Indeterminacy and Eastern Cultural Traditions in 1970s Japanese Video

The idea of the unfinished, articulated as indeterminacy, held great currency in 1960s and 1970s Euro-American art practices. Western artists often cited eastern traditions such as Zen as inspirational for their new open-ended process-based practices from performance and conceptual practices to early media practices. Video was developed in Japan as a technology at this time, but articulated as an artistic medium in English language discourse that was subsequently adopted and adapted by the Japanese art scene. As it was then theorized in Japanese language discourse of the 1970s and early 1980s, this focus on process and media lent itself to association with native Japanese cultural sources ranging from literati renku and renga to the popular Edo-period entertainment utsushi-e and more generalized cultural references such as the importance of “ma” and non-sequential time as a catalyst for contingency and generation. This talk will consider works by three members of the 1970s collective Video Hiroba through this lens to consider how these associations framed video as a medium generally, and framed Japanese video pioneers specifically at this early moment of the post-modern move from object to process. What does it mean for eastern culture to be placed as a herald of the future of contemporary artistic approaches, how does this influence the reception of work by Japanese practitioners, and how do these references function when artworks circulate internationally?