Traveller’s Teacup

Today – Twas a beautiful Winter’s day in Tokyo. The sun was glistening and everybody was out trying to catch a ray or two.

My flatmate (Jenna) and I were no exception. We had decided to venture out into the metropolis to see everybody else and some art.

Over at Roppongi’s National Museum of Modern Art, we visited the retrospective show for Kayama Matazo. I had seen a flyer for the exhibit a week earlier, and had been eagerly anticipating the opening.  His work was of the traditional nihonga “Japanese-style” painting: ink, watercolour with natural pigments displayed on scroll and folding screens. This style of painting typically depicts birds, and nature scenes.

Being a master retrospective, there was definitely something else within his work. Within the paintings, sparkled an artist’s transcendence into the beauty, dynamism and nature of nature.

1000 cranes in flight across a full moon sky, a wolf pack resting in the prairie grasses,  a mountain stream flowing amongst hills burnt with the colours of Spring and Autumn. The Folding screens several metres across and hanging scrolls behind glass, can in no way be given justice with the images here.

Later, we cruised across to the Mori Art Museum, to see Chalo! India: an new era of Indian Art .The exhibition was inimitably India: a kaleidoscope of psychedelic colours, sounds and philosophic concepts. Paintings, sculpture, mixed media and film communicated messages about urban life, collectivism, invisibility, spirituality, globalisation, memory and technology.

The work that particularly interested me was The Euphoria Machine : Preliminary Reverse Engineering Field Laboratory by Raqs Media Collective Tokyo 2008.  It wasn’t so much the installation and use of audience interaction tools that I found engaging … it was the plaque on the wall describing the “movement”. I wrote down the details in hope of tracking down the artists, and in a scroogle search found them and it. Days earlier blogger Ian on the road had also been snagged. He had actually taken a photo of the plaque and had transcribed it in full on his site. Here’s a section:

Euphoria Machine is the name we give to the apparatus of desire and cognition that seeks to create a consensus within society for boundless energy and wealth, and effaces all the doubts and dissent about the ways in which this energy and wealth must be acquired.

Today, when there is a general perception of a systemic crisis of the global financial apparatus, fueled by a crisis of sentiment and the inverse of euphoria, a “reverse engineering experiment” on a machine that doesn’t quite seem to be working as well as it is supposed to, seems to be timely.

Sometime after the second world war, Edward Louis Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, a key strategist of war-time propaganda campaigns and the intellectual god-father of the advertising and public relations industry, applied a key discovery he had made during the fashioning of the war propaganda to the future success of Capitalism. The discovery was this – in no other war in Human History, had wars been fought in the name of democracy, peace and prosperity. They had been fought for land, for the expansion of a particular dynasty or ruling groups’ power, for religious zeal and for other concretely political purposes. The propaganda campaigns of the second world war however, successfully named a different kind of motivation for war – the desire for happiness, peace, prosperity and liberty. The identification of common virtues with the war machine proved to be a very successful motivator.

Once the war ended, Bernays realized that the same process could be replicated in “peacetime” – only this time, people must be made to realize that a contributing their labour to capital, or buying goods that they did not necessarily need (in order to keep the machine of capital running) could be done by identifying these acts with basic human drives for beauty, health, happiness, love, joy and contentment. So, people were told that they could feel a profound happiness, if they bought a shoe, or went to work in a call centre. This was a subtle but significant shift, in that it divorced a good from its function. A shoe, for instance was no longer something that covered and protected your feet, instead, it became a key to your personal well being. A job was no longer something you did to earn a living: it became a mark of your special identity as a human being. The building blocks of Capital were internalized as personal drives.

To us, this marriage between deep seated internal drives and the running of the bast impersonal network of a global economy is the secret of the Euphoria Machine…

…At earlier times, the excitement around the post-war economic boom in Japan, or the rise of the “Asian Tiger” economies in the Nineteen Eighties, or the current mania around the Chinese economy, as well as the earlier “boom” periods in transatlantic and western European economies are all instances of the Euphoria Machine at work.

The key product of the Euphoria Machine is processed perception. The perception that all “growth” is wonderful, that happiness can be indexed by GDP, that there is such as thing as an “Indian” Economy, and that this thing known as the “Indian Economy” is booming. Even the idea that there is such a thing known as “Indian” Art, a small but symbolically significant cog in the machine of the Indian Market in niche high value goods is booming. All these are products, and by products of the working of the Euphoria Machine.

The iteration of this Project at the Mori At Museum for the “Chalo! India” Exhibition takes the form of the processional elaboration of the “reverse engineering” of the Euphoria Machine at work. We start with the assumption that we know the machine exists. The projects intent is not to prove or demonstrate its existence. Its proofs are all around us, in plans, projections, advertisements, policy statements, blueprints, balance sheets, reports and so on.

Instead, the project aims to analyze its constituent parts, their operations and their interconnections in such a manner as to show how the “fuel” (human drives and desires) is combusted and how that energy runs the moving parts of the Machine so as to achieve the desired end….

So as it was, later, when we were standing on the “sky deck” of the Mori building (52 floors up), I was struck by Tokyo and her surrounding prefectures all around us.  Utterly bewildered. 400 hundred years ago, a fishing town, probably with cranes and bubbling brooks. Now, the biggest concrete city on earth, with 35 million people calling her “home”.

First Tokyo Eastside from skydeck….

then Tokyo Westside from skydeck…

It was at this instance that I thought about the our brave Indian comrades, and the experiment they were  dressing and reflecting back on their triangular patch of earth. For me, the art piece had a luminance, even the making of a movement, an upheaval. Sure its a think, but its worth asking what apparatuses will realign mass emotions in our future.

Konichiwa from Tokyo!!