The country behind the mirror

I've joined 'Dogtime' art school department @ Gerrit Rietveld Academie to a Japan excursion: this is a small text for the catalogue of the DOGTIME graduation show 2015.

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The country behind the mirror.

(breath in...) 

Japan is a test, a challenge to think the unthinkable, a place where meaning is finally banished. Paradise, indeed, for our great students of signs. [i] 

I have visited Japan well over ten times. To indicate and share those experiences is not that simple. What to tell about the colour Red, to a person who has never seen any colour?

“The impossibility of anticipating the unknown” was the title of my short preparation talk for the participants of the DOGtime trip to Japan. I could only hope that to a person who had never been to Tokyo, my ‘explanation’ of the city would be like a poem of an imaginary world, like an addition to the Invisible Cities of Italo Calvino.

So I referred to Japan as ‘the country behind the mirror’, and said they might discover, behind the skin-deep shiny surface of modern capitalism, the land of upside-down and inside-out. And discover that the Japanese wil insist that traffic lights use the colours red and blue, instead of red and green, even though the colours used in Japanse traffic lights are indentical to ours.

Fundamental and rigid definitions in the West can be voids in Japan, 'Maai' (間合い) , an engagement distance..

I told the students that in this void of normality they might discover a point of view from which they might discover the otherwise invisible self-explanatory, the ‘normal’, the ‘I’ ; like a fish, becoming aware of the water in which it is submerged and subsequently becoming aware that he is actually, a fish.

In my talk to the students, I located Japan in ‘the far east’, but this topographical map is dismissible; 'The Far East' is most of all an area on a western cultural map: it exists somewhere in the 'Orient', it's a dimension of the western ‘I’:

'The Far East' is an exotic mirror; it mirrors everything except of who and what is in front of it and the confrontation with this awkward self-deflection invites us, sometimes forces us, to consider the possibility of anticipating an unknown I.

(breath out...) 

Geert Mul

June 2015.

[i] ‘Paraphrased from Edmund White’s review on Roland Barthes his book ‘The Empire of Signs’ (1983). The original sentence reads: “For Barthes Japan is a test, a challenge to think the unthinkable, a place where meaning is finally banished. Paradise, indeed, for the great student of signs.”