Publications, Articles & Papers
The young artists featured here – a poet who composes on a typewriter, a musician who has built an entirely analogue recording studio, a photographer who shuns digital for manual vintage cameras and an artist who DJs on a gramophone – are all, in their different ways, reacting to digital culture's fast-forward momentum. Are they driven by nostalgia for a past they did not live though and in retreat from a present that makes them uneasy as it makes everything easier?
"The arts have the potential to show that the everyday can be reinvented and that the ordinary is usually extraordinary and that the extraordinary, can become part of or intervene and wonderfully interrupt everyday life."
Naomi Kashiwagi
Page 2, TILLTEUROPE: Creative Clash: Transforming Organisations with the Arts: Artistic Interventions to stimulate innovation, sustainability and inclusivity (2010)
http://creativeclash.squarespace.com/
Tillt Europe - Creative Clash is a European policy grouping of two intermediary organisations Tillt (Sweden) and c2+i (Spain), the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB) and the Brussels-based research and advisory company KEA. This grouping has been created in 2009 to promote cooperation and links between the arts and organisations (private and public). Tillt Europe – Creative Clash advocates interactions between the arts and organisations in the form of “artistic interventions’’.
Tillt Europe – Creative Clash promotes a special form of artistic interventions in organisations that is based on a mutual exchange and dialogues between people in their working environment and artists. “Intermediary organisations” act as a mediator between the world of art and the workplace (art mediator). They propose to artists and organisations (businesses, public services, associations) to interact with a view to remedy organisational challenges.
They are new forms of arts organisation that enable art to work at the centre of civil society whether in metropolitan centres or in rural areas. They lead the creativity and innovation that is the driver of economic and social recovery.
It is art in its capacity to subvert that is assigned the function to challenge routines, mindsets and traditional management processes. Artistic involvement enables organisation to evolve. In return this social interaction enables artists to renew and transform their vision and
artistic expressions. The organisation becomes the artists’ workshop.
The end result is not necessarily an artefact for display in a museum or an art gallery for instance but rather a new perception of the work environment and society which empowers people, enabling individual and collective self-fulfillment for the well being of organisations.
Informed by a major consultation earlier in the year, 'Achieving great art for everyone' sets out a 10-year vision with five ambitious goals at its heart. It argues for excellence, founded on diversity and innovation, and a new collaborative spirit to develop the arts over the long term, so they truly belong to everyone.
"The arts have the potential to show that the everyday can be reinvented and that the ordinary is usually extraordinary and that the extraordinary, can become part of or intervene and wonderfully interrupt everyday life."
Naomi Kashiwagi
Page 14, Achieving great art for everyone: A strategy for the arts (Arts Council England)
http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/our-work/achieving-great-art-everyone/
Old Media / New Work: Obsolete Technologies & Contemporary Art?Saturday 1st May 2010, 9am-6pm?Portland Hall, University of Westminster, 4-16 Little Titchfield St, London W1W 7UW
Contemporary art shows renewed interest in ‘lost’, ‘obsolete’, and ‘archaic’ visual media forms and the illusion-producing processes of the past—for example: the camera obscura, the magic lantern, stereoscopy, Victorian stage illusion, shadowgraphy, optical toys, the panorama and stylised period representations such as the imagery of spiritualism, automatic writing and early photographic techniques. A platform for engagement with such ‘old media’ has been provided by the Magic Lantern Society’s popular public lecture series, Professor Pepper’s Ghost, at the University of Westminster this year. As a further development, the conference ‘Old Media / New Work’ will concentrate on art and artists working with or around such ‘lost’ practices, in order to show, discuss, and explore such work in context of contemporary relevance and future possibilities.
http://archivingcultures.org/category/oldnew
Reinventing the Reel: Reclaiming the everyday
Synopsis
Reinventing the everyday and the functions of obsolete technologies has the potential to catalyse liminal experience in everyday life and contribute to the practice of reclaiming the everyday. By reinventing the everyday – recycling the redundant and that of the established order, reusing obsolete technologies and everyday objects, the curiosities and enchantments of the everyday can be revealed. The complexities of the everyday, the poetics qualities and potential for inventiveness in everyday life can contribute to an inquisitive quest for reclaiming the everyday.
The habitualized nature of everyday life has the potential to be transformed and illuminated by eradicating the everydayness of everyday life. With the impact of capitalism, consumerism and commoditisation, the dialectic of everyday life and liminal experience are becoming entwined and diluted. By subverting these social and economic systems together with critiquing this symbiotic paradoxical tension, the possibility to defamiliarize and reveal inherent enchantments and reconfigurations is potentially attainable through artistic practice. It is possible for the liminal and everyday to coexist compatibly and that the boundaries between the two, to become less defined and for there to be new ways of seeing the practice of everyday life.
Naomi Kashiwagi
http://archivingcultures.org/oldnew/74
Progress Reports: art in an era of diversity (INIVA)
Interview
Sally Lai: I wanted to select you as I know that you haven't worked with Iniva before or shown extensively in London. Also, when we were on a selection panel for an arts council scheme we started to have interesting conversations about diversity. What made you interested in taking part in this show?
Naomi Kashiwagi: I think it is important to have a platform for cultural diversity across the arts, and this is an exemplary organisation. Iniva not only reflects culturally diverse artistic activity in Britain, but also internationally. I feel that this will be a new and appropriate context to show my work that will also serve to catalyse and offer new interpretations of it. In my work, I look for unintended and innovative conceptual or visual connections between objects, ideas and functions, and in this way I explore the potential of things beyond their prescribed uses.
SL: Would you say that there are specific cultural influences on your work?
NK: This bringing together of incongruous things can be related to my cultural identity, in which two cultures, British and Japanese, are brought together.
SL: I know that you have lived in, and travelled to, many different places, including Venice. I am interested in 'inter-cultural' as opposed to 'multicultural'. Do you find either of these terms useful?
NK: Being brought up in two cultures, the inter-cultural manifests itself in my art practice and also in my routines and everyday approaches. I think multiculturaI describes society, but for me inter-cultural is about how we interact with other cultures and how multiculturalism becomes a part of our everyday life without it being ‘other’1. I am interested in everyday and liminal experience and I think this is because I have experienced Japanese and Western modes of life simultaneously. Neither culture relates to the idea of the ‘other’, and the interaction of the two allows me to see ways of being beyond what is conventional. The habitual ‘everydayness’ of everyday life has the potential to be transformed and illuminated.
SL: You mentioned the transformation of the everyday. Can you say more about that and also the way in which your work challenges and explores connections between art, music and language?
NK: I often look at interrelationships between art, music and language – all modes of communication. I have used pianos and wind-up gramophones as drawing instruments, typewriters as musical instruments and violin bows as paint brushes. I’m interested in creating a new language out of existing materials and objects, in order to transform perceptions. This relates to my experience of combining English and Japanese in ways that don’t relate to the respective languages. The way I work is also a reflection of my identity, because two distinct and recognisable cultures are brought together, to create something entirely new that resonates with my innate cultural make-up.
SL: Who do you discuss ideas and your work with?
NK: A diverse range of artists, musicians, architects, poets and dancers. They include Pavel Buchler (artist), Tom Phillips (artist, writer, musician), Michael Anthony Barnes-Wynters (graphic artist and curator), Kostas Arvanitis (lecturer in museology), Greg Keefe (lecturer in sustainable architecture), Vik Kaushal (architect), Mary Griffiths (curator and artist), Almagul Menlibayeva (artist), Eunhye Hwang (performance and sound artist), Dinu Li (artist) and Gruff Rhys (musician).
SL: That’s a wide range of different disciplines. I’ve also seen your work in a variety of locations – in a gallery but also in a swimming baths and a library.
?NK: I find it interesting talking to people about ideas and values and how they manifest them within their work and everyday life, consciously and subconsciously. I find resonances with people who have similar value systems, who are excited by the same things and experience similar cultural and social difficulties and frustrations, but who work in different ways.
SL: How much is the work about process? I like the way that you also have pieces which are recordings of the sounds from the process of creating the drawings, meaning that the drawing is experienced in a different way.
NK: I am interested in ritual and process and this could stem from Japanese ritualistic processes that are inherent in all aspects of life, from arranging flowers to drinking tea, or preparing food, or drawing a single horizontal line. I like to start off with an idea and develop it without having a preconceived idea of what form it will take. I also attend to the things that are often disregarded, for example the sound of a drawing being made.
An exhibition in book form, this showcase of the best of drawing now features one hundred works by almost fifty artists including Susan Hauptman, Paul Noble, Jeff Gabel, Tracey Emin, Jane Harris, Julia Fish, Cornelia Parker and Jerwood Drawing Prize winner Sarah Woodfine. Carefully 'curated' with many new drawings specifically commissioned for the volume, the book also includes an Introduction by the Editors which lays out the themes underpinning this diverse and exciting selection of work. With a revival of interest in drawing in recent years, "Drawing Now" is a timely collection of the work of artists intent on giving a contemporary twist to the most traditional of forms.
Ones to Watch: Naomi Kashiwagi
The Manchester-based performance artist kicks off our new series on up-and-coming cultural folk – and performs with Warehouse Project DJ Matthew Krysko as part of Saturday’s Manchester Weekender
Naomi Kashiwagi is admittedly a little fixated on the old and the useless. Dusty gramophones, abandoned typewriters and busted violin bows find new life in her art, which takes in everything from sound and composition to language, drawing and collage.
The 28-year-old artist is at an interesting point in her career. With a 2008 Best of Manchester award under her belt, and her work increasingly featured in exhibitions around the world, you’d be forgiven for expecting her to be one of those continent-hopping artists who seem intent on world domination before the age of 40. It’s something of a relief to find, instead, a very down-to-earth young woman who calmly says that she’s enjoying a fertile time in her art practice, but that she finds her day job at the Whitworth every bit as fullfilling.
And it must be said that the work in question occupies a fascinating place at the intersection of several disciplines. She describes what she does as ‘reinventing the everyday – reusing obsolete technologies and objects to reveal the curiostities and enchantments of the everyday that are inherently strange… I want to help people realise that there are different ways of seeing the world.’
Kashiwagi sees her half-Japanese, half-English cultural identity reflected in her desire to bring seemingly disparate things together. A paint brush and a violin bow don’t appear to have much in common, but they’re both made of wood and horsehair. Why not use a violin bow to paint with, then? That’s the way her mind works, and listening to her describe her creative process, its hard not to catch her enthusiasm for finding unexpected new uses for old things.
Past projects have included a musical score to be played on typewriters, and since 2005 she’s been using gramophones in unusual ways – replacing the needle with a compass leg and drawing on paper with it, for example, or applying 78rpm electrical tape to old 78s of Dixieland Jazz, gospel and classical music to create random patterns of sound.
Her gramophone DJ skills will come to the forefront in a collaboration with Warehouse Project resident Matthew Krysko for the Manchester Weekender. Kashiwagi says the two met on a collaborative project at the Whitworth and became curious about each other’s work – and, as she explains, its hard to imagine two more different ways of playing a record: ‘I play with no headphones and, because of the electrical tape and the sounds of the different records blending together, you can’t predict what it’s going to be like,’ she says. ‘What Krysko does is so much more controlled. We’ll both be learning from each other.’
Her interest in music stretches back to a youth spent playing classical piano and flute, but it was an art teacher at Halifax’s Crossley Heath Grammar School who first showed Kashiwagi what life as an artist had to offer. Getting to know artist Tom Phillips was also pivotal, as he became an ongoing source of advice and inspiration. Having benefitted so much from her own mentors, it’s only fitting that securing similar support for others should now figure prominently in Kashiwagi’s life – she hold an education and outreach role at the Whitworth, as well as acting as Associate Lecturer in Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Having a day job in art brings other benefits. ‘It gives you more creative autonomy. It seems ideal to just make art all the time, but you have to worry about the financial considerations much more: “oh, this piece sold, so I’ll do more like that,”’ she says. ‘This way, I am making a living doing something I love, but I also have the freedom to experiment with different things.’
Kashiwagi is a passionate advocate of her adopted hometown. ‘People are so open to ideas in Manchester,’ she says. She tells a story about the time she had an idea for an audio performance in the General Readers Room at Central Library. She figured it was a no-hoper. ‘It felt quite cheeky even asking at the time. You’re meant to be quiet in the library!’
But to her surprise, staff there loved the idea and she went on to create it. ‘That’s the realisation that being here gives you,’ she says. ‘you can make things happen.’
http://www.creativetourist.com/features/ones-to-watch-naomi-kashiwagi