Project 2010
Theory
Tuesday
7 October, Introduction
Under the title
GoodTripBadTrip.reloaded, this research and
workshop project continues in 2009-2010 with a renewed focus at
the era of
the trip: the sixties. The
sixties are a key era in the formation of what we today call contemporary art, yet
in this signification process many of the inherent contradictions and paradoxes
in the art of the sixties have been neglected. A critical observer could
sometimes get the impression that an older generation of art curators and
critics in their attempt to build the canon, in a conscious manoeuvre have pushed
aside the whole legacy of artistic psychedelia in favour of conceptual art (and
its side-branches); the art that is today seen as
the denominator of 1960s art. Currently however a young generation
of art historians is re-setting the balance, for example Danish art historian Lars
Bang Larsen (who was our DAI-guest at the start of the workshop in 2008) is
involved in a research on psychedelic scenes other than the ones in the
Anglo-American sphere, notably in Scandinavia and South America. His
publications have broadened the existing picture of the 1960s. One of the
complexities of the era the fact that the appearance or concrete look of much
of the art was quite delusive. For example the psychedelic light projections by
Mark Boyle and Joan Hills (later The Boyle Family) were based on rational
underpinnings; they used and burnt all bodily fluids in one of their film
screenings. On the other hand some of the conceptual works by Walter de Maria,
through their connection to the spiritual world of native Indian-Americans way
of life, could be said to demarcate mystical trajectories.
In the art territory of the 1960s, Psychedelia and Conceptualism may form
two converging fields. One type of art from the Psychedelic field are light
projections:
-Mark Boyle and
Joan Hills / Sensual Laboratory,
Son et
Lumìere for Earth, Air, Fire and Water, UFO club London where they are
asked on 23 December 1966 to provide the light environments for Soft Machine
(through 1967);
–Gustav Metzger,
liquid crystals light projections, for
Cream, The Who, The Move, Roundhouse London, New Year’s Eve 1966;
-Livinus van de
Bundt,
lumo-dynamic machine (ldm),
for Jefferson Airplane, various European locations, ‘68-69.
On the other side,
the field of Conceptualism contains complex 'line works':
–La Monte Young,
Composition 1960 No.10 Draw a straight line and follow it. A work that was realized two times by Nam
June Paik as,
Zen for Head, 1961-62;
-Richard Long,
A Line Made by Walking, 1968;
-Walter de Maria,
Mile Long Drawing, 1968.
Also, between Psychedelia
and Conceptualism there is a locus where one can situate works from the 1960s
that, because they were difficult to categorize, have fallen into the cracks of
art history. A few examples:
-Ian Wilson, Circle on
the Floor, 1968;
-Gino de Dominicis,
Second Resolution of Immortality (The Universe is
Still), 1972;
-JCJ Vanderheyden,
Exhibition [work in 3d], 1968;
-Edward Krasinski, his
art using the blue adhesive tape strip line, starting sometime in the 1970s;
-Charles Ray,
Ink Line, 1987.
Curatorial
hypothesis
Going back in time, there is a strong and intimate link between
Psychedelia and Conceptualism, two important but apparently contradictory fields
of artistic research and production in the 1960s. With the years, after the
1960s, this idea itself and the experience thereof have disappeared from our
thought horizons. One aim of the workshop is to re-connect the fields, by offering
a platform of awareness for what at present appears to be an art historical
lacuna. At present this is an urgent thing-to-do because current definitions
will not stand: Conceptualism is more than only a rational art addressing pure
reason and Psychedelia is more than experiential art aimed at over-stimulating
the senses. Our critical interest in these definitions, and the wish to reopen
them, coincides with a wish to generate a less nostalgic view of the 1960s. It
is a challenge to open fresh perspectives at the 1960s and their legacy. The
'capita selecta' of subjects and artists discussed in our collective meetings
that follow below, are just an attempt at that.
Wednesday 11
November
So as to grasp the meaning of certain
artworks from the 1960s, we could see them as results of ‘an impossible
encounter’ between what at first sight appear to be opposites: Conceptualism
and Psychedelia. I make this claim to acknowledge part of the 1960s art
production, a special corpus of works dispersed over America, Europe and Japan,
which, departing from concepts, aspire to set ideas and forms free.
Conceptualism and Psychedelia were more in sync with each other than what is
today often assumed.
1. Developments in the 1960s culture at
large fed into the art realm, like the late-fifties dream of smashing through
barriers – barriers of time and outer space (space travel) and of time and
inner space (mind travel, drug-culture).
2. The 1960s saw a general euphoria about
the new era, with a young generation born after the second world war that
wanted to review the foundations on which this new era would be built, and so,
in art, music and dance practitioners were reinventing their basic artistic vocabularies,
the building blocks of their media, and engaged in re-mappings of their terrains
of research.
3. The critique of institutions, established
orders (state, church, family) and life views, translated into various
alternative ideas for individual and collective living, leaving traditional
patterns and social confines behind.
But the 1960s were a complex mosaic, they
were much more than an era of euphoric youth only. It was the era of the Cold
War, of Vietnam War, the assassination of Kennedy, to mention only some larger
happenings. It was the era of the hippies who propagated alternative
lyfestyles, but also the era of the death of the hippie, of a parade in which a
symbolic casket was carried along Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in October
1967, with hippies chanting: “Hippie is dead – now we are free Americans.” A
few months earlier,
Time Magazine had
gone to print with a report about the new popular lifestyle, including the
statement: ‘One East Coast hippie recently held a “funeral” for his former
self. “You must follow the river inside you to its source”, he said, “and then
out again.” Here there is an interesting link to art: consider the start of
Conceptual Art, where a whole history of the art of the past was seemingly
buried, so as to forge a new beginning.
In the work
Island Song/Island Monologue, American artist Charlemagne Palestine
seems to look back at the sixties. In his video-performance, made in 1976 so a
while after the 1960s, it seems as if he is coming to terms with the euphoria
in which the 1960s were collectively imagined. Here's a dry but efficient
description of the piece: ‘Palestine harmonizes with
his motorcycle and drives around the Island.’ Another one: ‘In the 1970s, Charlemagne Palestine produced a
seminal body of performance-based, psycho-dramatic videotapes in which he
ritualistically used physicality, motion and sound to achieve an outward
articulation of internal states. Intense and often violently charged, these
exercises are characterized by a visceral enactment of physical and
psychological catharses.’
Charlemagne Palestine’s piece reveals a
demystified view of the 1960s desire to smash barriers in a way not thought of
before,– he simply comes down to earth… I repeat: ‘Palestine harmonizes with his motorcycle and drives around the Island’...
The artist expresses his desire to escape from an island (actually Hawaii), in
the shape of a constant ‘drone’ that consists of his singing and the sound of
the motorbike, a steady engine growl,– a drone that can be heard from the start
of his ride till the end. His desire is finally gratified, when at the end he
stops his bike and signals of a ship horn can be heard, as a calm finale to his
frantic singing.
Hippies versus Conceptualists
Hippies
and conceptual artists are only seldom mentioned in one line. Why is this As I
open the Conceptual Art chapter in the Van Abbebook on its museum collection*,
the first thing I read is a statement about the 1960s, as an era of growing
resistance and critique of established orders. In the book, the 1960s are the
era of conceptual art, so here no historical images of richly coloured hippies
wandering peacefully in the streets. Instead the chapter images show white
walls, which somehow make me think of voids.
What
would Hippies and Conceptualists have in common We can look at an early
definition of the term psychedelic, to find out what hippies were after: ‘The
hippies have popularized a new word,
psychedelic,
which the Random House Dictionary of English Language defines as: “Of or noting
a mental state of great calm, intensely pleasureful perception of the senses,
aesthetic entrancement and creative impetus; of or noting any of the group of
drugs producing this effect.” –Robert Jones, ‘The Hippies: Philosophy of a
subculture’,
Time (7 July 1967).
In
terms of our workshop, Jones is defining what it is to have a good trip. It may
come as a slight surprise, but also in Conceptual Art the pleasureful perception
of the senses has been emphasized. Sol LeWitt, the artist who has become known as
the fore-fighter of Conceptual Art, talked about the importance of perception, the
sheer observation of art, and the fresh discoveries that thus can be made. But
he also mentioned the extent to which art objects and the way they are present
in a room are sometimes rather difficult to grasp. In a famous statement,
LeWitt commented on and destabilized the supposed foundations of Conceptual
Art: ‘Conceptual art is not necessarily logic. The logic of a piece or series
of pieces is a device that is used at times, only to be ruined. Logic may be
used to camouflage the real intent of the artist, to lull the viewer into the
belief that he understands the work, or to infer a paradoxical situation (such
as logic vs. illogic).’ –Sol Lewitt, ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’,
Artforum (June 1967).
*
Van Abbemuseum: Het Collectieboek (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 2002).
Time and Space
Remarkable in the 1960s is the search for
alternative concepts and experiences of space and time. Dan Graham, as one of
the artists, has spoken clearly about the paradigm shift. In an interview in
2000 he claimed that the 1960s saw the rise of “the notion that symbolic space,
like Renaissance perspective, should be cut down”. This statement is in a book
on Dan Graham; next to this it has a photo of Robert Smithson’s
The Eliminator (1964), a small sculpture
of steel, mirrors and neon made as if it could be in a room on a coffee table,
that evokes the endless world of science-fiction and its time- and space
travels (
Dan Graham (London, Phaidon,
2001), p. 8).
Smithson’s sculpture resonates with the
radical Op Art from the 1960s, such as Bridget Riley’s
Metamorphosis (1964), a painting where space is folded into two
vertical parts that dig into each other, resulting in a zip that leads to
another dimension, a space behind the space in front of us. In the Dan Graham
interview, also the change of perception in the 1960s is addressed. Graham: 'In
the sixties we believed in instant moments, in ‘no-time’, getting rid of
historical time.' The 'attack on time' seems to be at the core of Graham’s art
from the 1970s: a corpus of ‘phenomenological-behaviouristic’ works: in
video-cabins (collection Van Abbemuseum) ‘the just-past’ is recorded
continuously, so the cabins constantly produce new evidence of events that just
have happened. Graham relates the works in a casual way to Psychedelia and the
music of the 1960s: 'Also, of course, there was drug-space; I remember thinking
about the pop group The Byrds – they were yelling a kind of mythology of the
past and a projection of the future. So there was no now, but just these
different projections.'
As of
the 1980s, Dan Graham’s pavilions of transparent and opaque glass were
produced; a body of work that, in a symbolic way, could be defined as social
sculptures. The works form an answer to one of the biggest dilemmas of the
1960s –the relation of individual and collective experience– in that they
connect these experiences: though a person can enter a pavilion alone (s)he is
always accompanied by others, who from the outside see him or her through the
glass. In 2000 Graham described his pavilions as '…photo opportunities for
parents and children, inside and outside, a little bit psychedelic, with the
anamorphic situation [the integration and the reflection/change of the
surroundings in the glass] very much related to the body, the 360-degree radius
of the body and your visual field…' This reference is noteworthy: here Graham
talks of a sensorial realm or field extended through psychedelica. For Graham
there's no doubt: the 1960s left a strong legacy.
Sand Castles
It’s
amazing to read about the public actions of the hippies, the be-ins, sit-ins,
flower parades, painting and cleaning actions, the shops where food and cloths
were handed out for free (flip-side: 'capitalist entrepreneurs who offer psychedelic
posters, claiming they sell the artist’s trip'). And it’s funny to read about a
parallel action by ‘Sam Sparafucile' (Sam Sparrow), king of the Brooklyn
artichoke mob, who sent engraved invitations on a testimonial 'Spaghetti-in' to
New York Police Commissioner Howard R. Leary. My booklet on the hippies says
the event ‘was a sign of wider repercussions of the hippie philosophy and
lifestyle’, but it has been argued that this type of popular acceptance which
made the hippie philosophy and lifestyle become mainstream, took the spark out
of the movement. Paul Thek is an artist whose work features a mix of euphoria
and anxiety, that possibly reflects more precisely the complexity of the 1960s
Zeitgeist. Thek has become known for 'The Tomb' (1967), a work that later on
was renamed 'The Death of a Hippie'.
Richard Flood of the
Walker Art Center: 'In 1967, Paul Thek made one of the great, lost works in
American art.
The Tomb — Death of a Hippie was a large pink ziggurat
containing a body cast of the artist attired in pink clothes and shoes. The
tongue lolls from an opened mouth as in a swoon, the fingers of the right hand
have been severed, and scattered around the body are offerings for the
afterlife. The installation presented the artist as an eroticized, victimized
vagabond; a creature shaped by Vietnam and Altamont, Kent State and Hair–a
martyred hero for a new lost generation. In 1970,
The Tomb came to
Minneapolis in the Walker-organized exhibition Figures and Environments, which
was installed in the auditorium of Dayton’s department store during construction
of the Walker Art Center building. Years later, a badly damaged cast of the
“hippie” was returned to Thek after an exhibition, but he refused to receive
it; after storing it without pay, the shipper presumably destroyed it.'
Thek's
installations have, and that is quite remarkable, something in common with Sol LeWitt's serial structures. Both are
inhabited by a labyrinthic element, LeWitt's pristine art uses such an element
to investigate perception; with him seeing that gets lost in exploration; Thek's
temporary 'ruins' suggested that, there, ritual enactings have taken place of
existential concerns.*
Robert Smithson
on LeWitt and Thek (in his article ‘Entropy and the new monuments’,
Artforum 5, June 1966):
‘According to [Marshall McLuhan], an electrical numbing or
torpor has replaced the mechanical breakdown. The awareness of the ultimate
collapse of both mechanical and electrical technology has motivated these
artists to build their monuments to or against entropy. As LeWitt points out,
“I am not interested in idealizing technology.” LeWitt might prefer the word
“sub-monumental”, especially if we consider his proposal to put a piece of
Cellini’s jewelry into a block of cement. An almost alchemic fascination with
inert properties is his concern here, but LeWitt prefers to turn gold into
cement.’
‘LeWitt’s first one-man show at the now defunct Daniel’s
Gallery presented a rather uncompromising group of monumental “obstructions”.
Many people were “left cold” by them, or found their finish “too dreary”. These
obstructions stood as visible clues of the future. A future of humdrum
practicality in the shape of standardized office buildings modelled after Emery
Roth; in other words, a jerry-built future, a feigned future, an ersatz future
very much like the one depicted in the movie “The Tenth Victim”. LeWitt’s show
has helped to neutralize the myth of progress.’
‘Unlike the hyper-prosaism of Morris, Flavin, LeWitt and
Judd, the works of Thek, Kaufman, and Bell convey a hyper-opulence. Thek’s
sadistic geometry is made out of simulated hunks of torn flesh. Bloody meat in
the shape of a birthday cake is contained under a pyramidal chrome framework –
it has stainless steel candles in it. Tubes for drinking “blood cocktails” are
inserted into some of his painful objects. Thek achieves a putrid finesse, not
unlike that disclosed in William S. Burrough’s Novan Express; “–Flesh juice in
festering spines of terminal sewage – Run down of Spain and 42
nd St.
to the fish city of marble flesh grafts–”.
*Important is to note that in the 1960s many women artists
were active in New York and the U.S. (and in South America), making major
bodies of work. For example: Carolee Schneemann, Lee Bontecou, Lygia Clark,
Simone Forti, Adrian Piper, Joan Jonas, Anna Mendieta, Yvonne Rainer, Judy
Chicago, Jo Baer, Eva Hesse. The art and personal story of Lee Lozano, who
dropped out of the art world at a certain moment, is a special case.
Wednesday 16 December Both the oeuvres of Joseph Beuys and
Marcel Broodthaers are invested by what the godfather of curators, Harald
Szeemann, called individual mythology. Probably his concept should be seen in a
larger cultural perspective, notably the anthropological field work and
writings by Claude Levi-Strauss, especially the study 'Mythologies', who in the
1960s focused on structural resemblances of the mythologies, oral traditions
and rituals, of first nations in South America, North America, Alaska and
Siberia. Beuys and Broodthaers brought into play a life story of the artist, blurring
the line between fact and fiction. Beuys created his own myth, he was into
magic and shamanism, as a counterlever for a rational modern culture.
Broodthaers proposed a mythological look at reality that at the same time was deconstructed.
One of his points was, and here he differed principally from Beuys, that art,
because it is lacking in worldly power, should be about poetics. There is a
beautiful and sad film by Broodthaers, called 'La Pluie' (The Rain), where you
see him sitting at a table, writing a love letter with ink, but because of the
rain all his writing immediately disappears. And yet he goes on! The idea of individual mythologies
was sanctified by Harald Szeeman's Documenta V (1972), with a 'chapter' of
artists who were categorized as such. The idea seems closely connected to the
1960s. The cases of Beuys and Broodthaers reflect two contrasting answers to a
major challenge of the era: the creation of an audience, the formation of a
public body, the potential of a collective as a liberating force. But the 1960s
were also the era of the individual! It is exactly this encounter of the
individual and the collective, that becomes manifest in drugs-culture and the
experience of the trip (see Tom Wolfe,
The
electric kool-aid acid test [London: Black Swan, 1991], or. 1968). The big
question: is a trip is an event which by nature is an individual experience, or
can a trip be shared, can it be a collective experience In art, one answer to
this question we find in the history of performance art, typified by moments
wherein artists alternate between individual approaches and collective address.
From fluxus and happenings to performances, in front of a public or not…
Wednesday 13 January A very remarkable conceptual artist, almost not know anymore in the
western world, was
Yutaka Matsuzawa from Japan. Deeply rooted in a zen-philosophy, his work aspired to transcend
all the material borders. As a curator he organized various important group
exhibitions of conceptual art in the 1960s-70s in Japan. In one of his
one-person shows,
he staged his own
death. In my view his oeuvre delineates a mystical trajectory.
'about yutaka
matsuzawa and the exhibition nirvana, by adriaan van ravesteijn (Museumjournaal
15/5, November 1970, pp. 256-260, translation Dutch-English MK)
Today,
Wednesday 12 August 1970, the exhibition Nirvana starts in Kyoto.
A
letter, dated 15 July 1970, of Yutaka Matsuzawa (one of the organisers) gives
me the most recent information:
12
August (that is today) the complete second floor of the Kyoto Municipal Museum
is available, 13 August half of the floor and 14 August – the last day of the
exhibition – only one last room: ‘exhibition space is getting smaller every day
and at last vanishes’.
Incidentally,
in this objectless exhibition this does not lead to insurmountable
difficulties; after all, in the invitation brochure it is clearly stated that
the accent is on ‘non-substantiality’, ‘invisible expression’ and
‘non-existence non-space – non non-existence non non-space’ and that
submissions are awaited in the form of photos, heliotypes, sound recording
tapes, films, drawings, bulletins etc.,
in
short: one should be able to send the item to-be-sent by mail.
The
exhibited works will be collected in a bag (the Nirvana-bag), for which purpose
500 photocopies of the sent items will be made.
For
the catalogue, which will be added to the Nirvana-bag, each artist obtains one
page of 20 x 30 cm.
Furthermore,
from Matsuzawa’s letter (in
his English):
‘Originally
I organized – I mean I planned – almost same non-object exhibition
‘anti-civilization show’ in 1966, but it did not realized. Than in 1968 I used
the prototype of Nirvana manifesto at ‘zone’ symposium in Kyoto. In 1970
finally a long time idea of my non-object show come to realize’.
The
motto of the exhibition Nirvana is: ‘toward the final art’ with as subscript:
Abandon
the whole heartened devotion to
substance
Which is erroneous
apart from
the poor illusion of matter
transform, the nonsense axis of
co-ordinates of values.
nil
imagine
the final form of non-art.
Exhibit the final fine-art
thenceforth there is no fine-art.
The
Nirvana-committee (the final art committee) invited a.o. the following artists:
On Kawara, Yun Mizukami, Hideto Yamazaki, Kenichiro Ina, Lawrence Weiner,
Donald Burgy, and from the Netherlands: Jan Dibbets, Ger van Elk, Stanley
Brouwn and Boezem.
Coinciding
with the exhibition, around 50 particpants will gather for discussions and
conferences in the places Fudoson, Jigokudani, Kitashirakawa, Sakyoku and
Kyoto, and Art & Project – also at the same time – in Amsterdam will engage
with Nirvana. It is decided that will result in an article in Museumjournaal
about Yutaka Matsuzawa and the exhibition Nirvana. Yutaka Matsuzawa (12.000 km
from here and 8 hours before) has as a contribution to Nirvana the following
‘information work’:
For free communication:
At Nirvana we exhibit:
Art & Project (Amsterdam) and
The group ‘Continuation in Non-
Continuation’ (different parts of
Japan).
Those who wish to know more about this
Can join the information
or us.
We are happy to answer
your questions.
Biography
Yutaka
Matsuzawa was born 2 February 1922 in Shimosuwa in the province Nagano-ken, the
place where he still lives and works as a mathematics teacher at a secondary
school. He may be considered a pioneer of conceptual art in Japan.
1945 forecasts
at the beginning of the summer, wile eating azalea at the foot of the mountain Myoko, the
end of the war.
1946 ends
a study of architecture at the Weseda university.
1955-57
travels with a Fullbright-scholarship
to the U.S., teaches at Wisconsin State College
and studies modern art and philosophy of religion at Columbia university.
1960 (old year’s eve) holds the
warning, to make art immaterial.
one man exhibitions
1963 Yutaka
Matsuzawa’s one man exhibition in Psi (Aoki Gallery, Tokio).
1965 Drowning
of a secret body in the nothingness and on a deserted plane!
(Naika
Gallery, Tokio).
1966 All
living creatures vanish – 1966 (MAC J, Tokio).
1967 V 1010 (Azuma Gallery, Tokio)
1967-68
Sends every month another
postcard with an ‘information work’.
1968 introduces
conceptual paintings on television.
1968 gives
a lecture at the conference ‘zone’ (Kyoto).
1969 Yutaka
Matsuzawa’s Psi Room (Aoki Gallery, Tokio)
1970 Introduces
informative paintings in Bulletin 21 (Art & Project, Amsterdam).
The complete
production of the above mentioned ten years, plus the printed matter
(‘information works’) that Matsuzawa besides of this – at irregular times –
sent to a small circle of friends and acquaintances, so it appears, easily go
into a large office envelope.
Main
goal in his work is the united possession and experience of ‘ku-ge-kan’.
‘Ku-ge-kan’
is the same as ‘mu’ in the zen-conception (the traditional Japanese way of
thinking) and in Japanese it means
nothing (the general absence of
something).
One
thing and the other is related to the Eastern thought: ‘shiki soku ze ku, ku
soku ze shiki’ which means: to exist is the same as nothing and nothing is the
same as to exist. Matsuzawa is strongly interested in how far these traditional
ways of thinking can be imported into conceptual art, and he argues that, when
we possess the conditions of ‘mu’, we will have an absolute communication that
is not limited by anything.
He
wants to help people to enter this imaginary space. His
‘Imaginary–Space–Research–Center’ was founded for that purpose. Also, in his
work he introduced the concept (sign) Psi.
Psi
is used to express the invisible presence of something. Take for example a
pencil. Stripped of its physical properties such as weight, colour and form,
the pencil still exists,
only in an
invisible condition. Well, this is Psi!
Matsuzawa’s
goal is to perceive Psi (which is relatively impossible, but this a priori
impossibility makes him having a go at it!). First, he separates idea and
perception as much as possibly, and after that, without any help from whichever
medium, he reconnects them.
Everything
between idea and perception needs to be banished because it prevents a direct
contact (just like the pencil needs to be stripped of its physical properties
weight, colour and form so as to perceive Psi without obstacles.)
Real
space has to disappear and invisible space has to come in its place. Yusuke
Nakahara (art critic in Tokyo) writes about this:
For
me it is not a mystical, but an ultra-rational mode of thought. We are used to
the artwork as the medium between idea and perception. But Matsuzawa wants to
get read of any medium.
I am
tempted to call his art ‘meta-art’. ‘Meta-art is not art that presents something,
but art that inspires people. The direct contact of idea with perception
results in an inter-communication.
His
art is not a new conception but a sublimated form of an existing conception’.
A few
of Matsuzawa’s project to clarify this:
At
the 10h Tokyo Biennale* Matsuzawa exhibited his own death: an empty room, with
above both entrances to the room signs with the following text in Japanese and
English:
My own death (paintings that exist only
in time).
When you walk quietly through this room,
my proper death goes through your thoughts like a flash of light. It is my
proper future death, that is not only equal to your proper future death but
also to the death of hundreds and hundreds million human creatures in the past
and that of thousand trillion human creatures in the future.
In an
explanation that Matsuzawa gives in the catalogue:
This room can be that room or that garden
or that city or that sky; it can either not exist or be an empty
space, a void that stands outside the power of imagination and outside
everything that has been created. It is the emptiness of ‘ku-ge-kan’ that makes
hundreds and thousands of seeds blossom and in which I exhibit my own death and
the future. It has an infinite existence in the mind of anyone who thinks about
it and it exists only in time. It is my death and your death and his depiction
and her depiction; it is interwoven with the Nirvana, that neither diminishes
nor increases nor comes nor goes.
Matsuzawa
will exhibit another version of “My proper death’ at the ‘Japan Art Festival’
in the Guggenheim Museum in New York (beginning 1971):
My proper death (depictions that exist
only in time). Now I offer to anyone who is passing by my future death. At that
very instant, in a cavern on a plateau in Middle-Japan, I pull out both your
hearts deep from your breast and let them fly in the milk white mist that often
appears there.
A
project that is only in part of Matsuzawa, but yet very characteristic for him,
follows hereunder.
One
of the activities of Art & Project in Japan was the acquisition of 1 m2 of
ground for Stanley Brouwn (Amsterdam) as part of his ‘1 m2 grond project’. This
project consists of the collecting of pieces of ground of 1 m2 from every
country on earth. Till that point Stanley Brouwn already owned ground in
Denmark, Sweden, West-Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Suriname and
the U.S.
To
obtain ground in Japan I placed, under the section reclaimed land, the
following ad in the daily newspaper Asahi: ‘asked for sale, wherever in Japan,
1 m2 of ground. Art & Project (tel) (400)7369.
Mutsuzawa,
who got to see this ad, offered me, from a forested mountain top that he owns
at Sensuiiri Chiseki (close to his place of residence Shimosuwa)
one square meter for sale.
As
condition it was put that he acquired rights of loan on the ground, so as to
destine the tree that stands on this square meter for the building of a
meditation hut.
He
made this decision out of the great appreciation that he has for the work of
Stanley Brouwn.
The
ground would first be sold to me after which I, having returned in the
Netherlands, would resell it to Stanley Brouwn.
Tuesday
31 March 1970 I travelled to Shimosuwa to say goodbye to Matsuzawa.
After
the lunch, the payment of the ground came up. Matsuzawa asked me the amount of
Psi.
He
did not want to distract the transfer by something as material as money. After
my assent with this, a receipt was made out.
Finally: imagine Matsuzawa’s Psi (after
all he is invisible to you!).
*The
10
th Tokyo Biennale was organised by The Mainichi Newspapers and the
Japan International Art Promotion Association and held from 10 May till 30 May
1970 in the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Gallery. From 6 June till 16 August the
exhibition was furthermore presented in the places Kyoto, Nagoya and Fukuoka.
Yusuke
Nakahara was as commissioner general responsible for the selection of the 40
participating artists. Those were a.o.: Carl Andre, Boezem, Daniel Buren, Christo,
Jan Dibbets, Ger van Elk, Barry Flanagan, Hans Haacke, Kenji Inumaki, On
Kawara, Janiis Kounellis, Edward Krasinksi, Sol LeWitt, Yutaka Matsuzawa, Mario
Merz, Bruce Nauman, Panamarenko, Markus Raetz, Keith Sonnier, Richard Serra,
Jiro Takamatso and Shintaro Tanaka.
Sources:
Yusuke
Nakahara – Matsuzawa and ‘meta-art’ (Bulletin 21 Art & Project).
Shuzo
Yasui – Surprising Conceptual Art (The Mainichi Newspapers, 26.3.1970).
Jospeh
P. Love – The Tenth Tokyo Biennale of Contemporary Art (Art Int., XIV/6 Summer
1970, p. 70).
Yutaka
Matsuzawa – (catalogue 10
th Tokyo Biennial).'
Wednesday 16 February
A very remarkable
psychedelic work is
Tony Conrad's The Flicker, an experimental film made 1965. The film
consists of five different types of frames, a warning frame, two title frames,
black frames, white frames. It is currently being re-made digitally into a
compact computer program by Tony Conrad's son. The film is accompanied with a
soundtrack by Conrad on a synthesizer that he built solely for the film.
The
film starts with a warning message, which reads:
WARNING. The producer,
distributor, and exhibitors waive all liability for physical or mental injury
possibly caused by the motion picture "The Flicker." Since this film
may induce epileptic seizures or produce mild symptoms of shock treatment in
certain persons, you are cautioned to remain in the theatre only at your own
risk. A physician should be in attendance.
The film then goes on
to a frame that says "Tony Conrad Presents," and then to a frame that
says "The Flicker," at which point it starts. The screen goes blank,
then after a short while, the screen flickers with a single black frame. This
is repeated again and again until it creates a strobe effect, for which the
film is titled. This continues until the film stops abruptly.
This work
over-stimulates the senses, and poses the question of how the human organism
stands and processes an overabundance of stimuli or information. The automatic
viewer's response, so as to deal with this, is to reset the senses and create
an inner state of mind where there is silence.
Wednesday March
24
What were the sixties in the Netherlands, what did they
signify What were the changes in the Dutch sixties culture at large, and how
did they reflect in the art What is the significance of an even earlier
figure, Robert Jasper Grootveld, who was an example for Provo and the later
Dutch counter-culture With respect to our trip, Robert Jasper Grootveld's public
actions in Amsterdam as Anti-Rook-Magiër (anti-smoke-magician) are relevant. In
the 1960s Grootveld was a pseudo-shaman, as a crucial cultural figure or public
performer in the Dutch scenery, with his way of life he embodied an alternative
way of being in the world.
Internationally the Dutch developments in the sixties get a
lot of recognition: they're singled out as early examples of progressive
changes in culture at large. Dutch reception of the sixties itself is less
transparent, it seems to go through motions. Yet we had our highlights. Take
the example of a series of events in The Hague on the day of 1 February 1967 in
the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, 'situaties' (situations), to which various
individual artists and collectives contributed.*
One of the contributions to the whole series, which a local
newspaper called 'an orgy of light and sound', was 'Exposition of a Family',
consisting of a young mother and father and their two-year old child, the
Boomsma family, who spent a day in the museum as a work to be seen. Two years
later, in a similar spirit, German artist Immo Jalass, at that time a resident
artist in Amsterdam, proposed to bring over the house and the (existing) family
Van Dijk to the hall of honours of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Due to
technical and financial reasons this project could not be realised. Jalass:
'When it is becoming ever harder to draw a sharp line separating art and life,
and when one, principally, does not want to draw this line anymore, the
ultimate consequence is, to 'exhibit' daily life itself.'**
* Paul B.M. Panhuysen a.o., 'Situaties',
Museumjournaal, 1967, pp. 176-185.
** I. Jalass, 'Overgrijping voor het Stedelijk Museum
Amsterdam',
Museumjournaal, 1969, pp.
78-79.