美学校アーカイブ
■ アリス・モード・ロクスビーさんと嶋田美子さんによる美学校研究など
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proposal of Bigakko exhibition
Anti-Academy
Proposal from Alice Maude-Roxby and Yoshiko Shimada
At a time when art school education is apparently ‘in crisis’ we look to significant artists’ workshops developed in the late ’60s and propose an exhibition and publication examining the teaching and student experiences of three idiosyncratic ‘anti-academy’ art programmes instigated around 1969 in response to the context of political/social/cultural change. Where the current debate around art education in crisis seems anchored on the demise and economic unviability of the conversational ‘one to one tutorial’ our investigation centres in particular on an unpacking of active and physical group experience- the ‘artist’s workshop’- specifically of the late 1960s and early 1970s, as an impetus for exchange and transferal from one practice to another. These artists’ workshops opened up questions on all levels of what art could be and how it could directly relate to life. In an opening up of the questions of how to teach and how to learn these workshops often utilized ‘performance’ or resulted in ‘events’ which were ephemeral and site specific, evidenced through film, photography, visual teaching notes, handmade/low tech journals and writing and at times re-surfacing subsequently as the group experience was assimilated into individual student practices. As subject for an exhibition an insight into the nuts and bolts of production- in this case through the actuality and impact of ‘radical’ artists’ workshops from written proposal to action - opens up ‘dialogue’ on the potential ongoing relationship of art to life rather than closing down by taking a historical view which situates these events as finished in the past. For the exhibition Anti-Academy the materials relating to three distinct teaching programmes (each evolving around 1968- in Tokyo, Iowa and Copenhagen) are evidenced through artists’ written proposals, films, photographs, manifestos, teaching notes, artifacts, objects and paintings and at times the workshop instruction is re-visited and currently activated by students and artists in the present time.
Our focus is on the early artists’ workshops at Bigakko, Tokyo (the anti-academy founded in1969 with artists Genpei Akasegawa Genpei, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, Kikkuhata); the Intermedia Programme, Iowa University (programme founded by Hans Breder in 1969 with visiting lecturers Vito Acconci, Mary Beth Edelson, Linda Montana, Charlotte Moorman/Nam June Paik and students Ana Mendieta, Charles Ray) and the collaborative activities of Ex-School, Copenhagen (the ‘Experimental School’ founded in 1961 by Troels Andersen with the participation of Per Kirkeby, Henning Christiansen and others), Denmark. These three anti-academies situated themselves on the peripheries of the art world and each retained an idiosyncratic character directly fuelled up by opposition to the mainstream and in response to the political and social climate, location and cultural context which were acutely beyond the comparatively mainstream character of what has been considered ‘avant garde’ education for example at Freie University in Dusseldorf or Cal Arts.
The Intermedia Programme at Iowa University was established almost single handedly by the German artist Hans Breder. Within the Intermedia programme students experienced workshops by various visiting artists and the emphasis was on exploring ‘ liminal spaces, the boundaries between media, between artistic and scholarly practices, between genres, between social and political universes, between viewer and artist’. The programme was characterized by an innovative use of ‘media’ and ‘technology’. The archive also reveals very diverse approaches from artists like Dan Graham and Linda Montana regarding the development of a ‘workshop brief’ and its relationship to their ongoing practices. There was a strong support from Breder for feminist artists’ participation in the Intermedia workshop programme and an emphasis on developing a collaborative relationship with the local community.
Bigakko, Tokyo can be seen to draw most explicitly from the concurrent political context. Bigakko was founded in 1969 by the publishing house Gendai Shicho-sha. Gendai Shicho-sha was notorious for its commitment to publishing an eclectic selection of controversial contemporary Japanese writing alongside the first Japanese publications of de Sade and others. For Gendai Shicho-sha, operating in response to the political and social backdrop of student revolt in the post-war climate characterised within the art world both as a rejection of western modernism and a questioning of Japanese cultural and political history. The teaching programme involved very diverse approaches stretching from the overtly political to the conceptual to alchemy- during 1970-71 students had to attend all classes.
Ex-School was established in Copenhagen in 1961 by Troels Andersen, an art historian of the Russian Avant-garde and artists including Per Kirkeby, Henning Christiansen, Paul Gernes, Bjorn Norgaard and others . Ex-School advocated a collective anonymity over the pursuit of personal individual careers and rejected the emotional and subjective dimensions of artistic creation. They exercised an across-aesthetic experimental group practice, working collectively across genres and styles.
Common concerns embedded in the programmes at Bigakko, Intermedia Iowa and Ex-School were:
-Crossing the boundaries dividing art and life, aesthetic and political action
-Emphasis on processes, ideas and the ephemeral ‘art event’ positioned between media rather than as commodity or coming out of traditional art making processes
-Inclusion of the body of the spectator, actual space and time in the process of art-making, resulting in a strongly performative experience of art.
The exhibition we propose will be constituted of three installations of artifacts, films and documents, each relating to a radical moment in art teaching: Bigakko, Tokyo; Intermedia Programme at Iowa; and Ex-School, Copenhagen.
Each presentation is articulated within the gallery as an individually curated element, the Bigakko programme curated by Yoshiko Shimada and Alice Maude-Roxby; Intermedia Iowa by Cornelia Schmidt Bleek, and Ex-School, Denmark by Stefanie Seibold in collaboration with Tania Orum.
Seibold, Schmidt Bleek and Shimada are each concerned within their own practices with the articulation of ‘documentary’ evidence as subject for exhibitions.
Drawing from artists’ archives relating to each institution, objects of the exhibition will include work of the faculty artists and students involved, and accounts of the histories, ideologies and experiences of the programmes as expressed through interviews with tutors and students. For example, from materials relating to the University of Iowa’s Intermedia programme we will exhibit ‘workshop documentation’ and project briefs written by artists such as Linda Montana, Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman, Robert Wilson, and Dan Graham for students such as Ana Mendieta, Charles Ray and others. “Old Man’s Creek” is one example. This super 8 film pictures fellow students Ana Mendieta and Charles Ray collaborating on the muddy banks of the river. Mendieta is pictured deeply submerged in mud pulling more and more mud towards her with her hands so that she becomes progressively encased towards her neck. Fellow student Charles Ray is seen in white trousers clearly not wanting to get his hands muddy. He aids Mendieta with her work by skidding and sliding accumulations of mud on the edges of his feet which he scrapes towards her. Within the exhibition we will show both the work of the artists/lecturers and the students, and examining the transaction between one practice and another.
Bigakko employed the most radical Japanese artists of the day. One such artist was High Red Center member Genpei Akasegawa, notorious for the courtcase in which his defence team and witnesses (including all of the most well known critics and artists) failed to persuade the jury that Genpei Akasegawa’s copies of 1000 yen notes were art rather than counterfeit money. From 1969 to 1971 an extraordinary programme of teaching was developed at Bigakko—running in parallel this extended from the political to the metaphysical, from conceptual to alchemy. For example Mokuma Kikuhata instructed groups of students to work on large-scale panels on which they meticulously copied composites of drawings by an ex-miner Sakubei Yamamoto, depicting life and work of ordinary miners in the turn of the century to the pre-war period. Yamamoto’s work is included in UNESCO’s memory of the world this year. Natsuyuki Natsuyuki Nakanishi developed a series of drawing exercises through which students’ awareness of the body, the act of living in relation to the world as a whole and each other could be heightened. Such exercises included drawing with one hand whilst placing a finger in another student’s mouth, or drawing and making objects whilst students hands are strapped together and one eye is covered.
Ex-School artists wanted to discard traditional notions of the artist as a special kind of person and art as a special activity. They used varying strategies to achieve this de-mystification of art and the artist. When off-set printing became available in the second half of the sixties, Ex-School members turned to producing posters, handbills, newsletters, journals and books and increasingly used photography. The use of these media was often an integral part of the collaboration between members of the avant-garde(especially the sculptor and performance artist Bjørn Nørgaard) and the various youth movements involved in critical and subversive activities and attempts to form alternative communities in the years 1967–1972.
Considerable attention has been paid to the influence of the political/social/cultural contexts of 1968 on artists’ practices but often this is mediated via a ‘historical’ viewpoint closed off in the past. Investigating the articulation of the influence on this moment in art education in Tokyo, USA and Europe adds to an understanding of how the ongoing influence of politics and social or cultural change is distilled within teaching programmes developed by ‘radical’ artists. Having to articulate a project or workshop brief brings to the fore and makes explicit issues, questions or ideas which are otherwise perhaps more slowly and inherently developing within individual artists practices. Also drawing attention to the act of production and the exchange from artist/lecturer to artist/student, rather than an analysis of ‘finished work’, perhaps allows us to unpack more of the ideas inherent in the making of things and open up conversations through teaching of options and directions in which the work could go.
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