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Jennifer Clarke
Invisible Matters: Doing anthropology with art
in post-disaster Japan
I’ll spend six months in Sendai, Japan, exploring the role of artistic responses
to the ‘triple disaster’ in creating alternatives to mainstream narratives. which
are often apocalyptic, or in some sense defer reality and responsibility.
I am interested in the connections between creativity, corporeality, and
spirituality, as a means to deal with ecological crisis, and radiation exposure,
by working with wood, and plant-life, making visual work for collaborative
and solo exhibition, in Japan, Taiwan, and Aberdeen 2015-16.
Broadly, I am interested in the connections between creative practices,
corporeality, and spirituality as a means to deal with ecological crisis,
suffering, and invisible matters ,including radiation exposure.
This involves developing visual and theoretical work through both
anthropological and artistic practices. The aim is to examine how material
realities intersect with other logics, understood in terms of syncretism
(Law, 2013),
and considering the relationships between the disciplines understood as
knowledge-forming practices. By this I mean approaching art and
anthropology as existential commitments to the world; ways of knowing
and imagining the world they provide a means of being ethically
committed to learning from, and living through, other things, and other
conceptual realities. I am particularly interested in how can art and
anthropology engage with other sensibilities without translating them
into secular, or scientific, conceptual categories.
東日本大震災復興支援アートプロジェクト
「POSTCARDS TO JAPAN」展巡回
Specifically I am interested in the Japanese concepts of gaman 我慢 す
る(endurance/patience) and ho-ben 便(expediency/ ‘skilful means’),
and how they are interrelated and translated, in relation to ecology and
responsibility.
I aim to explore how art and anthropology might translate these ideas
across cultures and disciplines, tackling “the rupture between the real
world, and our imagination of it” (Ingold, 2013)
我慢 する Gaman in Japanese responses to the disaster, this sense of
enduring suffering is being used to justify the endurance of human
created injustices, such as exposure to radiation. It originates in a
negative Buddhist idea about self-attachment, but has transformed into a
positive way of figuring suffering based on the idea of ‘self’ as a delusion.
Unlike Stoic suffering, which is indifferent to life’s vicissitudes, this
Buddhist approach means recognising suffering as integral part of life.
嘘も方便 Uso-mo ho-ben (which I translate as “ a lie can also be
expedient” ) has allowed the obfuscation of information and the absence
of individual responsibility, as well as discrimination, all of which have
material and corporeal implications.
• an anthropology with art, in the context of this project, pivoting on a
series of collaborative exhibitions.
• Developing photography (including camera-less), drawing, and mixed
media installation, continued interest in working with wood and trees,
as metaphor as well as material.
• 生け花 ikebana (flower arranging) I will be learning from a hana-artist
who works in public in the outsider-art tradition. My approach to
ikebana is based on an understanding of it as both a "consolatory"
practice and as decorative, symbolic, object, connected to Buddhist and
Shinto commemorative practices.
• 木版画 through the studio practice of mokuhanga (wood cut prints),
abstract images Matsushima, recently devastated by the tsunami.
• 体 (karada: body/health/organism/substance) an emerging theme
involves exploring the boundaries of ‘the’ body/ my body, thinking
about subjectivity ecologically, in the context of feminist traditions in
contemporary art,and exploring real and imagined boundaries by
considering ways of protecting bodies from invisible radiation
.
‘Painting
my belly with borax’
References
Guattari, F. 2005 The Three Ecologies transl. I. Pindar
& P. Sutton. London/New York: Continuum.
Jelinek, A. 2013 This is Not Art Activism and Other
‘Not-Art’ London: Tauris & Co.
Ingold, T. 2013 Dreaming of dragons: on the
imagination of real life Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 19, 734-752
Tanizaki, Junichiro 2001 [1933] In Praise of
Shadows. London: Vintage Books
Whitehead, A. N. 1978 [1929 Process and Reality:
an essay in cosmology New York: Free Press
仙台市 Sendai before and after March 2011