Embodying Emptiness: Enskillment and experiment among contemporary artists in Japan

Speaker: Iza Kavedžija (University of Cambridge)

Photo credit: Iza Kavedžija (University of Cambridge)

Abstract

How is ‘skill’ to be understood when art practitioners deliberately seek to destabilize their practice and avoid treading familiar ground? Enskilment in general is usefully approached as an education of attention, through learning and interaction with others and with the environment. Yet many contemporary artists, both in Japan and elsewhere, deliberately avoid using those techniques in which they are particularly skilled, sometimes as a form of rebellion, or critique of traditional art and its position as a ‘sphere apart’; at other times in a search for alternative forms of expression. As such they commonly explore various different techniques or media, or embrace what has recently been termed transmedium. Is there still nevertheless a process of enskilment - or attunement - that is at work in cases? Based on 15 months of fieldwork with a loose network of contemporary artists in the Kansai region of Japan, this paper describes specific form of attunement that emerges as central to such experimental practices of making, epitomised by the idea of ‘embodying emptiness’. 

Speaker Biography

Iza Kavedžija is an Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests span health and wellbeing; aging and the life course; and art and creativity. Her books include ‘Making Meaningful Lives: Tales from an Aging Japan’ and the ‘The Process of Wellbeing: Conviviality, Care, Creativity’. Iza is currently leading an AHRC-funded project entitled ‘The Work of Art in Contemporary Japan: Inner and outer worlds of creativity’.

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