Rehearsals, no. 1: Perhaps the theater is not revolutionary in itself; but have no doubts, it is a rehearsal of revolution!
What is a global art? Is it really possible, or merely a horizon to be approached, but never reached? In 1924, when the artists of the Japanese Dadaist-Constructivist group Mavo featured a directory of the world’s notable avant-garde magazines in the back of their eponymous journal, inserting themselves among the likes of The Hague’s De Stijl, Berlin’s Der Sturm, and Warsaw’s Blok, that gesture may or may not have been reciprocated. But it didn’t matter. All it took was for Mavo to project themselves into an international community in order to become part of that community. We know all too well from contemporary experience that even with the sophisticated communications technology we now have, international exchange is still circumscribed by language barriers, cultural differences, great firewalls, concentrations of capital, and simple disinterest. But at a time when the Covid-19 pandemic has revealed the extent of both our interconnectedness with and isolation from each other, and when the specter of a third world war looms larger than ever in recent memory, retreating into myopia or ethnocentric ressentiment is a failure of imagination.
While it may at first seem incongruous for a project grounded in curatorial studies, the title Rehearsals—A Journal for Globally Engaged Art is thus in a sense a Mavo-style announcement of our commitment to continuing an international conversation among peers. Perhaps a truly global art is not attainable in itself, but it is still worth striving for as a site for negotiating difference and otherness and establishing mutual understanding. The word rehearsal is rich in significance here. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, in its earliest English usage it meant “to give an account of, report, tell, narrate (a story)” before taking on the sense of “reiterating” or “repeating what has already been said or written.” Going back further, the root hearse refers to a “harrow” or “large rake for breaking up soil,” so that rehearsal has a connotation of turning over or digging up buried stories. Added to this is of course the now common sense of an exercise in preparation for a public performance, suggestive of a process of becoming. The visionary dramatist Augusto Boal expands the scope of this last sense when he writes in his 1974 book Theatre of the Oppressed that, while it may not immediately change the world, the liberatory theater he proposes is nevertheless “a rehearsal of revolution.”
All of these images reflect the ethos of the Graduate School of Global Arts at Tokyo University of the Arts, where students coming from a broad array of national and linguistic backgrounds investigate the mechanisms of historical memory, identity, the postcolonial condition, and globalization while researching interdisciplinary, socially engaged art practices. Specifically, the accounts in this first edition of Rehearsals emerge out of the curatorial practice course led by Fumihiko Sumitomo and myself during the 2021 school year. Doris Sommer’s The Work of Art in the World, which outlines the philosophical necessity for art in a utilitarian world, and proposes arts-based education as a means for increasing the cultural agency essential to healthy democracy, is one of the foundational texts of the course. Artists BuBu de la Madeleine and Akira Takayama kindly included course participants as research assistants on major exhibition projects—the former employing the mermaid as a figure that crosses boundaries of being, gender, and geography, and the latter commissioning writers from across the Asia Pacific to write poems in response to the propagandistic War Record Paintings of Japan’s imperialist era. Finally, Ade Darmawan of ruangrupa and Leonhard (Barto) Bartolomeus of Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media speak with us about how education drives the innovative activities of Indonesia’s art collectives.
Translation is a kind of rehearsal, in multiple senses, and any global project must engage with multiple levels of translation. Rehearsals will be a space for experiments in translation practice and theory.
The rehearsal is a model of an alternate approach to time and productivity; it is a deferral that nevertheless moves forward, a kind of productive unproductivity. Rehearsals will be a space that operates along different time scales to those that regulate contemporary life and the attention economy.
Appropriate to the incubator/laboratory of the university setting, Rehearsals will inhabit the in-between and the in-becoming; it will be a space for realization through play, for performance with reflection.
Rehearsals will be a space that is open to failure, to aborted expression, to trying again, to working over, to restating.
Rehearsals will be a space for recognizing the revolutions taking place in art around the world now and across historical epochs.
And for the record, when the Polish avant-garde group Blok featured a directory of international peers in a 1924 issue of their eponymous journal, Mavo was there alongside Brno’s Pásmo and Bucharest’s Contimporanul.
Andrew Maerkle
Tokyo, March 2022
with
Hyesu Cho
Hanna Hirakawa
Qiuyu Jin
Sanghae Kwon
Keisuke Nakaya
Xiyue Yan