Out of Bounds: Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus
Sogetsu Contemporary Series © The Museum of Modern Art
Written by: Makenna Karas
Art is often experienced passively, as an elite enterprise that you are expected to tiptoe around with a hushed voice and hands safely secured behind your back. You can look, but you can’t touch. Japan Society’s recent exhibition “Out of Bounds: Japanese Women Artists in Fluxus” subverts this elitist ideology by inviting viewers to actively interact and engage with the pieces. It honors the groundbreaking achievements that Japanese female artists have contributed to the Fluxus, the avant-garde movement that has pushed the boundaries of art since the 1960s. Each with a focus on process rather than product, works from artists such as Shigeko Kubota, Yoko Ono, and Mieko Shiomi will be reactivated for audiences to explore in a showing that will run through January 21st at Japan Society in New York.
Yoko Ono, Bag Piece, 1964 © The Museum of Modern Art
The interactive element of the exhibition is most poignant in Ono’s ephemeral “Bag Piece”, which invites you to step inside of a large black bag, remove your clothing, and perform a small task of your choosing. Through the black cloth, you are able to see out, but no one is able to see you. It was originally performed in 1964 with the intent of cultivating an experience where race, sex, and gender are rendered utterly irrelevant. This leaves the participant to explore a space where their identity is free to exist outside of external factors. For an audience, watching a miscellaneous form move inside of the bag conjures up an experience of epistemological nihilism, exposing the feeling of trying, but never fully being able to understand the inner workings of another person.
Takako Saito, Hand chess, 1996 | Courtesy of boa-basedonart
Themes of engagement and play continue to appear with Saito’s “Hand Chess”, an installation that features an open hand with a game of chess resting in its palm. The pieces are perfectly set up with an array of open spaces resting before them, suggesting that there is a game to be played and moves to be made. While everything is still within the shot, you cannot help but feel that each piece is anything but fixed. It is suggestive of the constant change that is dependent upon the choices that we make in our own lives. This idea is central to the Fluxus movement, where art is something to be experienced and held, not passively examined from a distance. The meaning of art and life, the piece suggests, rests in the palms of our own hands.
Shigeko Kubota, Photographed by George Maciunas | Vagina Painting, performed during Perpetual Fluxfest, Cinematheque, 1965 © The Museum of Modern Art
Reigning as an icon of both video art and the Fluxus movement, Kubota’s “Vagina Painting” from 1965 further sharpens the edge of the exhibit. Pushing back against patriarchal ideas of women existing in art only as nude muses, Kubota dipped a paintbrush in red paint and tied it to her underwear, dragging it across a canvas with her swaying body. She becomes a living, breathing participant of art, and life, rather than a mere object of the male gaze. It was, and remains to be, a radical display of both feminist and artistic liberation, underscoring the overarching theme of active participation that the exhibition executes with poignant precision.
