Unscheinbaren, Uninteressanten, Nichtbeachtenswerten,…
Throughout a career that spans the late 1940s to the present, Yamaguchi Katsuhiro has consistently proven to be one of Japan’s most visionary artists, distinguished by his restless curiosity about new media and means of artistic expression, and a powerful intellect that has been expressed not only through artworks but also through the organization of…
From museum storage rooms and Butoh dance performances to gallery visits and Shinjuku by night, a group of MoMA curators in the C-MAP research group led by Associate Curator Doryun Chong went to Japan in the fall of 2011. The goal: to visit the people and places that have been crucial in the curators’ research…
The Sogetsu Art Center (SAC) in Tokyo was a major hub for avant-garde activities between 1958 and 1971, a period of concentrated energy for the experimental arts in Japan. Artists, musicians, designers, critics, writers, and performers gathered at the SAC to test out new experimental practices and to engage in dialogue about new directions in…
The members of Chim↑Pom—Ellie, Ryuta Ushiro, Yasutaka Hayashi, Masataka Okada, Toshinori Mizuno, and Motomu Inaoka—have been working collaboratively since 2005. Perhaps best known for their performances and interventions made in immediate response to the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant disaster, the group has continuously engaged with social and political concerns in their native Japan and…
It is impossible to consider the art created in Japan during the socially and politically tumultuous 1960s without factoring in the role of the spaces or sites where that art was exhibited. Not only film activities but also music, theater, art, dance, photography, design, and literature were supported by sites that fostered artistic expression. Among…
As environmental and media ecologies changed drastically in 1960s urban Japan, how did artists respond to rapid growth and prosperity, and to their byproducts and side effects?
I have set out primarily to introduce places, people, and events that do not usually appear in foreign guidebooks by selecting sites that I like and find interesting in my daily life in Tokyo. Though unfortunately I can’t introduce very many sites, I hope that these articles will help you become better acquainted with a…
Shiomi Mieko, artist, composer, and Fluxus member, graciously welcomed C-MAP members into her home in a quiet residential neighborhood in Minoo, Osaka.
Pushing the boundaries of the meaning of music and performance, the Sogetsu Art Center (SAC) drew some of the most cutting-edge composers and performers from Japan and around the world to its stage. See scores, fliers, photographs, and other documentation related to music at the Sogetsu Art Center.
