HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS : Tsuyoshi Ozawa

Tsuyoshi Ozawa installating Museum of Soy Sauce Art at Collection Lambert, Avignon, France
Courtesy the artist, Tokyo, Japan

Tsuyoshi Ozawa

Tsuyoshi Ozawa b.1965 (Japan)
lives and works in Tokyo, Japan

launch interview with Tsuyoshi Ozawa

Tsuyoshi Ozawa is an artist with a knack for combining the real and the virtual and for turning lighthearted critiques into real alternatives. His Museum of Soy Sauce Art (1998-2000), a parodic look at Japanese art history, features many familiar Japanese masterworks re-created in soy sauce. Displayed with texts tracing the venerable, but entirely imaginary, history of soy sauce art, the installation drew the attention of a director of a soy sauce company. At first regretting his ignorance of soy sauce painting, the director laughed "with indescribable satisfaction" when he found out that the entire project was imaginary and ended up funding a franchise of the original temporary museum. Ozawa's Nasubi Gallery, consisting of milk-box-sized portable exhibition halls, was originally conceived as a critique of the Japanese system of "pay to show" rental galleries but also existed as a real alternative to those galleries, profiling both famous and unknown artists. Such public artworks are deeply influenced by the Neo Dadism Organizers, an art group active in Tokyo in the 1960s, and by Fluxus. Quietly and beautifully transgressive, his works are interventions in a mundane and sometimes oppressive world.

Like several artists in How Latitudes Become Forms, Ozawa is interested in artistic practice as a part of everyday life. His ongoing Jizoing project, for which he takes daily photos of a jizo (a familiar Japanese bodhisattva, one of the many incarnations of Buddha), is both an artwork and a daily meditation. Taking the pictures in areas of political turmoil, he noted that the light at dusk is the same all over the world. This led to the Twilight Jizoing Series, photographs taken at twilight every day and printed in the "peaceful and healing" color of blue. Both vernacular and conceptual, Ozawa's work seeks always to communicate. For his Sodan (Consultation) works, he first created paintings in consultation with successive advisors on the street and then created The University of Sodan Art, an art school that taught Sodan painting as well as a course on overcoming one's fears, and mounted a number of performances and exhibitions.

Ozawa has exhibited in Asia and abroad. Recent solo exhibition venues include Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo, Japan (2000), and the Asian Fine Arts Factory, Berlin, Germany (1999). In addition, he was featured in the 2002 Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; IKIRO/Be Alive: Contemporary Art from Japan 1980 to the Present (2001) at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, The Netherlands; Public Offerings (2001), organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California; Cities on the Move (1999), Vienna, Austria; and the First Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale, Japan (1999).

--Aimee Chang

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

On October 13, 1994, a European curator in charge of the Malevich room at the Bienal de São Paulo threw out some dancers who had entered the exhibition wearing Hélio Oiticica's Parangolés.[1] His exact words were "Get out."[2] This micro-event, which took place fourteen years after Oiticica's death and a few months after the first international retrospective of his work,[3] remains an informative example of how art history and art institutions have too often neglected artistic productions that fall, aesthetically or geographically, to the left of the canon.

What was at stake here? What exactly was supposed to "get out" of that room? One canon dominating the Malevich exhibition might be the notion that Western culture has been for more than two centuries the normative civilization, leaving indigenous cultures (Brazilian in this case) on the threshold of recognition, guilty of being marginal, "premodern." Another canon relates to the now all-too-familiar tension between high and low cultures. Indeed, the dancers with whom Oiticica collaborated belonged to a neighborhood samba school and were training for the carnival. How dare such an impure, highly popular (in a social, not Pop art, understanding of the word), performative, if not downright subversive practice, where social hierarchies do not apply, enter the temple of high European modernism which Malevich exemplifies?

There are no easy answers to the issues raised by this incident, and blaming a curator after the fact won't help us understand the underlying crisis in art and in the practices of cultural institutions: a crisis that echoes the historical ruptures, the political traumas, and the epistemological breaks that have occurred over the last thirty years and have challenged the centrality of the Western world. The fact is that since the 1960s and the independence and liberation movements of decolonization, new kinds of discourses have emerged, irrevocably altering Eurocentric discourses and their fragile claims of universal validity.

In a closer and more critical historical framework, one could declare that the world is a different place since the uprisings and geopolitical restructuring that began in 1989. The revolutions in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989, the democratic revolution in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, also in 1989, the Gulf War in 1991, and the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994 have opened a new era for the twenty-first century--one in which the world economy and new information technologies have "not only reconfigured centrality and its spatial correlates, [but] have also created new spaces for centrality."[4]

1 The Parangolés are colorful costumes intended to optimize body movements, conceived by the artist for dancers at a samba school with whom he was working.

2 See Luciano Figueiredo, "The Other Malady," Third Text 28/29 (autumn/winter 1994), pp. 105-116.

3 The exhibition Hélio Oiticica traveled from February 1992 to February 1994 to the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris; the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; the Centro de Arte Moderna da Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian,Lisbon; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

4 Saskia Sassen, "Global Cities and Global Value Chains/The Topoi of E-Space," in Politics, Poetics: Documenta X, The Book (Ostfildern-Ruit: Cantz,1997), p. 736.

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

is very exciting for us because we are able to work with a community that we have not yet worked with in depth. We are fortunate to have an artist of Ethiopian decent who has a good understanding of East African cultures and is committed to providing artistic experiences to this immigrant community. One of the lessons we learned from Julie is that privacy is very important within the East African communities. Originally the project was conceived as a group activity. Now, it's shifting toward individual projects so that the participants will feel more comfortable.

CA: At the heart of Julie's project is the desire to have these new communities be able to take ownership of their new neighborhoods, new routines, and new homes. It's a self-mapping, self-ethnographic project that reflects the stamp they have made on the city. They are not just outsiders here in a new city but rather are in a city that has been distinctly imprinted and changed by their presence.

SR: The idea of mapping is also connected to the exhibition How Latitudes Become Forms. The invention of latitudinal measurements in the fifteenth century marked a major advancement in Western mapmaking processes. Of course, now those inventions are associated with issues of exploration and colonialism, and maps have become politically controversial to a certain extent. Consequently, the use of the word latitudes in the title of this exhibition provides an opportunity to thematically connect with place, and also with multiple histories. Mapping can be a metaphor for how we organize knowledge or experience. We are combining these themes in a hands-on class for students in the Walker's art lab, offered in conjunction with tours of the Latitudes exhibition. Students will use maps as place identifiers, pattern work, and collage elements to make artworks both individually and collaboratively in response to the work they see in the galleries.

SS: Mapping is a way to graphically and conceptually understand complex connections, especially between the local and the global. We live in a nomadic world, where the Internet literally creates new networks and associations. Also, people are able to travel and move about more freely. You don't really belong in one place, but in multiple places.

MW: That raises the issue of the museum's role in a nomadic world, both as a civic institution and as one node in a global network of contemporary art institutions. As the institution presents and collects work by artists from around the world, it is important that we present the art on its own terms and interpret it according to its own strategies. This requires us to know the implications of the artist's choice of materials and forms and to recognize the cultural dialogues the pieces are participating in: Is a piece created for an international audience or an internal one? Understanding the art-historical context of some of this work will be a challenge. It's hard enough to talk about contemporary art when you are familiar with its conceptual antecedents. Could it be that art produced for a global audience is the beginning of a new art history--that its antecedents are all of the possible art histories?

SR: One of our responsibilities is to go beyond just looking at a work of art in terms of its elements and to examine the (art)world in which it was made. That includes the world of the artist--his or her local community and historical context. That might sound monocultural, but, in fact, more and more artists today live in and move through many localities. They may be working as artists on several continents. They may have their work shown in many, many different places, in many, many different contexts. Global arts education, for me, means precisely these overlapping circles of (art)worlds that can inform even just one work of art.

SS: I've certainly experienced a shift in practice. I have to say, a few years ago, I would have thought naively that the phrase "global arts education" meant doing a forum on the Web that would have reached out across the world. Now, I have a very different opinion about what working globally might mean, which, for me, probably means working locally in a very different context.

CA: The global and the local have been discussed among the teens for a long time. We're always looking at the most contemporary work in the galleries because that is where we can find artwork from all over the world. Those "global" issues we see in the work relate to the "local" (as well as profoundly personal) issues that are going on in the teen's small communities of friends or at school. I feel my job is to help the teens work in the

Musings on Globalism and Institutional Change
Vishakha N. Desai, Kathy Halbreich

ON JANUARY 26, 2002, Kathy Halbreich, director of the Walker Art Center, and Vishakha N. Desai, senior vice president and director of the Museum at the Asia Society, New York, sat down to discuss the pitfalls and the grace notes of addressing globalism in one's institutional and curatorial practices. Following is an edited version of that conversation.

Kathy Halbreich: Some people think of the Asia Society as a culturally specific institution that focuses exclusively on traditional art. Since joining the Asia Society in 1990, you've been clear that it is, quite literally, a multicultural institution that highlights contemporary as well as traditional practice across the disciplines. Can you talk about some of the challenges of being involved in an institution that represents half of the world?

Vishakha N. Desai: It is interesting that even though the purview of the Asia Society covers more than half of the world, we call it "culturally specific" whereas institutions that typically cover Euro-American cultures are often seen as being "universal" or encyclopedic. Such perceptions are at the heart of how Asian art is received in this country.

One could argue that throughout the last century the ways in which the histories of Asian art have been told in the United States, and in the West in general, have tended to differentiate those stories from the present and from one another. When I began to ask why the study of Asian art so often excludes the twentieth century, I became increasingly aware of my own hybridity, which is also a reflection of the hybrid history of modern Asia. Clearly the study of this history, embedded in the history of colonialism, undermines the "purity" question that is equated with traditional Asian art.

KH: What is the "purity" question?

VND: Once you acknowledge colonial history, even for those countries that were not colonized in the twentieth century, the history of twentieth-century Asian art cannot be discussed without considering the intervention, influence, and hegemony of the West. It cannot be done. One of the things we've learned from the debate going on in cultural studies is that when you look at other cultures, if you keep them "pure" or "authentic," you also keep them ahistorical, nonchanging, static. But cultures can no longer be examined in isolation. The minute I ask myself, "Who am I? What composes my identity?" I realize that the privileging of Asian cultures as pure and as "other" is an ideological position that is not acceptable.

KH: I'd like to examine how art historians have tended to differentiate one culture from another, acknowledging neither the hybridity nor the perils of nationalism. But is it possible that one of the positive outcomes of glob-alism today is this sense of differentiation between and among ourselves, between and among our cultures, between and among continents, countries, and generations?

Tsuyoshi Ozawa

. . . crisis in art and in the practices of cultural institutions: a crisis that echoes the historical ruptures, the political traumas, and the epistemological breaks that have occurred over the last thirty years and have challenged the centrality of the Western world.

. . . the word latitudes in the title of this exhibition provides an opportunity to thematically connect with place, and also with multiple histories.

Once you acknowledge colonial history, even for those countries that were not colonized in the twentieth century, the history of twentieth-century Asian art cannot be discussed without considering the intervention, influence, and hegemony of the West.