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Lisa Mullins: Japan continues to struggle with the aftereffects of the March earthquake and tsunami, and the ensuing nuclear disaster.  Today, Japan’s parliament approved an additional $25 billion in disaster relief.  The World’s Marco Werman recently traveled to Japan as part of an ongoing collaboration with the PBS documentary program, Frontline.  While he was there he found Japanese rethinking some big issues — energy, an economic policies and even your cultural direction of the past 50 years.  Marco’s story airs tonight on Frontline. It chronicles a group of young people bent on provoking change.  They call themselves Chim Pom and have some surprising influences.

Marco Werman: Six people in their 20s and 30s, Chim Pom told me when they first met they seemed to have as their common interest the MTV series, Jackass.  You know, people who take a run down a flight of stairs in a shopping cart, crazy stuff like that.  And they like the idea of doing crazy, Jackass type stuff, but around social issues.

Mullins: So more art as activism?

Werman: Right, you know for example, long before the earthquake Chim Pom noticed that as Tokyo became more affluent, the piles of garbage grew and so did the number and size of rats in Tokyo.  So they went out with nets, captured a bunch of rats, killed them, stuffed them.  They videotaped the whole thing.  Then they displayed these rats.  Now, imagine these rats are now stuffed, taxidermed rats with kind of like clown makeup on their faces and sort of almost emulating anime characters from Japanese culture. So it really has this kind of very local indigenous feel, but at the same time it’s kind of scary.

Mullins: Kind of scary, I mean they’re trying to make a statement there.

Werman: Yeah, I mean they’re making a statement of affluence.  This is what you’re paying for when you have all your designer handbags and you know, big cars.

Mullins: Which makes you wonder what they’re saying now as a statement through art about the current nuclear crisis.

Werman: Well, that’s precisely what the Frontline story is all about.  And they are in this crisis up to their ears, literally.  I mean they’ve gone up to Fukushima a number of times.  One of the pieces they’ve done is a video installation called 100 Cheers (we’ve got a link at theworld.org so you can see what it looks like), but it’s also got a strong audio component. So the Chim Pom guys and the one girl in the group went up to Fukishima.  They went to a fishing village that was really wrecked by the tsunami and met some local kids from the fishing village.  And together they formed this huddle and in the huddle they cheer [speaking Japanese].  One kid might be shouting out ‘Stop radiation!’  Or ‘Fukushima nuclear power plant, radiation leakage’ or whatever comes to their minds…’I want a girlfriend,’ ‘Give me spinach’, ‘Grandpa!’   It was very much of the moment, very spontaneous, very free association.  [speaking Japanese], but when I saw it in the gallery show back in Tokyo, I mean it really came out as a strong expression of Japanese solidarity with what had happened up in the North. And so there’s this one shot from the middle of the huddle, and then another shot, wider shot as you saw where you’ve got the entire wreckage of the village in the background.  It’s shocking.

Mullins: These boats and they’re out of the water just standing on end, and these kids off to the side just being kids.

Werman: Yeah.

Mullins: And then letting out a big…

Werman: Well, it’s kind of a giant exhale of relief almost.  It’s catharsis.

Mullins: That’s right.  So how are these messages from the artists who filmed this, how are they getting out?

Werman: Well, you know, some people are paying attention.  There was work that they had that quite a few people saw.  Some media outlets in Japan have written articles about Chim Pom.  One of the people that I interviewed for the story was veteran journalist, Mitsuko Shimormura, and she’s interesting because she started this talking group of business leaders, lawmakers, citizens.  And she’s directing the discussions with them around where Japan is headed economically and spiritually.

And she began this kind of philosopher’s camp if you will, before March 11, before the earthquake.  And they’re discussing a lot what would it take to change in Japan?  To move away from massive amounts of nuclear energy to feed the Japanese affluence to less energy in a more austere economy?  And Shimormura told me that her prognosis for change in Japan is pretty mixed.

Mitsuko Shimormura: Japanese people and Japanese culture is a very I mean difficult, full-changing you know, because nobody wants to stand up and say I want to change this way.  That means criticizing former system, former leaders you know, so nobody wants to say that.  That’s our system.  You have to break that too.

Werman: So slowly, Lisa, partly because of people who are speaking out like Chim Pom, change I think is coming to Japan.

Mullins: That is The World’s Marco Werman.  His story, The Atomic Artists, airs tonight on PBS’ Frontline.  You can also find all of Marco’s coverage from Japan on our website, theworld.org.

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• www.alissaquart.com
• www.olofarnalds.com
• Roni Horn
• www.eileenmyles.com

I bought into Brand Iceland. I visited the art spots Reykjavik, Stykkiholmur, and Budir. I swam in a hot river and slept in a hotel where the walls were painted lichen-green. When I came back to New York, I was still seeing traces of Iceland everywhere. There was even a new Iceland-themed exhibit by the American artist Roni Horn. It’s going on at the Whitney Museum right now.

Icelandic singer Olof Arnalds played at the opening. Horn’s show starts right in the elevator, with aquatic sound art.

Horn’s show is full of pictures of Iceland: geothermal water, taxidermist birds, faces floating on the surface of hot springs. She’s drawn to the isolation, the communal atmosphere, and above all, the landscape.

Donna De Salvo curated Horn’s show. She sees the draw of Iceland like this:

“You know the extremes, where you have volcanic activity marching right down to the sea, and this collapse in a sense for us at when you live in an urban environment like NY to see this extreme range of terrain is just magical.

Iceland has long attracted other American artists. Call it Artland. Yoko Ono, Richard Serra, and the poet Anne Carson all came here looking for a muse. Same with Eileen Myles. She just wrote The Importance of Being Iceland.

“Iceland is really interesting because it just happened to be to the side in a way so certain things could continue to exist and certain people could have a self-effacing way of looking at their own culture.”

I love that Icelandic self-effacement. There’s that appeal of their music and literature. It’s all about stubborn iconoclasm. An experimental writer like Myles could seem odd in the world of American letters. But in Iceland, odd is perfectly normal.

Eileen Myles: “Icelandic artists are really proud of how many odd strange people who’ve lived in odd strange ways were part of their history American artist wouldn’t go for a folkish approach to who we are and really claim lineage to these oddballs, there’s a kind of funky pride.”

While Iceland was a dreamscape for artists, it was also floating by on a wildly inflated economy of credit. Iceland’s fishing culture had migrated into banking and boutique hotels. Then it all crashed. Now crushed by debt, their currency devalued; do the newly poor Icelanders still see themselves in the portraits American artists make of them? Philosopher Oddny Eir Evarsdottir says in a way they do. Icelanders depend on American artists’ view of their country. Just like American artists depend on Iceland.

“We are living inside it like inside the crisis situation we are like really hoping that inside Iceland’s economy we are heading toward this metaphor of an Iceland as a health and beautiful place where you can go way like an asylum and I really hope we will go there so at this moment, the guest’s eye, the metaphors of others, it’s so helpful.”

These metaphors may not help much in the end. But Iceland will still have its amazing, strange indie music to keep Artland alive. All those heated, water-logged dreams. For The World, this is Alissa Quart.