What does an artist do? What is the artist’s role in society? Those are a couple of big questions that Hiroko Kikuchi – artist, community designer, art program manager and co-principal of Creative Ecology Partners – will address in her talk at CSU Monterey Bay’s first Visual & Public Arts Visiting Artist Series of this semester.
And explanation is necessary for Kikuchi’s own work. It’s not straightforward art-on-the-wall stuff. It’s influenced by the Fluxus movement, a conflagration of creative folks in the 1960s who blended mediums and disclipines, from architecture and urban planning to music and visual art, over time and across multiple venues. Yoko Ono and Korean video artist Nam June Paik were proponents.
Kikuchi’s work deals with cultural identity, social change, community and children. She was part of a grassroots reconstruction effort after Japan’s 2011 Tohoku Earthquake. But she’s into rebuilding communities devasted by other means, too. One of her pivitol pieces was Sifting the Inner Belt, a year-long series of performances, potluck dinners, conversations and installations in Boston. The name is a reference to an “urban renewal” project in Boston that ended up wrecking neighborhoods and displacing families. That seeded her involvement in the 10-year-old National Bitter Melon Council, which purports to “create an alternative basis for community.”
“It is important to polish technical skills, but I want art students to question why they are creating what they are creating,” she writes from Japan. “Also, they want to ask themselves what an artist is and does, to make sure that each of us is aware what his/her role is in the society.”
This lecture, aimed at students but potentially invaluable for all of us, might be a good starting point to renew, in a constructive way, our approach to a new style of art that is actually not so new.
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