Index One Hundred Years Have Nearly Passed Since the First Communist State, 9 the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic Was Born Yoshinori Niwa Hysteria of History or a True Story of What Communism Is 17 —Looking Back With Tossing Socialists in the Air in Romania Eugen Rădescu Politologist, Curator, Theoretician, Founder of Bucharest Biennale, PAVILION – Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, Bucharest Diary Bucharest—A Rainy, Sad Day in the Shivery Winter, Bucharest 23 Yoshinori Niwa Unbounded Identities—Asserting Cultural Friction through Performance 45 Nina Horisaki-Christens Independent Curator and Writer, New York Diary Japan—We Thought the Soviet Union Would Be 51 Better Than This Society. But in Actual Fact, It Isn’t Yoshinori Niwa Living with a Ghost 73 Elena Yaichnikova Independent Curator, Moscow Diary Moscow—Needless to Say, He Came in as Vladimir Lenin 77 Yoshinori Niwa The Communists’ Blueprint for a Revolutionary Revolution 97 Yoshinori Niwa Yoshinori Niwa Speaks 104 —On Other Works
Transcript
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Index
One Hundred Years Have Nearly Passed Since the First Communist State, 9the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic Was BornYoshinori Niwa
Hysteria of History or a True Story of What Communism Is 17—Looking Back With Tossing Socialists in the Air in RomaniaEugen RădescuPolitologist, Curator, Theoretician, Founder of Bucharest Biennale,
PAVILION – Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, Bucharest
Diary Bucharest—A Rainy, Sad Day in the Shivery Winter, Bucharest 23Yoshinori Niwa
Unbounded Identities—Asserting Cultural Friction through Performance 45Nina Horisaki-ChristensIndependent Curator and Writer, New York
Diary Japan—We Thought the Soviet Union Would Be 51Better Than This Society. But in Actual Fact, It Isn’tYoshinori Niwa
Living with a Ghost 73Elena YaichnikovaIndependent Curator, Moscow
Diary Moscow—Needless to Say, He Came in as Vladimir Lenin 77 Yoshinori Niwa
The Communists’ Blueprint for a Revolutionary Revolution 97Yoshinori Niwa
Yoshinori Niwa Speaks 104—On Other Works
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Yoshinori Niwa Speaks’ 108 —On a Series of the Communism Works A Spectre of Words—Niwa Yoshinori and the Spectrum of the Common 113Eiko HondaIndependent Curator, London
Yoshinori Niwa’s Melancholy Smile and Kitsch 139Kenjiro HosakaCurator of The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
After the Revolution—Communism, Capitalism, and the Economy of Event 160F. AtsumiEditor/Critique, Art-Phil
Work Descriptions 164 Yoshinori Niwa CV 166
Contributor Profiles 169
So we say “I live in Japan,” but for exam
ple, even though Japan is an island country and independent,
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_01.jpg
Going to San Francisco to Dispose of My Garbage
2006
When I w
as in prison camp, I read his w
orks. I was a follow
er of Christian faith in Soviet tim
es.
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0013.jpg
Purchasing My O
wn Belongings Again in the D
owntow
n
2011
014.jpg
Shaking Hands w
ith 100 Cats in N
orway
2007
There was the 52 article, according to it, every citizen has a right to profess their religion, or not to profess a religion at all, w
hich means to be an atheist... A
theistic, godless... When he died
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A Spectre of Words—Niwa Yoshinori and
the Spectrum of the Common
– Eiko HondaIndependent Curator, London
If I was to speak without fear of being misunderstood, I would say my art practice isn’t something “cool” like critique. At its root, it is more like a kind of ‘curse’ —the artwork titles are like a script for a curse. – Niwa Yoshinori, 2012 i
Words are never “only words”; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do. – Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce, 2009 ii
A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848 iii
I read his works – the 7th volum
e, the 12th... And defended m
yself by this. Well, w
hat can I do… W
ell, they say many dirty things about Lenin these days…
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15.tiff
Walk in the Opposite Direction of a Demonstration Parade
2011
different things here, so this Klimov w
rote that it is… a sign of latent hom
osexuality. He said it, you know
... Is it unnecessary?.. Well, w
hat can I do… A
nd now they say, Lenin w
as not like we used to
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Transforming Puddle A to Puddle B (2004/2007/2012) Berlin, Germany and Tokyo/Fukushima, Japan
Going to San Francisco to Dispose of My Garbage (2006) Tokyo, Japan and San Francisco, USA
Shaking Hands With 100 Cats in Norway (2007) Stavanger, Norway
A Memory With Vegetable (2008) Santiago, Chile
Give Hats to 50 Pigeons (2008) Tokyo, Japan
A Bear Goes to the Zoo to See Bears (2010) Tokyo, Japan
Tossing Socialists in the Air in Romania (2010) Bucharest, Romania
Walk in the Opposite Direction of a Demonstration Parade (2011) Tokyo, Japan
Purchasing My Own Belongings Again in the Downtown (2011) Tokyo, Japan
Applauding Bears in Bern (2011) Bern, Switzerland
Exchange Between Turkish Lira and Euros in Istanbul Until There Is Nothing Left (2011) Istanbul, Turkey
Duplicating My House Key and Distributing the Copies (2012) Tokyo, Japan
Holding a Demonstration to the Peak of Mt. Fuji from the Prime Minister’s Official Residence (2012) Fuji-Tokyo, Japan
Sweeping Up the Dust to the Prime Minister’s Office (2012) Tokyo, Japan
Holding the Police in Front of the Diet Building (2012) Tokyo, Japan
Looking for Vladimir Lenin at Moscow Apartments (2012) Moscow, Russia
Making a Political Speech Intentionally Translated With a Different Meaning (2013) Swedish Embassy, Tokyo, Japan
Selling the Right to Name a Pile of Garbage (2014) Manila, Philippines
Requesting People in Taiwan Who I Met By Chance to Declare If They Die, Taiwan Will Disappear (2014) Taipei, Taiwan
– you know, he had a stroke, they cem
ented a half of his brain. A half of his brain w
as cemented, do you get it? It w
as a whole cem
ent. But you know, there is a m
an, his name is Klim
ov, he debunks
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Often seemingly absurd, Niwa Yoshinori’s many different filmed “acts” literally enact pre-defined titles – or ‘curses’ as he calls them - in public space around the world. As the artist says, these acts are ‘clearly private behavior, but I intentionally carry them out as if they are public acts’.iv Curses towards who or what, then? His underlying subject of concern is the ever-urgent issue of the common: that is, “the common” with which human civilisation has organised its social and political systems in the 20th and 21st Century – or what philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri define as the necessary ‘open knowledge and capacities for creating and sustaining life and relationships’.v A curse – or Noroi in Japanese – is both an utterance of words in anger and a call that invokes an external power to change a seemingly inevitable outcome. It is not prose or poetry; in Niwa’s practice, it operates as something of a mixture between a slogan and Kotodama i.e. the soul, or more appropriately in this context, spectre of language.vi It is a declara-tion that shapes the possibility of what might still be realised. Through the enactment of these pre-planned artwork titles in the public space, Niwa makes possible unpredictable disruptions within the existing systematised social and political reality, creating a brief emancipation of the common, albeit momentarily.
The two major systems the artist strives to embody with his actions in his work are the dominant neoliberal capitalism, and the still reverberating influence of communism, as it existed around the world before the triumph of globalisation and the free market.
Although the artist states that nationalities and ethnicities are public communi-ties that exist only in the imagination, and there’s no such place as the periphery,vii Niwa speaks from the particular vantage point of a young artist born in a society that has had a form of state controlled capitalism—in Japan, 1982.viii He grew up in the era where civil conceptions of ownership over the common were rapidly transformed through the economic “Bubble” until 1990, followed by the two ‘lost decades’ of 1990 – 2010, where the country’s stock market had collapsed and the economy stopped growing. Despite the fact that almost 90% of people in Japan identify themselves as ‘middle class’, a so-called kakusa society (referring to class disparity) has swiftly emerged in the years since the Bubbleix, in what the Soviet Union under Gorbachev’s Communist regime (1985 - 1991) had previously recognised as de facto ‘socialist country’.x Niwa says: ‘I strongly curse the systems of money and real estate. Real estate has been passed down to our time, just be-cause, at some point in history, somebody violently decided that some land, which wasn’t a property of anybody’s at that time, was now, his own’.xi So he denounces the system, having struggled himself to keep up with the price of rent in contemporary Tokyo. ‘But I’m not an activist - therefore I don’t claim “the land to be returned”. … Rather, I try to challenge with my own body, in my own way, how things work. Artworks are made while undertaking this process’.xii
Like he didn’t live in Russia, like he was alw
ays abroad, walking around beerhouses and so on…
But when there w
as Lenin, people believed him even m
ore than they believed the God. That’s w
hy
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Speaking of the ‘common’, Hardt and Negri specify two kinds; the first is the ‘common wealth of the material world – the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature’s bounty…; the second is ‘those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledge, language, codes, infor-mation, affects, and so on’.xiii Privatisation of ownership or public authority over these common resources and capacities is, according to them, what undermines their power. However, ‘[t]he seemingly exclusive alternative between the private and the public cor-responds to an equally pernicious political alternative between capitalism and socialism. …The political project of instituting the common…cuts diagonally across these false alternatives…and opens a new space for politics’, they argue.xiv How Niwa performs his ‘seemingly private’ acts as if they are publicly assumed behaviours precisely creates, therefore, the slippage within and beyond social and political dichotomies, in which the artist points us towards the ‘new space for politics’ waiting to be uncovered. The arena of his interventions spans across the vast yet familiar human experience of the everyday: from our relationship to food, animals and political ideologies to existing systems of money, garbage, territorial land and language.
Niwa’s earlier works began with his monologues with entities such as puddles, vegetables, cats, chickens, pigeons and bears. These are all indeed part of a common-wealth of the material world, or ‘all nature’s bounty,’ often reduced to passive existence within the human managerial systems of consumption, entertainment and private owner-ship.
This quest began with his concern for one of the most fundamental causes of strug-gle and conflict: territorial land. In his 2004 work Transforming Puddle A to Puddle B, he moved a puddle from the former East Berlin to West Berlin. Using his very own mouth as a dropper, he filled up a plastic bottle at location ‘A’ and then emptied it using his mouth again at location ‘B’.xv This futile behavior evokes the past yet recent memory of socially, politically and territorially divided common land once violently marked by the Berlin Wall: the Marxist-Leninist Socialism of the German Democratic Republic imposed by the Soviet Union on the East side; and the liberal democratic capitalism of the Federal Republic of Germany brought in under the US and UK administrations on the West; both competing with each other for a greater prosperity. The work also reveals his helpless position as a young Japanese person who seemingly doesn’t have any connection to this political history. The only thing he could do is something as nonsensical as this act. ‘The very situation where one “can’t do anything” is the chance for a creative behavior, rather than a state which stops your thinking process’, the artist says. ‘The circumstance of this condition clearly and naturally begins to appear, by repeatedly questioning why it’s impossible’.xvi
think…
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061.tiff
Requesting People in Taiwan Who I Met
by Chance to Declare If They Die,
Taiwan will Disappear
2014
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061.tiff
Requesting People in Taiwan Who I Met
by Chance to Declare If They Die,
Taiwan will Disappear
2014
berlin.jpg
Tran
sfor
min
g Pu
ddle
A to
Pud
dle
B
2004
everybody were like m
arching in line and wanted to be like Lenin.
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Shaking Hands With 100 Cats in Norway (2007), A Memory With Vegetable (2008), Give Hats to 50 Pigeons (2008) and A Bear Goes to the Zoo to See Bears (2010) may also be relatively self-explanatory in terms of what takes place in these works. Niwa makes earnest attempts to either apply typical human communication methods, such as shaking hands, writing a memoir and giving gifts, or alters his own visual and behaviour identity, by wearing a bear costume and walking like a bear to go see bears at the Ueno Zoo in Tokyo. These acts, as a result, rather forcefully accentuate the almost vain power relation between humans and domesticated animals or industrially produced vegetables, which people would rarely question.xvii The artist’s subject matter extends beyond conven-tional ‘organic’ existence such as the above. In Going to San Francisco to Dispose of My Garbage (2006), he literally takes a bag of domestic rubbish from his home in Tokyo to San Francisco in order to dispose it. He, of course, behaves as if it is publicly acceptable to visibly carry it as a luggage on board. After all, Niwa is claiming, he ought to retain his ownership over the rubbish as his ‘possession’ until he finds a way to discard it based on the socially set waste management system; although, of course the existence of rubbish is merely transported to elsewhere, even if one may no longer see it in front of their eyes.
The subject of garbage appears again eight years later in Selling the Right to Name a Pile of Garbage (2014); this time in Manila, the capital of the Philippines, he negotiates with local landfill businesses to sell this right as an Internet auction. Niwa was aware of the cynical fact of the city’s troubling status as an international destination for the waste of more economically powerful countries such as Canada and Japan.xviii Although hardly known outside the Philippines, Japan and the Philippines signed the Japan-Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement (JPEPA) in 2006 without adequate public consultation. A ‘mega-treaty’ as described by international trade experts, it is ‘an amalgam of a Bilateral Investment Treaty and a Bilateral Free Trade Agreement that adopts many of the key fea-tures of the North American Free Trade Agreement between the United States, Canada and Mexico’.xix It legally allows hazardous and toxic waste to be traded with 0% tariff—in-cluding pharmaceuticals, sewage, clinical and chemical waste—as well as worn-out textile materials and cables that were previously prohibited to be traded; as a matter of fact, this is an ‘invitation to make the Philippines the dumping ground for Japanese waste’.xx
Speaking of legal rights, Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues that they are ‘per-missions masked as rights; they do not change in any way the distribution of powers’.xxi
And in this instance, it rather affirms and accelerates the existing dynamic. The Japanese artist’s proposal in effect strangely confuses this power relation by auctioning for money the right to name—a symbolic gesture and potentially legalising the act of gaining an ownership over the common. The common, in this context, is the land—although filled with unwanted manmade waste.xxii Yet this right is paradoxically only available to those who have the money to spend on this ‘permission’, and who have access to the Internet in
He w
as in some research institute, from
70s.
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a country whose user rate is only 37% of its population in comparison to Japan’s 86.3%.xxiii Whilst the works convey issues of material consumption and responsibilities over waste at the heart of globalised neoliberal capitalist trade, it also brings our attention to the vigor-ously debated notion of the ‘anthropocene’; a recently proposed term for the age of anthro – or ‘human’, where manmade material entities such as concrete, plastic and waste have made such a significant effect on the environmental condition of the earth at a planetary scale and as a result become part of ‘nature’, as exemplified by the landfill.xxiv Thereby, instead of reducing human and nature into a conventional dichotomy, Niwa foregrounds the contested notion of nature as the common and reveals its presence embedded within humans’ political system and ideologies, whether it is rubbish, animal or vegetable.
‘[Nowadays] it’s harder to throw things away than to receive them’, the artist observes. ‘In terms of economy too: it’s difficult to relocate something that has once been purchased to somewhere else. For example, the timeframe in which you are allowed to dispose your waste at a rubbish collection point is [usually] very limited. …Things that are sold can only be purchased – and if purchased, there’s no choice but to own it’.xxv Niwa’s investigation into the monetary system and material goods can also be seen in his 2011 works Purchasing My Own Belongings Again in the Downtown and Exchanging between Turkish Lire and Euros in Istanbul Until there is Nothing Left. In the former work, he goes up to a kiosk to purchase a magazine – then he goes to a cashier at another shop with the very same magazine he purchased elsewhere in his hand, whilst the shop staff scans the product’s barcode without realising that it doesn’t belong to the shop. What is happening here is an attempt to go outside the systematised economy of consumption made out of mere digital code; although it is supposed to correlate to ‘things’ available to be bought in exchange for money, his action goes against the assumed flow of consumption and its eco-nomic data and disrupts the ideology of capital.xxvi In the latter work, as the title indicates already, he again goes against the grain of the economy. The laborious act of exchanging the currency back and force does not create any profit. Instead only time disappears—time, it could be argued, being the ultimate common of our existence, which is also significantly monetised in our society. As a result, the staff at the currency exchange office gets con-fused and angry. Angry perhaps because the laborious act no longer makes any sense in their business.xxvii Hardt and Negri argue that ‘law and capital are the primary forces [of]… the transcendental plane of power. … [It] compels obedience … by structuring the condi-tions of possibility of social life’.xxviii By cutting through both of these forces, the artist anticipates a departure from the given condition.
Thus, Niwa’s mode of enacting ‘curses’ seems to have increasingly shifted from monologues with non-human entities to direct dialogue and interaction among human beings in response to the politics of power, rights and responsibilities from around 2010 onwards. This is because, he says, 2010 was the year he had his first solo exhibition at the
Maybe, it w
as more interesting that tim
e…
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αM Gallery in Tokyo.xxix This was where he presented his filmed acts as something to be seen as ‘exhibition artworks’ in a gallery space; until then he had always thought he was a performance artist. ‘Having thought through artworks that would still carry strength as exhibition works, I arrived to a state where I push-stretched the methodology called performance I had long engaged with’. At this point he moved towards making work that conveys multiple layers by direct interaction – or ‘collision’ to use the artist’s word – with other people.xxx Some of these are namely: Tossing socialists in the air in Romania (2010), Looking for Vladimir Lenin at Moscow Apartments (2012), Holding a Demon-stration to the Peak of Mt. Fuji from the Prime Minister’s Official Residence (2012), Making a Political Speech Intentionally Translated With a Different Meaning (2013) and Requesting People in Taiwan Who I Met By Chance to Declare If They Die, Taiwan Will Disappear (2014).
The first two of these examples explicitly engages with political thoughts and the resonance of communism and socialism. Communism was of course the major alternate utopian political system to capitalism in the 20th Century, even if the Soviet Union might be said to have failed to achieve a viable form of socialism in practice. Communism stands for the egalitarian emancipation of the common free of class struggle and man’s alienation from ‘his product, from his work, from his fellow man, from himself and from nature; in which he can return to himself and grasp the world with his own powers, thus becoming one with the world’ as the social psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm puts it.xxxi Although Niwa claims that he doesn’t seek out radical social revolution as such, his aim is ‘to dissect society by means of art’, he says: I always think that a new visible world appears … by decomposing [the social system] into something simple’.xxxii
After Lenin’s death, Stalin ruled for almost three decades, with a belief that ideals of socialism couldn’t be achieved without the abolition of capitalism.xxxiii Niwa’s curios-ity towards these political systems only visibly emerged in his work since his travel to Romania, motivated by his desire to witness and somehow relate to the 1989 Romanian Revolution – a historic event he watched as an online NHK documentary filmxxxiv whilst in Tokyo in 2005, yet never experienced in real life. In both of the seemingly nonsensi-cal propositions, the artist taps into contemporary memories of the defeated regimes still potentially carried by the citizens in their private space: either in their mind or at home. The impossibility of knowing history as a first hand experience is also reflected in the ways in which he places Japanese and/or English subtitles to the filmed interactions; sometimes spoken words are intentionally translated with slightly different meanings. With Gorbachev’s Perestroika in 1986, the Soviet Union saw a surge of theatre-writers and filmmakers such as Mikhail Shatrovxxxv and Marina Goldovskaya,xxxvi who presented alternative views of their past communist history by actively cultivating what Hardt and Negri define as the second kind of common ‘knowledge, language, codes, information,
They say, they are people of another generation.
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affects, and so on’xxxvii – that used to be heavily censored until then. Yet, at the end of the day, ‘Nobody knows what real nonfiction of history is. … [P]erhaps there’s no such thing as truth’ the artist reflects.xxxviii The exercised political ideologies precisely limit the scope of the common and construct a social configuration accordingly; as Walter Benjamin once remarked, ‘everything depends on how one believes in one’s belief’.xxxix This is perhaps another way of pointing out that one’s belief may not always be kept intact through straightforwardly blaming the easily visible aspect of the system of ‘how’ the political system works – instead, it needs to be decomposed as Niwa’s practice does.
His more recent piece Making a Political Speech Intentionally Translated With a Different Meaning (2013) may exemplify further the complexity of political history and the impossibility of seeking the ‘truth’ embraced in the ‘communism’ works discussed above. On the other hand, the artist’s standpoint of ambivalence towards political systems could be most directly observed in his work Walk in the Opposite Direction of a Demon-stration Parade (2011). The piece was made during a time of heated debate and mass-demonstrations against the nuclear power plant after the explosion of Fukushima Daiichi in 2011, following the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami on 11th March. Instead of walking along with the flow of the public demonstration in Shinjuku, he instead joined the crowd by walking completely in the opposite direction. ‘Of course, I felt that the promotion of the nuclear power was no longer allowed. But then I also questioned; would it be fine to block the stem of problems just by the act of demonstration?’, the artist comments.xl Without be-ing able to decide his own position, the most appropriate way to embrace it seemed to be to walk against the flow, witnessing everybody’s face, one by one. It is almost symbolic of so many people who were not at the demonstration – for the very same reason of ambiva-lence.
What may then be ‘one’s belief’? Belief informed by political ideologies one finds her/himself in, where there’s no outside world as such? The strongest force of political ideology that shapes the global dynamic of the current neoliberal capitalism through the second kind of common – knowledge, language and information – is the English language. Niwa’s ‘curse’ towards this can be observed in his recent publication project, Reenacting Publicness: Translating Artwork Descriptions into 23 Different Languages (2013). This was a three-year project where people he found through the Internet translated a descrip-tion text of the artist’s 33 works he made in the year between 2004 and 2012 into 23 differ-ent languages. The initial motivation behind it was his straightforward desire to somehow overcome the communication barrier, as well as frustration with the fact that conversation always had to go through the dominating tool of the English language—all of which he has experienced with people he has communicated with abroad in the making of his work.xli The book begins with the following statement: ‘As the reader is supplied with many more languages than necessary, this testimony of a world which spreads before us in end-
And w
hen the building was being destroyed, this Lenin w
as taken out of it.
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en-jp3.jpg
Selli
ng th
e Ri
ght t
o N
ame
a Pi
le o
f Gar
bage
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etw
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and
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t
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In flying this flag, and that was the beauty of com
munism
.
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less translation provides a response to the imaginary identity which we cling to’.xlii This statement echoes his remark on nationalities and ethnicities,xliii in which he suggests they are public communities that only exist in imaginationxliv and that there’s no such place as the periphery.xlv By meditating on the enactment of ‘public-ness’ and the very ‘we’ in the above statement, he arrives at a fundamental aspect of the human condition: our very existence prior to political ideologies.xlvi Public, originally deriving from the Latin word populous meaning ‘people,’ may bypass our conventional conception of the public-private dichotomy which both neoliberal capitalism and totalitarian communism embraced; instead, it positions itself closer to the notion of democracy, where the power of people ought to institute the wealth of common. In this sense, the etymology of ‘public’ in Japan, and perhaps in China and Taiwan too where the notion is spelt out with the same character of ‘公共’, is certainly a conception to overcome. Different to languages of Latin origin, the urbanist Julian Worrall explains that ‘Its usual rendition in Japanese is kôkyô (公共), combining the characters of oyake (公) “official” and tomo (共) “together, same”. At the core of the concept in Japan is governmental authority, and hence state power’.xlvii
vlcsnap-15754866.jpg
Applauding Bears in Berne
2011
at the same tim
e there were all that scrapes about Soviet U
nion…
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This indeed, anticipates one of his most recent works, Requesting people in Taiwan who I met by chance to declare if they die, Taiwan will disappear (2014).
Negri articulates the condition of artistic paradox today; it consists ‘in the wish to produce the world (bodies, movement) differently – and yet from within a world which admits of no other world other than the one which actually exists, and which knows that the ‘outside’ to be constructed can only be the other within an absolute insidedness’.xlviii Contemplating his time in Manila, Niwa reflects on the capitalist condition of choice and freedom by recounting the state of Philippines prisons he heard about from the locals. In these prisons, varying level of financial wealth determines degree of comfort allowed to prisoners inside the walled world. ‘[T]he only thing you can’t do is [to] “step outside.” … In the same way … [we] cannot “step outside” capitalism either’.xlix The very choice and freedom of his artistic production, including his ability to make journeys to many dif-ferent nations, is also conditioned by his immanent political identity as a passport holder of the former Asian empire, Japan. This empire and its subsequent post-war alliance the politics of the United States of America grounds its economic power and thereby the scope of ‘choice and freedom’ over the common its citizens may have, within the wider global political structure.
Where does he, Niwa, – or we – go from here? Neither the “spectre of commu-nism” nor of capitalism, it is Niwa’s ‘curse’ – the political mantra and Kotodama, spectre of words – where this very discussion, assemblages of words and thoughts, arises helps us perhaps determine the potential spectrum of what might still be realised.
xxxvi Marina Goldovskaya (1941 – present): ‘One of Russia’s best known documentary filmmak-
ers, Marina Goldovskaya has made 28 documentaries as director, cinematographer and writer. Her films
have appeared on Russian, British, Japanese, Swedish, German, French, and US television. Award win-
ning titles include “The House on Arbat Street” (Prix Europa & Golden Hugo Award); “The Shattered
Mirror” (Golden Gate Award) and “Solovki Power” (Joris Ivens Special Jury Prize)’. UCLA School
of Theatre, Film and Television Marina Goldovskaya, 2015. http://www.tft.ucla.edu/2011/09/faculty-
marina-goldovskaya/
The 1988 film “Solovki Power” may be the most notable example of her work on the issue of re-
inventing history, where she re-told horrifying memory of the prison camp on Solovski island in the
White Sea. The labour camp is said to have been a prototype of numerous more Gulags that came after
in Soviet Union.
xxxvii Hardt and Negri 2011, op.cit., p.viii.
xxxviii Niwa Yoshinori and Wakiya Sakiko, Tokyo Source: 068 YOSHINORI NIWA [An interview arti-
cle with the artist] 7 January 2012. http://www.tokyo-source.com/interview.php?ts=68
xix Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce, Verso 2009, p.3; Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte
Briefe, Vol. I, Suhrkamp Verlag 1995, p.182.
xl Niwa Yoshinori and Wakiya Sakiko, Tokyo Source: 068 YOSHINORI NIWA [An interview article
with the artist] 7 January 2012. http://www.tokyo-source.com/interview.php?ts=68
xli Further detail on this project can be read on: http://reenactingpublicness.tumblr.com/
xlii Niwa Yoshinori, Reenacting Publicness | Translating Art Work Descriptions into 23 Different Lan-
guages – The Interventionist Projects of Yoshinori Niwa 2004 to 2012, My Book Service, Tokyo, 2013:
2014, p.448.
xliii Niwa Yoshinori and Ichihara Shoji, Transnational na Kojineizou Kijustujutsu. The title translates
as: Transnational Description Methodology of Personal Video, [A talk event] at NADiff Window Gal-
lery, Tokyo, 19 February 2012. Japanese transcript of the event is available on: http://www.nadiff.com/
Someone from
outside sometim
es
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fair_event/window19_niwa_report1.html
xliv This remark, although made from dissimilar political position, may also recall the former UK Con-
servative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s much-discussed statement to readers’ mind; ‘They are
casting their problems at society. And, you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual
men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and
people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after
our neighbours’. – in an interview in Women’s Own in 1987.
Although the artist says he is not so interested in her political view, he is ‘interested in her way of
reasoning.’ Niwa Yoshinori and Wakiya Sakiko, Tokyo Source: 068 YOSHINORI NIWA [An interview
article with the artist] 7 January 2012. http://www.tokyo-source.com/interview.php?ts=68
xlv Ibid.
xlvi The political scientist Benedict Anderson, who coined the notion of ‘imagined communities’,
proposed the definition of the nation as ‘an imagined political community – and imagined as both inher-
ently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never
know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the
image of their communion’. Furthermore, he articulates that problem here is that with nationalism, i.e.
conscious sense of belonging to the nation, is that ‘one tends unconsciously to hypostasise the existence
of Nationalism-with-a-big-N (rather as one might Age-with-a-capital-A) and then to classify ‘it’ as an
ideology. (Note that if everyone has an age, Age is merely an analytical expression.) It would, I think,
make things easier if one treated it as if it belonged with ‘kinship’ and ‘religion’, rather than with ‘liber-
alism’ or ‘fascism’’. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism, Verso, London / New York, 1983: 1991: 1996, p.5.
In this discussion of Niwa’s work in relation to the idea of nation, public and political ideologies, I
follow the path of this remark made by Anderson.
xlvii Julian Worrall, Nature, Publicness, Place: Towards a Relational Architecture in Eastern Promises:
Contemporary Architecture and Spatial Production in East Asia, MAK – Austrian Museum for Applied
Arts/Contemporary Art, Vienna; 5 June – 6 October 2013, pp. 95-96.
xlviii Antonio Negri, Art and Multitude, Polity Press, Cambridge / Oxford / Boston, p.108.
xlix Niwa Yoshinori, RUN & LEARN Projects & Art Guide: Philippines, Japan Foundation, Tokyo,
2015, p.31.
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目 次
世界で初めての社会主義国家、ロシア・ソビエト連邦社会主義共和国が
誕生してから100年が経過しようとしている
丹羽良徳
歴史のヒステリー、あるいは共産主義の真相
―「ルーマニアで社会主義者を胴上げする」とともに振り返る
エウジェン・ラデスク
政治学者、キュレーター、理論家、
ブカレスト・ビエンナーレ共同創設者、ブカレスト
ブカレスト日記 ― 悲しくも雨の降る寒い冬のブカレスト
丹羽良徳
果てしないアイデンティティー ― パフォーマンスによる文化摩擦の表明
ニーナ・堀崎・クリスティン
インディペンデント・キュレーター、ライター、ニューヨーク
日本日記 ― （ソビエトのことを）この社会よりはいいだろうと思って見てたけど、
実際いいことないわけだ
丹羽良徳
亡霊とともに生きる
エレーナ・ヤイチニコワ
インディペンデント・キュレーター、モスクワ
モスクワ日記 ― もちろん、ウラジーミル・レーニンとして
丹羽良徳
共産党員による革命的な革命の青写真
丹羽良徳
丹羽良徳は語る ― 諸作品について
丹羽良徳は語る’ ― 共産主義シリーズについて
言葉の幽スペクタ
霊 ― 丹羽良徳と〈共コモン
〉の範スペクトル
囲
本田江伊子
インディペンデント・キュレーター、ロンドン
丹羽良徳の哀しい笑顔とキッチュ
保坂健二朗
東京国立近代美術館主任研究員、東京
革命のあとで ― 共産主義・資本主義・ことのエコノミー
F. アツミ
編集／批評、アート・フィル
作品情報
丹羽良徳 略歴
寄稿者 略歴
176
178
182
184
188
190
192
194
198
201
204
212
215
218
220
222
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Art-Phil
Historically Historic Historical History of CommunismPublication Date: 14 September, 2015 (the first edition)
Organisation: Yoshinori NiwaContribution: Eiko Hoda, Elena Yaichnikova, Eugen Rădescu, F. Atsumi, Kenjiro Hosaka, Nina Horisaki-ChristenDesign: Neda FirfovaTranslation: Chelsea Elizabeth Birenberg, Chikako Ninomiya, Genouzono Sevin, Penguin Translation (Kumiko Kato, Verity Lane)Editing: Yoshinori Niwa, F. AtsumiPublisher: Art-Phil www.art-phil.com / [email protected]: Edel Assanti / LondonAcknowledgements: Yasuhiro Koma, Koji Yoshikawa (float), Jeremy Epstein (Edel Assanti), Chika Goto (UMISHIBAURA), Satsuki Teramoto (SANEI PRINTERY CO., LTD.)Print: SANEI PRINTERY CO., LTD., Tokyo, Japan
Copies with disorderly binding and missing pages are to be exchanged.No part of this publication maybe reproduced without the prior permission of the publisher.
