Installation view, 2F Exhibition Gallery, Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2024 “30 Ways to Go to the Moon”  Photo: Takaaki Arai

Space Age Love Song – 9 Ways to Stroll Through Moving Images

 

For me, the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2024, themed “30 Ways to Go to the Moon,” began on February 1, 2024—one day before the official opening date—when I saw Tomoaki Ishihara’s “Saccade and Afterimage” at MEM as part of the festival’s Partnership Program. I was enraptured by the artist’s “Eye Throw” videos, captured by throwing a camera up in the air. The footage resembled that taken by a camera attached to a rocket. My eyes, separated from my body, were launched into space, perhaps to see the Moon. Did I manage to “go to the Moon” at that moment? Memories of previous Yebisu International Festivals for Art & Alternative Visions (“Yebizo,” as the festival is popularly known) came flooding back, and perhaps because I recalled the second edition, “Searching Songs,” Space Age Love Song *1 started echoing in my head.

 

 

This was the 16th edition of Yebizo, and I was reminded yet again of the accomplishments of Keiko Okamura *2, who curated “Seven Nights, Seven Lights” (2008) and “Imagination: Vision, Perception and Beyond” (2008), events that preceded the festival, before going on to establish Yebizo itself. Each edition of the festival, whether the inaugural “Alternative Visions” (2009); the second “Searching Songs” (2010); the third “Daydream Believer!!” (2011), themed on dream- and memory-like moving images; or the fourth “How Physical” (2012), which focused on the physical and bodily side of the same medium, has been bursting with the exuberance brought about by engaging unabashedly with moving images. When Space Age Love Songand “Daydream Believer!!” resonate, they evoke a Moonage Daydream*3 .

 

Installation view, 3F Exhibition gallery, KIM Insook, House to Home, 2021, Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2024 “30 Ways to Go to the Moon”  Photo: Takaaki Arai

 

On February 8, I attended a live interview with Kim Insook. Seated next to Hiroko Tasaka (head curator of the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2024 and curator at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum) and Hikotaro Kanehira (co-curator), Kim suddenly stood up and started asking her fellow panelists questions while filming the exchange. As the conversation progressed, I found out that Kanehira was part of the team that had planned the event *4. Kim’s Commission Project (CP) exhibition on the third floor comprised two works of moving images, one focused on the conservation of tradition and its fusion with new culture, the other questioning the category of “family” and encouraging reflection on community issues. The interview with Tasaka and Kanehira was to be added to the latter work.

 

February 9, Performance view, 2F Exhibition Gallery, Akira Rachi, Fragments on “shibboleth / schibboleth,”  Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2024 “30 Ways to Go to the Moon”  Photo: Takaaki Arai

 

On February 9, I attended a reading performance by Akira Rachi. The light and sound of a projector, the words being projected, and the reading itself combined to fill the air with tension. I can’t seem to shake the human voice resonating in a space for moving images, speaking the words, “Carry this passage around with you as a poem.” A stopped clock evoked a Shomei Tomatsu photograph, as Rachi said. I suppose that thinking about ways to “go to the Moon” is a means of nullifying the earthly demarcations symbolized by the word “division.” It leads to the awareness that, like all human beings, I was born on this planet; I’m On Earth *5.

I was surprised to find that many events, including Kim and Rachi’s, were held in the exhibition gallery on the second floor. This was made possible by the gallery’s open space, undivided by temporary partitioning walls. I don’t remember seeing another exhibition at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (TOP) held in a gallery without temporary walls, and the space felt incredibly fresh especially for Yebizo, an event usually associated with dark, enclosed spaces. Neither not having the speakers (performers) get up on a stage, nor the audience moving around freely throughout, seemed to hinder appreciation of what was going on. Exhibition visitors were viewing the exhibits, each at their own pace, even during events, while event attendees would from time to time look at the exhibits around them, too, or watch the rest of the audience. This distinctive atmosphere was a major feature of this year’s Yebizo.

 

February 3, Performance view, 2F Exhibition Gallery, Evelyn Taocheng WANG, Layers of Vocalization, Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2024 “30 Ways to Go to the Moon”  Photo: Takaaki Arai

 

February 11, Performance view, 2F Exhibition Gallery, MOUNTAIN/FULL EDITION, Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2024 “30 Ways to Go to the Moon”  Photo: Takaaki Arai

 

The exhibition in the second-floor gallery, described in the official guide as a “space for collective intelligence,” included works from the TOP collection and was not limited to moving images (video) in the narrow sense of the word. The same space was also used for screenings and performances by the likes of Kohei Sekigawa, Evelyn Taocheng Wang, and Mountain/Full Edition. Here, both footage of John Baldessari teaching the alphabet to plants and a sound installation of Marcel Broodthaers interviewing cats conveyed a sense of being present at events happening in that very moment. In this room, so full of “liveness” in a variety of forms, moving images appeared not merely as records or reproductions, but as events in real time and space.

 

 

Installtion view, “The World Beyond,” AL　Photo: Chie Sumiyoshi

 

 

On February 10, my awareness of “30 Ways to Go to the Moon” was enhanced by “The World Beyond” at AL, another component of the Partnership Program. The strength of the works, the clear concept, and the brilliant curation all contributed. Makoto Ofune’s work, which used pigments made from crushed Martian meteorites, shone in a dimension that transcended the senses of the physical world, while Tetsuro Kano’s mobiles, inspired by the mechanical models used to illustrate the movement of planets, suggested a zero-gravity space. Mars and the other planets made me think of the festival’s seventh edition, “See You on the Planet” (2015), and Vénus *6 played in my head.

Taro Shinoda’s project of viewing footage of the moon simultaneously in different places around the world relativizes our Earth-bound perspective. I applauded “The World Beyond,” an astute expression of the “30 Ways to Go to the Moon” theme, to the tune of Tsuki no oto*7 . As per the lyrics of that song, the people who had fun return to the moon, while the forgotten people play the sound of the moon. Those people are in our memories, dreams, and photographs; in images, in other words. “Going to the Moon” to meet them, then, is going “into images.” Images, however, aren’t places we can go to.

 

 

February 12, Performance view, 2F Lobby, Ei Arakawa-Nash, Plush Subjectivity (Tokyo), Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2024 “30 Ways to Go to the Moon”  Photo: Takaaki Arai

 

It bears noting that the festival featured several ambitious screening programs again this year, including “Recent Video Works from Taiwan,” which I unfortunately didn’t have the opportunity to see. The Yebizo program is in essence a comprehensive one, composed of screenings, exhibitions, various events, the Partnership Program, and more. Because of this, I’m aware that it would be desirable for me to critique the festival as a totality. However, as the number of programs any one individual can attend is limited, every Yebizo brings with it some difficult choices as to what to prioritize during the event period. In writing this text, I have started from the premise that it is important to indicate the grounds of one’s criticism, and while the specific exhibitions and events I refer to are the ones I attended in person, I have sought to present points that are not limited to those exhibitions and events but, in part through my experiences at past editions of Yebizo, apply to and elucidate the program as a whole.

 

February 17,  Performance view, 2F Exhibition Gallery, Kohei Sekigawa, The Touch of Your Lips, Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2024 “30 Ways to Go to the Moon”  Photo: Takaaki Arai

 

On February 16, I ran into an acquaintance in the exhibition gallery on the second floor, where Tasaka and Kanehira also appeared. Our water cooler conversation focused on the current edition of Yebizo, with words like “park” and “plaza” being thrown out, and the gallery, the venue of our chat, was a space not unlike a park or plaza. This revealed the meaning of saying that “going to the Moon” is also about “going into images.” A park or plaza is a place you can go to; the moment I thought of that, inspiration struck: this is a “video plaza” (video hiroba), isn’t it? Whether my idea matches the intentions of the people behind Video Hiroba, a pioneering Japanese video art collective, is beside the point; those were the words I found most appropriate in the moment.

Fujiko Nakaya and Dara Birnbaum, who one might call classics; Pak Sheung Chuen, whose work with transparent light is fascinating; the brilliant editor Cory Arcangel; Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda with their exquisite presentation methods; David Hammons, whose photos and videos are accompanied by captivating sound; Félix González-Torres, whose works can be taken home; Kaoru Arima, who incorporates performative elements into his work—I couldn’t name all the exhibiting artists here even if I tried, and the sight of the exhibition was truly one best described as a “park” or “plaza” of moving images. One might even say that in this space, the images did not express something; rather, they constituted the world.

 

Installation view, B1F Exhibition Gallery, Fenberger House / Roger MCDONALD, Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2024 “30 Ways to Go to the Moon”  Photo: Shu Nakagawa

 

On February 17, I attended a lecture about the Fenberger House by Roger McDonald in the basement gallery. An “exhibition within an exhibition,” the Fenberger House embodies the idea of “nested” curation, and indeed the allure of Tasaka and Kanehira’s curation lies in the way it suggests a nested, interchangeable structure, rather than a hierarchy. Seeing the work of Hilma af Klint, I was reminded of “The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985” (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986). Relatedly, the work of Ana Mendieta certainly deserves more recognition.

 

Installation view, B1F Exhibition Gallery, AOKI Ryoko + ITO Zon, The state one reaches by the age of 9, 2011/2024, Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2024 “30 Ways to Go to the Moon”  Photo: Shu Nakagawa

 

In the same basement space, I also ran into an impressive work by Ryoko Aoki and Zon Ito. Footage seemingly depicting drawings was projected onto materials such as stones and sponges, giving a real sense of the malleability of moving images. And then, finally, I arrived at the innermost room in the basement, dedicated to the work of Nobuko Tsuchiya. The theme of this year’s Yebizo, “30 Ways to Go to the Moon,” was derived from the title of Tsuchiya’s exhibition “30 Ways To Go To The Moon” (2018). As the bold naming suggests, this edition of Yebizo succeeded in its broad interpretation of moving images, starting with its reference to Tsuchiya’s exhibition. For this reason, it allowed attendees to encounter a diverse range of moving images freed from the self-serving aspects of the medium.

The experience of walking through Tsuchiya’s space resembled that of taking a stroll; an experience in which the everyday and the extraordinary exist side by side, and where there is purpose, but also a lack of purpose. “Going to the Moon” is the same as “going into images,” as well as “going on a stroll.” The destination of this stroll, of course, is the Moon, and the background music can be none other than Osanpo*8 . Tsuchiya’s works are imbued with another sensation, too: sleep. When I fall asleep, my memories wake up, detach from my body, and go on a stroll. My memories encounter someone else’s on their stroll to the Moon, and we exchange memory images. So someone else’s memories are lurking in the dreams I see. The Moon, as Tsuchiya’s work shows us, is a place where memories go for a stroll.

There it becomes impossible to distinguish between dreams and reality. If your memory is all you can rely on, you won’t be able to differentiate between real memories and dreams. Mundane reality disappears from memory, whereas intense dreams remain. If our dreams contain someone else’s memories, and those memories are derived from real experiences, it’s only natural that we cannot distinguish between dreams and real memories. My body, then, is a device that stores images we call memories. When I dream, my memories escape from that device and go for a stroll to the Moon, where they encounter someone else’s and images of memories are exchanged. A collective unconscious forms when an image is shared with countless memories. The Moon is a device that stores memories of the collective unconscious, and a Yebizo that inspires such reflection is nice to have. I hear The Whole of the Moon*9 on a full moon’s night.

 

Installation view, B1F Exhibition Gallery, Nobuko Tsuchiya, 30 Ways To Go To The Moon, 2024, Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2024 “30 Ways to Go to the Moon”  Photo: Shu Nakagawa

 

On March 22, the Commission Project came full circle for me with Kim Insook’s exhibition. It now included the interview with Tasaka and Kanehira she shot on February 9. The two curators overseeing a vast array of programs were speaking on a monitor that was part of a single artist’s work. But there was no sense of anyone attempting to overturn the power structure, and both Tasaka and Kanehira were speaking naturally. The transparency of this “nested” structure symbolizes the appeal of this year’s Yebizo. Another CP participant, Yu Araki, was exhibiting a work shot in a small village in Iceland. This “Road Movie” without movement expresses the journey from Chicago to Hollywood through the eating of hamburgers named after successive places along U.S. Route 66.

Exhibited alongside Araki and his friends’ ordeal in moving-image form were photographs related to Route 66 (by Robert Frank, Ansel Adams, Kenji Kanesaka, and others) from the TOP collection. The photos inviting the viewer to Route 66 lent fuel to Araki’s film, conjuring up a Moonlight Drive*10 . The CP ended with an archival exhibition featuring the work of the previous project’s finalists (Rei Hayama, Hiroyuki Oki, Kim, and Araki). Kim and Araki had been awarded the previous Special Prize, which won them the right to exhibit here (the prize had originally been envisioned to be given to a single artist). However, the prize is intended only as a designation within the CP framework and does not indicate that one artist’s work is superior to any other’s. The works of Hayama and Oki from the previous edition, although somewhat different in orientation, were all highly original and ambitious pieces deserving of praise for the way they expand the possibilities of moving-image expression.

 

On March 30—a month and a half after the end of the official program and nearly a week after the closing of the CP exhibition—Yebizo looped back for me as I attended the two solo exhibitions by Tomoaki Ishihara held at Kyoto City University of Arts. At a symposium that same day, Ishihara used the memorable phrase, “Images are light; bodies are heavy.” The argument this edition of Yebizo gave rise to—that moving images, rather than expressing something, constitute the world—can be used to invert this ingenious comment on moving images in general; thus, “Images are heavy; bodies are light.” Freed from their self-referentiality as a form of visual expression, moving images appear in a variety of forms. The physical arrangement of moving images makes them feel “heavy,” but when they are actually viewed, the tyranny of the visual gives way to multisensory perception. The result, paradoxically, is bodily “lightness.”

I hear Space Age Love Song again, this time accompanied by a philharmonic orchestra*11 . Phil means “love,” and with harmony, a festival of moving images transforms into love for moving images. If moving images don’t express something, but constitute the world, a festival of moving images is a festival of the world, and loving the medium means loving the world. Loving moving images, loving the world. Moving images love, and so does the world. The reason I chose this track as my ultra-personal Yebizo theme song becomes clear. It’s a love song—for going to the Moon, going into images, going to a video plaza, strolling to the Moon, and strolling through images. Behind its glamorous and festive façade, the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2024: 30 Ways to Go to the Moon quietly questioned the relationship between moving images, the world, and love.

 

 

Note

 *1 A Flock of Seagulls – Space Age Love Song

 *2 Keiko Okamura is a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. She established the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions in 2009 while working at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, and directed editions 1–5, 9, 11, and 13 of the festival.

 *3 David Bowie – Moonage Daydream

 *4 See “Event Overview” in the Information section for details on the members of the planning team.

 *5 Miki Furukawa – I’m On Earth

 *6 The Roosters – Vénus

 *7 Tenniscoats – Tsuki no oto

 *8 Halmens – Osanpo

 *9 The Waterboys – The Whole of the Moon

 *10 Blondie – Moonlight Drive

 *11 A Flock of Seagulls With the Prague Philharmonic Orchestra – Space Age Love Song

 

Translated by Ilmari Saarinen