On February 20, 1909, French newspaper Le Figaro printed a piece called “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” on its front page — written by a relatively-unknown 32 year-old Italian poet named F.T. Marinetti. (I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read the full text.) The bombastic and incendiary tract sent shock waves through the European artistic community in its call for a total upheaval of preexisting artistic convention. The poet advocated the demolition of museums, libraries, and traditional morality. And in the ruins, Marinetti wanted to foster a new aesthetic called Futurism that would embrace technology and the modern psychology of the machine age, echoed in the famous line that “a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine gun fire is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” Although Picasso’s cubist paintings had ushered in the age of modern art years before Marinetti’s writing, the Manifesto articulated the Modernist ethos as a philosophy for all artistic pursuit, and in the process, provided a high-energy clarion call for the subsequent century’s avant-garde artists, social visionaries, trouble-makers, and all-around punks.

One hundred years later, Marinetti’s Manifesto no longer succeeds in épater les bourgeois, and many of its core ideas — once intended to stab directly into the eye of the aging establishment — sound like romanticized justifications for powerful forces of reactionary evil. The Futurists’ push to “glorify war” sounded righteous in the nationalistic atmosphere of the early 20th century but almost instantly became abominable as millions were slaughtered in the trenches of the Great War. Marinetti’s misogyny (“contempt for women”) and racism (comparing factory sludge to the breast-milk of a Sudanese wet nurse, for example) have not accompanied the arc of progressive Western society. Even Marinetti’s cavalier espousal of “the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness” takes on a sinister ring as we seek to hose down the conflagration of the Bush presidency. Marinetti is often roundly dismissed as a proto-Fascist. True, he was an early supporter of Mussolini. And even if we counter that the poet eventually felt betrayed by his old pal when Fascist Italy took on a necrophilic infatuation with ancient Rome, you can still draw a straight line between the idea of Futurist “cleansing violence” to Nazi and Fascist Europe. And in our new battle against environmental depletion, Marinetti is again on the wrong side of history. He loves industrial waste and factory exhaust — his verse potential PR copy for the defenders of polluters on K Street.

The Manifesto does, however, contain sympathetic and benevolent ideas, but these have lost their impact for a totally opposite reason. Futurism now suffers from its success: the last century has been Marinetti’s. The Italian poet’s revolutionary embrace of automotive beauty is no longer novel in the shadow of dime-store hot-rod culture and widespread SUV mania. Marinetti’s preference for youth and novelty has morphed into the central philosophical engine to consumerist culture. Creative destruction is not just for poetry, but guided American capitalism to international dominance. Technology has permanently nestled into creative culture and can no longer be cleanly removed. The power-drill pulse of gabba music, for example, would surely overshadow the wildest ambitions of Russolo’s intonarumori. Like all great cultural innovators, Marinetti has seen his legacy suffer by being successfully subsumed. His angry manifesto now graces a million creased textbook pages — the kind of yellowed volumes he would want drowned in a diverted Venetian canal.

And like all prophets, he was completely wrong about the future. The Manifesto does not make specific predictions, but Marinetti tied the particulars of the Futurist aesthetic to his own historical circumstances. The idea of cacophonous technology is pure nostalgia: ancient dynamos may have been ear-piercing, but our cornucopia of truely life-integrated personal gadgets make no external sound at all. Marinetti heard the future as a bang, but the art of product design has offered a century of softer and softer whimpers. Our latest and greatest vision of the future wants technology to design itself out of the picture: eco-consciousness is poised to erase the modern era with the same scorn as Marinetti feels for classical times.

And yet, the Manifesto can still be a useful corrective for any contemporary artist and writer and thinker, with applicable lessons for this deeply Futurist-inspired future. Despite the familiarity of the Manifesto’s convictions, I still swoon in its romantic energy. Even in translation, Marinetti’s prose jabs against familiar rivals with the speed of a master pugilist, almost proto-gonzo. Thank god for the historical detail of good newspaper placement, or otherwise he could be easily charged with unbearable pretension and self-indulgence. But it is exactly Marinetti’s choice of romantic idealism over cynicism that allows the text to still feel alive today. His belief in belief comes in stark contrast to our sour generation, who protest equally at no one and everyone, spit at meaning, conviction, and hope. Ha, you say: these “suspect” virtues recently elected a president! That may be true, but they are still fundamentally unwelcome in the corrosive culture of cool that permeates every part of the youth culture experience. We are stuck in a strange corner: worshiping the romantic idealism of the past while immediately tearing down anyone attempting a modern analog.

The word “futurism” now regrettably refers mainly to Alvin Toffler types, sober armchair sociologists trying to predict coming waves of complex patterns for an audience of Sunday afternoon dreamers and long-term stock analysts. Marinetti had no aims on Nostradamus, but instead, aspired to be a kamikaze pilot nosediving towards stale convention, walking the walk, dreaming of poetic suicide — and yes, counting the days until “younger and stronger men” would throw him “in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts!” So what would Marinetti think of our rotting shell of a pop culture, still looking to its 1960s Old Masters, judging all success against the unrepeatable case studies of Lennon/McCartney, Zimmerman/Dylan, Keroauc, slouching against the canonical ideas of 20th century art under the legitimizing banner of post-modernist sampling and pastiche. Marinetti’s call for constant artistic progress still inspires! But alas, the irony: when we waste “the best part of our strength in a useless admiration of the past,” this time Marinetti is part of the problem. To love Marinetti is to bury him. You cannot just kill your idols, but you must also burn your “Kill Your Idols” T-shirt.

Calls for Neo-Futurism will go unheeded, and I doubt I will see a day when artistic manifestos are screamed to the world from the front pages of a major daily news publication. The Futurist Manifesto, in the end, never embodied an eternal, absolute, and ahistoric philosophy, able to be adopted afresh by every waking generation, but instead is merely a single, well-executed love poem to the future of Marinetti’s present — a grip of the razor edge and sharpened point, a vivid dream of routing a long list of gray demons and sagging enemies, an artistic mission to realize the perfect human community. Marinetti seems more charming in the haze of hindsight — a contemporary version would rightly feel like an obnoxious demagogue — but admit your admiration: who does not dream of standing on the world’s summit and launching once again an insolent challenge to the stars!

For reference, Patrick has the nice, bold voice, while Marxy has the high-pitched nasal voice and talks while he eats.

(The photo in the graphic above was taken in a Nara gift shop last year.)

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Sight unseen, Japan’s first truly contemporary art fair opens tonight. Scheduled on the same week as the Art Fair Tokyo, the 101 Tokyo Art Fair forces the megalopolis into its first Tokyo Art Week.

The world looks to Tokyo for what’s next, casually ignoring that what is there now consists of a tangled and underdeveloped infrastructure. It’s akin to many folks’ experience of moving to Tokyo and learning that it actually takes months to even get an internet connection installed. Compared to Basel and New York, Tokyo is a relative village of hovels when it comes to fine art as a commercial system.

On the macro scale, there is a severe lack of support unparalleled in other first world nations. No zaibatsu has a contemporary (or even modern) collection of note, and there is a complete lack of consumer awareness regarding fine art, though magazines like Brutus and Art-It have slowly been attempting to educate their readers about art history and the contemporary milieu. On the micro level, most Tokyo apartments lack adequate systems to actually hang art and real-estate agents charge exorbitant fees to plug holes in walls. There is a complete lack of a support network for emerging artists age 20 to 30 who more often than not leave their art careers in the dust in order to pursue a regular paycheck.

What has been present is an art fair that is more akin to a trade show than an art fair in both look and spirit. The Art Fair Tokyo would do well to look at the 101 interlopers as a source of inspiration. In lieu of a hodgepodge, non-curated mishmash of different genres, eras, and stuffed walls of the work that hasn’t sold for the year, 101 Tokyo offers another option. Namely, it’s a cultivated, highly curated sampling of exhibition spaces. Each gallery involved with 101 is permitted to show three artists maximum, and only new work is exhibited. The 101 Tokyo organizers are committed to educating their audience. They have gone as far as offering two separate seminars on art investing in Tokyo’s market in both English and Japanese, as well as a seminar on Collecting Art in the Context of Wealth Management.

There are other aspects of 101 Tokyo that are quite a change from the other gig in town. The fair is a stark contrast — the Director is an artist, and the crew running the fair is genuinely excited about visual work. All are young, a 32 year-old being the eldest, and they are decidedly international. 101 Tokyo stands as a series of events of inclusivity, something that must be cultivated if contemporary fine art as a commercial sector is to grow into something viable in Tokyo. They even have parties where you can shake your ass and even potentially get laid by someone your age whom you enjoy talking to about contemporary aesthetics with — more than can be said for elsewhere.

As purportedly over-invested in design and architecture as Tokyo is (which is debatable and a whole lot of lip service to say the least), contemporary fine art in Tokyo could really use a kick in the pants. With luck, 101 Tokyo will deliver a decent bruise.

I. The Past Battle

We had stayed up all night, my colleagues and I. But not as drowsy individuals slouching towards daylight, nor as a collection of human beings shaking hands, waiting to speak, and warming a particular vector in physical space. Spread across manifold longitudes, we took terminal shifts at our terminals, engaging in a two-handed clatter to further embellish a never-ending reel of electronic dialogue. We gladly assumed the Posture of Our Brand New Century: faces illuminated in a fluorescent glow, digits clicking out polyrhythms, sweaty palms soiling the plastic below.

At our distinct junction in the information network, productive discussion and debate almost immediately erupted into destructive warfare. Just like the riverside picnics at the beginning of the Civil War, onlookers multiplied to watch the bloody skirmish in a carnival spirit, judging the success of the posted materials by the numbers of passions inflamed. “Enemies” — who may have ultimately shared the same values and goals, but different priorities — took upon the task of endless rhetorical antagonism, and the obliqueness of sarcasm in the purely written exchange bred further hostility. Maugre our best intentions, these daily skirmishes always ended in scorched earth stalemate. Everyone hobbled away from the battleground, flags singed and elbows bruised.

The war of attrition ultimately decimated the rewards of creation and cerebration. Engaging debate was reduced to ongoing bickering. We lurched towards the reset button.

II. What We Learned

In retreat from the battle, one vision stood out against the sunset like Constantine’s Chi Rho at Saxa Rubra: for all the point scoring and fist pounding, we know absolutely nothing in absolute terms. Whether wearing the masks of “cultural relativists” or “structural determinists,” we should unite to reject dogma — the hard-headed notion infecting disparate ideologies that a single system of thought has already established the answers and our job is to merely punish the vulgarity of unbelievers.

(How can one write a manifesto without offering a fresh, more accurate set of dogmatic principles? Continue reading the First Manifesto of Néojaponisme!)

Dogma involves babysitting heirlooms of dubious value deep within a bunker of reinforced concrete. With so much territory left to explore and subtleties yet to be grasped, how can we subject ourselves to live in such a prison or be employed as one of the guards? We must hit the road, uncover trails, overturn rocks, traverse darkened alleyways, and open more forbidden chests than the members of the Olympic Pandora’s Boxing Team. The jury will always be out on most of our core issues, and we are hardly delusional enough to see ourselves as the final arbiters. Our role can only be the constant presentation of new evidence to the court.

With small numbers and narrow concerns, we will not be able to dislodge the craggy peaks of such hardened concepts as New, Old, Underground, Overground, East, West, Reality, and Fantasy. Instead, from henceforth we pledge to thoroughly explore the valleys of contradiction and inconsistency located in-between these mighty mountain ranges.

III. New/Old: Struggling to Find Novelty

After a lifetime of basking in the languid leisure of discursive entertainments, we have come upon crisis. Technological change continues to corrode the central pillars to our comprehension of art and culture. Once stable concepts like stardom, influence, popularity, and importance are now mere carapaces, no longer in parallel motion with their underlying assumptions.

We had been taught to bestow the banners of innovation and progress upon a tapered array of arts, which we later discovered had been already perfected by our elders. Despite all this talk about the speed of cultural and technological change in the new century, we continue to idolize a music and an ideology of anti-social sloth from fifty years prior. Dependable formats for espousing cultural revolution had slowly morphed into a franchise enterprise of petty crafts.

We flew out into the world believing that progress was inherent and never-ending. We too would inherit the titles and crowns of the previous generation by picking up where our older brothers left off. We followed our instilled desire to break down barriers and raze temples — only to see such destructive passion rot into frustration. Our forefathers had already cleared all the land and built their careers on the bountiful harvest. With pickaxes drawn and nothing to slice in half, our arms began to wither — the weapon hanging over our heads like the Sword of Damocles.

The crisis of our generation, or perhaps, every generation: novelty itself had become an expired idea. And yet we had been warned repeatedly that indulgence in retrospection could only lead to stagnation! “Do not turn back to view Sodom, children!” And yet, we are criticized for not being pillars of salt!

The burden of history has only intensified in our increased ability to consume the New and the Old, the Ancient and the Current, the Established and the Wobbly, equally and simultaneously. (Sorry, Father, in one click we can learn more about the obscure regional hits at your high school prom than you ever knew at the time.) The unconscious calculation fundamental to former ideas of cultural progress that “new automatically trumps old” is based on an expired assumption that we live in a fixed continuum of time.

Modern technology allows greater freedom from the chains of the fourth dimension, but such freedom creates severe competition from ghosts.

Although it seems tempting to demand a total annihilation of the stale cultural values of the past, the concept of scrap-and-build also seems quaintly archaic — as if the world revolves purely on change and not the choices of continuity. Our first goal must be to question contemporary assumptions and their incompatibility with the present before we advocate a program of erasure.

Our generation has no choice but to indulge in a revised futurism beyond the historically-anchored concept of Futurism. Uninhibited time-shifting and multi-directional time-travel are more advanced than constantly pushing the seams of forward progress. With no new territory, we cannot simply be the New Adventures of Lewis and Clark to etch our names in heavy tomes. We must move back and forth, side to side in our honest attempt to break new ground.

IV. Underground/Overground: Welcome Home

The intersections between the underground and the overground seen in the late 1960s and early 1990s should be considered historical flukes, perfect cultural storms of markets, consumers, and media convergence. They are not the inevitable results of cyclical history. Now that the information overload has vastly expanded the individuation and atomization of non-mainstream cultural sects, we have thrown permanent cultural control back to the lazy plurality of the middle. “Number One” is no longer an indicator of public reception as much as the top prize in a petty masculine battle between marketing budgets.

So in this era of self-marginalization, let us celebrate the return of the niche, the minor, the incomprehensible, and the minimal back to its small, hidden nest. We shall no longer lament the passing of an exceptional era when these strange morsels of culture from the fringes found favor in the masses. We weirdos may never climb the heights of our forebears, but let us enjoy the warmth and comfort of our secret caves and secret knocks.

V. East/West: Japan as International

Twelve-hundred words and we have yet to mention why we have congregated: Japan. But keeping in the spirit of exploratory re-imagination, let us no longer construe Japan in such a literal sense, solely as the island nation lying off the Eastern coast of the Asian continent. Japan is bigger than just Japan. Japan is metaphor and allegory, successful case study and cautionary example, tragedy and comedy, Eden and the Land of the Lotus Eaters. All these multiple narratives cannot possibly be correct at the same time, unless we remove Japan from its strict geographical denotation and explore a more abstracted Japan in conjunction with our normal surveillance of reality.

Lessons learned in past battles will guide our new explorations within Japanese society and culture, but let us use internal philosophies within Japan to justify our more expansive approach. We have always been attracted to a certain fringe of contemporary Japanese consumer society that pursues the mukokuseki (無国籍) — a “no nationality” framework of the modern world. In Tokyo, the following are all pedestrian: sips from a Mauritanian vanilla milk tea at a Continental cafe under the soothing pulse of Bossa Nova; glimpses at a kanji-coated article about a Hollywood-funded Hong Kong director; calls on a Korean phone and music on a Chinese-built, American-designed iPod as the Japanese train passes Belgian designer boutiques, German bakeries, and British pubs. Mukokuseki is a New Internationalism — an inclusive philosophy to unite the world on equal terms — more apt for today’s society than early attempts at the forced uniformity into primary colors and straight lines. Japan’s selfish neutrality between East, West, continental system, and island isolation allows such equidistant acceptance.

Even if we remain pinned down with the legal regulations of citizenship, the bureaucratic hustle of visas and master cards, we have already abandoned the psychological confines of the nation state. The Mukokuseki philosophy may have been born from a hyper-materialist, consumerist pursuit, but we shall test the potential of expanding the ideological core. And within this new view, we can no longer examine Japan without an eye to the rest of the world, and conversely, we must explore the rest of the world to keep an eye on Japan.

VI. Reality/Fantasy: Néo-Orientalisme vs. Néojaponisme

Oh, we do like Japan! There has been much controversy over this issue, but we proudly proclaim again that our criticisms come from a hope to see Japan protect its strengths and maximize its potential. We feel sorry for a conception of love hollowed out to command unambiguous and unconditional acceptance of the status quo. We certainly appreciate specific strengths of the Japanese system: excellent transportation, healthy food, public civility, product diversity, and visual proficiency. The question is whether these system outputs fully justify the less desirable elements running behind the scenes — monopoly, duopoly, oligopoly, organized crime, statism, patriarchy, feudalism, or worse. More importantly, are these dark forces integral to producing desired outputs or can they be cleanly removed like vestigial organs?

In the past, we may have been excessively militant about eradicating the fantastical myths that seem to overpower the realities of the Japanese nation.

As Japan blossoms in the international garden, a few cling to Néo-Orientalisme, a Romantic ideology updating the old lust towards submissive geisha and beautiful ukiyo-e with an obsession for Japan’s post-1980s cultural and technological accomplishments. Japan certainly provides the world with alternate social, economic, and political systems for serious consideration, but we should not make the mistake of believing that we have discovered a utopian parallel to our own society. If we really want to advocate certain policy triumphs in Japan for global betterment, we must fully understand the sometimes painful realities behind the working order.

So we will continue to harpoon fictional whales in the Neo-Orientalist pod, but we shall not charge the fields like a grand cavalry of humorless party-poopers. We must admit: the fantasy of Japan is often lovely in its own right. Man cannot live on data alone. By all means, we should celebrate the collective fantasy itself as exquisitely-rendered fantasy. Yes, we will continue to fight the nefarious use of fiction as a deceptive political tactic or cynical tool for economic gain, but we should hardly shun all poetic tributes to Japan in a narrow search for prose.

We have taken the name Néojaponisme as a convenient rubric for our pursuits. This is not a revival of that specific Japonisme visual design style of the 19th century (now often construed as “Neo-Japanesque”), but we do indeed identify ourselves as impudent inheritors of the original Japonisme spirit. We too are non-Japanese inspired by Japanese culture, and we too hope to advocate Japanese products and creative culture that may have been devalued or ignored in Japan. But let us correct the fundamental philosophy of the previous movement in two areas:

First, we expand the idea of Japonistic Japanese inspiration beyond pure visual aesthetics to a broader appreciation of myriad creative fields.

Second, we remove any Orientalisme or self-serving fantasies at the base of appreciation. We know thee not, Nanki-Poo and Yum-Yum: fall to thy prayers!

VII. We Want! We Don’t Want!

Starting afresh, we authors, editors, and supporters at Néojaponisme adopt a new stride to move forward and avoid the tarpits of previous sojourns.

1. We no longer want to hear the echoes of our own voices bouncing off the cocoon walls! We invite a host of authors and speakers, artists and thinkers, professors and students, enemies, compatriots, dissidents, and traitors to speak their mind in the virtual pages of our humble journal.
2. We shall bring the words and thoughts of the Japanese public sphere into the current lingua franca and shall aim to eventually bring our English thoughts into Japanese! Why rely on hearsay when you can hear what is actually being said?
3. We refuse to be buried within the steel of a fixed structure! Vaporize the essay! Rip the blog in half! Drown the podcast! Frisk the fisk! Long live the essay! Celebrate diversity and inconsistency! Format innovation should walk hand-in-hand with content innovation!
4. We shall not drown in a sea of text! Welcome, visuals. Hello, music. How are you doing today, video footage? Salut, holographic meta-tags.
5. We refuse to abandon the Net to hollow carbohydrates! Down with link collections! We must provide an alternative to the ever-growing number of Boing-Boingian cultural capsules masquerading as substantive intellectual sustenance! Enough pointing already, Netizens! Such a constant flow of sugary meme morsels will ruin your appetite. Who will sit down and read an essay when the Internet Gods provide hundreds of fragments and gimmicks in its place? We denounce this addiction to sweets and promise to provide protein to the hungry masses. Do children dream of being linkers or linkees?
6. We shall build up and promote the Future to fill the wreckage of our creative destruction in the Present! Nobody wants to hear our whining! If we tear up a poisonous oak, we must plant a fair elm in its place. For every discussion on the problems swimming in our pool, we must relay a glimmer of hope twinkling on the horizon.
7. We shall continue to fight the intrusion of business logics on our creative expressions! Eradicate tie-up advertorial by 2008! Stop creating hierarchies of cultural importance through advertising outlays! The only way to take pop culture seriously is to take pop culture apart, and sometimes dismantling does not please the dismantled.
8. We reject all forms of celebrity, idolization, and implicit social hierarchies! Fame is a symptom we confuse for the ailment. Like charisma, celebrity is not something possessed, but describes the aggregate response of others towards a specific individual. The social relations behind the phenomenon of celebrity are wholly negative: creating barriers and ranks between the like-minded.
9. We shall speak to a broader audience than this old ghetto! We are transmitting live from Tokyo, Japan to the rest of the globe! Slouching in our tender corner of the world, once again we point our queries to the stars! We hope you will be listening when fragments of answers ricochet off the atmosphere and return to our little transceiver.
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