HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS : Tabaimo

Japanese Zebra Crossing, 1999
Tabaimo
Courtesy the artist and Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo, Japan

Tabaimo

Tabaimo b.1975 (Japan)
lives and works in Tokyo, Japan

launch interview with Tabaimo

Tabaimo mines familiar stereotypes of Japanese life--commuter trains, sushi, suicidal students, and overworked businessmen--to create poignant, surreal, and hilarious animated installations. Like other talented satiric commentators in the art world, including William Kentridge and Yoko Ono, Tabaimo possesses an insightful eye, a quick wit, and a facility with the truth. In addition to this, she seems to possess a deep affection for her subject matter and a sense of belonging to the community she lampoons. In an artist's statement, she wrote, "I have experienced the feeling of the word normal more passionately than any other person. I believe my thinking is exactly the same as others around me. It is through these views that I have produced my artistic concept." An exceptional student, who felt that she was blessed, Tabaimo later realized that she was ultimately just like everybody else. She embraced this realization and the accompanying sense of normalcy, even mundanity, and used it to channel an ironically idiosyncratic view of contemporary life, both in Japan and elsewhere.

Her moving tableaux, such as Japanese Zebra Crossing (1999), place the viewer in familiar "Japanese" places (a commuter train, a kitchen, a communal bath), making us a part of the cartoon universes unfolding around us. Illustrated in a low-tech style reminiscent of ukiyo-e and presented in a complex multiprojector format, her films are both technologically sophisticated and handmade. This aesthetic appears to connect our new hyper-speed global world with the modern one of the latter part of the previous century.

The winner of the prestigious Kirin Contemporary Award in 1999, Tabaimo has had solo exhibitions in Japan at the Kirin Plaza in Osaka; Gallery 16 in Kyoto; and Gallery Iteza, Kyoto. She was a participant in the 2001 Yokohama Triennale, Japan, and in the exhibition IKIRO/Be Alive: Contemporary Art from Japan 1980 to the Present (2001) at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, The Netherlands. Like many contemporary artists who work with moving images, she has participated in a number of international film festivals, including Images Festival of Independent Film and Video, The Netherlands (2002) and Canada (2001), and Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, Germany (2000).

--Aimee Chang

Translocations
Jeebesh Bagchi, Steve Dietz, Gunalan Nadarajan, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Yukiko Shikata

How can we get beyond this initialization of time and space? I think translocal is a strategy, and ideas such as Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone, being nomadic, can be omnipresent, depending on the situation.[12] Regarding the IO_dencies project, it was very important that no one could have an overview of what was happening, as the totality of the information flow was happening only invisibly at info-level--on the server. Each participant had a different experience. No one could share the same reality.

With the Tokyo version of IO_dencies, what the user sees at the interface depends on the information "tendencies." Each participant can visualize the flows as he or she wants and modify them in many ways. Also, there is a kind of "ghost" of other users remotely influencing the flows of the person's interface. You operate your own interface locally, as do others, but some interaction or influences occur, which can happen randomly, unexpectedly.

Tendencies and density of flows operated by each user form a kind of info-agency, which creates an applet that starts to seek similar tendencies and connects to them to make stronger tendencies. Info-flows are always in dynamic flux in these info-spaces. Over time, links between local data grow to influence the whole; in other words, global information.

I use the term local not in a sense limited to Tokyo people, or exhibition visitors, but rather as including any local participants accessing from any place in the world, which I think could be called translocal.

KR+cF (Knowbotic Research) raised the question of urbanism and urban planning to make the local participants face (invisible) realities and possibilities--to have them start thinking of themselves as one of the flows of Tokyo.

Greetings,
yukiko

* * * * *

From: Gunalan Nadarajan <gunalan@lasallesia.edu.sg>
Date: Tue Mar 12, 2002 0:11pm
Subject: Re: Why "translocations"?

Shuddha and the Raqs Collective,

I am particularly impressed with the position (or refusal to position) that conceptually grounds the concept of your Sarai initiative. The etymological and historical references of sarai upon which you have developed a form of strategic nomadism have interesting resonances, as you rightly noted, with notions of the translocal and translocation. I wonder, however, if you had thought of the limits of nomadic strategies such as yours, since there is a tendency for such strategies not to have a life after their initial interventions and effects. The strategic advantages of nomadism seem to issue exactly from its mobility and lack of institutional baggage. However, this also seems to limit the capacity for such nomadic strategies to have long-term effects and sustainable structures to maintain the dynamic of change they initially bring about or point to. Does Sarai see itself becoming more rooted, or are roots always dangerous? Location may have become less important, but the locatedness you suggest as being crucial for your work may need to develop some kind of roots, not for grounding but for a sustained relationship to a location.

I am also a little puzzled by the notion of translocal being presented in these discussions as somewhat antithetical to operations of globalization. It seems to me that the "trans" in translocal is driven by what Okwui Enwezor has called the "will to globality," which is a desire for connectivity and access to what is perceived to be global.[13] If translocation is a movement, and therefore a moment of globalization, despite being attentive to

12 See Hakim Bey, T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, anti-copyright 1985, 1991). This text is also available at http://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html.

13 Conversation with the author.

Globalization from the Rear: "Would You Care to Dance, Mr. Malevich?"
Philippe Vergne

Amazingly or not, institutions, museums, and art centers have been slow to react, having embraced these ideas only very recently and having learned a great deal from practices outside their purview. For example, it is fair to say that a project such as the XXIV Bienal de São Paulo introduced a very large range of art-historical scholarship stemming from a history of ideas and movements barely known within the Eurocentric perspective.[8] This biennial offered an alternative history of art, not an institutionalized art history. Although many of the artists were familiar to an art-educated audience, the methodology implied that there are as many art histories as there are art historians, as many cultures as there are cultural lenses. In terms of methodology and exhibition practices, this biennial also broke new ground by aggressively developing educational strategies oriented toward a very broad range of audiences who were not only unfamiliar with the notion of modern and contemporary art but who also had their first encounter with a "museum" exhibition by attending the biennial.[9] This focus on educational strategies in the context of art institutions is seminal if such institutions have an ambition to challenge their own protocols at every level. To borrow from Rosalind Krauss' essay on experimental sculpture in the 1960s, it might be time for art institutions to think of themselves in an "expanded field."[10] In such a field, the institution, rather than being the figurehead or the voice of authority acting on another, becomes a voice working in concert with others, including plural audiences and plural cultures. Such a nonhegemonic conception of the institution places the emphasis on conversation as a strategy for promoting, among other things, the idea of education as liberation that Brazilian educator Paulo Freire developed (not so surprisingly) as early as 1968.[11]

To invite and encourage such dialogue is at the heart of How Latitudes Become Forms: Art in a Global Age. The project began by asking such questions as: How can the Walker Art Center as an institution contribute to are vamping of its own structures? How can we build an institution that generates at every level of its activities different practices, different scholarship, and different interpretative strategies growing out of the sedimentation of our history? The aim was not to replace one dominating model with a new one, in an antagonistic way, but to affirm at a structural level the inherent support and complementarity that different views and traditions provide. How can we acknowledge in our everyday practice that now more than ever "we are in the epoch of simultaneity ... the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and the far, of the side by side, of the dispersed"?[12] In the context of a museum of modern and contemporary art, it means that the institution has to overcome a major contradiction: between its mission of preservation and permanence and its mission of change. The notion of "permanent change" might be the solution; it is also what distinguishes an art center from a strictly collection-based institution.

The location of culture is shifting. As Homi K. Bhabha has written, in his attempt to relocate the notion of Western modernity, "What must be mapped as a new international space of discontinuous historical realities is, in fact, the problem of signifying the interstitial passages and processes of cultural difference that are inscribed in the 'in-between,' in the temporal break-up that weaves the 'global' text."[13] The relationship of globalization and the arts is not about "ecumenism or good will,"[14] or about political correctness, or even worse, guilt. Nor is it about finding an "insurance policy on humanness."[15] The complexity of the issue resides in the terminology of the issue itself. The minute one pronounces the words global art or global exhibition, one is already part of the problem, positioning oneself as the other, as a First-World protagonist, as a dominant signifier. The question of globalization and art is about transforming the structure of Western modernity so that one is able to write other histories of forms and practices, other art histories.[16]

8 The XXIV Bienal de São Paulo (1998) was curated by Paulo Herkenhoff on the theme of cultural anthropophagy.

9 Conversation with Paulo Herkenhoff, 2000.

10 See Rosalind Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, 1985), pp. 276-290.

11 See Paulo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York: The Continuum Publishing Corporation, 1983).

12 Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," in Documenta X, The Book, p. 262. Originally published in Diacritics 16, no. 1 (spring 1986).

13 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 217.

14 Arjun Appadurai, Globalization (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 15.

15 "The presence of the Negroes beside the whites is in a way an insurance policy on humanness. When the whites feel that they have become too mechanized, they turn to the men of color and ask them for a little human sustenance." Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), p. 129.

16 On this topic it is important to study the seminar that Jean-François Chevrier has developed since 1994 at L'École Nationale Supérieure desBeaux Arts in Paris, which is formalized in the exhibition and the box/book Des Territoires (Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, 1999-2001). Art Historian Sarat Maharaj has also developed a series of seminars at Berlin's Humboldt-Universität that challenges the methodologies of art history and art practices in light of philosophy, biology, and literature. Both Chevrier and Maharaj espouse a history of art that integrates heterogeneity and cultural diversity and embraces the voice of the "subaltern," the "oppressed."

Interactions/Intersections: Cultural Globalism and Educational Practice
Christi Atkinson, Susan Rotilie, Sarah Schultz, Kiyoko Motoyama Sims, Meredith Walters

on me to go out and make sure different communities are culturally enfranchised. They already are. They're already making waves, but they are small waves only because they don't have a stage. My practice has shifted from a need to initiate conversations to working with people who have already started them.

One of the most recent examples of this was a student forum we hosted. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Muslim students at the University of Minnesota from Africa, Saudi Arabia, and other regions felt they needed to have a conversation about what it means to be Muslim and, specifically, Muslim in America.[4] They wanted to discuss how Islam is a global culture, and how they, as Americans or as foreign students in America, need the protection that all Americans deserve in terms of not being hunted down and questioned simply because they're here and they're visible as being different. They were not negotiating their right to be "different" but rather demanding the respect and protection that everyone else takes for granted.

SS: It was affirming that the students perceived the Walker as a relatively neutral site and safe place to have a very challenging public discussion. There has been a great deal of research and discussion in the field about the museum's role as a civic institution. One report even dared to ask the question, "Should museum professionals view themselves as citizens first and museum staff second?"[5] For me, the idea of the "small" conversation or collaboration is shorthand for creating multiple and flexible strategies of paying attention to and supporting the social transformations taking place here and throughout the world.

SR: The education advisory committee is another example of a small conversation. That group is a small circle of people involved in educational systems, either as teachers, administrators, teaching artists, or professors teaching education at the college level. This year, largely because of our involvement with the global advisory group, we decided to engage these teachers in a discussion about what is appropriate for us to offer schools in terms of resources and educational experiences around ideas of globalism. Initially the conversation reminded me of what Christi mentioned earlier, that the understanding of certain words, such as globalism, shifts in different contexts. We needed to unpack the associations we had with that term, in particular how globalism and multiculturalism mean different things.

Multiculturalism in the 1980s and 1990s had to do with the local--understanding cultures that form a diverse local community. Multicultural learning helped us to be citizens of a very diverse community by understanding traditional practices, histories, and ways of communicating and living. Globalism has different connotations. It is about the world today and the interconnections between economic systems, the effects of new telecommunications and technologies, environmental concerns, and political dynamics as well as the cultural and historical contexts.[6] In schools, globalism crosses many disciplines and subjects. Because teaching from a global perspective is so complex, it is often not specifically part of school curricula.

This generation of students will probably form their ideas about globalism from the media, marketing, and the Internet. I imagine we'll go through the same cycle with globalism education that we did with multicultural education, where first of all there's a questioning, then an acknowledgment of what's lacking, and then an integration

4 Understanding September 11 was presented by the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change/MacArthur Program, University of Minnesota, in partnership with the Walker Art Center and the Institute for Global Studies, University of Minnesota, on November 12, 2001, at the Walker Art Center. This community forum featured two panel discussions. The first, "Effects on Civil Liberties," was chaired by John A. Powell, founder and executive director of the Institute on Race and Poverty (IRP) at the University of Minnesota Law School; other panelists were Keith Ellison, attorney with the law firm Hassan and Reed Ltd.; Joan Humes, Assistant United States Attorney and civil rights coordinator for the U.S. Attorney's Office, District of Minnesota; and Joseph Margulies, a principal in the law firm Margulies and Richman. The second panel, "Arab-Americans and Muslims in the Fabric of U.S. Society," was chaired by Ragui Assad, associate professor of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota; other panelists were Dominique Najjar, member of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee; Fatma Reda, MD, FAACP, clinical associate professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School and associate at the Center for Human Rights, University of Minnesota Law School; and Ahmed Samatar, James Wallace Professor and dean of International Studies and Programming at Macalester College, St. Paul.

5 Ellen Hirzy, Mastering Civic Engagement: A Challenge to Museums (Washington, D.C.: American Association of Museums, 2001).

6 See Roland Case, "Key Elements of a Global Perspective," Social Education 57, no. 6 (October 1993), pp. 318-325. In this article, Case, a Canadian social studies educator, defines two interrelated dimensions for educating from a global perspective. The substantive dimension includes knowledge of the world today and how it works. The perceptual dimension encompasses concepts and attitudes such as open-mindedness, anticipation of complexity, and empathy, from which we want students to perceive the world.

Tabaimo

The strategic advantages of nomadism seem to issue exactly from its mobility and lack of institutional baggage. However, this also seems to limit the capacity for such nomadic strategies to have long-term effects and sustainable structures to maintain the dynamic of change they initially bring about or point to.

. . . a nonhegemonic conception of the institution places the emphasis on conversation as a strategy for promoting, among other things, the idea of education as liberation that Brazilian educator Paulo Freire developed (not so surprisingly) as early as 1968.

. . . the idea of the "small" conversation or collaboration is shorthand for creating multiple and flexible strategies of paying attention to and supporting the social transformations taking place here and throughout the world.