HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS : Kaoru Arima

untitled , 2002
Kaoru Arima
Courtesy the artist, Aichi, Japan

Kaoru Arima

Kaoru Arima b.1969 (Japan)
lives and works in Inuyama-City, Japan

launch interview with Kaoru Arima

Since 1997, Kaoru Arima has produced drawings on a daily basis, following the disciplined methodology of a diary. His supports vary from notebooks to plain paper to the pages of newspapers. His drawings are figurative and borrow from a wide range of sources, unfolding a complex and intricate sense of iconography: Priapus emerging from the back of a child centaur; a hallucinated hydrocephalous salary-man wearing nothing but a tie; a mushroom-headed genie brandishing an oversized amanita; a urinating angel; a mermaid flirting with a hairy devil; an anthropomorphic tree playing the deus ex machina; a man growing puppets out of his own arms. Distorted bodies with eccentric sexuality, twisted mythologies merging with underground icons, primal anxiety juxtaposed with absolute serenity, and sharp sarcasm next to naive poetry are elements animating the rather odd nature of these drawings. All of these images are drawn with a nervous line and occupy the center of the page, isolated on a white painted background when on newspaper. A very short text is embedded in the body of each drawing, providing a textual equivalent or complement to the visual messages. The texts themselves, as absurd as the drawings, reveal a delight in word play, puns, and the comedy of life. They provide an additional twist to the drawings, revealing a weird philosophical truth--a truth that is often critical of Japanese society, its fears, its fascinations, its beliefs, and its taboos. In an oblique way, his work seems to follow the poetic tradition of the haiku--very short poems appearing to be cute aphorisms yet informed by direct experience--and he merges national cultural references with philosophy and "zero-emotion" humor.

Arima feeds his practice from dual traditions: one deriving from a nonmodernist Zen Buddhist history, the other informed by conceptual art strategies that aim to systematically analyze and exhaust the temporal, spatial, and cultural parameters that constitute art and culture. The subversive dimension of his work stems from the fact that each of these languages produces a critique of the other without establishing a hierarchy of one over the other.

Arima runs a space called the Art Drug Center. Based in the remote location of Inuyama-City, this art center (which he considers part of his work as an artist) has become a necessary local link between communities and cultural projects. He has shown his work in numerous group shows in Japan, including Transit, Laforet Harajuku Kokura, Kitakyushu (2001); Contemporary Art 2001 at Yada Citizen Gallery, Nagoya (2001); and Let's Go to the Living Room at the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo (1998-1999). In 2000, the Fukugan Gallery in Osaka organized a solo exhibition of his work.

--Philippe Vergne

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

new practices. Nevertheless, as important and reassuring as the notion of thirdness and in-betweenness is, it might only be the third step on the way to change. It is not sufficient merely to acknowledge the notion of thirdness; one needs to make it active, to pull it toward an alternative center. If not, thirdness might become a definition that restrains and limits new knowledge rather than one that empowers it.[28]

For Atelier Bow-Wow and Can Altay, the starting point for their respective projects involves inventory and documentation. This impetus to record one's own environment is apparent in many artistic practices today, most obviously in the practice of film, but not exclusively. The logic of the documentary has increasingly emerged in the visual arts over the last decade, as demonstrated by the incorporation of moving images into art practices, using models borrowed from popular culture and entertainment, including Hollywood movies, music videos, and video games.

The exigency of information and realism reveals itself in Chinese artist Wang Jian Wei's film Living Elsewhere (1999-2000; pp. 245-247). The film, which documents a failed real-estate development project in the suburbs of Beijing, seems motivated by the need to record a socioeconomical and cultural mutation. The same drive applies to Zhao Liang's film Bored Youth (2000; pp. 253-255), which focuses on Beijing's predatory urban development, even though the pure documentary language is mixed with editing strategies inherited from music videos. In both cases, documentary filmmaking becomes a means for sustaining a tradition that has almost disappeared from art practice: the tradition of storytelling.

Although she does not use moving images as a medium, Yin Xiuzhen participates in this strategy when she documents--through installations or interventions--the way in which memory vanishes with the destruction or dislocation of communities (pp. 249-251). Such artists seem to embrace a sense of civic responsibility that redefines activism as a quiet subversion rather than a frontal and oppositional attack. The powerful body of work that has erupted under this logic of documentary has also allowed the practitioners to reassert their own proximity and to locate their practices, and the consequences thereof, on a very local or regional level. Again, this movement can be seen as an effect of a widely globalized culture. Here, the urgency is to find a way to make a difference. The local is becoming the alternative, and it contributes to a redefinition of the nature of the audience through the involvement of communities.

The paradox of the increasingly globalized world is that many artists are attempting to reinvent, or to establish, their difference. This movement, which might be the unavoidable flip side of globalization, was the cornerstone of the Gwangju Biennale in 2002.[29] One outstanding feature of this exhibition was the presence of twenty-six collectives or independent organizations from Europe and Asia. These groups have emerged over the last decade as fundamental protagonists in art-making and diffusion, developing alternative strategies that affect the relationship of art to the larger world. These groups/platforms, all active in their communities as exhibition venues, educational structures, or production units, serve as a metaphor for a new arena of negotiation that lies in between the global and the local.[30]

In many ways, the projects of Kaoru Arima, developed through his Art Drug Center in Inuyama-City, Japan, echo such concerns. In his own house, Arima opened an art center to provide a platform for fellow artists who might not otherwise find venues for showing their work. With a similar attention to the value of proximity, the New Delhi-based Raqs Media Collective, composed of filmmakers and new-media practitioners, is working on a series of initiatives motivated by the desire to interpret, understand, and engage the urban construct of the city in which they live and work. One of their projects is based on the creation of a "cyber neighborhood," acenter for digital intervention with kids in a working-class settlement in New Delhi.

28 On this topic see Leslie A. Adelson, "Against Between: A Manifesto," in Unpacking Europe, eds. Hassan and Dadi, p. 245.

29 The 2002 Gwangju Biennale, titled Pause, was co-curated by Charles Esche, director of the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, Malmö, Sweden,and Hou Hanru, freelance curator, director of the 2000 Shanghai Biennale, and member of the Walker Art Center's global advisory committee.

30 For more on this topic, see Hou Hanru's essay on page 36 in this book.

"Le Cinema est un Language Universel"
Cis Bierinckx, Philippe Vergne

forced him to be creative, and it was this apparent limitation that inspired him and other Cinema Novo filmmakers. They were political activists who wanted to express themselves. In Marins they found an example demonstrating that money isn't as important as creativity and the will to tell your story. Money is a Hollywood concept. Very important movies have been made on almost no budget. In the United States, examples include the early films of Jim Jarmusch, films by Cassavetes, and so on. The Cinema Novo movement was very important in the political language of Brazil.

At the moment we see something similar happening in China. The digital camera has created new possibilities for many Chinese filmmakers to express themselves outside the political system. Digital filmmaking has contributed to a kind of democratization process that enables more people to express themselves. It's cheap; one can film without thinking of expenses and even edit at home. A videocassette is also easier to distribute illegally than film reels. In this way the digitalization of the image is having an impact comparable to the introduction of 16mm and Bolex cameras in the 1960s. This democratization of cinema, first in the 1960s with the 16mm camera and now with the digital camera, has created throughout the world a direct cinema with greater political content. The sociopolitical views of the 1960s are certainly in a period of revival right now, although the approaches are different because it is a different world today.

PV: What does the term globalism mean to your practice?

CB: Globalism in film, like globalism in its broadest definition, has its good and bad sides. There is definitely greater access to world cinema at this moment than ever before. However, the problem with world cinema is that the European market tries to get their hands on it, in the same way that the markets drive the visual arts world. For instance, many African filmmakers live in France. They're not really familiar with the French film industry, but they get funding to make their films through governmental organizations. A prerequisite to receiving such funding is to have a French producer. Often, not really knowing this producer (as happened with Senegalese filmmaker Mansour Sora Wade and his film Ndeysaan [The Price of Forgiveness]), they go ahead without first building a relationship. Oftentimes, these producers are merely after the money and tell the naive filmmaker that the money has run out even before the film is finished. Where the money has gone remains a mystery, and nobody asks, as long as the producer's books are in order. It's an awkward system that protects the producer more than the filmmaker. The international sales agents, who are holding tight reins on the sale of non-European films, are another obstacle. Thai cinema, films from China, Iran, Hong Kong, South Korea, Argentina, and Mexico are all reaching new heights of popularity, overshadowing even American independent cinema. It is painful to know, however, that these sales agents sometimes interfere with the look of the film or request that the filmmaker do a new edit. Take for instance Jia Zhang-ke's Platform. When I saw it in Venice it was twenty minutes longer than the version we received here to screen. The French sales agent had requested that the filmmaker cut it down. He told him that they wouldn't be able to sell it at the original length. Even independent world cinema is becoming more and more a product of sales and marketing considerations. This is in opposition to the original intention of the filmmakers--of every artist--whose concern is in the first place to get exposure for their work. They want their work to be seen, but it has become unavoidable with the rise of the film and art markets that they lose their creative freedom and no longer have a say in what is done with their work. Isn't that right?

Aside from these factors, and coming back to my own practice, we face another misfortune as programmers. We are charged a lot of money by the sales agents for screenings because, as they say, there are too many festivals at which to show global cinema and only those who can pay will get the product.

PV: Is globalization essentially an economic phenomenon?

CB: Globalism is rooted in the economy. In our practice we use the term globalism in another connotation. We see globalism as opening the windows to the world, but the reality is that globalism is and remains a factor of the market and the economy. We borrowed the word from economics. Our vision of globalism and our dreams are of a completely different order than those of economic globalism. However, in our practice we are so often confronted with the economic side of things that we get frustrated in our global thinking.

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

that this is a strength moving forward into the twenty-first century, which does and will belong to people who can live in multiple places simultaneously and recognize that their identity changes from place to place.

Yet, as leaders in cultural institutions, is it our task, when taking on a new project like this, to try to make connections by finding similarities, which is different from being homogenous, or to look for the differences in how people deal with these issues and accept these differences, learn from these differences?

KH: I'm realizing that the older I get, though I remain galvanized by the single art object, what really keeps me involved daily are the ideas contained in that object. I am looking, I guess, for people whose approach may be very, very different from my own, but through dialogue with them, even if it is frictive, I become bigger and the ideas--as well as the artwork--become richer. Certainly, when starting our initiative, we needed to have a core of familiar people on the committee, just to create a foundation, some security. But most of the people around the table were new faces. And, somewhat miraculously, we found facets of each other that linked us together.

I want to go back for a moment to this notion of the avant-garde. I don't hear that word used much in visual arts discourse these days. The question for me is, does it have any historical currency in, say, China, which you mentioned earlier? From the Western perspective, we may have embraced their artists as engendering a revolutionary reflection of the avant-garde. I know this is very hard to answer in a broad sense, but what, if any, historical currency does the notion of the avant-garde have in Asia?

VND: Again, it depends on the culture, so you have to parse it out. In the Chinese tradition, it was something that people were really attracted to, especially in the 1980s and early 1990s. I would venture to say that one of the reasons for this is because China, within its own cultural practice, has a tradition of resistance to a mainstream. Therefore, this was an idea that they could relate to and make their own. It is simply not that foreign to the Chinese, whereas it was not a word that had the same level of currency in Southeast Asia. In India, it's very complicated because of the nationalist movement. There, the notion of subverting a mainstream or of subverting the national ethos in some way--in this case, it was a colonial ethos--was a part of the practice. Therefore, people could also relate to the notion of the Western avant-garde as something they would resist, subvert. At the same time, India is a very peculiar place. Even just recently, I was in India and I heard again and again that people are very proud of how various food companies--McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Dominos Pizza--have to drastically change their usual practice to suit the indigenous taste in India. And people talk about how outsiders who come to India end up being Indianized to a much greater extent than they are able to assert some sort of influence on India. That reveals a very different way of dealing with the dominant, the outside: by incorporating it into something indigenous. It departs from the resistance or the dialectic model. I've sometimes referred to the Indian approach as an amoebic model--little pieces that open up, get separated, and then get incorporated into a larger organism, which is a very incremental process.

KH: What I find interesting is that the Indian embrace of the avant-garde, if I understand it correctly, resulted paradoxically in the Gandhian delight in tradition and the imperative of tradition.

VND: Exactly, since that was a predominant way to subvert the colonial enterprise.

KH: So, in fact, even though we think of the avant-garde and the idea of resistance as being about the creation of something new, in India, the avant-garde was a return to something indigenous, precolonial.

VND: That was the most revolutionary thing you could do. But, then, that quickly became the conservative model, and artists and intellectuals moved away from it. It's partly the injection of the nationalist discourse into the avant-garde that makes it much more complex.

KH: And rigid?

VND: Sometimes rigid and dynamic at the same time.

Kaoru Arima

Such artists seem to embrace a sense of civic responsibility that redefines activism as a quiet subversion rather than a frontal and oppositional attack.

The digital camera has created new possibilities for many Chinese filmmakers to express themselves outside the political system.

That reveals a very different way of dealing with the dominant, the outside: by incorporating it into something indigenous.