Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

After the “Descent to the Everyday” 65
member Ay-O, with Akiyama Kuniharu, staged Happening for Sightseeing Bus
Trip in Tokyo. Going into landscape was another approach. A memorable
instance was Event to Alter the Image of Snow in 1970 by the Niigata group
GUN (founded by Maeyama Tadashi and the mail artist Horikawa Michio
in 1967 and active through 1975): it “spray-painted the snow” on the bank
of the local Shinano River in 1970. 62
For The Play in Kansai, a major concern was to take a “voyage”
away from everyday consciousness trapped in familiar space and time. It
admittedly “went outside the institutions of art, which meant going outdoors.
. . . It is important to do so in daily life, empirically, and persistently,
like farmers do. The Play’s actions constituted a return to man’s essential
being, and our plowing around it has become art.” 63
The collaborative collective was established after “The First Play
Exhibition” in August 1967. Staged outdoors at a playground near the city
hall in downtown Kobe, it was a three-evening program of outdoor actions
by thirteen artists. The initial core members included Ikemizu Keiichi, Okamoto
Hajime, Mizugami Jun, Nakata Kazunari, and Fukunaga Toyoko, all of
whom participated in the exhibition from which the new group took its
name. The Play’s signature works are its outdoor summer projects, which it
annually undertook through 1986. The membership was Xuid, each time a
collection of participants gathered together. The constant presence was
Ikemizu, who had Wrst made his name with Homo Sapiens, conWning himself
in a cage under the summer sun on the riverbank at “Gifu Independent Art
Festival” in 1965.
The Play’s Wrst collaboration was the grand-scale Voyage: A Happening
in an Egg. The plan called for a release of a huge egg (3.3 meters long
and 2.2 meters wide) into the PaciWc Ocean, from Shionomisaki in Kansai’s
Wakayama Prefecture, the southernmost point of Japan’s main island. There
was a remote possibility that the egg might reach the United States (Figure
2.6). For this to happen, the seven participants needed to take the egg,
made of polyether resin and Wberglass and weighing 150 kilograms, twenty
miles offshore and drop it into the Japan Current, which Xows into the California
Current. They successfully secured cooperation from the local Wshermen’s
union (which offered current data and arranged the use of a boat for
the project), the prefectural Wshery experimental station (which the union
persuaded to provide another boat), and a professor of oceanography (who
certiWed the project’s research value). On August 1, 1968, the egg was released
as planned. Ikemizu explained to one of the journalists who covered the
project: “The egg carries an image of liberation from all the material and
mental restrictions imposed upon us living in contemporary times.” 64 There
was one telegraph report of its sighting after a month.