Cleaning Service

One of the most interesting things in the Berlin North exhibition I saw on Sunday was Autonomy and Political Action, a video of interviews with figures in the Japanese art scene. Focused on independent non-profit grassroots cultural initiatives, the video was made by a mysterious collective called Reinigungsgesellschaft, which translates as 'Cleaning Service' or 'Purification Society'. They'd been to Osaka, where they'd found an art collective based, like themselves, on cleaning -- members literally did cleaning jobs in exchange for studio space.



But most of the interviews took place in Tokyo. There was one with Ozaki Tetsuya, publisher of Art It magazine, which I've already mentioned in Click Opera, another with Peter Bellars from Command N gallery, probably most famous for their Akihabara TV project which put art on the screens of the TV shops in Tokyo's Electric Town, and one with a Sean-Lennonish character called Roger McDonald from Arts Initiative Tokyo, a group of young curators with an office in Daikanyama. Roger seemed an interesting and likeable chap, so today I fired off an e mail suggesting some sort of Momus participation in his MAD programme when I'm in Tokyo later this year (Edgar Franz is currently setting up a Momus show at Club Que in Shimokitazawa sometime in September). MAD stands for 'Making Art Different', but I liked the way Roger grinned and called the name 'appropriate enough'.

A bit further ahead, on a bigger scale and another continent, I've been tentatively invited to appear at the American Institute of Graphic Arts' National Design Conference in Boston in September 2005. These approaches to AIT and AIGA (and neither is any more than that at present) signal two things -- my increasing feeling of affinity with the world of design and visual culture, and my desire to get more involved with institutions and teaching.



When I was 18 the thing I really wanted to be was a designer. I planned to go to Central Saint Martin's in London to study either graphic or industrial design. I sat in the art room at school devouring copies of Design magazine (it doesn't exist any more, even though design has since become a much more important factor in British life. Mission accomplished, perhaps?). At school I won prizes for drawing and photography, and self-identified as a visual person. Yet somehow the idea of plunging straight into London scared me, and my family, bookish people, put bookish pressure on me. So when Aberdeen University offered me a place studying literature I took it. I don't regret that, but it's interesting that even as a university student in Aberdeen, my culture was still visual. I tended to hang out with the kids at Gray's School of Art rather than my fellow literature studes, who (in my mind at least) all wore invisible ruff collars. King's College, where we did literature, was an ivy-clad medieval town. Gray's, in stark contrast, was a glass cube. At King's College you excavated sentences from books about other books. At Gray's you messed around all day with paint and video, listened to The Fall, and drew naked bodies. How cool was that?



To this day it's probably my biggest regret that I never went to art college. I'd still love to teach at one. I've already lectured at the Corcoran in Washington DC, at the media lab of the University of Lapland at Rovaniemi, and at Maidstone College of Art in Kent. My friends, to this day, tend to be fashion, art or design students, and the stuff I write, either in songs or for magazines, tends to revolve around issues that relate to 'design' in the broadest possible sense. If you run a course in Time-Based Media or Design and Ethics or Modernism, Utopia and the Inevitable Banana Skin at an art college anywhere from Tokyo to Timbuktu, mail me! I'm available! I'd be delighted to take you to the cleaners... culturally speaking, of course!