[from catalogue]

 

To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the POCORART project to support art activities by people with disabilities, Chiyoda City and 3331 Arts Chiyoda have organized the “POCORART World Exhibition 'Chance and Necessity and ... - Liberating raw expression of artists and people with/without disabilities,” an exhibition that brings together the works of fifty artists from twenty-two countries.

 

This exhibition at 3331 Arts Chiyoda presents over 240 exhibits from around the world, selected without the constraints of what would traditionally be considered art. Many of these artworks are shown in public for the first time, or are shown for the first time in Japan. This is a valuable opportunity to examine unique works that give form to the internal energy of artists representing a diversity of geographical regions and cultures.

 

The raw expression liberated in these creations transcends the framework of fine art, and is unrestricted by categories such as nationality, age, gender, or whether the artist has disabilities.

 

Chance and necessity and individual wandering thoughts: Dedicated to people with life

By Rena Kano (exhibition curator)

 

When, where, and how “I” was born are factors beyond my volition, out of my control. Similarly, the emergence of life on this world was by chance. Nevertheless, in different ages and different regions on Earth, there have been cultures that regard one's origins as inevitable destiny (necessity), or that regard one's family and social relationships as random occurrences (chance), or that ascribe both to necessity. In this way, people in different ages and different cultural spheres have used the concepts of chance and necessity in their interpretations of logic and of cause and effect in human life. Whatever the interpretation, humans survive this complex, interlaced maelstrom that cannot be described simply as chance or simply as necessity. Moreover, in much the same way that we emerged, from these circumstances emerge a diversity of products of imagination and creativity. To give viewers a deeper understanding of this exhibition, Chance and Necessity and ... , I would like to introduce a number of keywords.

 

Lives and works

 

Stories or anecdotes from the artists' lies are used in place of biographical profiles to introduce the exhibiting artists. French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, writing about artist Paul Cézanne, said “Although it is certain that a person's life does not explain bis work, it is equally certain that the two are connected. The truth is that that work to be done called far thar live.” 1 Even if we cannot go as far as saying that a person's life orchestrates their works, or that a person's works orchestrates their life, it is indisputable that someone's artwork cannot be completely separated from the events and thoughts in the life that they live. A work can emerge as an embodiment of the artist's life, or in a form that borrows the power of the tools and materials, as if it were the artist's alter ego. Through their works, artists can convey pieces of themselves using the potential that exists within a limited range of tools and materials.

The artists: “people with Iife”.

 

The meaning and nuance of a Japanese word change according to the characters chosen to write it. The Japanese term for a person with disability (or people with disability) is shogaisha. Written with the characters for “lifetime” instead of the characters, it can take on the nuance of “people with life,” a phrase that is probably unique to Japan. Before World War II, and extending into the prewar period, shogaisha was written using a character that means handicap or damage, to refer to someone with a some sort of disability in bodily function. The term was largely used in legal, medical, educational, and labor contexts2. Today, it is more common to replace the handicap character with simple phonetic characters ensuring a more neutral nuance and avoiding discriminatory expressions. There has also been a shift towards more neutral (politically correct) expressions in other languages, such as “person with disabilities” in English and “personne en situation de handicap” in French (instead of expressions like “les handicaps”). In Japanese, the phrase shogaisha art is commonly used to describe art where the artists are people with disability, but in English and French, phrases like “art by people with disability” or “l'art des handicapés” have been used less frequently. Instead, the tendency has been to use words and concepts that have emerged from completely different backgrounds, such as "outsider art" and "art brut." In Japan, driven by the welfare field, there are many exhibitions exhibiting art produced by people with disability. Both the organizers and the visitors to these exhibitions tend to focus on the origin of the works as produced by artists "with disabilities," and that becomes an unambiguous element of this "art." However, considered from a cultural perspective, when talking about the strength of such works, it does not make sense to focus only on disability. which is only a small portion of the creator's makeup. Artistic creativity is considered when selecting the exhibits in these exhibitions. Taking that into account and considering the nuances of terminology in Japan, there are artists with disabilities and there are other without disabilities. In respect of that creativity, for the purposes of this exhibition I refer to the exhibiting artists as shogaisha written with the characters for “lifetime" thinking of the artists as "people with life."

 

Art need not be fine art: Revealing true views

 

Apart from the issue of how to write shogaisha, the use of the term art in shogaisha art also benefits from clarification. The creative works exhibited here are not necessarily fine art. Moreover, there is no need to attempt to make them fit the strict definition of fine art. One reason is that when many of the artists produced their works, they did not necessarily have any intention of showing it to anyone. Sorne were created on the assumption that the artist himself or herself would be the only viewer, or they are utilitarian or necessary works that are directly linked to the artist's way of life, including aspects such as sexuality, occupation, and documentary. Sorne are produced to alleviate the artist's own pain or to liberate the artist from that suffering, whereas others are produced for pleasure. The fact that many of these works are untitled suggests that the artist had no intention of explaining them to a wide range of people, or of seeking empathy or understanding.

 

Rather than creating works to be viewed as fine art through artistic activities that assume the existence of society or of another, and that are based on the concept of self as an extension of modern Western philosophy, the works reveal the artist's unknown true opinions as a private individual. The psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, suggested that when people see something familiar that would normally be hidden, they feel that it is creepy. When we look at these artworks, the disclosure of true ideas that would normally be kept hidden may similarly result in feeling that the work is creepy. This is a situation where the declared description of "art" and the expression of the true view of each private individual are different. Irrespective of this situation, the creative works exhibited here are undoubtedly the manifestation of the thoughts of the creators, revealing their actual awareness of things, including themselves.

 

Six themes

 

The six themes of this exhibition are not independent; they have porous boundaries, permitting movement between them. The scope of the time and space in which people spend their day-to-day lives (or "I" spend my day-to-day life) begins with the mind and body and expands outwards, encompassing the home, groups, the environment, society, cultural spheres, nations, the Earth, the universe, and memories that transcend space-time. At the same time, there is movement in the opposite direction, towards the center. And also movement in the form of resonance that affects the whole and each part. The creative processes behind the individual works exhibited here show the same patterns, with some beginning from a part or an individual act and progressing to a whole, while others begin with an overall image, moving on to individual parts and acts. Seen in terms of time, the details of the works are the moment we call "now," and in terms of space, they are the place we call "here." That epistemology is manifested in the lines, colors, forms, contrasts, and other features of the works.

 

Identity

 

The first theme addresses the issue of individual identity. In the works of artists such as Josef Hofer and Marian Henel, the artist as an individual is expressed as a sexual body, modeled on others who excite them. Hofer's self-portraits placed within complex yellow and orange frames are nudes, taking up erotic poses. The figures change, sometimes emphasizing the lower body. Henel photographed dolls modeled on a corpulent woman, emphasizing the buttocks. After a while, he became the subject of the photographs himself.

This moment of creation by Hofer aligns neatly with the primitive moment of identification during the mirror stage in the life of an infantas described by philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan: Coming across a mirror and encountering his own image in the mirror as an other. Soon recognizing that the other in the mirror is himself. Shifting from the self as experienced within his own body to the visible self and perceiving the gaze of the other regarding him objectively from within the mirror. From this beginning emerge the imaginary world and the ideal self.

 

In terms of identification, the opposite to Hofer's approach can be seen in the portrait photographs of Tomasz Machciúski, who has been experimenting for fifty years in making himself incognito, liberated from his own thoughts. Machciúski takes as his model the other, a social body. To model the character and nature of individuals, he transforms the social self or other that people can see, like a physiognomy chart, changing not only costume, hair, and makeup, but also using his facial expressions to express internal human states such as agitation or calm. The effect is as if he has been possessed by the soul of the person he is portraying. Yet, what can be seen here in Machciúski's works is not the other, but otherness, performed by the self. Hofer, Henel, and Machciúski's works share the characteristic of a vague boundary between self and other. The other can be found in the self, or the self can be found in the other, with the border between the two shifting back and forth.

 

One of Japan's best-known artists, Morimura Yasumasa is renowned for photographic works in which he dresses himself as the subject of a painting. Discussing commonalities between his work, contemporary selfie and cosplay culture, and self-portraiture in the history of art, Morimura talks of "the thrill of the dynamic shift from the ordinary to the extraordinary ... when leaving behind your ordinary everyday self and warping into a completely different character 3". Perhaps that indicates that extraordinary pleasure can be had by blurring the boundary between self and other. Either way, this seems to be an essential process for understanding both self and other.

 

Location of the mind

 

The location of the mind has been a subject of debate throughout the history of the human race. For example, Descartes argued for mind-body dualism, with body and mind being separated at a single boundary between the self and its surroundings. In contrast, for Arthur Koestler, the mind was not a single entity, and the boundary between body and mind existed at multiple levels of a hierarchy within an organism, from regulating organs to cognitive habits 4.

As described above, the first theme includes works that are manifestations of what the mind is like in text and in figures, not just as portraits. In a long letter addressed to "Dear Mom," his mother, Harald Stoffers manifests his thoughts and feelings physically on the paper, through the physical text that resides there, rather than through legible and comprehensible writing. A similar comment can be made about the diary of Cario Keshishian in the second theme, but with Keshishian's hand-written texts, the farm of what he writes is legible, bis thoughts manifesting as meaning.

 

Leopold Strobl draws bis mental and emotional landscapes on paper, as if drawing windows that represent the boundary between what is inside and what is outside the mind. He does that by cutting out physical landscapes and real-world silhouettes and taking them into the framework of bis own mind. He begins by coloring the black, shadowy sections and the sky, which he paints green. He then draws over the buildings, trees, and other parts of the scenery between the black and green sections. The black shadows and the green sky govern the perspective far from his mental landscape and appear to be a means of measurement far reckoning the distance between he outside world and bis mind. Yonaha Shun paints rapidly, capturing his desires and thoughts in pictures and words that spill out like a live broadcast of whatever is going across bis mind. Yonaha's resulting paintings have compositions that look very much like world maps.

 

Relationship between actions and objects

 

The second theme addresses the next issue concerning the mind, focusing on the communication of ideas via actions and objects. Certain objects or materials trigger desires, impulses, or pleasure, and these responses become overt as movements of the body. The unique relationships with the farms that emerge remain as traces. Actions act directly on objects, and objects become a means of conveying the artist's thinking and emotions to the outside world.

 

Marc Moret's Collage a Maman is a three-dimensional work created by bonding together items such as sewing tools passed down from bis mother on her death. As a means of keeping his memories of his mother fresh, Moret collects items that no longer have an owner, and resurrects them as part of one of his works. These works are placed in a reliquary room in his home, and he goes there to pray each day. They can probably also be interpreted as portraits of his mother, or her body, or the womb that represents his origin. In the same way that long ago, ancient people used hairs or other parts of bodies far casting spells, each of these inherited items has become a spiritual reproduction of the original owner.

 

There are also works that have arisen from processes associated with the artist's job. When Takeda Hiraku was working on collecting used disposable chopsticks so that they could be recycled as resources, one of bis jobs was to pack the collected chopsticks into milk cartons. He put so much effort into this task that the chopsticks protruded out of the top and continued to grow, eventually creating the work entitled Chopsticks. Takeda had no prior image of the finished work. He simply focused on the act of inserting chopsticks as the most important thing to be doing here and now. As a result, each of those actions became a part of the work that emerged in the future.

 

Mimesis of form (models)

 

The third theme addresses how artists perceive living beings in the outside world (models), and how they imitate them in their own way. The artists extract the characteristics and nature of the subjects with their own eyes. We attempt to discover how the work produced achieves sufficient reality for the artist, despite its differences from the original model. Whether the result resembles the original model is not in question. Lines and farms as perceived by the artist are interpreted visually, communicating to the viewer's mind the feelings that the artist wishes to convey and the artist's emotional state.

 

Curzio di Giovanni's works reproduces photographs of models or actors from magazines. To general readers of the magazine, the faces of the stars in such photographs have become icons, conveying the actor's charisma. In contrast, in Di Giovanni's drawings, rather than the faces, he concentrates more on details such as the hats that the models wear, or the bags under their eyes. Fashion magazine photography is designed to inspire fashions and generate purchases. The photographs are symbols, images that are to be replaced by consumption, but viewing Di Giovanni's sketches reveal that instead of emphasizing the clothing or sunglasses that are the products being sold, he emphasizes shade on the model's face, the shape of the model's lips, and of collarbones and shoulder blades, or the shape of the model's hand.

 

Charles Steffen's work originated from images in his memory of the bodies of living beings and figures of actual people. He dismantled these images into their parts, then reconstructed them to create his distinctive imaginary beings. The figures drawn by Steffen were combinations of human and non-human parts, hermaphroditic figures, or figures undergoing metamorphosis. All these images were reconstructed from data accumulated from his own experiences and perceptions.

 

Shuji Takashi begins his works by drawing the outline of a motif placed on his desk in black pastel. During that process, he rotates the paper frequently, drawing from many different angles. The rotation seems to be the key to the large shadowy entity drawn on the paper.

Wassily Kandinsky, an active artist in the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century, created glass paintings by painting outlines on the rear of the glass, and then adding layer after layer of colors and gradations, a process that led to the birth of abstract painting. Shuji's rotation is reminiscent of this layering in the pioneering days of abstract art.

 

Differences in expression according to cultural paradigm

 

Even if an individual has a unique viewpoint, human imagination and creativity are influenced to some extent by the culture that they belong to, by their historical, geographical, and social environment and background, and by customs and social codes. The fourth theme introduces examples of how the subjects, methodologies, and forms of art are dependent on such cultural backgrounds. This dependence occurs because of the cognitive foundations of our cultures, which inform our perception of the environment and external worlds that we live in, and the way that we take things in, understand them, and express them in our creative output.

 

These differences in cultural paradigm stand out particularly in the way that we visualize things that are not visible. Examples of art concerning things that are not visible include works that attempt to express sounds or the soul.

 

Julius Bockelt of Germany produces works that visualize sounds, perceived by our sense of hearing. Sounds consist of invisible waveforms, and Bockelt attempts to verify them as measurable elements by applying a scientific gaze to the phenomenon. Specifically, he converts physical proof of the soundwaves that hit his eardrums into symbols, creating a visual reproduction of the sounds.

 

In contrast, Véio of Brazil and Ni Tanjung of Indonesia have created works that reproduce invisible souls or spirits. Véio creates wooden sculptures that take advantage of the naturally occurring shapes of tree trunks, branches, and roots, adding color in the form of bright primary colors as the only man-made element. He calls this material "open wood." The vivid colors open up the wood, revealing forms such as the features of animals, and thereby transforming the material into something completely different.

 

The anthropomorphic figures that Tanjung created are said to closely resemble elements of magic in an animistic world where human spirits dwell. The large number of images modeled on human faces mimic the invisible spirits of ancestors. They are apparently parasite wood or objects to which the spirits are drawn.

 

Science, art, and magic are all means for commingling the visible and the invisible. Materials, imagination, actions, and subjects are all partial elements of works, and all join together in a whole work. And when creating something with them, different cultural spheres place their emphasis on different parts. For example, Bockelt's emphasis is on sound as the subject, whereas Véio's emphasis is on the dimensions and shapes of wood, and on production methods such as coloring, and Tanjung’s emphasis is on the use of her works as tools for magic.

 

The manifestation of cultural characteristics in the form of expression can be seen in the works by Kuroda Katsutoshi and Hirano Tomoyuki of Japan. war journals and travel journals have been produced all over the world in many different ages as paintings, scrolls, and dramatizations, and all have been used to depict scenes of battles and disasters, but the choice of technologies and means of expression influenced by manga and anime is probably a distinctive feature of artists living in the cultural sphere of this particular region and age.

Kuroda draws war stories like manga, with pages divided into frames, but starts from the climax and works backwards. The climax is often the destruction of the Earth or the extinction of humankind. This is by no means a happy end, but there is no judging of the readers or of the characters in the story, who are based on real people. Hirano also uses an actual person, named Miho-san, as the main character in a travel journal drawn like an anime. He chooses black paper as a base for mounting both art paper like that used for camera blocking in anime production, and templates like those used for narration script. The works pay particular attention to the character's outdoor shoes, which Hirano calls "dosoku," and he draws a variety of camera shots seen from inside the shoes looking out.

 

Downscaling and reordering the world

 

The fifth theme introduces attempts to understand the origins of our universe, our society, or our living environment by obtaining a birds-eye view and reducing it to a scale that can be held in the hands for analysis. Each of these attempts devises its own original compositional elements and measurement methods for the world under examination in order to impose a unique order. This is similar to the way Renaissance painters incorporated perspective, using perspective drawing and vanishing points to impose order on their canvases. Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss described the vast majority of artworks as being small-scale models, noting that the process "always involves giving up certain dimensions of the object 5."In order to grasp and understand things of the world that we live in, we reduce the overall scale to produce an imago mundi, an image of the world.

 

George Widener employs days of the week, dates, charts, maps, symbols, numbers, and other elements in an attempt to understand the events of his life and historical events within a subjective system of meaning that incorporates both past and future. The relationships of correlation and opposition for each of the elements are set out and configured within the canvas.

 

In the sense of order, there are works that concentrate on the process of disassembly of the elements that constitute the world. Jockum Nordstrom cuts out drawings produced in advance and divides them into categories such as naked women, human figures, sea life, housing, and animals. He then places these elements on a paper support as collage, composing a painting. In Recalling Home, Entang Wiharso cross-checks the society that we live in against houses and human bodies at the abstract concept level. Elements appearing as constituents of our world include power and discrimination and prejudice based on poverty and conflict.

 

Memory Reproduction Mechanisms

 

The sixth theme introduces the mind's thoughts that are not swayed by time and space. They can be seen as a means of escaping from space-time in order to survive. There are works that are means for editing and communicating memories, and there are works that function as memory reproduction mechanisms, letting the artist access those memories at any time.

 

Tsurukawa Koji's paintings consist of red dots of various sizes interspersed with glimpses at things that members of Tsurukawa's family told him in the past, suspended in the air like echoes. Ueda Kaito searches advertising flyers and brochures for icons or images of things that he likes, then cuts them out and sticks them together, creating a block of paper that he carries around with him. They apparently function as a symbol and as a constant reminder of the things that are important to him.

 

The memories handled may not be from the artist's own life. There are works that transcend space-time in pursuit of peace and security for our world. Vanda Vieira­Schmidt keeps producing drawings day after day to combat evil through her World Rescue Project

The works introduced under the six themes of this exhibition are the results of our individual impulses and wandering thoughts, but they are also products of our society. This conceals a hidden structure that awakens thoughts in others who view the exhibition and feeds their thoughts back to the artists in the form of rapport. The artists each experienced many different events and occurrences during their lives, and in the process of surviving and coming through those circumstances, eventually discovered and settled on their own form of artistic expression, or a form of expression for conveying their true views. The creations presented here could each have also been presented as belonging to other categories, including fine art, science, medicine, magic, and documentation. Nevertheless, they are incontrovertibly symbolic representations or means for addressing the puzzle of the existence of the universe and of my own existence.

 

Finally, I would like to dedicate this exhibition to the dreams and madness of every one of the "people with life" who bravely faces this tremendous puzzle.

 

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "Cezanne's Doubt," in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Press, 1994), 70 (italics in original).

2. For example, see Katei Zashi (Family Journal) No.6 (Katei Zashisha, Feburary 1893); Jido Kenkyu (The Study of Children) (The Japanese Child Studies Association, January 1926); Kikan Ningen Kagaku (Human Sciences Quarterly) No.4 (Ganshodo, Oecember 1949); and Rinsho Ganka (Japanese Journal of Clinical Ophthalmology) (Igaku Shoin, May 1950).

3. Morimura Yasumasa, Jigazo no Yukue (the whereabouts of the self-portrait), (Kobunsha, 2019)

4. Arthur Koestler, The Ghost in the Machine (Hutchinson, 1967)

5. Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage (Librairie Plon1 1962) (Translated from the French by George Weidenfield and Nicholson Ltd.)