End of Summer Lecture Series:
"Wilderness as Method, Contemporaneity as Method"
Guest Lecture with Reiko Tomii
Independent scholar / Co-director, PoNJA-GenKon
Sunday, August 19th, 2018 at 6 PM
GUN
Event to Change the Image of Snow (1970)
photo of performance-art event in progress
(photo © Hanaga Mitsutoshi)
Based on her recent publication, Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (MIT Press, 2016), Dr. Tomii will outline two basic concepts “wilderness” and “contemporaneity” as key methodological frameworks to construct local and global art histories. First and foremost an artist’s strategy, “wilderness” was inventively and imaginatively exploited by three protagonists of her study, Matsuzawa Yutaka, a pioneer conceptualist in central Japan; The Play, a Happeners’ collective in Osaka; and GUN, a politically aware group in Niigata. “Contemporaneity,” a geo-historical concept derived from the Japanese notion of kokusaiteki dōjisei (international contemporaneity), offers an art historian's strategy. To narrate a world art history of postwar practices, she has proposed such theoretical and methodological terms as “connection,” “resonance,” and “similar yet dissimilar” among others. She will demonstrate their application by focusing on the stone-based works of Mono-ha and conceptualism around 1970.
End of Summer is a cross-cultural art program based in Portland, Oregon at the Yale Union contemporary art center. It is comprised of an annual summer residency for artists from Japan, as well as a lecture series. Outside of this core summer program, symposiums, exhibitions, and other related projects are also organized in Japan, and internationally.
End of Summer exists to build a dialogue between the U.S., specifically the region of the Pacific Northwest, and Japan through contemporary art. Through this entry point, the program aims to engage in a larger exploration of Japanese art in the era of global artistic practice, as well as the continual reconsideration of notions of East and West, center and periphery.