Immediacy of Image – Image of Immediacy. Live Media Art in Japan between Tradition and Hypermodernity. An historical and contemporary View

Abstract

In 1970, French philosopher Roland Barthes declared Japan as a model for a kind of system liberated from any (Western) signification-overload, at an important moment in time when art in the West as well as in the East began forming an alliance with technology. The emergence of the new medium video then became symptomatically representative of and a contributor to the changes that occurred. Its inherent function as an ‘electronic mirror’ unfolded, not least through its direct cultural use: it remains a symbol in the West because it is still regarded as subject-loaded and therefore exposed to the reproach of narcissism, whereas the East regards it as a signifier for the emptiness of symbols. In Japanese linguistic usage the word Art is understood in a wider sense of Life and the World in their multiplex manifestations. This is of course both traditional and ‘hyper-modern’, understood as an experiment, an attempt to say something new – just as, in the early days of the Gutai-Group, J.Yoshihara ordered to his pupils not to do anything that anybody else would do: an effort to go beyond the commonly accepted boundary of our daily reality, to think and to live in a different way.