Description
“Over two days, January 26–27, 1964, the Hi Red Center founders (Akasegawa Genpei, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, and Takamatsu Jiro) and Izumi Tatsu staged an event called Shelter Plan in the lobby and room 340 of the Imperial Hotel in Hibiya, Tokyo. Hi Red Center claimed to be acting on behalf of a fictitious organization, the Shelter Plan Conference, and sent invitations and instructions to specific acquaintances. When visitors arrived, they had their height, weight, shoulder width, face size, interior mouth volume and other measurements taken, and photographs taken from the front, sides, back, top of head, and bottom of shoes, generating data with which individual specifications were created for customized one-person shelters. No shelters were actually created, and the series of events—people receiving invitations, coming to the hotel as instructed, and participating in their own measurement—was the work itself. Hi Red Center was formed in 1963 with the mission of staging “direct actions,” and went beyond existing concepts of the work of art, repeatedly staging events and happenings not only at museums and art galleries but also on streets, rooftops, and trains. Shelter Plan was one of Hi Red Center’s most ambitious events, involving not only visual artists affiliated with Neo-Dada and Fluxus, but also musicians, designers, editors, and video artists.”—Go Hirasawa, "Moment When a Singularity is Born: Essay on Jonouchi Motoharu," Collaborative Cataloging Japan, April 10, 2019, http://www.collabjapan.org/essay-go-hirasawa-jonouchi-motoharu-english
Creation Date
1964
Format
16mm
Color