Hi Red Centre [ed. Shigeko Kubota]
HI RED CENTER
New York City, USA: Fluxus, 1965
22 x 16 ¾"
Edition size unknown
A cartographic poster documenting the activities of the Tokyo-based art collective Hi Red Center, which consisted of Genpei Akasegawa, Natsuyuki Nakanishi and Jiro Takamatsu. The work features a map of central Tokyo, upon which are superimposed descriptions of twenty Hi Red Center actions.
Like many early Fluxus editions, George Maciunas had conceived this as a "complete works by" project. Similar efforts were boxed works, to allow for the inclusion of new pieces, but the short-lived Hi Red Centre had already disbanded the year prior.
The poster is designed by Maciunas and edited by Shigeko Kubota, who had just travelled from Tokyo to New York and sought to bring the group's efforts to the attention of American audiences.
The double-side poster features documentation of the Japanese group's various "events and exhibits". These include performances such as Cleaning Event, where the trio washed city streets by hand, in response to the government’s demands that the city should present a clean image to the world.
Other examples include:
"Dinner party on the anniversary of non-V Day at Citizen’s Hall. A great and delicious meal was eaten energetically by performers while audience observed. At midnight Kazakura branded his chest with hot iron.”
“The Gallery stayed closed for 5 days. After 5 days a cockroach was released from a bottle kept there.”
“Books, pants, shirts, shoes, full trunk etc. were dropped from roof to street. Afterwards the smashed trunk was kept in the baggage room of Ochanomizu railroad station.”
The poster was included in Fluxus 1, and sold individually for fifty cents. For five dollars, one could purchase a crumped version held together with rope. The image was also reproduced as a wall piece for an exhibition at the MoMA in 2013.
"Unlike a conventional map, the Hi Red Center poster is not a standardized tool for geographic orientation. Rather, the collective conceptualized the map as a means of crystallizing their ephemeral actions and public interventions—literally etching them onto the city grid. By superimposing documentation of their subversive actions onto a map of Tokyo, Hi Red Center reimagined the city’s urban landscape. In lieu of a traditional coordinate plane, lines connect geographic points to corresponding textual descriptions of events orchestrated by the collective. On the backside of the map are corresponding documentary photographs that provide visual evidence of interventions such as Dropping Event (October 10, 1964), during which Hi Red Center associates flung the contents of a suitcase, followed by the suitcase itself, off the rooftop of the Ikenobo Flower School’s headquarters. According to the text on the map, dropped items included “books, pants, shirts, shoes, full trunk, etc.”
- MoMA
