10. Mieko Shiomi: Spatial Poem (1965–75)

“Write a word (or words) on the enclosed card and place it somewhere.”

With this simple instruction, titled Spatial Poem No. 1 (Word Event) and sent out to an international mailing list of over a hundred Fluxus affiliates, Mieko (née Chieko) Shiomi launched her Spatial Poem project in 1965. Ultimately, Spatial Poem encompassed nine scores composed across a decade of Shiomi’s practice and engaged more than 230 collaborators who reported their realizations of the artist’s instructions back to her by mail from twenty-six different countries (fig. 10.1). Spatial Poem is an apt emblem and metaphor of the global network of intermedial, experimental notation practices that began to formalize in the mid-1960s and continued to expand into the 1970s and beyond. Its structure integrated the composition, execution, and documentation of individual scores and their performance into a single holistic project of a performative-conceptual nature. Shiomi’s project was rare among experimental notation practices of the time for its attempt to actually gather and compare diverse realizations.

Incredibly ambitious in scope by the time it concluded, Spatial Poem’s origins were urgently practical. In spring 1965, after a busy season rushing between avant-garde events at various concert halls and artist lofts in New York, Shiomi grew concerned with the limitations of space and time that hampered the full integration of her artistic community. As a response to the “inconvenience of communication,”¹ as the artist put it, Shiomi suggested to leading Fluxus organizer George Maciunas “a do-it-yourself work that takes place on the whole earth as its stage, on which many people living away from me can interpret the event in their own ways and send me their reports.”² Enthusiastic about the idea, Maciunas offered to contribute his design acumen to the project’s documentation. The fascinating dialogue between the two artists is captured in the Archive section of this chapter; it includes Shiomi’s sensitive warnings to Maciunas about his increasingly “autocratic” management of Fluxus affairs.

Shiomi launched Word Event in New York and orchestrated the remaining eight poems from her home in Okayama and later from Osaka, cities far from Tokyo, the center of the Japanese avant-garde. Tied to these provincial sites due to caregiving responsibilities, she found that “the mailbox outside was a marvelous window open toward the world.”³ Furthermore, Shiomi understood the liberating potential of reframing the everyday through the notion of the event. “We have a ton of obligations, and tasks, and many, many trivial things,” she has said. “But when you look at things as an event, your mind is free from that kind of task. It’s very free and released.”⁴ Shiomi has identified her practice as being rooted in the experience of loss and having to make do with very little, a sanguine outlook undeniably linked to her experience during World War II Japan, specifically the trauma of her childhood possessions being destroyed in a 1945 air raid.

When Shiomi first turned to writing text scores as a young artist in the early 1960s, she initially referred to them as “action poems.” These pieces—including Mirror Piece, Wind Music, and Shadow Piece (all 1963)—encouraged a poetically flexible interpretation of language that might reframe and transform the reader’s experience of everyday phenomena, particularly in the natural world. Shiomi began this work following her musicology studies at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (also known as Geidai, now called Tokyo University of the Arts), where she wrote a thesis on the twelve-tone technique of Anton Webern and performed works by Arnold Schoenberg. Crucially during that time, she formed the groundbreaking Group Ongaku (Group Music, ca. 1959–62) with peers Takehisa Kosugi, Shūkō Mizuno, Mikio Tojima, Yumiko Tanno, Gen’ichi Tsuge, and Yasunao Tone in order to probe the boundaries of music through collective improvisation. Shiomi’s formative work with Group Ongaku laid the foundation for her individual exploration of the dynamics between the singular event and its simultaneous occurrence with other events. In an essay published in the September 1960 issue of Nijisseiki buyō (Twentieth-Century Dance), featuring a number of statements by Group Ongaku members, Shiomi advocated a practice of “sonic collage,” which embraces the chance dialogue created by simultaneous yet independently derived sounds.⁵ In March 1962, she presented her new experimental practice in a solo concert at Okayama Cultural Center Hall, including works realized from graphic scores along with examples of what she considered “action music”: walking around the stage, piling up matchboxes, and saying numbers at random.

As Shiomi’s trajectory illustrates, transpacific conversations between American and Japanese figures in the postwar experimental music, performance, and intermedial visual art worlds that The Scores Project highlights were virtually immediate, thereby troubling the idea that aesthetic innovations could be traced to any one center. Following signal encounters with the artists Toshi Ichiyanagi and Nam June Paik, Shiomi became involved in Fluxus in 1963. When she first met Paik, at a concert at Tokyo’s Sogetsu Hall in 1963, he proclaimed that she was already a Fluxus artist. Indeed, Maciunas was by that time familiar with her work, as Ichiyanagi (who had recently returned to Japan after seven years in New York, some of which were spent studying with John Cage) had sent several of Shiomi’s scores to Maciunas in January 1962, before the official launch of Fluxus. In the same period of Shiomi’s first meeting with Paik, she visited Yoko Ono’s apartment in Tokyo, where she encountered scores by George Brecht, and began to think of her evolving notational language in relation to the Fluxus concept of the event.

Another important moment of exchange that Shiomi likely witnessed during this period was An Exhibition of World Graphic Scores, mounted in November 1962 by Ichiyanagi and Kuniharu Akiyama at Tokyo’s Minami Gallery on the occasion of Cage and David Tudor’s first visit to Japan. By December 1963, Maciunas had in hand Shiomi’s complete works and was planning a Fluxus edition. Encouraged by Akiyama and Maciunas, with whom Shiomi was now in regular contact, she traveled with Shigeko Kubota on a tourist visa to New York City in the summer of 1964 to immerse herself in the Fluxus milieu. Her complete works were ultimately published by Fluxus that year under the name Chieko Shiomi (she had yet to take on the name Mieko) and the title Events and Games (1964).

Shiomi’s Spatial Poem series adapted concepts from her early action poems, relating simple actions to highly subjective notions of time and space. Through nine different instructions, interpreters were invited to think about and respond to concepts and actions of direction, falling, shadows, opening, orbiting, sound, wind, and disappearance. Although the scores clearly relate to the genre of Fluxus events, Shiomi hewed to the conceptual framework of poetry, drawing from a longstanding investment in literature that had preceded her advanced studies in music. Additionally, she requested that participants’ reports include the specific place and/or time of the action’s completion. Anticipating this framework was Shiomi’s score Direction Music for Fingers (1964), which she performed in New York as part of a solo presentation in October 1964 at Washington Square Gallery, coinciding with a yearlong “Perpetual Fluxfest” (figs. 10.2, 10.3).

The piece not only was a response to her growing concerns about the abiding spatiotemporal limitations on creative activity but also anticipated her discovery of a broader solution to this problem in Spatial Poem. For Direction Music for Fingers, Shiomi invited participants to write a real or imagined location on a card and then attach the card to a string, the other end of which was tied to one of her fingers. The participant then affixed the card to a point reaching toward the chosen location. Peter Moore’s photograph of the event shows Allan Kaprow consulting a map of Manhattan while Shiomi, arms raised, sits at the center of a new, provisional spatial network (see fig. 10.3). Taking up again the notion of direction for Spatial Poem No. 2 (Direction Event) (1965), she explained her poetic intent in a letter to Maciunas: “I meant ‘direction’ not only direction on compass[;] in this poem it is rather the state of consciousness of the relation between yourself and [the] outside world” (fig. 10.4).⁶

Mostly from afar, Shiomi collaborated with Maciunas to create records of the first four Spatial Poem events in the form of object editions in line with the aesthetics of ongoing Fluxus publishing endeavors. Each edition plays cleverly with the given poem’s concept, inviting quasi-performative engagement as the reader inspects it. We are invited to delicately maneuver tiny paper flags (fig. 10.5), unfurl an enormous paper map (fig. 10.6), let fall the pages of a wacky calendar (fig. 10.7), and gently thread a roll of microfilm through a handheld viewer (fig. 10.8). Like many Fluxus affiliates, Shiomi sometimes protested Maciunas’s overbearing designs, but, in general, the two artists sustained a productive long-distance collaboration until Maciunas’s chronic illness made this impossible. (Shiomi had wanted him ultimately to design collective reports for all nine poems.)

Spatial Poem transforms the utopian ideal of the indeterminate or open-form work’s potential for infinite possibility into a carefully documented program that has been preserved for later cross-examination. Indeed for Shiomi, the opportunity to compare multifarious interpretations is the most compelling aspect of composing open-ended scores. In 1973 she reflected, “The reports returned by various people are very diverse and full of individuality—some poetic, some realistic or cynical, some artificial, some spontaneous, etc. When they are all collected together, they present a fantastic panorama of human attitudes.”⁷ The resources included in this chapter enable you to compare reports sent to Shiomi by dozens of wide-ranging figures, some of whom are not typically associated with Fluxus: John Baldessari, stanley brouwn, Carolyn Brown, Christo, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Allen Ginsberg, Daria Halprin, Richard Hamilton, Sylvester Houédard, Douglas Huebler, Ray Johnson, Vytautas Landsbergis, György Ligeti, Jonas Mekas, Brian O’Doherty, Robin Page, Betty Parsons, Carolee Schneemann, Paul Thek, Peter Van Riper, Tom Wesselmann, Robert Whitman, Jean-Pierre Wilhelm, La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela, among many others.

Through Spatial Poem, Shiomi acted as the conductor of a worldwide action-music composition, illuminating in intimate detail an international social network of likeminded artists allied in a search for sympathetic collaborators and audiences with whom to share their vanguard work. Although Spatial Poem is sometimes characterized as a form of mail art, Shiomi did not consider it so, since her focus was on the simultaneity of actions performed rather than her administration of the project. More notable, perhaps, is the way Spatial Poem adopts as its very method the Fluxus notion of intermedia, or rather (as the artist has more recently described it) “transmedia”—an artistic practice in which “the original concept is carried into subsequent works even though the form of expression is different each time.”⁸

After completing the final piece, Spatial Poem No. 9, appropriately titled Disappearing Event (1975), Shiomi self-published an artist’s book chronicling the vast array of responses she had received over the years. The book’s cover and a related promotional postcard feature the titles of each event arrayed alongside a graphically abstracted photograph of the Earth closely resembling the famous “Blue Marble” image taken by the crew of Apollo 17 in 1972, acknowledging that Spatial Poem had indeed unfolded alongside an expanding global ecological consciousness among artists and intellectuals of the period (figs. 10.9, 10.10). Imagining the Fluxus network in parallel with our solar system, Shiomi has remarked, “I have been at the position of Pluto. But living in a remote place enabled me to see the outline of Fluxus rather clearly.”⁹ The experience of reading through Shiomi’s compilation of Spatial Poem scores recalls George Brecht’s conviction that an event score may be either performed or simply observed or imagined. Impressively, the works guaranteed both outcomes: first, in the actual performances conducted by members of Shiomi’s network, and second, in our mental visualization of each performance as we read the gathered reports.

Concluding in 1975, Spatial Poem may be understood as an emblematic final bookend to more than two decades of collective experimentations with performance notations. For the artist, however, its audience was potentially much greater. “I would like to think,” Shiomi has written, that “the collective anonymous poem can be preserved as a monument for the people of the 30th century—if we survive that long.”¹⁰

Notes

1. Mieko Shiomi, “Mieko Shiomi,” Art and Artists 8, no. 7 (1973): 42. ↩︎

2. Mieko Shiomi, quoted in Kakinuma Toshie and Takeuchi Nao, “Oral History Interview with Shiomi Mieko,” 1 December 2014, trans. Reiko Tomii, Archival Research Center, Kyoto University of Arts, https://www.kcua.ac.jp/arc/ar/shiomi_eg_1/. ↩︎

3. Mieko Shiomi, quoted in Michelle Elligott, “Interview with Artist Mieko Shiomi: Chapter 3,” 27 October 2011, Post: Notes on Modern & Contemporary Art around the Globe, website of the Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP) program at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, https://post.at.moma.org/content_items/22-interview-with-shiomi-mieko. ↩︎

4. Mieko Shiomi, quoted in Sally Kawamura, “Appreciating the Incidental: Mieko Shiomi’s ‘Events,’” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 19, no. 3 (November 2009): 313. ↩︎

5. Chieko [Mieko] Shiomi, “Onkyō no obuje no sokkyōteki korāju: Onkyō to no taiwa” (The Improvisational Collage of Sound Objects: A Dialog of Sound), Nijisseiki buyō 5 (1 September 1960): 17–23, cited in William Marotti, “Challenge to Music: The Music Group’s Sonic Politics,” in Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies, ed. Benjamin Piekut (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 126. ↩︎

6. Mieko Shiomi to George Maciunas, ca. 1965, Jean Brown Papers, 1916–1995 (bulk 1958–1985), 890164 and 2016.M.14, box 31, folder 30, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. ↩︎

7. Shiomi, “Mieko Shiomi,” 44. ↩︎

8. Mieko Shiomi, “Intermedia/Transmedia,” transcript of a lecture given at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 29 April 2012, trans. Midori Yoshimoto, Post: Notes on Art in a Global Context, website of the C-MAP program (see note 3 above), https://post.moma.org/intermedia-transmedia/. ↩︎

9. Mieko Shiomi, quoted in Alison Knowles et al., “An Evening with Fluxus Women: A Roundtable Discussion,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 19, no. 3 (November 2009): 370. ↩︎

10. Shiomi, “Mieko Shiomi,” 44. ↩︎