Exhibition Review: <i>Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s–1970s</i>

In 1966 the experimental Japanese filmmaker Takahiko Iimura arrived in the United States on a summer fellowship with the Harvard University International Seminar (now the Harvard International and Global History Seminar).1 A cofounder of the Japan Film Independent group in Tokyo, Japan, and an influential avant-garde filmmaker, Iimura was so taken with the US that after his fellowship ended he decided to stay, relocating to New York City. Iimura’s move to the US would have a profound impact on his work, allowing him to become more engaged with the genre-bending intermedia artists of New York’s downtown avant-gardes and inspiring him to experiment with the electronic medium of video.2 The recent exhibition Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s–1970s begins at this junction between the Japanese and American avant-gardes, opening with Shelter 9999 (1966–68), a multimedia collaboration between Iimura and the experimental composer Alvin Lucier. First performed in 1966 at the Electric Circus in the East Village, the piece features two digitized 16mm films (projected directly onto the gallery wall) overlaid with images from a slide projector and set to Lucier’s electronic music. The curators noted that additional performances of the work took place in Gray Hall in Hartford, Connecticut; a church on the outskirts of Chicago; and an auditorium in Tokyo; and these projects also occasionally featured the artists’ partners, Akiko Iimura and Mary Lucier, the four of them collectively known as The Sparks.3Shelter 9999 is an imaginary shelter of the future that Iimura made in response to his encounters with the ubiquitous “shelter” signs directing New York City’s residents to building basements in case of a nuclear emergency. The work’s multimedia form exposes the latent anxiety of this experience; its visual and aural expansion into the spaces of the gallery echo the ways in which repeated encounters with “shelter” signs spread a sense of unease into the geographies and rhythms of everyday life. Shelter 9999 is composed primarily of images of shelter signs, posters, and everyday graffiti. At times the shots strobe across the gallery wall like a series of warning sirens, so zoomed in that their legibility disappears, awash in abstraction; at other times, they flash across the wall, marked by a sense of palpable violence with the film stock scratched or burned through overexposure in an echo of the blinding light of an atomic blast. These images are accompanied by Lucier’s soundscapes, whose sharp, metallic pulses coupled with the rhythmic cracks of the slide projector fill the space of the gallery, reinforcing the claustrophobic alarm of Iimura’s imagery. As Shelter 9999 permeates the gallery space, illustrating Iimura’s masterful exploration of film as a spatial art form, it reveals the ways in which the tensions that characterized postwar atomic anxieties scaled from the banality of everyday experiences to geopolitical relations.The curators rounded out Shelter 9999’s collaborative production with individual digitized 16mm films by Takahiko and Akiko and an illuminating collection of ephemera and photographs. These pieces reify the exhibition’s central theme of connection and collaboration, highlighting the profound impact that the Iimuras’ relationship with the Luciers had on one another’s projects.On view at the Philadelphia Art Alliance at the University of the Arts, Community of Images was organized by the collective members of the international Collaborative Cataloging Japan (CCJ)—Go Hirasawa, Julian Ross, and Ann Adachi-Tasch—and co-presented with the Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia. Additional curatorial support for the massive project was provided by scholar Nina Horisaki-Christens, who served as a curatorial advisor, and Mia Parnall, who served as a curatorial assistant and online viewing program curator.At its core, the exhibition celebrated the incredible collaborative energies between Japanese and American moving image artists who flourished after the US began easing immigration quotas in 1965. This more lenient border policy, coupled with a period of greater economic stability in Japan, led to a surge of travel for Japanese artists. Takahiko Iimura, Yukihisa Isobe, Shigeko Kubota, and many of the other artists featured in the exhibition first arrived in the US at this time and began collaborating more directly with their American counterparts. Many of these artists were closely allied with Fluxus. Consequently, some of the key figures associated with Fluxus in the US appear as points of contact and exchange in this exhibition including the Luciers, Jonas Mekas, Nam June Paik, Jud Yalkut, and the poet Allen Ginsberg.Organized into seven sections, the galleries on the first floor were each centered around a single multimedia installation and the distinct artistic relationships that revolve around that work. Following Shelter 9999 on the first floor of the exhibition viewers encountered the gallery featuring a reconstruction of Yukihisa Isobe’s Floating Theater, a canopy-like parachute that acted as a screen as it floated in the air. Interested in ecological justice and inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, Isobe was in charge of planning public events with the New York City Parks Department (now the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation) when he created Floating Theater. In 1969 he activated the work through a multimedia performance in collaboration with Yalkut titled Dream Reel. Staged at the State University of New York at Oneonta, Dream Reel featured multiple film and slide images projected onto the parachute’s surface and incorporated sound by multiple composers. The curators of Community of Images restaged Dream Reel, carefully trying to recompose the series of projected images that include a number of collaborative film-video projects by Yalkut and Paik. Featuring the distinctive aesthetics of the Paik-Abe video synthesizer, better known as the Wobbulator, the Paik-Yalkut images were projected across the surfaces of Isobe’s Floating Theater. Paired in this way, the synthesized, technicolor images of the Paik-Yalkut collaborations were made lighter and more playful; the electronic scans were freed of the material heft that characterizes their viewing on a CRT monitor, and instead swayed atop the parachute’s surfaces to the rhythms of the air rising from the industrial fans beneath. Even so, as a work whose form yearned for the expansive outdoors, Dream Reel ultimately felt too confined by the gallery space.The curators took a slightly different approach to the works on the top floor, organizing each gallery around a key set of themes rather than direct relationships between the artists. Some formally experimental and historically fascinating works were found on this floor. Some of the standouts include Kenji Kanesaka and Marv Gold’s Super Up (1966), Masanori Oe and Marvin Fishman’s Great Society (1967), and Ko Nakajima’s Liquid Projector (1969/2024). The first two are pop art filmic political commentaries. Like Iimura, Kanesaka traveled to the US through the Harvard International Seminar. While attending Northwestern University, Kanesaka teamed up with the Chicago producer Marv Gold to make Super Up. Filmed in 16mm, the piece follows James Taylor, a tall, lean, black teenager from the infamous Cabrini-Green housing projects as he steals a bottle of milk, outruns the police, and returns to the projects, set against bold and graphic advertisements for consumer goods. Inevitably, the juxtapositions between the teenager’s poverty and the excess of American consumer culture create a sense of strain in the work. But it is Kanesaka’s graphic shots, as bold as the advertising images he critiques, that seize the viewer’s attention. Oe and Fishman’s Great Society similarly comments on the hypocrisies of American culture, but in relation to mass media rather than advertising. Commissioned by CBS in 1967 to provide an overview of the entire decade, the ironically titled Great Society is a six-screen collage of appropriated newsreel footage. The piece cycles through a diverse array of images including footage of dancing, beauty pageants, political events, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, and atrocities committed in Vietnam, among many other images. In a style reminiscent of pop paintings like James Rosenquist’s F-111 (1964–65), the screens occasionally alternate, juxtaposing footage of American teenagers dancing alongside images of fighter planes dropping bombs, before all six screens coalesce into a US flag. Finally, Nakajima’s Liquid Projector is a testament to not only the experimentation of Japanese multimedia artists during the postwar period, but also to the curatorial team’s dedication and determination to exhibit these works. An early DIY projector that Nakajima made out of a glass disk to hold water and colored oil, which he used to volley images onto the gallery walls, the original Liquid Projector was lost and had to be reconstructed for the exhibition. In a shimmering carousel of kaleidoscopic colors, the piece expands on Nakajima’s earlier interests in the “interplay between the precision of industrial production and the messiness of organic reproduction” as it reflects the various lights around the space of the gallery, creating a psychedelic landscape of projected celluloid.4Included on the top floor of the exhibition was a gallery showcasing projects by some of the leading female Japanese artists working in experimental film and video including Mako Idemitsu, Shigeko Kubota, Kyoko Michishita, and Fujiko Nakaya. While Kubota has more recently been the subject of several important exhibitions, namely the nearly contemporaneous Viva Video!, a traveling monographic exhibition in Japan, and Liquid Reality, a smaller but nevertheless beautifully curated show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York,5 the other artists have yet to get their due. Most of the works on view in this gallery explicitly engage with issues of power and identity including Idemitsu’s film Woman’s House (1972) and four-channel video installation Women (1977), which capture women’s burgeoning autonomy. Kubota’s Video Girls and Video Songs for Navajo Sky (1973), probably her best-known single-channel work, critiques the infrastructural inequities of the Navajo people while documenting her stay on a Navajo reservation. Michishita’s Being Women in Japan: Liberation within My Family (1973–74) explores the everyday lives of women, and Nakaya’s Friends of Minamata Victims—Video Diary (1972) uses video’s live feedback technology to replay images of protestors demonstrating against the ecological disaster caused by the Chisso Corporation back to themselves on a portable monitor to “create a new sense of their own power and autonomy by placing them on the television screen.”6 The inclusion of work by female artists was especially important in relation to the exhibition’s themes of collaboration and exchange. Many female artists of the era felt particularly stifled within the context of the Japanese postwar art scene and could gain more exposure in the US. But the inclusion of these artists is also important in relation to the idea of exchange. Many of these artists performed the unremunerated, underrecognized, and all too frequently gendered social labor that helped cultivate and maintain artistic communities. They translated texts, worked as art critics, organized symposiums and exhibitions, and performed countless other organizational tasks. The curators highlight this not only in the ephemera, but also with the final intriguing positioning of Kubota’s well-known Video Girls alongside excerpts from her Video Talk Show (1977), which highlights her role as Anthology Film Archives’ first and only video art curator.7For its conclusion, Community of Images came full circle, returning to Iimura’s work with an installation of his Dead Movie (1964). Nestled into a narrow closet, the piece features two projectors facing one another. The first is threaded with looping black leader, while the other is filmless, projecting only light. With a sense of wry humor and ontological wit, Iimura’s work exposes a series of contradictions, in which the presence of film results in no image, while its absence creates an ethereal projection of white light. While highlighting the shifts in Iimura’s work between poetic film and a more structuralist practice, Dead Movie leaves viewers with a series of philosophical questions about the formal and social paradigms of expanded media.Community of Images was nearly canceled at the last minute. The sudden and unexpected closure of Philadelphia’s University of the Arts had an immense impact on the exhibition, leaving the curators unsure of its viability. Adachi-Tasch, CCJ’s director, sought special permission for the exhibition and was able to reach an agreement with the university to remain open. While ultimately resolved, the exhibition’s potential closure before it began is an important reminder of the lengths the curators went to in an effort to showcase this pioneering group of artists. It is also a reminder of the continuing precarity of so many of these projects, which remain too little known in histories of the avant-gardes and in need of further research and preservation. Ultimately, the exhibition is not only a curatorial feat, but also a significant scholarly contribution to histories of expanded cinema. Coupling diligent archival research with countless artist interviews and thoughtful preservation work, Community of Images is a testament to the significant artistic legacy of Japanese intermedia art.