Jonathan Watkins
Conversation with Jonathan Watkins, former Director, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
Conversation with Jonathan Watkins, former Director, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
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Similarly, projects such as Beppu Project and Breaker
Project, Osaka, amongst others, aim to renew a sense of
citizenship through cultural activity, art with a social
purpose. How do you view such projects and do you
believe they offer sound models or approaches to creative
practise and could they play a leading role in developing
arts practice, as well as defining it?
JW: I have heard about them, met the people who have
co-ordinated them, but have never actually been and wish
I had. It is an interesting phenomenon and reflects the
tendency in Asian cultures – pervasive before European
contact in the 19th century – not to treat artworks as
discrete objects. And cultural memory is not so short.
There hasn’t been such an established obsession in Asia
with the discrete art object produced by a sensitive
“artist” genius, in the same way, there has been in the
west. It was much more about shared experience. Now we
show Ukiyoe on walls, framed and glazed, but it was
originally made for people to collect and they enjoyed
passing it around, sharing it amongst groups of friends
and acquaintances.
KW: You curated an exhibition at Ikon of Ukiyo-e prints
by Utamaro.
JW: Yes, most recently, Utamaro. Of course, there was
some Western influence in Japan before him, but still, the
Japanese art world isn’t one in which relational practice is
simply a repudiation of modernist tradition – and the
notion of the artwork as a discrete gesture – but it is
arguably a continuation of an earlier tradition. That’s my