Nikkei

Unlike the cathedral, Nikkei Place, the National Nikkei Museum and Heritage Centre, is a rather impressive building, set in an attractive garden on a quiet suburban Burnaby street. Yet what's inside is something of a disappointment.

Beyond the nice garden, elegant façade, and airy foyer, the building is essentially little more than a souped-up community centre, with the usual array of rooms to rent at prices we are assured give excellent value for money.

The museum itself is simply a small room off the foyer, and apparently there's no permanent collection. The exhibition when we visited was "Tenugui: Design Excellence in Japanese Daily Life," a display of Japanese cotton hand towels accompanied by a short video, some prints in which these towels feature, and a couple of other bits and bobs.


The exhibition is pretty and informative enough, don't get me wrong. It takes an everyday object that can no doubt easily get overlooked, and shows both the multitude of its uses (hand towel, headscarf, glass cleaner, handkerchief...) and the way in which its simple but elegant motifs, usually either abstract (dots, circles, lines) or drawn from nature (flowers, grasses, seeds, suns), always exceed its utilitarian functions. This is a design philosophy of unobtrusive adornment: an apparent contradiction in terms that structures everyday life in Japan.

But the strange thing is that this is indeed an exhibition about Japan. Given that we are at the Japanese Canadian National Museum, it's odd that there's no attempt to address the Canadianness of the Japanese Canadian experience. What new uses or meaning accrete around tenugui outside of Japan? What new motifs appear as the cloth is transculturated or appropriated into other visual traditions? (There was at least one design with penguins; are there any with polar bears, beavers, or hockey pucks?)

In short, instead of providing a window into "the history of Japanese Canadians" (as the museum's mission statement has it), we have instead a dehistoricized celebration of one small remnant of the Japanese motherland. It's as though the hand towels themselves, with their ordered repetitions, were a synecdoche for a vision of Japanese culture in its entirety as always the same, intact in all its incarnations.

It's not surprising that a diasporic community should have such a nostalgic and idealized vision of its cultural roots. But I'm not sure why it should be enshrined so uncritically in an institution that has at other times had so much more interesting things to say.

Audain

A very quick visit to the Vancouver Art Gallery this afternoon only gave us time to zip around some of the current exhibit "Shore, Forest, and Beyond".


This is the private collection of a local property developer (turned cultural philanthropist) and his wife, and it focusses on British Columbian art from nineteenth-century indigenous masks and carved wooden chests to contemporary conceptual photography. Rather incongruously, it also includes a significant number of works on canvas by the Mexican muralists (Rivera, Siquieros, Orozco, Tamayo). The fact that these pieces sit very uneasily with the rest of the collection was highlighted by the fact that several of the labels were quite blatantly wrong: the title of Tamayo's "Figura de pie," for instance, was translated as "Pious Figure" rather than "Standing Figure," which gives rather a different impression of what that picture is all about.

As for the British Columbian art, there were a large number (over twenty) of Emily Carrs, from different stages of her career. Which only served to remind me how little I like this most iconic of West Coast artists. In the catalogue Audain himself writes that originally he didn't think much of Carr, but that he came round to her by way of a comparison with Gauguin: "what Gauguin had done for the landscape and people of Tahiti, Emily Carr had done for the Northwest Coast" (24). But this is a back-handed compliment at best. It only underlines both artists' exoticization of difference, and the way in which they frame the cultural and racial other within a vision of a lush natural habitat. And the viewer knows (but the artists never show) that this habitat is shortly disappearing thanks to modernization and indeed the early stages of the development that will subsequently give Audain the cash to buy up the pious inscription of what that development supposedly destroys.

Of the BC modernists, I rather preferred Edward Hughes's depictions of maritime activity--ferries, fishing vessels, and the small ports that dot the province's coast and outlying islands. They are painted with an apparent naiveté, but it is precisely the somewhat naive attention to detail (the baby's pram on the wharf, the boat's name "Imperial Nanaimo") that makes them rather more reliable records of the process by which indigenous culture was edged out in the Pacific Northwest.

And when it comes to the painting of nature, I was pleasantly surprised by Jack Shadbolt's "Butterfly Transformation Theme 1981," a large canvas in six panels that revisits the butterfly motif and transforms it into something between an exuberant celebration of natural vitality and an almost pop art revelry in artifice and abstraction.

Tanabe

Today to Burnaby Art Gallery, which has a show of works on paper by Takao Tanabe.


I'd never heard of Tanabe, but I liked what I saw. The pictures were mainly landscapes, mostly of Canadian scenes (the West Coast, the Rockies, the Prairies), often verging into abstraction.

I liked best the series of pictures of the Prairies, which were on the cusp between landscape and abstract: graphite on dark paper, a thick line roughly outlining the horizon and maybe rain above or grass below.

Burnaby Art Gallery was interesting too: occupying an old mansion house that has more than its fair share of history; the building was previously used variously as a monastery, a cult's headquarters, and a fraternity house.

aimless

It is perhaps too easy to call Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled "Kafkaesque," and yet from the Central European setting to the befuddled narrator trying to make sense of a vaguely nightmarish world in which there seem to be hidden connections that he can't quite discern, it is Kafka who is surely the reference point here.

One major difference, however, between The Unconsoled and (say) The Trial is that the problems besetting Ishiguro's narrator and protagonist, a pianist by the name of Ryder, come because he is celebrated, rather than persecuted. But as time goes on, the line between celebration and persecution becomes increasingly blurred, and what begins as mere befuddlement approaches closer to nightmare.

Ryder has been invited to give some kind of recital in an un-named town that features a hotel in which Frederick the Great may once have stayed, run by a manager who is a little too eager to be of service; a historic Old Town with a Hungarian Café at which the hotel's porters relax, gossip, and give rousing displays of their bag-handling prowess; a more modern, windswept housing estate a bus-ride away in which a committee of busy-body housewives rule the social roost; and a series of other more or less shadowy locales and colourful but slightly creepy characters.

Just about everyone that Ryder meets declares themselves incredibly honoured to make his acquaintance at last, and almost all of them have some little favour to ask--if it is not too much trouble, though they swear that it will surely not take more than a minute or two. The hotel manager, for instance, would like the great pianist to glance at some scrapbooks his wife has put together; the hotel porter hopes that, in the speech that Ryder somewhat belatedly finds he is due to give at the recital, he may spare a moment to mention the work done by porters such as himself; and so on and so forth. All these small favours add up, most of them come to take up much more time and effort than anticipated, and soon Ryder finds he is slowly being suffocated by these small requests for kindness.

At first sight, people are simply being over-familiar. But in fact Ryder starts to realize that some of these new-found acquaintances are familiar, and include old schoolfriends strangely displaced. Others should be rather more familiar to him than they are. Above all there is Sophie, the porter's daughter, and her son, Boris. She treats the distinguished visitor as though he were her estranged lover, and her son as though he were Ryder's own offspring, and soon Ryder is almost convinced that she is right. Everything seems to resonate some dim memory somewhere. And if everyone has some small stake in Ryder's visit--the housewives' committee, for example, aggrandize themselves with the honour of looking after the musician's parents--in some cases Ryder slowly realizes that he, too, has some kind of stake even though he can't fully work out what it is himself.

It is tempting to try to come up with a rational key to this otherwise mysterious story. Is the answer, say, that Ryder is suffering from amnesia, shock, or delusions of some sort? There are certainly hints towards such narrative "solutions," and there is for instance no doubt that very many characters are in the grip of a variety of delusions--not least concerning the role of art and the way that this obviously much-anticipated visit by a celebrated musician might improve the profile and prospects of the town. And yet, on the one hand, there are a number of strange occurrences that really can't be fully explained away: space and time both appear warped, as when Ryder finds his childhood car rusting in a field outside a reception given in his honour. We find it hard to discern any hard border between delusion (or dream) and sanity (or consciousness); both are delineated with the same measure of realism. Moreover, on the other hand, it is as in Kafka precisely the search for logical explanation that gives rise to the greatest madness. Here, too, it is a bureaucratic logic (if in the form of making things easy for an honoured guest, rather than difficult for a suspected criminal) that ultimately throws up the "utterly preposterous obstacles everywhere" that are "quite typical of this town" (388).

In the same vein, it is hardly spoiling the plot to reveal that the recital never ultimately goes ahead... and, indeed, that it never particularly matters, either for the plot or for the experience of reading the book. In the end, if there is any logic to the long-anticipated event at all, Ryder slowly discovers that it has less and less to do with him. However much he is told he is the centre of the fuss and activity all around him, he comes to see that really he is only an excuse at best, a vehicle for other people's desires to play out as they try to position themselves within the community, or to reposition the community itself. The means by which they establish their positions is art, or the (often rather abstruse) discussion of what is apparently defiantly difficult modern art--in some ways The Unconsoled is almost a case study in the (il)logic of Bourdieusian symbolic capital. And finally even the art itself hardly matters.

So Ryder finds himself, as the book ends, a "rider" on a tram whose route is an apparently endless circuit of the town, or perhaps a rhizome that brings everything together. For "you can go anywhere on this tram" and it seems to offer its riders a full breakfast of "eggs, bacon, tomato, sausage" (533). Soon the pianist, now that the time for the recital has come and gone suddenly at a loss if no longer as lost has he once was, is happily eating and chatting, in no hurry to get off or go anywhere in particular. Despite everything, "Things had not, after all, gone so badly," he muses (534). He might even agree with his new friend: "Oh yes, this is a marvellous tram" (533).

And perhaps The Unconsoled, for all its gloomy title and Kafkaesque ambience--and the title is justified by the fact that everyone here is wounded in some way or another, and consolation would require some portion of the resolution that Ishiguro refuses--resembles somewhat the tram with with which the novel finally and rather arbitrarily ends. Perhaps it's because we ultimately don't care enough about the petty squabbles that occupy the townsfolk so, but the book turns out to be a sort of Kafkaesque comedy: rather aimless, and mysterious in its constant circuitous motion, but the journey alone is enjoyable enough for a while, even if it means we miss our stop a few times.

punished

The Saturday photo, part X: Daniel Santoro's "Eva Perón castiga al niño marxista leninista."


In English, "Eva Perón Punishes the Marxist-Leninist Child."

This is merely one of a series of extraordinary paintings on Peronist themes. A selection is available all on one page here, and there are still more to be seen at Santoro's website.

Now I simply have to get hold of his Manual del niño peronista.

Many thanks to Ana Vivaldi for pointing me in Santoro's direction.

demolición

It's Peruvian (proto)punk. From 1964, would you believe? "Los Saicos" (pronounced "Psychos") and "Demolición" ("Demolition")...


The lyrics:

Echemos abajo la estación del tren / demoler, demoler, demoler, demoler / Nos gusta volar estaciones de tren / Ye ye ye ye ye ye ye.

Let's bring down the train station / Demolish, demolish, demolish, demolish / We like blowing up train stations / Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah.

To hear how that might sound today, here's a cover version.

Los Saicos are featured, along with other Peruvian groups of the sixties such as "Traffic Sound" and the "Shains," in an exhibition "Arte nuevo y el fulgor de la vanguardia" (El Comercio's note here) that has just opened in Miraflores, curated by Emilio Tarazona and Miguel López. Go see it if you can.

CADA

There is nothing necessarily spontaneous or unconscious about the disruption of habit, and dehabituation can be taken on as a conscious strategy. Indeed, it is the avant garde gesture par excellence. During the Pinochet dictatorship, the Colectivo Acciones de Arte (Art Action Collective or CADA), comprising several prominent Chilean artists and writers such as novelist Diamela Eltit, poet Raúl Zurita, and visual artist Lotty Rosenfeld, staged a series of performances designed to intervene in and interrupt the establishment of everyday habits of neoliberal consumerism.

As Robert Neustadt’s CADA DÍA (literally, “Every Day”) documents, these actions included the October 1979 “Inversion of Scene” that aimed to “underline the transparency of everyday repression” by cloaking Santiago’s Museum of Fine Arts with a white sheet on the one hand and renting ten milk trucks on the other while taking out an advert in a daily newspaper that consisted in nothing more than a blank page (31). CADA’s purpose was literally to screen off the museum while touching upon familiar objects and practices (the newspaper, drinking milk) so as, in Nelly Richard’s words, “to modify both the customary perceptions of the city [. . .] and the social norms which regulate the behaviour of the citizen” (Margins and Institutions 55). Other CADA actions included showering the city with 400,000 fliers dropped from the air, in the name of “a fusion of ‘art’ with ‘life’” (Neustadt 35), and Lotty Rosenfeld’s conversion of the broken white line in the middle of streets and highways into a series of crosses. These are classic shock tactics of artistic defamiliarization, undertaken on a massive scale. Especially in their willful disarticulation of the signs of normality that the dictatorship wanted to convey for both national and external consumption they set out to force “the gaze to unlearn what the press habitually teaches it” (Margins and Institutions 56).


At the same time, and beyond the fact that the artistic avant-garde is all too easily recuperated into a familiar tradition of provocation that can never quite escape the aestheticizing gaze, surely any artistic shock tactic could be no more than pale reflection of the effects of the coup itself. If art is defamiliarization, then like it or not Pinochet was its greatest Chilean practitioner.

doubletake

Last night I finally got around to seeing the Brian Jungen show here, just a few days before it closes. Jungen's a local boy made good, but I had worried somewhat that I wouldn't like the exhibition, thinking him perhaps just a one-trick pony. And indeed he is. But what a trick.

And the "Prototype for New Understanding" series, all 23 of which were in the show, is justly renowned. Here, Jungen takes Nike Air Jordans, cutting them up and reshaping them to resemble indigenous masks. From a distance, they could very easily be taken for "authentic" native art. From close up, the doubletake.

Jungen has added human hair to some of these pieces, in order to enhance the illusion. And some are more complex than others. But I liked best the simplest, the ones that were still recognizeable as a basketball boot, albeit topologically transformed, soles cut away, other incisions made, and reshaped. For what you realize is just how odd these shoes actually are. The decor, the little gnarls and buttons, the swoosh, the stitching. They are of course in their own way totems of contemporary consumer culture.


Or as Cuahtémoc Medina puts it in his interesting catalogue essay:

Implicit in [Jungen's] Prototypes is a crucial sociological observations: shoes (and particularly designer trainers) are the contemporary consumer's mask, a tool for the Western ritual of impersonation [. . .]. That shoes are a shamanic tool of sort can be easily attested by advertisements, which usually portray them as quasi-magically transforming their user, fusing the phantasm of the sport's idol with the consumer. (34)

More here.

visuality

Magali M. Carrera emphasizes the way in which the shift from a colonial regime of power in Latin America also implies the constitution of new "kinds of time" ("From Royal Subject to Citizen" 32). Late eighteenth-century writers "transfer the reader out of the fixed present of New Spain into alternative realms of time: the non-chronological, allegorical and futuristic time of utopia" on the one hand "and the legendary, idealised past" of foundational fictions on the other (32).

For a postcolonial society even to be envisaged, that society must be placed within historical time, and allocated both a destiny and an origin.

Benedict Anderson's point about the temporality of national consciousness is similar. Anderson writes that it is "the idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogenous, empty time [that] is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which is also conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history" (Imagined Communities 26).

But where Anderson argues that this temporality is particular to the novel and the newspaper, and so to print capitalism, Carrera wants to show ways in which it was also visualized, depicted in the art as well as the literature of the nascent Spanish American republics.

So whereas Anderson traces a shift from a medieval culture in which "the figuring of imagined reality was overwhelmingly visual and aural" (23) to the novel and the newspaper as "forms [that] provided the technical means for 're-presenting' the kind of imagined community that is the nation" (25), Carrera shows how the iconography of Empire was replaced with an alternative visual imagination specific to national self-determination. From "casta paintings" that map social hierarchy indelibly onto biology, to historical narratives of social invention such as José Obregón's The Discovery of Pulque.



Painters such as Obregón, then, contest the ways in which the art of Empire "laid out the static sociopolitical territory of the royal subject's body visually." They therefore "revise and transform the eighteenth-century political and social construction of the royal subject into that of the nationalist body" (19).

From a categorization of ideal types, as found in the casta paintings, in which each limb or organ of society should know its rightful place, to the historicization of identity as part of a dynamic social whole. Obregón takes the calcified representations of the indigenous, "remove[s] them from the present and place[s] them into an originating and allegorical time" (32).

Of course, the price that the indigenous pay is that, restored to history by the mestizo state, they are also marginalized and rendered invisible in the present.