Jennifer Clarke

Invisible Matters: Doing anthropology with art

in post-disaster Japan

I’ll spend six months in Sendai, Japan, exploring the role of artistic responses to the ‘triple disaster’ in creating alternatives to mainstream narratives. which are often apocalyptic, or in some sense defer reality and responsibility.

I am interested in the connections between creativity, corporeality, and spirituality, as a means to deal with ecological crisis, and radiation exposure, by working with wood, and plant-life, making visual work for collaborative and solo exhibition, in Japan, Taiwan, and Aberdeen 2015-16.

東日本大震災復興支援アートプロジェクト「 POSTCARDS TO JAPAN 」展巡回

Broadly, I am interested in the connections between creative practices, corporeality, and spirituality as a means to deal with ecological crisis, suffering, and invisible matters ,including radiation exposure.

This involves developing visual and theoretical work through both anthropological and artistic practices. The aim is to examine how material realities intersect with other logics, understood in terms of syncretism (Law, 2013), and considering the relationships between the disciplines understood as knowledge-forming practices. By this I mean approaching art and anthropology as existential commitments to the world; ways of knowing and imagining the world they provide a means of being ethically committed to learning from, and living through, other things, and other conceptual realities. I am particularly interested in how can art and anthropology engage with other sensibilities without translating them into secular, or scientific, conceptual categories.

Specifically I am interested in the Japanese concepts of gaman 我慢 する (endurance/patience) and ho-ben 便 (expediency/ ‘skilful means’), and how they are interrelated and translated, in relation to ecology and responsibility.I aim to explore how art and anthropology might translate these ideas across cultures and disciplines, tackling “the rupture between the real world, and our imagination of it” (Ingold, 2013)

我慢 する Gaman in Japanese responses to the disaster, this sense of enduring suffering is being used to justify the endurance of human created injustices, such as exposure to radiation. It originates in a negative Buddhist idea about self-attachment, but has transformed into a positive way of figuring suffering based on the idea of ‘self’ as a delusion. Unlike Stoic suffering, which is indifferent to life’s vicissitudes, this Buddhist approach means recognising suffering as integral part of life.嘘も方便 Uso-mo ho-ben (which I translate as “ a lie can also be expedient” ) has allowed the obfuscation of information and the absence of individual responsibility, as well as discrimination, all of which have material and corporeal implications.

.‘Painting my belly with borax’

• an anthropology with art, in the context of this project, pivoting on a series of collaborative exhibitions.

• Developing photography (including camera-less), drawing, and mixed media installation, continued interest in working with wood and trees, as metaphor as well as material.

• 生け花 ikebana (flower arranging) I will be learning from a hana-artist who works in public in the outsider-art tradition. My approach to ikebana is based on an understanding of it as both a "consolatory" practice and as decorative, symbolic, object, connected to Buddhist and Shinto commemorative practices.

• 木版画 through the studio practice of mokuhanga (wood cut prints), abstract images Matsushima, recently devastated by the tsunami.

• 体 (karada: body/health/organism/substance) an emerging theme involves exploring the boundaries of ‘the’ body/ my body, thinking about subjectivity ecologically, in the context of feminist traditions in contemporary art,and exploring real and imagined boundaries by considering ways of protecting bodies from invisible radiation

仙台市 Sendai before and after March 2011

References

Guattari, F. 2005 The Three Ecologies transl. I. Pindar & P. Sutton. London/New York: Continuum.Jelinek, A. 2013 This is Not Art Activism and Other ‘Not-Art’ London: Tauris & Co.Ingold, T. 2013 Dreaming of dragons: on the imagination of real life Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 19, 734-752Tanizaki, Junichiro 2001 [1933] In Praise of Shadows. London: Vintage BooksWhitehead, A. N. 1978 [1929 Process and Reality: an essay in cosmology New York: Free Press