HOW LATITUDES BECOME FORMS : Zon Ito

Slaver Twinkled in, 2001
Zon Ito
Photo: Kazuo Fukunaga, courtesty Kodama Gallery, Osaka, Japan

Zon Ito

Zon Ito b.1971 (Japan)
lives and works in Kyoto, Japan

launch interview with Zon Ito

Zon Ito privileges mediums that were peripheral to contemporary art practices during the twentieth century because they were considered too low, too domestic, too precious, too narrative, or too crafty. His embroideries on fabric use the pictorial model to display strange playlets, hallucinated landscapes, and twisted wildlife scenes. The visual vocabulary he uses for these embroideries also appears in the animation films he has conceived with artist Aoki Ryoko (Psychic Scope, 2000), in his series of handmade books titled Scrap Works of Scum (1999), and in his tiny plaster sculptures Word-Chain Game Ornaments (1999). The underrated nature of Ito's practice and his choice of mediums define an aesthetic of quiet subversion that visually echoes the anti-economic globalization that inspired Noami Klein's "no logo" philosophy, and a rear-guard attitude as opposed to an avant-garde one.

In its content, Ito's art taps into our prenarrative and prelinguistic past. Bypassing the viewer's rational self, his animated work and embroidered tableaux ignore the strictures of logic and reality, meandering across the mind's eye like captured daydreams. Time-based works resolutely ignore the structures of time, repeating certain movements (a puppy running toward the viewer, for example) several times. Disparate elements are juxtaposed (a bird flying over a waterfall over which a bulb of garlic is suspended), yet seem to exist in harmony. Reminiscent of video games from the 1980s, children's television, and dreams, his work exists within the realm of delight. His world of liquid associations gives room for a hypersubjective vision that blends memory, the dream world, and hallucinations. Such an aesthetic is informed both by a literary tradition and by the underground, psychedelic, hippie youth culture that seems to have recently reemerged in music, film, and fashion from a refreshed interest in (if not nostalgia for) the 1970s.

Ito's work was recently exhibited in Beautiful Life, Art Tower Mito, Tokyo, Japan (2002), and in the 2001 Yokohama Triennale, Japan. His most recent solo exhibition, Bura Bura Liquid, was held at the Kodama Gallery in Osaka in 2001.

--Philippe Vergne

Content, Context, and Cultural Commitment: Curating the Performing Arts
Philip Bither, Baraka Sele

What really concerns me about using those terms when we work with other cultures is that it's our language, not theirs. I remember the first time I mentioned "multiculturalism" to an Africa Exchange artist. He said, "That is not our term. We do not subscribe to American or European intellectual, aesthetic terminologies, or to your curatorial philosophies. We're doing something else over here." That was a revelation to me. I began to realize that I couldn't go to Africa or other places and use a word like avant-garde because people said to me, "That applies specifically to a European or American aesthetic and has nothing to do with what we're doing."

Most of us in the presenting and producing field don't know the terminologies used in other countries, don't know the aesthetic histories of those countries. So we come with preconceived notions about what contemporary work is. So many times when I thought I was looking at traditional work in Africa, people told me that I was looking at contemporary work. Irène Tassembedo, a choreographer from Burkina Faso, said to us, "You don't even know what traditional work is because Americans have never seen it. Traditional work is sacred. It is a sacred ritual and if I were to put it on a stage, I would drop dead, and you would drop dead from seeing it." She also said, "You don't know what our contemporary practice is. You are still trying to keep us in the eighteenth or nineteenth century and, yes, we treasure that tradition, we build upon that tradition, but we are doing something else now. Our work is informed by contemporary practice and training. I have been trained in all the same modern techniques that American and European artists have been trained in, but that doesn't mean we throw out all the tradition that came before us. It is now something new and different. It is not traditional. But we would also not call it totally contemporary." So we have to start learning what that work is. If we haven't actually seen traditional African work, according to this choreographer, what are we comparing it to? What are we talking about? How do we put some label on this?

PB: Those are key issues that we deal with continually. When we bring an artist to the U.S for the first time, the temptation is, of course, to prefer the prestige of bringing them exclusively to your own city. But don't we have a responsibility to spread the wealth of knowledge, the privilege of access, to our colleagues? Gerald Yoshitomi noted in 1995, "The only way that things will move forward is if these nodes of expertise can be encouraged or even funded to support the spread of that knowledge and the building of those networks around the country."[4] How can we become those "nodes of information," rather than having our programs benefit only the Walker or NJPAC?

BS: One way is by taking on this new role of being in direct relationship with the artist, even though when there is no middleman for me, my work becomes more labor-intensive. I now have to figure out transportation, touring, funding, visas. There's a whole new set of tasks and responsibilities when you function as a producer and not just as a presenter.

PB: It's a huge, huge undertaking. In the past few years we've done it for the God Squad from Berlin and dumb type from Japan, among others. It requires, I would estimate, five times more effort than being part of an existing tour or engaging a project that comes to a single city.

For good or ill, the box office drives so much of our field at large and keeps it, in some ways, susceptible to its worst tendencies. The market does drive certain ways that we position events. There tends to be a sense of selling the exotic, especially when dealing with cultures that are interestingly alien or different from what one's own population knows about. How do you address that issue?

BS: I'm glad you brought this up, because I was hoping we would eventually get to this notion of the exotic. Someone once said to me, "Let's be clear. As soon as you take something out of its home, out of the context in which it was created, you are exoticizing it." To be quite honest, I agree. I know that I am exoticizing almost everything I do because I am in no way presenting it in its original cultural, political, and geographical context. What I hope I'm not doing is exploiting the artists and their work.

PB: What's the line between the two?

4 "International Presenting in the United States," Pew Charitable Trusts.

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

on Uttar-Priyadashi.[2] This work could be perceived as traditional East Indian theater-dance from the Westerner's point of view, but from the East Indian's point of view it's a very contemporary interpretation of the traditional forms. It made me rethink how I might design programs with different resident artists and art forms that we bring in from around the world. When the Walker presented Uttar-Priyadashi, our solution was to invite a scholar of Indian dance and theater, Dr. Sunil Kothari, who was traveling with the company, to speak to students in theater and dance classes at Macalester College and also to have him give a talk before the show. It helped to frame the performance within a more nuanced context than simply traditional or nontraditional. It conveyed that these artists are carrying forward--and adding complexity to--longheld traditions, but using a contemporary vocabulary.

MW: Making those many vocabularies available is so important, and your solution is a perfect illustration of it. Westerners, Americans, anyone removed from that culture, really, have limited vocabularies for that form of dance. As you said, traditional and nontraditional are terms that don't illuminate anything and are in fact misleading. Audiences unfamiliar with these complex histories are forced to make analogies to what they do know--or think they know--about a foreign culture, which is usually a mix of news reports, a few facts from world history class, or artifacts seen in museums. In a contemporary arts context we had the opportunity to distinguish between flat representations of a culture and the actual artistic process of contemporary dancers from Manipur.

SS: I valued hearing about the various issues and challenges the committee members faced in their own communities surrounding the presentation of contemporary work. Walter Chakela, for example, is dealing with a particular history of revolution and apartheid in South Africa. He was struggling to convince his audience, consisting of primarily black South Africans, that their literature and theater are as good and as valuable as the works of Shakespeare and Chekov. Because European drama was all they ever read or learned about in school, Shakespeare is perceived as literature with a capital L, and they needed to be convinced that their stories, about revolution and apartheid, were equally "Literature." Though the details vary from locale to locale, in a strange way it was reassuring to discover that everyone around the table was wrestling with the challenge of overcoming audiences' preconceptions and apprehensions about contemporary art.

Christi Atkinson: One thing this initiative has reinforced for me is the power of certain words, such as global and globalism, and how those words can mean dramatically different things to different people. For example, one of our advisors felt that globalism was just a buzzword for the new American imperialism. And yet, no matter how strongly we all felt that these words were problematic, there were no agreed-upon, adequate alternatives to these terms. When our vocabulary itself is shifting, the intended discussions can't even be realized.

KMS: There is a connection between a person's perception of a word--such as globalism, community, local--and the cultural background and history that he or she grew up in. I'm working in an American institution, creating programs for an American audience, yet this process has made it clear that my ideas of internationalism or globalism stem from being Japanese and growing up in Japan. I have a double perception in a way.

I am sensitive to how Asian culture is often wrapped up into one big category, which hides all the unique qualities and differences within Asian cultures and art. Asia includes China, Japan, and Korea as well as the expanse of Southeast Asia, and we all have very distinct cultural and artistic traditions and histories, although we have a lot of things in common too. From the Westerner's point of view, the commonalties are often emphasized more than the differences. I am much more aware of the need to accentuate differences within Asian cultures, rather than to simplify them in one cultural category.

SS: Do you think there is a tendency in America to lump everyone from one country or continent together?

2 Uttar-Priyadarshi (The Final Beatitude) is a music-theater-dance work conceived and directed by Ratan Thyiam, a leading East Indian director, and uses stylized movement and vocal techniques that reference traditional performing and martial arts of Manipur. Uttar-Priyadarshi was performed by the Chorus Repertory Theatre of Manipur, India, which was established by Thyiam. It was copresented by the Walker Art Center and the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts at the Ordway Center, St. Paul, Minnesota, on October 2, 2000.

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?

Zon Ito