Still from Idemitsu's video Hideo, It's Me, Mama, 1983. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art. work, when seen as a whole, forms a kind of away from her cultured and traditional fam­ and friends, she began to develop compli­ mandala. ily to study film at Columbia University in cated scripts and to hire professional actors New York. She subsequently lived for eight and production crews. In the context of Jap­ A !though Video Hiroba was short-lived as years in California, where she experimented anese video, her use of plots is her most Man organization-by the late 1970s the with both film and video, returning to Japan distinctive feature. group disbanded as its members pursued in time to be a founding member of Video Idemitsu spent nearly a decade creating radically different matters, from computer Hiroba. Her innovative video work began in videotapes on the "Great Mother" theme. In graphics to fiction to sculpture-several of California with her attempts to study the these she scrutinizes the emotional interac­ the original members are still important fig­ people around her, to penetrate their psy­ tions of mother-child relationships, reveal­ ures in Japanese video as artists, curators or chology and understand how they related to ing the underlying volatility of seemingly teachers. Fujiko Nakaya abandoned the others, by asking pairs of people to discuss placid households. Her fictive episodes form of political documentation exemplified spontaneously on camera their relationships might depict a spoiled daughter who inso­ by her Minamata videotape to concentrate or a specific psychological topic. When Ide­ lently picks up men but is incapable of leav­ on nonvideo "fog installations" that are mitsu returned to Japan she continued such ing her dispassionate professional mother, often used as settings for music and dance. video "studies" as part of an effort to come or a despondent artist painfully struggling In 1980 she founded Video Gallery Scan, to grips with her country's profoundly miso­ with identity, career and social conventions which has played a major role as a distribu­ gynist society. She explored women's con­ after she is forced into a marriage. In her tion service, an archive and a screening scious and unconscious behavior by record­ video narratives Idemitsu investigates fami­ studio for video in Tokyo. It has promoted ing their daily routines, taking advantage of ly discord to expose the constraints of social the medium through a newsletter, competi­ the you-are-there sense of reality that video conventions and the conflicts caused by liv­ tions and international festivals, most imparts and the apparent candidness of ing in a hybrid Japanese-and-Western cul­ recently in February 1992. people on camera. After first making low­ ture. She provides troubling observations, Mako Idemitsu was a rebel who broke budget collaborative projects with family never solutions. Art in America 125 Nakajima: L'Ame dubois, 1991, video installation at the Zekou Art Gallery, Paris. Idemitsu's videos take place in claustro­ psychological twist from the intruding pres­ planning large, world's-fair-like "expovi­ phobic rooms that represent ordinary urban ence of the monitor. sions," as was the case in Kobe in 1981, homes. In each room there is a prominently Tsukuba in 1985 and Nagoya in 1989 and '91. placed television set; its screen, displaying ost early video works in Japan (as He has also been a prominent teacher. When close-up shots of various family members, is M elsewhere) concentrated on creating Japanese art colleges in Tokyo and else­ a window into her characters' minds. In perceptual dislocation or studying the video­ where began to offer video courses in the Hideo, It's Me, Mama (1983), a son away at making process itself. The work of the '70s '80s, the teachers were from the Hiroba college is shown only on the television set artists most often consists of real-life events generation (then in their 40s or 50s), while kept on his mother's kitchen table. Both go fragmented or abstracted into sequences of their students tended to be 20 years youn­ about their daily lives: he studies, listens to moments, or well-crafted, carefully com­ ger. For that reason video in Japan has music on earphones, she putters in the posed images concerned with the two­ sometimes been described as jumping a gen­ kitchen, makes dinner for her husband. The dimensionality of the TV screen. Katsuhiro eration. The students took up editing pro­ mother puts the son's meals in front of the Yamaguchi's work is typical. His 1977 Ooi cesses, which were central in the U.S. in the television and he consumes them on and Environs, a portapak stroll around his '70s but only became possible in Japan in screen. home neighborhood, is colorized in distort­ the '80s. 3 With sound tracks based exclusively on ing, sometimes cotton-candy hues. In his Among the younger, post-Hiroba artists dialogue and ambient noise, Idemitsu's vid­ recent video sculptures, Yamaguchi is still are Masaki Fujihata and Hiroya Sakurai. eotapes are more like documentaries than preoccupied with light and movement; Sakurai, who studied with Yamaguchi, was dramas. This merger of fact and fiction is a unfortunately his work tends to resemble one of about 20 young videomakers who familiar aspect of conventional docudramas the kinetic light shows of the mid-'60s on St. organized their own group exhibitions in seen on Japanese television, but Idemitsu's Mark's Place. 1984, '85 and '86, under the name Video work (shown only in the typical video milieu But Yamaguchi has been very influential. Cocktail. He makes installations that in­ of galleries, museums and festivals) gains a Japanese civic leaders turn to him when clude nonnarrative video and thus can be 126 May 1992 .-- Hiroya Sakurai: TV Terrorist, 1987; installed at the second Australian Video Festival. Courtesy Video Gallery SCAN, Tokyo. viewed at the observer's own pace. One of Nakajima's objective is to heighten viewers' his best-known works is the 1987 installa­ awareness of ecological dilemmas, and tion TV Terrorist, shown in video festivals in Japan and Australia. At a time of terror­ there is conscious irony in the fact that he ism in Europe and the Middle East, Sakurai does so through high technology. raised questions about the mass media's manipulation of information and represen­ tation of violence. Of this work he wrote, "Why must I kill? Television told me. The other projects. In March of this year he in Japan has been produced by "visitors" to media as fiction blinds me, robs reality from presented an installation commissioned by the medium. Recognized abroad as one of me. I want to make everything blow NTT (Japan's AT&T); shown in Tokyo's the best Japanese videotapes ever made is a apart like a time bomb in my path." Spiral Building, the work was designed to 1982 collaboration between two men who Fujihata also showed with Video Cocktail; have the impact of virtual reality. Viewers had previously worked only peripherally he is known for his elegantly realized high­ experienced Fujihata's spatial environment with the medium. Shuntaro Tanikawa, a tech computer graphics rather than instal­ wearing infrared headphones, hearing poet, and Shuji Terayama, a playwright, had lations with political implications. In 1985, pleasant and unpleasant sounds triggered been working for more than 30 years with while working for the Sedic computer design by an invisible grid contained in a sloped an interdisciplinary group of artists· in group, he directed his whimsical and sophis­ vinyl floor. His intention was to create a Tokyo. Surrounding themselves with diverse ticated Maitreya, which combines a Bud­ fascinating aural and physical experience, talents, these longtime friends had taken up dhist text with images of proliferating geo­ and his work makes fun of technology at the various artistic means, both popular and metric objects. He then formed a small same time that it makes fun for the view­ underground, before they tried video. design company to integrate video and com­ er. In their Video Letter, made with the aid puter graphics, but now has moved on to Some of the most interesting video work of the artist-run video center Image Forum, Art in America 127 Dumb Type's 1987 performance/installation transformed into an electronic environment of karaoke bars, 4 fast-food restaurants and Pleasure Life is a hypothetical view of celebrity talk shows. the near future, while its 1990 pH looks at As Pleasure Life evolved and was pre­ impersonal, repressive aspects of megacity life. sented at various performance spaces, its original set-a white platform that also served as a screen for slide and video pro­ jections-was replaced by a more developed they used rudimentary consumer video at current popular culture. The group, now and larger set that resembles an integrated equipment to update a venerated literary consisting of architects, engineers, graphic circuit suffering from urban sprawl. It is a form, the collaborative renga (linked designers, choreographers, musicians, ac­ bristling grid consisting of 36 metal-frame verse). They exchanged electronic "let­ tors, painters, video artists, sculptors and pedestals supporting ordinary household ob­ ters"-monologues composed directly in computer programmers, was formed in 1984, jects such as room fans or glasses of water front of the recording camera with a thea­ when the founders were students at art along with TV sets depicting images of sky trical sense of timing and a poetic command school. Free-lance design work by members and grassy fields. In front of video images of calendar pages, the performers silently move among the pedestals to the accompaniment of mel­ lifluous yet commanding voices and TV­ jingle music on the videotape sound track (the production's lights, projections and sound are operated by computer).