Exhibition: Opening Reception – Sonic Speculations in the Documents of Postwar Japanese Art

Description

Exhibition Introduction by Lou Mallozzi.
Free and open to the public. No RSVP Required.

Sonic Speculations in the Documents of Postwar Japanese Art introduces a sound world little known outside Japan: Japanese artists working with sound in galleries and public spaces to interrogate artistic practice and social relations during the cultural and political upheavals of postwar Japan from the 1950s to 1970s. The radical artistic output of this period occurred in the complex context of Japan’s postwar economic boom, the failure of its student uprisings, the Mono-ha movement, Expo ’70, and numerous other factors. It is a period that remains virtually unexplored outside Japan, one that offers much to an increasingly global perspective in the field of the sonic arts.

Tomotaro Kaneko’s field is aesthetics and aural culture. He has organized the Japanese Art Sound Archive since 2017. His recent publications include Oto no Hon wo Yomou: Oto to Geijutsu wo Meguru Book Guide (Reading Books on Sound: A Guide to Writings on Sound and Art) (Nakanishiya Shuppan, 2024), “Arranging Sounds from Daily Life: Amateur Sound-Recording Contests and Audio Culture in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s” in Asian Sound Cultures: Voice, Noise, Sound, Technology (Routledge, 2023), and a Japanese translation of Jonathan Sterne’s book The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (tr. Nakagawa Katsushi, Kaneko Tomotaro, and Taniguchi Fumikazu, Inscript, 2015). 

Lou Mallozzi is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose works with sound, image, and language seek to destabilize our relationships with the familiar. His performances, installations, and interventions have been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, Radiorevolten Festival in Halle, TUBE Audio Art series Munich, and many others. Since 2019 he has been researching postwar Japanese artists’ use of non-musical sound and as a result was the guest editor and essayist for the series “Rekindled Present: Sound in Japanese Art 1950s-1970s” for the fall and winter 2024 issues of Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture (U. of California Press). He is on the faculty of the department of Art and Technology / Sound Practices at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.