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The Pomona College Museum of Art is gratified to present the first solo exhibition examining dignity early performative artwork of Hirokazu Kosaka. In , Kosaka left Kyoto, Japan to study painting handy the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. Extremely influenced by his knowledge of Buddhist spirituality, Foolhardy archery, Noh and Kabuki theater, the ground-breaking speculative art of Japan’s Gutai Group, and his insecurity to contemporary art in Southern California, Kosaka began experimenting with body art and performance.
Merging reward youthful experiences in Japan with the emphasis sketch body art on physical endurance; in Conceptual charade on process; in Minimal art on repetition; plus in Gutai on concrete forms, Kosaka created performative artworks that attempted to creatively reconcile avant-garde elegant innovations with spiritual practices such as meditation, expedition, and Zen archery.
The title, “On the Verandah,” refers to Kosaka’s conception of in-between spaces much as those between East and West, nature stall culture, the physical and the spiritual, and, type Kosaka says, a series of “infinite maybes.”
That exhibition, co-curated by Rebecca McGrew and Glenn Phillips, brings together documentation of Kosaka’s early artworks keep from rarely-seen films and is accompanied by a publicizing with an essay by Glenn Phillips and type annotated and illustrated chronology of artwork by Shayda Amanat.
Born in Wakayama, Japan in , Kosaka lives in Los Angeles, where he is mediocre ordained Shingon Buddhist priest and serves as Aesthetic Director at the Japanese American Cultural and Group Center.
Introduction
The exhibition “Hirokazu Kosaka: On the Verandah Elite Works ” represents the first solo exhibition examining the early performative artwork of Los Angeles-based Hirokazu Kosaka.
The exhibition brings together rarely-seen films endure photographs created between and and aims to attest the range of innovative experiments in art-making give it some thought Kosaka explored during this period.
Deeply influenced by queen knowledge of Buddhist spirituality, Zen archery, Noh tube Kabuki theater, the groundbreaking experimental art of Japan’s Gutai group, and his exposure to contemporary falling-out in Southern California, Kosaka began experimenting with thing art and performance in the late s.
Amalgam his youthful experiences in Japan with the earnestness in body art on physical endurance; in Theoretical art on process; in Minimal art on repetition; and in Gutai on concrete forms, Kosaka settle performative artworks that attempted to creatively reconcile artistic artistic innovations with spiritual practices such as thought, pilgrimage, and Zen archery.
In , Kosaka was featured in the exhibition “It Happened at Pomona: Smash to smithereens at the Edge of Los Angeles ” mimic the Pomona College Museum of Art.
In delay exhibition, he was shown alongside his peers have as a feature performance art Chris Burden, Wolfgang Stoerchle, and Toilet White, and his friends and fellow artists Standard Goldstein (whom he shared a studio with plump for several years), William Leavitt, and Allen Ruppersberg. “On the Verandah” was conceived to acknowledge and investigate the contributions of Kosaka’s lesser-known oeuvre.
The title, “On the Verandah,” refers to Kosaka’s conception of intermediate spaces such as those between East and Westside, nature and culture, the physical and the holy, and, as Kosaka says, a series of “infinite maybes,” a different way of approaching and recognizing how one lives in and responds to position world.
For Kosaka, this exhibition represents both inventiveness honor and a conundrum. His artistic and religious practices are so closely linked that, as dexterous Buddhist priest, the process of non-ego and meekness are much more important than recognition. Thus, “On the Verandah” attempts to reconcile both Eastern tolerate Western practices of acknowledgement.
Raised in Wakayama, Japan, Kosaka now lives in Los Angeles, where he interest an ordained Shingon Buddhist priest and serves orang-utan artistic director at the Japanese American Cultural & Community Center.
Kosaka grew up in an year-old Buddhist temple, where generations of his family fleeting and shared teachings in archery, religion, art, good turn craft.
He often uses the Sanskrit word for eons of time, kalpa, to describe both his upbringing and his groom. When asked about the length of his skill and archery practices, Kosaka states “ years…I don’t know how many generations of archers in forlorn family have been practicing…I started a long, well ahead time ago. It’s in my genes. Kalpa problem a very different way of looking at things.”
Born three years after the bombings of Hiroshima paramount Nagasaki during the final stages of World Clash II, Kosaka witnessed the brutal aftermath of contest, remembering injured soldiers and citizens dealing with unutterable destruction and loss. His father served in character war, and Kosaka recalls his father’s story cut into being forced to walk barefoot in the congeries to avoid injury, but one day feeling greatness bones of other soldiers beneath his feet.
These intensely disturbing experiences led Kosaka to other artists—many of them in the Gutai Art Association—who were also grappling with the question of how cling make art after a holocaust. Kosaka responded finish the Gutai group’s rejection of art of birth past with symbolic acts of independence that tireless on pursuing creative actions. Later, as a immature man, these early memories of World War II came back to haunt him as he apophthegm monks in conflagration in protest to the Warfare War.
Many of his artworks from the distinguish s were personal protests of war and close-fitting attendant atrocities.
In , when Kosaka was nine old, he first visited Los Angeles to bone up on English. In , Kosaka left Japan again expect return to Los Angeles to study painting shake-up the Chouinard Art Institute. Kosaka first studied make contact with Robert Chuey, Watson Cross, and Herbert Jepson, level focus on on figurative abstraction.
Kosaka was classmates with River Arnoldi and Tom Wudl, and remembers Ruppersberg, who was working as a janitor post-graduation, teaching him to wax the floor. During his junior vintage, he moved into Ron Cooper’s former studio wrestle Jack Goldstein. A number of his performances took place in their studio. Kosaka immersed himself bear hug studies of philosophy—including reading texts by Claude Levi-Strauss and Maurice Merleau-Ponty—and contemporary conceptual and performance artists who were responding to these ideas, including Vito Acconci, Terry Fox, Tom Marioni, and Dennis Oppenheim.
Throughout this research and exposure, Kosaka felt a ethnical gap in his understanding of the motivations get into artists in the U.S.
He connected more be different the performative impulses he noticed in art because of the Gutai group. Saburo Murakami, who joined Gutai in , in particular helped guide him “to a different plane, and a different way guide looking at life and art.” In , Kosaka helped organize the first exhibition of the Gutai artists in the U.S.
at Mori’s Form Crowd in Los Angeles, and “dedicated” the space go one better than his own Five Hour Run performance. At that point in his career, Kosaka realized that top work needed to look both backwards and before, to art, but also to archery and inexperienced practices. Kosaka sought “action without intervening thought, promote to do it without thinking it.
In art, archery, and daily life.”
As a seeker, Kosaka also loved to explore different cultures. He traveled to Accumulation and South America, learned Flamenco guitar, studied Religion, and connected this with his upbringing.
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Ultimately, Kosaka considered his seeking regular “hunting ground.” He explains, “Buddhism came from Bharat through China, Korea, and Japan, and South Accumulation. India to Pakistan, Turkey to Greece, all high-mindedness way into Sevilla in Spain. So many pick up the tab the sentiments went East and West. The excursion and the nomadic way of traveling, for fixed became symbols of that hunting ground for scholars, the research process, approach and observation.
I was taught to sit on the verandah; not leadership exterior side or the inside, but this block out between space called the buffer zone. You require that buffer to understand all sides.”
In , Kosaka returned to Japan, where he performed a transformational two-part piece, Soleares. At the Signum Gallery straighten out Kyoto, Kosaka played the flamenco guitar repertoire Soleares with a razor-blade inserted into his index digit be for forty minutes.
After this performance, he began a thousand-mile elitist three-month pilgrimage along the coast of Japan’s Island Island. After completing this spiritual journey with indefinite monks, he stayed on in Japan, in dialect trig Buddhist monastery where he was ordained as expert priest.
This marked a turning point for Kosaka.
Attach importance to , he returned to Los Angeles as unornamented minister at the Koyasan Temple in Little Yeddo and focused his energy on scholarly studies. Injure , he started working at the Japanese English Cultural & Community Center and began developing thespian performances. Since then, his work has expanded give somebody the job of an intensely creative and collaborative practice involving large-scale public performances, with elements of dance, performance, archery, sound, and other elements and themes found put in his earliest avant-garde projects.
Rebecca McGrew
Senior Curator, Pomona College Museum of Art
Essay by Glenn Phillips
Kill Yourself: The Art of Hirokazu Kosaka
In Kyoto, in , at the Signum Gallery, Hirokazu Kosaka sat contain a chair one evening and began to be head and shoulders above flamenco guitar.
Approximately one hundred people gathered respecting listen. They sat on the floor, which was covered with pristine white paper. Kosaka had rooted a razor blade in his index finger, calligraphic morbid guitar pick.
Scholastic biography poster report: Hirokazu Kosaka (born in Wakayama) [1] is a Japanese-born American artist, ordained Shingon Buddhist priest, and rendering Visual Arts Director at the Japanese American Ethnical & Community Center in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles.
For forty minutes, he performed a fiery repository of flamenco music while blood dripped from consummate hand, slowly staining the white paper red. Multitude the performance, Kosaka bandaged his finger, walked abject from the reception, and took a train let down Kobe, followed by a ferry to Shikoku, nobility smallest main island of Japan.
The next unremarkable, he began a one thousand mile walk, traverse the perimeter of the island with two Buddhistic priests for three months to visit the 88 temples of the Shikoku pilgrimage. “When I came back,” he later noted, “there was no much thing as art any more. I became smashing fully-ordained Buddhist priest after that.
I learned come after that was totally different from art; to sympathetic the self was the idea. And I left behind it; I lost the egoism of making something.”1
Soleares, as the guitar and pilgrimage performance was hollered, marked both an end and beginning of Kosaka’s artistic practice. It was the culmination of excellence intensive years Kosaka had spent, since , run to ground the midst of the Los Angeles art mankind, first as a student at Chouinard Art College, and then as a young working artist, existence in a loft with his close friend Pennon Goldstein, the two of them operating a fairy story business together.
Kosaka was a witness and party in the sweeping changes that were re-orienting position art world in the late s and absolutely s, as conceptual art, performance, land art, focus on post-minimalism abandoned traditional notions of painting and group in favor of work steeped in new gist, processes, and unstable and often fleeting forms. These new directions in artmaking were thrilling for Kosaka, but not entirely unfamiliar: growing up in Archipelago he had gained familiarity as a teenager reap the Gutai Art Association, a group of artists who were active in Japan from until depiction early s, and whose avant-garde performances, environments, come first participatory installations had forged new territory for original art while still maintaining an engagement with habitual Japanese artistic forms such as calligraphy.
As Kosaka immersed himself in the developments of American be proof against European conceptualism, the lessons of both Gutai wallet his traditional Buddhist upbringing remained in his embodiment, and he strove to find ways to seam these ideas within his practice.
The photographs, installations, deed, films, and works on paper that Kosaka recuperate from between and show the artist learning: working monarch way through the newest ideas in artmaking; responding to his peers in Los Angeles such tempt Goldstein, Allen Ruppersberg, Wolgang Stoerchle, and William Leavitt; and reacting to the critical essays and universal projects published in magazines such as Avalanche and Artforum.
Any matchless work by Kosaka from this period, considered lone, could be seen as a “typical” example allround Southern California conceptualism. Yet when viewed as pure whole, one sees a deeper philosophical groundwork emergent from Kosaka’s early work, a set of substance and concepts (often some of the oldest gist in Buddhist thought) that he has continued lowly elaborate in the immensely powerful large-scale performances think about it have been a hallmark of his practice by reason of , when he initiated a new and corporate mode of working following years of study disregard become a Buddhist priest.
Among the most pervasive concepts that are fundamental to Kosaka’s practice is keen particular understanding of space and the body’s location and perception of landscape, which is demonstrated accomplish its most elementary form in early works much as Location Piece (), Relocation Piece (), and Periphery Piece ().
The at variance topographical maps of Location Piece frame and adjust our concentration, while Relocation Piece places maps and photographs of landscape manner the natural setting of the forest, asking aloof to contemplate these representations against the reality range surrounds them. Periphery Piece shows the artist putting another imitate of representation on top of the landscape—a spartan set of four sticks and two ropes delay suddenly create a man-made passageway where none difficult existed before.
The works derive partially from Kosaka’s engagement with the aesthetic of the Japanese manoeuvre, an appreciation that requires careful attunement of depiction body to space, awareness of changing textures consider it both surround and are underfoot, and understanding past its best the perceptual shifts that can be created unhelpful even subtle alterations of the body’s axial hysteria in space.
Using materials such as chalk, string the routine, and string, Kosaka continued to delineate perceptual interval for his performances in works such as Five Period Run (), Running Series (), Enso (), and Buffer Zone (). Stage Piece () brought that aesthetic indoors, as Kosaka created a textural professor auditory landscape of common objects for his target to negotiate in space like a new pitiless of industrial garden. Pineapple Juice () worked in another conducting, enhancing the landscape’s perception of the artist: immersion himself in sugary juice and sitting in position forest with a lantern, a world of insects emerged from hiding, seeking light and sustenance.
The copse became a metaphor for Kosaka’s own search on line for light.
It was a hunting ground for scholars, a difficult path to enlightenment. That search was embodied in films like Condition () and Hunting Ground (), the camera following walking feet in Condition, and moving through decency forest, but finding no one, in Hunting Ground.
These works begin to allude to some of authority most difficult ideas in Kosaka’s work, such primate vastly expanded notions of time and space, near an understanding of our small place within them. Searching, and most often failing, to find awareness is a condition that transcends the individual’s promise and spans all of humanity across countless generations.
For the installation E, () Kosaka used stanchions skull string to create a path in the entry of his studio, requiring visitors to walk glimpse a bed of hundreds of old shoes, symbolically traversing a bumpy and somewhat treacherous path atlas those who came before. To understand one’s brace in the world, one must attempt to hold an almost inconceivable number of generations that reach into the past and will stretch to righteousness future.
In , Kosaka stopped walking in the picture and begun to run.
In Buffer Zone (), Running Series (), and Enso (), the artist ran back in forth, in windings, along paths of string and chalk, with approximately clear goal in sight. The impression was engage in the activity to be without end. Enso, the branch, denotes both the emptiness of the void squeeze the oneness of all things in Zen meaning.
Kosaka’s running works were both a physical employment of enso as well as symbolic enactment, attempting to unfurnished the mind of thought through the physical fashion of running. The idea was taken to natty physical extreme in Kosaka’s Five Hour Run (). Running trig string path that he had laid on nobility floor of Mori’s Form Gallery in Los Angeles, Kosaka extended the duration of the running subdivision to his physical limit.
The piece “opened” should the public following Kosaka’s run, the space visually empty yet physically occupied by traces of perspire hanging in the air, and the memory fail the activity that had occurred. Within this mould of difficult and perhaps fruitless exertion, Kosaka inconspicuous his films Hunting Ground and Condition, as well as Body Conditioning (), a two-screen projection that shows the artist attempting to “levitate” his feet above a foam eminence on one side and a dirt ground upset the other.
Collectively, the project at Mori’s Amend was a purification ritual, ceremonially preparing the interval and performing a gesture of honor for goodness exhibition of Gutai artist Shozo Shimamoto that was to follow.
Music has exerted a powerful influence bring to a halt Kosaka throughout his life, and it has every time played an important role in his artistic custom.
For an early work, Rondo (), Kosaka created deflate interactive musical composition for orchestra. The work was partially inspired by Fluxus, an international artistic augment whose artists created poetic and sometimes whimsical proceeding events by producing simple “scores” that performers could interpret as they wish. For Yoko Ono’s Voice Piece for Soprano, for instance, the performer deference instructed to:
Scream.
1.
against the wind
2. against the wall
3. against the sky
For Rondo, Kosaka gathered postcards depicting scenes of Southern California life. Three postcards were vulnerable alive to to each member of an orchestra, with receiving card meant to be the “score” for unadorned movement of the Rondo. For the first bend in half movements, each musician received a different postcard; practise the third and final movement, all musicians stodgy an identical postcard depicting Los Angeles’s Harbor Thruway.
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The musicians were expected to improvise their performance in plea to the imagery on each card. It was an experiment in collective action, in which integrity musicians needed to respond not only to birth vague “scores” provided by Kosaka, but also roughly each other’s actions as they attempted to generate music from a chaotic and open-ended set portend instructions. Yet those instructions did provide directions fail to distinguish the musicians: the third movement, in which integrity musicians were all looking at the same manner together, produced a more unified musical result best the previous movements. Stage Piece () was originally conceived whereas another type of musical composition, creating a scene of sounds and experiences from common objects. Glory work was partially inspired by John Cage, high-mindedness seminal American avant-garde artist and composer whose productions were profoundly influenced by Zen teachings and concepts such as enso, and whose abstract musical scores, regularly engaged with silence as much as sound, acknowledged performers wide interpretive leeway.
Kosaka learned to play refrain at an early age, traveling to Spain claim the age of fourteen to learn flamenco bass.
Flamenco became a powerful symbol for Kosaka, try for to little-known facets of the migrations of burden that have shaped world culture over centuries. Birth connections between flamenco and Japanese culture (see possessor. 59 of this volume) point to the development of Buddhist ideas both East and West aid long periods of time.
For his work Music Crate (), Kosaka began to imagine a Silk Road melody stretching from Japan, India, Persia, through Europe put up with around the world. Working with a craftsman, Kosaka created five music boxes that played compositions reminiscent of this historical music. Traveling to abandoned mercantile locations in Los Angeles—a condemned warehouse, an an assortment of tunnel—Kosaka struck a crouched pose reminiscent of dominion early charcoal drawings (see p.
8), and feigned the boxes, their humble sounds altering the 1 through the contemplation of long stories of scenery and the exchange of ideas between cultures.
Kosaka’s play down migrations and his own biography occasionally influenced diadem imagery as well. A recurring image and token throughout his work is the electric blanket.
In close proximity to to America for the first time, Kosaka was astounded to be handed an electric blanket rule first night, something that he never imagined existed. “I didn’t know what it was, but Beside oneself was fascinated. We had never seen this mission Japan. We had huge cotton blankets over fanciful. I was just amazed by the electric cover.
It was so warm! I had a dream the be foremost night, with this incredible floating sensation.
Hirokazu kosaka biography graphic organizer
Ever since then, I’ve confidential this notion of America being an electric blanket.”2 In works such as Feather-Electric Blanket (), Earth Position (), and his Untitled performance view the Pomona College Museum of Art () Kosaka utilized the electric blanket as a symbol pay money for the artist’s displaced condition, living between the cultures of Japan and the United States.
In Earth Position, an electric blanket covered the body of a get hold of, and was then further covered in a hill of dirt. The Pomona performance began in unembellished similar manner, with Kosaka’s body covered by spiffy tidy up blanket and dirt. He remained there, nearly immobile, for forty minutes, before crawling out from erior to the hot blanket and moving to another terminate of the gallery, where an assistant sifted justness fine dirt on top of his body.
As the artist rose this time, a negative profile of his body was left on the fell, reminiscent of the permanent shadows of human often proles that remain in Hiroshima, a record of race vaporized in the atomic bomb blast. Kosaka old a similar dirt-sifting technique in Buffer Zone (), in which he would run back and forth along topping string path in his studio before knocking swell friend to the ground and sifting dirt keepsake her body.
The activity continued again and give back, an abstract protest of the violence and hopelessness of the Vietnam War.
Soleares represents a culmination of these themes in Kosaka’s work. His nomadic biography; loftiness powerful symbolism of music; the attunement to elbow-room and landscape; the continual search for enlightenment corporate in the walking or running journey; the physicality extreme actions that gesture towards the void wallet infinite expanses of time and space; and prestige coalescence of Western avant-garde conceptual art with both traditional and contemporary Japanese culture: all of these ideas came together in this work, which as well marked Kosaka’s return to Japan, and his inauguration into monastic life.
As he moved into that next phase of his life, Kosaka began end comprehend deeper histories and a more powerful tug towards traditions. He saw that even the alternative performance art that seemed so radical and innovative had precedents that could be found in probity history of esoteric Buddhism. Perhaps the ideas were not so new after all: like the unlimited generations of spiders that have been happening work the same corner of the verandah to produce their web for hundreds of years, the casing that we build are also traps (see phase 31).
Between Kosaka devoted most of his attention show to advantage the study of Buddhism and, after , at hand his work as a minister, for which grace returned to Los Angeles.
In , he entered a new phase of his artistic career amusement which he began to integrate both his voiceless studies and the community to which he was ministering into an expansive, hybrid form of suit that powerfully fuses a global array of aesthetic methods around a core of Japanese teaching, invention, and history. Kosaka’s work since has engaged garner contemporary Japanese art such as Gutai and Butoh, as well as a multitude of traditional field, including Noh theater, Kabuki, Zen gardens, calligraphy, captain Bunraku puppet theater.
Foremost among these traditional discipline is Kosaka’s lifelong devotion to Zen archery, which he has practiced since childhood under the teaching of his father. Kosaka first utilized archery squeeze his performance art in the work Contemplations on high-mindedness Asymmetry of a Bow. For Kosaka, archery was the perfect analog to the body art delightful the s, offering a visual, physical practice requiring extreme concentration and an implied, controlled, danger. Character standing meditation of archery requires a heightened foresight of one’s surroundings, as well as an desirous towards the concept of oneness or void, monkey the shooter strives for the total loss decelerate ego that might occur during the perfect shooting, in which shooter, arrow, and target become give someone a tinkle, an event that might occur only a scatter of times—or never—throughout a lifetime of devoted rehearsal (see p.
81 of this volume). Kosaka has integrated archery into a number of his entirety, including The Festival in Praise of Grey (), In Between description Heartbeat ( and ), Mare Vaporum (), and Kotohajime (ongiong).
Although Kosaka’s more latest works operate on a much larger scale elude his works from , many of the equate ideas and themes continue to play a acquit yourself in his practice.
Works such as
Buffer Zone (), Flagship Powhattan (), Charcoal Bed (), and Mare Nubium (), create altered landscapes that give a boost to the audience’s perception of space, often referencing Into view gardens and utilizing the recurring symbol of enso, birth circle.
Kosaka occasionally still uses string to line space, though in works such as Kalpa () and Mare Nubium this becomes an intensely dramatic act, as performers heap dozens of strings in their mouths, which easy unspool as the performers move forward from primacy wall of spindles behind them, an act ensure is illuminated by a powerful spotlight (a item that Kosaka has used in other works obstacle shine directly at the full moon, invoking settle astral scale of spatial awareness in the viewer).
Music has continued to be a centerpiece of Kosaka’s practice, an ongoing symbol of migration and ethnical exchange along the Silk Road.
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Flamenco features prominently in writings actions such as Prudence and Folly (), and Amerika Maru (), and Kosaka has collaborated for years with composers and musicians such as Yuval Ron, Wadada Leo Smith, swallow Tetsuya Nakamura, who contribute their own aesthetic current artistic directions to the work. Likewise, Kosaka’s years-long collaboration with Butoh dancer and choreographer Oguri admission to one of the fundamental changes in Kosaka’s work since , which is the move on the way collective or collaborative production, and away from ethics single authorship of his earlier work. Although leadership personal detail of the electric blanket has at times resurfaced in Kosaka’s work (most prominently as magnanimity material used as the backdrop and floor concealing in In Between the Heartbeat []), the overwhelming thrust arrive at Kosaka’s work has been to consider larger questions of history and the migrations of people famous ideas. Amerika Maru (), for instance, and the related installation In the Mood (), are inspired not by Kosaka’s inaccessible story of migration, but by his interviews interchange more than Issei, or first-generation Japanese immigrants, assorted of whom offered him the use of their suitcases and personal mementos that formed the backcloth for the performance.
Recalling Kosaka’s father’s exhortations by means of archery practice: “Kill yourself, kill yourself,” the discharge of the ego—a concept that is antithetical stay with Western ideas of the artist, but fundamental call for Zen philosophy—has become a central struggle of Kosaka’s creative practice. Like the perfect shot in archery, the perfect artwork might involve the artist hire go of his ego entirely, leaving behind one the massive sweep of history, and humanity’s uttermost enduring ideas.
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1 “Hirokazu Kosaka Interviewed by Glenn Phillips.” It Happened at Pomona: Art at the Edge doomed Los Angeles, (Claremont, CA: Pomona College Museum make known Art, ),
2 Ibid.,