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Scott Tsuchitani: Hello again. I'm going to do something a little different today,
deviating from the textbook
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Scott Tsuchitani: To talk about artistic experience… artistic resistance, based
upon my own experience in my art practice.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So, I'm gonna basically present to you what I presented at the
Ethnic Studies Summit in a workshop on art as resistance.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Let's get into the slides.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Okay, so the title of the talk is Memoirs of a Geisha Guerrilla,
Art as Resistance.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Here's the outline I'm gonna talk about making art versus making
things happen through art.
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Scott Tsuchitani: What kind of aesthetic strategy?
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Scott Tsuchitani: Can be used for that. How art can be used as a method for
creating change.
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Scott Tsuchitani: in the Critical Race Framework, used in this case study is
Orientalism.
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Scott Tsuchitani: which we learned about in the chapter on Asian American Studies.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And so the case study will focus on the Asian Art Museum of San
Francisco.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Through a project I did that I call Memoirs of a Sansei Geisha,
Snapshots of Cultural Resistance.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And Sansei refers to third-generation Japanese American, meaning
my grandparents immigrated to the United States.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Skip that slide. So making art versus making things happen.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So I'm going to use an example. This is a Christmas card I made
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Scott Tsuchitani: when I was a community college art student, I was a painting
student at City College of San Francisco, way back in 2003, in my early 40s.
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Scott Tsuchitani: I was a single, childless, unemployed community college student,
living in a studio apartment in the Castro, and yet this is the Christmas card I
sent out.
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Scott Tsuchitani: I sent it out to about 4 dozen
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Scott Tsuchitani: Friends, relatives, friends of the family.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Sent them all out on the same day.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And then, this is back in the days of phone answering machines.
The next day, or it was the day after, coming back from my studio art class.
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Scott Tsuchitani: I see the answering machine is full of messages, right?
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Scott Tsuchitani: So why is it full of messages? Well, I should explain to you that
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Scott Tsuchitani: I just told you my marital status and childless status when I
sent this card.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So why… why did I send a card with all these people in it?
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Scott Tsuchitani: So actually, all the faces here… Are from photos of me
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Scott Tsuchitani: At younger ages, to suit the bodies of those figures.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And the photo in the background was a photo I found through an
internet image bank search for
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Scott Tsuchitani: Ideal Asian American family.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So, what I should explain to you is the reason I sent this card
was due to familial pressure, which tends to be highest during the holidays.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So, traditional family values going to the holidays, I'm a middle
child, I have an older brother and younger sister.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Each of them going to the holidays.
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Scott Tsuchitani: kind of had this life, right? This ideal…
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Scott Tsuchitani: Asian American life, where each of them was married to another
Japanese American, which is extremely rare.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And, my sister had two kids. This is the first year that my
brother and sister-in-law had a kid. So, my siblings were both married with
children, they owned homes in the suburbs, basically this ideal life.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And as I said, I was childless, single, unemployed, in my 40s. So
I needed to create space in the family. I needed to open up space in that cultural
norm.
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Scott Tsuchitani: For me to be myself.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And so to call into question those norms, By making a…
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Scott Tsuchitani: By satirizing it through this image.
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Scott Tsuchitani: But the thing is, so when I…
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Scott Tsuchitani: When I got to those messages on my answering machine.
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Scott Tsuchitani: The ones from my friends were like, oh my god, that was
hilarious, it was brilliant, because they opened up the card in the mail.
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Scott Tsuchitani: But there were other messages from parents of my friend, Friends
of my parents' generation.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Saying things like, well, it wouldn't be proper to congratulate
you on an answering machine, but we want to say we're very happy for you.
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Scott Tsuchitani: so it turns out that the card
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Scott Tsuchitani: triggered a chain reaction of phone calls among people,
especially the Nisei, my parents' generation. Like, have you seen Scott lately? Oh,
yeah, I saw him in Japantown. He said his parents were going to Japan, and the
relatives want to fix him up.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So I guess that's what… that must be what happened. That's why
they all look like Scott, right? So,
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Scott Tsuchitani: So a lot of laughter came after that, when I returned the phone
calls. At the same time, my aunties were calling up my parents, saying, you know,
what's going on? So my parents are getting a big laugh out of it. So a lot of joy
and laughter, but the aunties, before they called my parents, were calling each
other up, saying.
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Scott Tsuchitani: hey, I didn't get invited to the wedding. Hey, now I have to go
buy a wedding present, right? So…
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Scott Tsuchitani: It speaks to the power of norms and normativity that
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Scott Tsuchitani: For that generation, they're so invested in this being the ideal
for happiness, that…
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Scott Tsuchitani: to them, this was real, right? They wanted this for me. They were
happy, even though it was not suited to my life at all.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So…
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Scott Tsuchitani: Because this was how I felt in my family at that time, right?
This is from a t-shirt my best friend gave to me.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So Lisa Simpson saying, being a sensitive artist in this family
is hopeless.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So I wanted to create space for me to be that.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Without being so marginalized as we went into the holidays. And
it really worked, because there was so much joy and laughter.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Except maybe for my brother and sister-in-law who had the baby,
because it took a little attention away from them.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So I wasn't just contesting family norms, I was contesting a
racial norm. And as you know from the different levels of racism, right.
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Scott Tsuchitani: it starts with internalized, and I was… I was kind of living the
model minority stereotype.
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Scott Tsuchitani: In that I was an engineer with all these advanced degrees,
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Scott Tsuchitani: I had been living that life.
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Scott Tsuchitani: But then I wasn't happy with it, which is why I went into film
and then art.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And so… Contesting an internalized norm.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Right? Through this… through this Christmas card as well. So,
structural critique.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And here I'm citing another artist, another socially engaged
artist, Jeremy Deller.
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Scott Tsuchitani: who wrote, I went from being an artist that makes things
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Scott Tsuchitani: To being an artist that makes things happen.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So, the Christmas card, it made things happen. As I mentioned, I
was…
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Scott Tsuchitani: wanted to be a painter at that time. I was in a painting class at
Foothill… City College in San Francisco.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And for our final critique, the teacher had me put the Christmas
card up on an easel.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And he said, in terms of art, this is the best thing Scott has
made all quarter, all semester, right? But the thing is, it wasn't just about the
card as the art object.
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Scott Tsuchitani: The art encompasses the process of putting in the mail, the
process of each person opening it up and having a reaction, calling each other on
the phone, calling my parents, calling me, me calling them back. That's all part of
the art, right? It includes the social relations.
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Scott Tsuchitani: That led to a cultural shift in the family.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Now, it wasn't just temporary. For years after that.
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Scott Tsuchitani: We'd have larger family gatherings, and one of my uncles would
always ask me, Hey, Scotty!
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Scott Tsuchitani: how's your family doing? And I would talk about my parents, he's
like, no, no, not that family, your family, right? So,
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Scott Tsuchitani: Art has a way of working.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Differently than other forms of, Activism and change.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And so, for me, this was a revelation, because I wanted to be a
painter, but this was an example of art as agency, right? Cultural agency. Not just
making the thing, but making a thing that can make things happen, right? As a
catalyst for
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Scott Tsuchitani: Dialogue and collective change.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So, making art that matters.
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Scott Tsuchitani: When I'm saying art that matters, art that can make a difference
in the world by working relationally, working through social engagement, to create
collective change through dialogue.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And dialogue, just the definition of it itself.
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Scott Tsuchitani: is a horizontal process where it's mutual respect, true dialogue.
We're all on the same plane, rather than top-down power structure.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Alright, so what's the strategy in terms of aesthetics.
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Scott Tsuchitani: To making this kind of work that works.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And here, I draw upon queer and feminist studies
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Scott Tsuchitani: To do something called querying the Norm.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So making the normal appear strange.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Right? So making the normal appear queer, in a way, by making
visible the power relations behind its construction.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So…
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Scott Tsuchitani: That might not be clear. For more on norms and normalization,
look up the work of queer studies scholar Dean Spade.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Anyway, so yeah, queering the norm through this image that feels
kind of queer, right?
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Scott Tsuchitani: So some of my influences, BIPOC artists' influences in unsettling
racial norms,
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Scott Tsuchitani: two Latinx artists, or Latine artists, and African American
artists, so… Coco Fusco, Cuban-American.
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Scott Tsuchitani: The Couple in the Cage is a performance piece she did with
Guillermo Gomez Pena, who's based in the Mission District of San Francisco.
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Scott Tsuchitani: where they… They posed as newly discovered… members of a newly
discovered indigenous tribe in Latin America.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And this performance took place at museums around the world, and
then Fusco wrote about it.
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Scott Tsuchitani: which is also part of the art, which… in which she discussed the
dialogues that took place that were really revelatory in terms of the coloniality
that museum visitors bring to the museum, which thought that this was… that they
were real, Indigenous tribe members.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Daniel Joseph Martinez, Chicano artist, based in Southern
California.
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Scott Tsuchitani: The Castle is Burning, an installation he was commissioned to do
at Cornell University that ended up Resulting in…
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Scott Tsuchitani: white students wanting to deface the installation on the quad of
Cornell University.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And students of color forming a circle around it with their
bodies to protect the artwork.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And then protesting because the administration did nothing to
protect the artwork of this artist of color.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So they occupied the administration building for, like, a week,
With demands for… Latinx Studies.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And all of the demands were met by the administration.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And had such impact that here it is in the school newspaper.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And in 2023, so 30 years after talking about
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Scott Tsuchitani: The artwork and how it resulted in this takeover.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And then Carol Walker, African-American artist, who's challenged
norms not only, from the dominant
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Scott Tsuchitani: Group, but also among more senior African American artists.
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Scott Tsuchitani: upon how you should represent your race. So…
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Scott Tsuchitani: All these artists having a really powerful work in terms of
unsettling norms,
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Scott Tsuchitani: So I wanted to name them as influences.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So, art as a method of change, how can tactical art intervention
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Scott Tsuchitani: or guerrilla art? How can it transform racial common sense? So
this was, research for my PhD dissertation taking place at the intersection of art,
politics, and research.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So, art as a method for change, I'm highlighting two components
of that. One is… Activating the audience.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Because when we talk about making change.
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Scott Tsuchitani: you need a model for it. Here, I'm talking about dialogue as the
method, right?
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Scott Tsuchitani: So first, you need to engage the audience actively.
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Scott Tsuchitani: to spark dialogue. So it involves a rhetorical strategy of…
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Scott Tsuchitani: Breaking open the certainty of the status quo, Through
complexity, ambiguity, confusion.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So opening up space for truth and beauty to emerge, and create
space for
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Scott Tsuchitani: Critical public pedagogy, so how artwork can deliver anti-racist
critique, but only once you've ruptured
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Scott Tsuchitani: That hardened structure of the status quo.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And then space also for testimony as a decolonial method that
we've read about in our textbook.
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Scott Tsuchitani: from my colleague, Professor Acevedo.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And the purpose of activating the audience, especially
marginalized voices, not often given space in the center.
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Scott Tsuchitani: is to create space for that centering from the margins.
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Scott Tsuchitani: In a larger dialogic process of change.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And using the media to… help…
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Scott Tsuchitani: expand that dialogue, expand the audience. By creating a
spectacle through the art.
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Scott Tsuchitani: that is used to appropriate the media resources, to reach a much
bigger audience in this process of dialogic change. So instead of a vertical power
relationship.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Bringing us to equal… equal level, equal status with dominant
institutions in order to shift the discourse on race to something more equitable
and less racist.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So part of this involves Levels of engagement. How do we respect
our audience?
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Scott Tsuchitani: So the lowest level is propaganda, of telling people
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Scott Tsuchitani: what you think they should think, right? It's not gonna work in
reaching people who disagree with you, because
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Scott Tsuchitani: They already know they disagree with you, and why should they
listen to you? The next level up is the binary, like reducing the world to
simplistic black and white.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Also, really limited in what you can do with an audience, right?
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Scott Tsuchitani: Whereas art, poetics, aesthetic experience.
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Scott Tsuchitani: This is what art can do. It can move people to feel things they
didn't expect to feel.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And open up space through nuance and complexity, For active
engagement, And… Imagining otherwise. Limitless possibilities.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So, how does this work? Psychologists tell us there are three
faculties of the human mind, cognitive or thinking, affective, or feeling.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And conative, or conative, the impulse to act.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Which here, in this schematic, I'm showing as gut reaction.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So, I am theorizing that through art, by overwhelming the
cognitive and affective buffers, we can trigger an impulse to act, a gut reaction.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And… In terms of rhetorical terms, we could see these different
Logos, ethos.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Pathos Kairos working together to produce active participation.
So, intellectual activism.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Appropriating the authority or credibility of established
institutions,
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Scott Tsuchitani: Through aesthetic value, like storytelling, humor, critique.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And then kairos, we don't often think of Kairos, but this is
important for guerrilla actions, is well-timed playfulness, these things acting
together to activate your audience.
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Scott Tsuchitani: as… Co-producers of the art, co-conspirators, if you will.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Whether or not… whether or not they know it. So…
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Scott Tsuchitani: Here is Steve Lambert from the Center for Artistic Activism.
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Scott Tsuchitani: art is less about controlling the outcome of the person who
receives it, and more about stimulating a process that can lead to many outcomes.
So again, very different than propaganda, and also different than what we think of
as protest art, right?
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Scott Tsuchitani: Oftentimes, when we think of art and politics, art gets reduced
to illustrating the movement, rather than art acting autonomously to its full
potential. So here, Steve Lambert, an artist, is talking about
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Scott Tsuchitani: what it can do. We're not telling people what to think, we're
stimulating a process, right? We're respecting the audience.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And so, using Lambert's idea, a clear idea turned into art.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Produces a spectrum… reaches a spectrum of audiences and produces
a spectrum of responses.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So the critical framework through which I'm doing this for the
case study we're looking at is Orientalism, which we've already studied. So a
Eurocentric gaze that divides up the world into the West and the rest.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Censoring Europe, or whiteness, By racializing everyone else as
other, right? Defining whiteness, or what is human, fully human.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Against what it is not.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Right, the idealized other.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Based on a myth of cultural fixity.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Like, the Oriental, frozen in time, the timeless oriental.
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Scott Tsuchitani: As an epistemological justification for imperial conquest and
violence.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And this ideology propagated through museums as an institutional
system, through… What?
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Scott Tsuchitani: We now know is scientific racism, or what some
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Scott Tsuchitani: Members of elite society still refer to as race science or
eugenics.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So, museums in the… 18th and 19th century.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Inventing and promoting, especially 19th century, the racial
hierarchy of white supremacy through science, right? Ethnology, anthropology.
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Scott Tsuchitani: ethnography, and so forth. And we learned about that in the first
week through that video on race, the power of an illusion.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So museums, an instrument for manufacturing public consensus.
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Scott Tsuchitani: For imperialism and colonialism as a civilizing nation, of white
benevolence.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So that brings us to our case study, the Asian Art Museum of San
Francisco, founded, I think, 1963, and now occupying this building on Civic Center.
So this is a city-owned public institution.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So, it operates through a doctrine of public trust, this idea
that this resource
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Scott Tsuchitani: It's for the benefit of the public, right?
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Scott Tsuchitani: And in San Francisco, about a third of the public is Asian
American, and we pay taxes, so we're paying for this museum. And in terms of
authority or ethos.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Museums occupy a position of unparalleled public trust and
respect.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So the knowledge they produce Carries weight, in that sense.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So, most often, the culture of the museum can be traced back to
the personality of the founder. This is from a museum textbook, right? So who
founded this museum? Whose collection was it founded around?
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Scott Tsuchitani: Avery Brundage, who's widely known as having been a Nazi
sympathizer, and as head of the International Olympic Committee, wanted women out
of the Olympics.
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Scott Tsuchitani: As head of the U.S. Olympic team at the Berlin Olympics in 1936,
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Scott Tsuchitani: So these Olympics were… carried symbolic weight. Here's where
Adolf Hitler wanted to demonstrate Aryan supremacy to the world, to the rest of the
world, right?
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Scott Tsuchitani: That didn't happen, because African American athlete, Jesse
Owens.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Helpstaged them, right? He beat them.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Shortly after that, Avery Brundage, head of the American Olympic
team.
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Scott Tsuchitani: stripped Owens of his amateur competition status.
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Scott Tsuchitani: As head of the International Olympic Committee.
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Scott Tsuchitani: New Mexico City Olympics in 1968,
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Scott Tsuchitani: when John Carlos and Tommy Smith
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Scott Tsuchitani: raised their hands in a salute of Black Power.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Brundage expelled them from the Olympics.
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Scott Tsuchitani: This is the person around whose collection the Asian Art Museum
of San Francisco has been founded. So even though it's called the Asian Art Museum
in a city with a large Asian population on the Pacific Rim.
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Scott Tsuchitani: It's a historically white institution.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So let's look at how… that…
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Scott Tsuchitani: Racial background translates into the racial politics of their
programming.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So here's an exhibition, simply called The Arts of Japan, the
John C. Weber Collection.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Shown here at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and here in
Minneapolis Institute of the Arts. Very straightforward. Arts of Japan, John C.
Weber Collection. It's what are called pre-modern ceramics, textiles, woodblock
prints. You can see examples of it here.
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Scott Tsuchitani: When it comes to San Francisco, It becomes seduction.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Japan's floating world, right? So… becomes sexualized.
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Scott Tsuchitani: This is a photo I took at the opening, Here's the web page.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Seduction in Japan. Okay, so, you've wanted to escape. You've
imagined what it could be like. This is textbook orientalist fantasy, right?
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Scott Tsuchitani: I've underlined here in red, dive into this hotbed of hedonism
and transgression.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And it's the exact same exhibition collection, right? So…
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Scott Tsuchitani: We're seeing Orientalist escapism and hypersexualization.
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Scott Tsuchitani: At a museum, historically a white-run museum, that calls itself
The Asian.
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Scott Tsuchitani: That's not all. I took photos at the opening, right, where there
are many people in yellow face.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So yellow face being analogous to blackface, but…
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Scott Tsuchitani: for Asians, right? This one film scholar refers to it as a
vehicle within whites can play out a fantasy of otherness, so, right? Orientalist
fantasy.
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Scott Tsuchitani: using Asian culture, I'm assuming this is a staff person, I can't
really read the badge,
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Scott Tsuchitani: And this… this was just happening throughout this event, this
idea of culture as costume, cultural tourism.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Oh, and it didn't just end there. They had white drag queens for
the show of the arts of Japan, and white burlesque dancers.
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Scott Tsuchitani: at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.
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Scott Tsuchitani: But I don't want to just focus on that one museum, because, for
example, Yellowface has a long tradition in American culture. There's Carly Kloss
in Vogue magazine in 2017.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Cbs TV show, How I Met Your Mother… your France ad…
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Scott Tsuchitani: Katy Perry at the AMA in 2013.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And here's an ad, here's a product listing for Victoria's Secret.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Sexy little geisha, your ticket to an exotic adventure.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So you can see the language of this ad, very similar to the
language the museum used about this Orientalist cultural tourism, right?
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Scott Tsuchitani: this is… again, it's nothing new. Geisha as an expression of
white otherness goes back to the 19th century.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Jappie dolls were collected by white, white families,
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Scott Tsuchitani: Yellowface Racial Masquerade in theater. Here is photos of Madame
Butterfly.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And identity tourism was part of early white feminism, trying to
escape from white patriarchy by taking on different identities.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So I'm gonna… I wanna take you back now to… Late 90s, early
mid-2000s.
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Scott Tsuchitani: There was a geisha fever in American pop culture, propelled
largely through this novel, Memoirs of a Geisha. So it's a fictional work by a
white author.
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Scott Tsuchitani: that carried with it these similar themes that I've just showed
you, because they're kind of archetypal in terms of
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Scott Tsuchitani: Western stereotype of Japanese culture and bodies, right?
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Scott Tsuchitani: So this is in pop culture,
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Scott Tsuchitani: You may not… may or may not recall it, it was made into a
Hollywood film, adapted into Hollywood film.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And similar to the book.
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Scott Tsuchitani: This was written, produced, and directed by white men. So
literally a white man's fantasy of Asian female bodies, but in the film.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Instead of casting Japanese actors, or Japanese-American actors.
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Scott Tsuchitani: for a film set in Japan, The stars are all Chinese.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And so there's an Orientalist logic here working in that
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Scott Tsuchitani: what does Orientalism tell us? All Asians are alike, right? All
Asians look alike, they're all the same. So…
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Scott Tsuchitani: Hollywood casting, uses that racial sensibility.
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Scott Tsuchitani: But, again, this is Hollywood. When we go to the movies, we
engage in what's called suspension of disbelief, right? We know we're going into
something to escape reality.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Unless it's a documentary. Clearly, this is not a documentary.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So that's one thing when Hollywood does it, but…
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Scott Tsuchitani: What about when a museum does it, right? A civic institution,
knowledge-based institution, which, as I pointed out, occupies a position of
unparalleled trust
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Scott Tsuchitani: Public trust and respect.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So, I'm arguing that carries a different weight, a different
influence.
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Scott Tsuchitani: on how people look at Asian bodies, at least for me, being part
of this community in the Bay Area, where this promotion of this exhibit was
ubiquitous.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Aggressive, high-budget promotion by the same company that did
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Scott Tsuchitani: The Got Milk campaign included a billboard by Highway 101. You
could not drive through the city without seeing this ad, right?
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Scott Tsuchitani: So it turns out, I would learn later, not only is she not a real
geisha.
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Scott Tsuchitani: the model they hired this for this ad is not Japanese either.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So, it's the same racial logic as the Hollywood film.
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Scott Tsuchitani: But in this case, it's a museum telling you that all Orientals
are the same.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So… What can a socially conscious community college art student
Do about this?
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Scott Tsuchitani: this was my predicament, because I felt like…
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Scott Tsuchitani: This is a problem. If no one does anything about it, we're saying
we're okay with it. We're complicit, right? We're going along with it, we're giving
our consent.
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Scott Tsuchitani: By remaining silent.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So here I'm quoting a free book, A User's Guide to Demanding the
Impossible.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Written by the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination.
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Scott Tsuchitani: It reads, more information is not going to motivate us to act.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Neither are representations or pictures of politics.
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Scott Tsuchitani: What makes us move is tasting dreams of what could be.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Stepping into the cracks where another world is coming into view.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Right, so think about that.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Information's not gonna activate people, pictures of politics
aren't gonna do it, right?
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Scott Tsuchitani: Let's taste some dreams.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So, here I'm going to show you my work, Memoirs of Assensei
Geisha, Snapshots of Cultural Resistance.
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Scott Tsuchitani: That's me as a geisha.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So at the time, I was a community college art student, Alright.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Got my first little studio space, which is basically, like, 2
cubicle walls in a warehouse with 60 other artists.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And at first, I didn't know what to paint, so I did an exercise
that I learned from one of my teachers, Chester Arnold.
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Scott Tsuchitani: which he did in his studio was daily self-portraits. So every
day, one day a week for 6 weeks, little 4x6…
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Scott Tsuchitani: pieces, 4x6 inch pieces of paper that were gessoed, I did an oil
portrait, an oil painting self-portrait, and so…
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Scott Tsuchitani: What happened was, amidst this self-portrait process, was
creating a poster of me as the geisha as another form of self-portrait.
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Scott Tsuchitani: But also as this act of cultural resistance.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So I got the poster from a Japan… grocery store in Japantown,
where I knew one of the checkers. We grew up in, on the same block in Walnut Creek,
and he had been an art student. So he let me borrow the poster. It's a photo of me
at, like.
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Scott Tsuchitani: 3 in the morning when I couldn't sleep because I was pissed about
that exhibit.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And so I held my 3 megapixel,
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Scott Tsuchitani: Camera in front of me, under the hall light, trying to match the
lighting of the poster.
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Scott Tsuchitani: and snapped this photo, and then in Photoshop made this image.
So, it's even a little blurry, because the hand was moving when I took the photo,
but,
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Scott Tsuchitani: So I'm making a parody of the original poster, but changing the
text.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So it reads, Orientalist dream come true, geisha, Perpetuating
the fetish.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And so I had a… I had a group of friends.
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Scott Tsuchitani: these radical feminists, some of them identified as Maoist
artists in the East Bay,
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Scott Tsuchitani: And they always talked about guerrilla art, but they never
actually did any.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So I thought, when I made this image, I felt a certain power to
it, and I thought.
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Scott Tsuchitani: we gotta do something with this. So I shared it with them.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Oh, yeah, I was gonna say…
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Scott Tsuchitani: Oh, yeah, oh, anyway. Sorry, I'm jumping around. So I shared it
with them, and one of them, agreed to meet with me to do something with this, and I
have another inspirational quote here from
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Scott Tsuchitani: That same book I mentioned earlier.
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Scott Tsuchitani: It's easy to feel paralyzed by the complexities of the world.
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Scott Tsuchitani: To feel like nothing you do will ever make a difference.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Those in authority want us to feel that way, even though they
tend to be the ones in the minority.
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Scott Tsuchitani: But when we look back at history, we see that every movement,
every single shift in society began with a small group of friends.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Having an idea that seemed impossible at the time.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Alright.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So, I said to my friend Sylvia, let's meet in Japantown, and
we'll do something with this, right? So, Japantown, being a symbolic center of the
Japanese American community, many people were dispersed after the war because
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Scott Tsuchitani: They were put in concentration camps.
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Scott Tsuchitani: whose goal was assimilation, right? Dispersal and assimilation
after the war. So my dad was part of that forced evacuation from Japantown.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So, symbolic meaning, I've been involved with nonprofits there
for decades,
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Scott Tsuchitani: So we met outside the bookstore.
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Scott Tsuchitani: I printed these out on my inkjet printer at home.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Epson printer, used up a lot of dark ink.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And here's my friend Sylvia. She got permission sometimes to post
them.
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Scott Tsuchitani: I wouldn't get permission, because I had this paranoid, neurotic
energy. Sometimes I would just tape them up myself,
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Scott Tsuchitani: And we would engage people in dialogue about the issues, right?
Why we were doing this.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So here I posted one outside a kimono store.
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Scott Tsuchitani: On the security podium here.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And it was just subtle enough
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Scott Tsuchitani: That you might walk by and say, wait, what's up with… there's
something slightly off here with those glasses, right?
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Scott Tsuchitani: And so, I called this project Snapshots of Cultural Resistance,
Because…
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Scott Tsuchitani: I documented the work with that 3 megapixel camera, right, so…
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Scott Tsuchitani: When you do your guerrilla art intervention, you always want to
document it so that you can reach a larger secondary audience through the media.
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Scott Tsuchitani: I think in this day and age, people know that already, because
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Scott Tsuchitani: The first thing you're doing is recording and putting on social
media, but…
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Scott Tsuchitani: Back in the mid-2000s, that wasn't as clear, so…
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Scott Tsuchitani: Yeah, so I took a deep breath, we went inside the museum, and
stuck these cards in the racks there.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And I wasn't that inconspicuous, like, I'm taking flash photos,
because I'm thinking I want good documentation.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So my friend Sylvia's like, oh look, Indian classical dance,
trying to pretend like we're just visitors. I thought this woman was gonna bust me,
but it turned out she was just a guest visitor.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So she looked at it, frowned, and put it back, but other visitors
were watching us do this, and they're taking them, and they're laughing,
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Scott Tsuchitani: The museum people didn't notice… So…
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Scott Tsuchitani: In terms of my… my own conscience, my own integrity.
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Scott Tsuchitani: In terms of feeling like something needed to be done.
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Scott Tsuchitani: to resist this exhibit, right? Cultural resistance. I felt like
we had done that, but thankfully, my friend Sylvia said.
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Scott Tsuchitani: You know, you should put some contact information on there in
case people want to reach you.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And so…
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Scott Tsuchitani: I did that, right? And, like, 5-point font at the bottom of the
things I printed on my inkjet printer
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Scott Tsuchitani: Sick and tired of the same old guy gene sex fantasy?
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Scott Tsuchitani: Tell me about it. Return the Gaze, GeishaCrossing at Hotmail.com.
So, Returning the Gaze is a concept from feminist film theory about
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Scott Tsuchitani: reversing the power of the objectifying male gaze to turn it back
at the viewer. So geisha crossing, indicating a form of transgression of
boundaries, so gender, race, institutional, cultural, and so forth.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And by doing that, it generated email dialogue.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So, Liza Dalby, an anthropologist based in the East Bay, known as
the first Western geisha, because for her anthropology fieldwork, she did geisha
apprenticeship in Kyoto for a couple years. The difference being between her and
actual apprentices.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And she could leverage her privilege to come back to the U.S. and
publish
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Scott Tsuchitani: a best-selling non-fiction book about geisha practice, and
positioned herself as the expert in the West, so that she became a consultant on
the Hollywood film and the museum exhibition.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So she emailed to say that the fetish is real, she didn't talk
about it in her book.
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Scott Tsuchitani: But if I want to learn more about it, I can read the essay she
wrote for the exhibition catalog.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So, clearly not interested in a horizontal dialogue, she's
speaking down to me as a presumed authority.
336
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Scott Tsuchitani: even though she doesn't have a lived experience of being
objectified in the West, as a geisha.
337
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Scott Tsuchitani: She could take off the kimono anytime she wants, right?
338
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Scott Tsuchitani: Not… not be seen as…
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Scott Tsuchitani: an oriental other. A professor at UC Berkeley, art historian
whose class was debating the exhibit.
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Scott Tsuchitani: His class on Art and Architecture of Japan.
341
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Scott Tsuchitani: He reached out to congratulate us about the impact of our
intervention on the museum itself.
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Scott Tsuchitani: Because the partner of his graduate student
343
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Scott Tsuchitani: Worked in the museum and witnessed a series of meetings that the
administration called once they discovered my handiwork.
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Scott Tsuchitani: let's see, a journalist at a community-based newspaper in
Japantown, Nichibe Times. Wanted to know what this was about, how can you get a
poster, and what's up with the glasses?
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Scott Tsuchitani: And lastly, a member of the Asian Art Museum.
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Scott Tsuchitani: came through my Open Studios exhibit, Sunday, 5pm closing time,
Walks through and sees my…
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Scott Tsuchitani: Documentation of the intervention, along with my self-portraits.
348
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Scott Tsuchitani: and says, hey, I'm with the Asian Art Museum.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And I'm like, -oh, but it turns out, she said, no, no, I'm with…
350
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Scott Tsuchitani: I'm with the Education and Public Programs Department.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And those tend to be the most forward-looking departments of
museums, and she liked what I did, she wanted to buy digital prints I made based on
this action, and so we agreed at a later date to do that transaction, because she
didn't have any cash, and I didn't have a credit card thing. So,
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Scott Tsuchitani: That happened, as well as a curator coming through who was
impressed with The intervention, and offered me
353
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Scott Tsuchitani: My first group art show in a downtown gallery.
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Scott Tsuchitani: So for that art exhibition, I created this series of digital
prints and a DVD video installation called My Geisha Fantasy.
355
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Scott Tsuchitani: So, it included My Geisha Fantasy Billboard Liberation.
356
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Scott Tsuchitani: With me as the geisha on the billboard.
357
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Scott Tsuchitani: My Geisha Fantasy Bus Stop Liberation.
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Scott Tsuchitani: It's the bus stop in the Castro.
359
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Scott Tsuchitani: my geisha Fantasy Banner Liberation, And then…
360
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Scott Tsuchitani: a video, a DVD that played on a loop.
361
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Scott Tsuchitani: of traffic going past the billboard with my face on it, and
scrolling across it was the text from an article in the San Francisco Chronicle
that I got published about the intervention, so…
362
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Scott Tsuchitani: This showed at an exhibition, part of Asian Pacific Heritage
Month, at Silmart's Cultural Center.
363
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Scott Tsuchitani: Curated by Kearney Street Workshop, the oldest Asian American
arts organization in the country.
364
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Scott Tsuchitani: And it was very interesting watching the audience, because there
are many
365
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Scott Tsuchitani: many people scrutinizing these images, like, really close. And
they would go away, and they'd come back and scrutinize them again.
366
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Scott Tsuchitani: And… through interaction, I realized, some of them really were
invested in knowing whether or not
367
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Scott Tsuchitani: These were real.
368
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Scott Tsuchitani: There was a group of younger folks led by, A rather aggressive,
white guy, who…
369
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Scott Tsuchitani: demanded to know, what am I looking at here, looking at this
photo?
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Scott Tsuchitani: And I said, oh, it's a photo of me as a geisha on the billboard.
371
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Scott Tsuchitani: And he's getting more agitated, so his friend serves as an…
372
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Scott Tsuchitani: like an interpreter, even though we're all speaking English, and
says.
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Scott Tsuchitani: I think what he really wants to know is.
374
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Scott Tsuchitani: Is that real? Did that actually happen, or did you do that on the
computer?
375
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Scott Tsuchitani: And I said, well, my concept for this installation is for you to
just take it in as…
376
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Scott Tsuchitani: at face value, and make your own sense out of it. Like, I'm not
gonna be here to tell people
377
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Scott Tsuchitani: about it, you know, all the time. And… and I want you to have
that experience on your own, with that uncertainty being part of the art.
378
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Scott Tsuchitani: And he said, Well, you're here now.
379
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Scott Tsuchitani: And I said, well… There's value in not knowing, And he said.
380
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Scott Tsuchitani: He's like, well, there's value in knowing. And he says, we're
done here. Come on, let's bounce. And he led his group of friends out of the
exhibit.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And a classmate from my painting class was standing there
watching us, you know, this exchange going back and forth, and after they leave,
she's like, wow. I mean, if that were me, I just would have told him.
382
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Scott Tsuchitani: I said, no, that's not… that's not how this works, right? But,
you know, in hindsight, it's like, there was power playing out here, like.
383
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Scott Tsuchitani: he's asserting… do I have a slide here? Yeah. The settler demand
for knowledge, right? Because one way settler colonialism works
384
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Scott Tsuchitani: It's through epistemic control, like controlling the dominant
narrative and mastering other cultures through knowledge
385
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Scott Tsuchitani: Not necessarily caring about the people, Wanting to know, right?
386
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Scott Tsuchitani: And so… what I was practicing there comes from Indigenous
studies, right? A tactic of refusal.
387
00:43:59.510 --> 00:44:02.829
Scott Tsuchitani: just saying, just, no, I'm not gonna abide by…
388
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Scott Tsuchitani: your terms, like, you feel entitled to know, that's… that's…
yeah. Anyway, what it demonstrated to me
389
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Scott Tsuchitani: Was the unsettling power of not knowing, and how you can use that
to unsettle
390
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Scott Tsuchitani: whiteness. In this case, it was a one-to-one interaction, but
it's also operating systemically as well.
391
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Scott Tsuchitani: Through these tactics, so, I created a press kit of…
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Scott Tsuchitani: the documentation of the intervention, documentation of the
emails, and I sent it to… at that time, there was one veteran Japanese-American
journalist at the SF Chronicle, which is the main paper in San Francisco.
393
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Scott Tsuchitani: who wanted to do an article about it. We had to wait till there
was something ongoing, because the intervention took place at the end of the museum
exhibit.
394
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Scott Tsuchitani: So when the gallery exhibition downtown that I was part of was
gonna open.
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Scott Tsuchitani: We used that opportunity to do this. And it wasn't just me,
Crazy, marginalized.
396
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Scott Tsuchitani: Art student against respected cultural institution, I did this
strategically.
397
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Scott Tsuchitani: because I'm using the media as part of the tactical intervention,
right? So… I,
398
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Scott Tsuchitani: when I got those emails.
399
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Scott Tsuchitani: I reached out to people to get the permission, to give their
contact information to the journalist.
400
00:45:28.780 --> 00:45:39.550
Scott Tsuchitani: I got a non-profit director in Japantown, head of the National
Japanese American Historical Society, to agree to speak to her, Asian American
contemporary art critic.
401
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Scott Tsuchitani: the, sympathetic museum employee who came through my open
studios, the Berkeley professor, all of them
402
00:45:47.930 --> 00:45:52.780
Scott Tsuchitani: Got all their information, their consent, gave it to the
journalist, and so…
403
00:45:53.110 --> 00:46:02.560
Scott Tsuchitani: It's not just about promoting me as an artist, it's about
bringing this issue into a mainstream paper to get the issues out there from
multiple stakeholder points of view.
404
00:46:03.080 --> 00:46:07.300
Scott Tsuchitani: Which also forces the museum to have to acknowledge
405
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Scott Tsuchitani: what I did, the issue behind it, as well.
406
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Scott Tsuchitani: And so, it ends with the UC Berkeley professor having the last
word, saying.
407
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Scott Tsuchitani: If museums really want to address their communities, they have to
listen to their communities.
408
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Scott Tsuchitani: To the extent that museums assert authority to speak for culture.
409
00:46:28.610 --> 00:46:36.509
Scott Tsuchitani: They opened themselves up for critique, and they should engage
that critique. So they couldn't just laugh it off and dismiss it.
410
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Scott Tsuchitani: And once you get it into mainstream media, like, again, tactical
intervention, when you do this, go for the biggest media you can. I avoided
television because you can't control the spin,
411
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Scott Tsuchitani: But once you get in the mainstream, then it disseminates to other
sources, but you want to give them the opportunity to break the story first.
412
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Scott Tsuchitani: So, it went to Kyoto Journal, academic journals, including
413
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Scott Tsuchitani: A peer-reviewed article on teaching geisha in a Western context.
So think about that. This little gesture I did using my 3MP camera and inkjet
printer
414
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Scott Tsuchitani: has influence over how geisha is taught in a Western context.
415
00:47:23.380 --> 00:47:34.280
Scott Tsuchitani: That's quite powerful. Got picked up by student newspapers, Asian
American papers at UC Berkeley, at Stanford, Asian American Pop Culture Magazine.
416
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Scott Tsuchitani: And…
417
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Scott Tsuchitani: So some of these things are happening not too long afterwards, or
within a year or two after, but it actually had lasting impact as recently as 2020,
418
00:47:47.400 --> 00:47:50.209
Scott Tsuchitani: in the New York Times, and again in the Chronicle.
419
00:47:50.650 --> 00:47:54.949
Scott Tsuchitani: being cited in articles about related things, right?
420
00:47:55.120 --> 00:48:03.440
Scott Tsuchitani: these about racism or white supremacy in museums in 2020,
referencing this thing I did back in 2004.
421
00:48:03.580 --> 00:48:18.009
Scott Tsuchitani: It's cited in a book on queering Asian American contemporary art,
a couple journals in Asian American Studies. Here it is on the back cover of
Amerasia Journal, one of the flagship journals for Asian American Studies, so…
422
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Scott Tsuchitani: That is my case study showing you, one example of what art can
do.
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Scott Tsuchitani: And so here's a quote from an artist scholar named Alana Jelinek.
424
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Scott Tsuchitani: Speaking to an even greater potential for what art can do.
425
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Scott Tsuchitani: Create a breach, In normative discourse, a rupture.
426
00:48:41.830 --> 00:48:49.100
Scott Tsuchitani: Through bouts of surprise, jubilation, astonishment, or wonder
that exceed the thinkable.
427
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Scott Tsuchitani: To open the possibility of thinking otherwise.
428
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Scott Tsuchitani: So, in other words, Shifting the status quo.
429
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Scott Tsuchitani: By producing nuance and complexity in the face of orthodoxy, an
artist can profoundly alter established ways of seeing.
430
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Scott Tsuchitani: To reconfigure the foundations of knowledge and understanding.
431
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Scott Tsuchitani: So think about that. That's… that's saying… that's quite
powerful.
432
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Scott Tsuchitani: As a claim of what art can do.
433
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Scott Tsuchitani: So with that, I'm gonna end the talk, and
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Scott Tsuchitani: This is purely for your own interest, there's nothing…
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Scott Tsuchitani: Assignment-wise that you need to do in response to this talk?
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Scott Tsuchitani: If you have any questions or comments, I welcome them via inbox,
or come by office hours, Tuesday 1 to 5 on Zoom.
