House clearing of unpublished words …
Tokyo Midtown Award 2015 / Roppongi Art Night
Its hard to understand who this is award is aimed at and who the event is for. In conservative surrounds public art is a rare opportunity, yet no one here really aspires to it. Sadly on evidence, there are few that have little time for it. As for Roppongi Art Night, its now in it’s 6th year.
Mori Art Museum reopening / “Simple Forms”
The museum is reworked from within. Research areas are the greatest addition, especially the Film section.
http://www.mori.art.museum/english/contents/simple_forms/
Mika Ninagawa at Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo
A strange show where the opening night was accompanied by three outfits changes. This was echoed in each room where work shifted from style and sentiment. The best moments were the least talked about (corners of offal print; and an oblique and possibly misheard reference to The Matrix being here favourite film.) The most mentioned moments the most uninspiring. I forget exactly what they were but ‘fame’, ‘memory’ and the Olympics come to mind.
http://www.haramuseum.or.jp/en/common/pressrelease/pdf/hara/en_hara_pr_ninagawa_150127.pdf
Hikarie8 Tomio Koyama Gallery, Takuro Kuwata
Wonderful, inventive, unexpected. At the same time, makes my skin crawl.
http://www.hikarie8.com/artgallery/2015/02/takurokuwata.shtml
Hikarie8 / CUBE 1, 2, 3, “I’m sorry please talk more slowly” Hikarie Contemporary Art Eye vol.1「小山登美夫 監修」
有馬かおる、COBRA、松原壮志朗、J・パーカー・ヴァレンタイン、佐々木健, 森田浩彰、XYZ Collective、Kaoru Arima、COBRA、Soshiro Matsubara、J.Parker Valentine、Ken Sasaki、Hiroaki Morita
In the culturally stiff surroundings of the city, this bunch do everything to loosen up proceedings. Possibly an instruction manual of sorts for contemporary art. If only… Impromptu and unpretentious its not only the sense of humour be a deviant spirit that happily stands back and laughs as it looks on. Both Aoyama Meguro and Misako & Rosen have made it their business to not only point at how stupid the question of which language is best used locally and worked to fashion their own language. The food abroad sucks, the weathers not as nice and public holidays are in short supply. No public baths? No way … Unsurprisingly both galleries are succeeding abroad where others locally are struggling. The moral or this tale? Language is unimportant. Communicating is everything, especially whens its absurd and happily abstract.
http://www.hikarie8.com/cube/2015/03/hikarie-contemporary-art-eye-vol1.shtml
TOLOT Shinonome “Hyper-Materiality on photo”
The problem with photography exists beyond the surface and hardly ever scratched. ‘Hyper-Materiality’ is a nod to ideas beyond the image and into the heart of issues teased or subtly suggested. In the case of this show, work present seems less equipped for thorough investigation but it digs a little deeper than you would expect. Photography it would seem from the collection of hung material is only interesting when it’s not photography. Go figure.
http://gptokyo.jp/archives/1964
Kaoru Arima, “Face of a human”
Sculptor turned painter with his latest show for Misako & Rosen in Otsuka, Tokyo. Anyone that turns from sculptor to painter so freely deserves more attention.
http://www.misakoandrosen.com/en/exhibitions/15/03/
Yumiko Chiba Associates / Hagiwara Projects / Talion Gallery, “The Camera Knows Everything”
The exhibition spread itself across three galleries, each focusing on a different aspect of the photographic image and contemporary art practices. Yumiko Chiba Associates featured Jiro Takamatsu, Motohiro Tomii, Takuma Ishikawa and Dennis Oppenheim under the subtitle ‘Production Process / Auxillary Equipment’. ‘Environment / Observer’ at Hagiwara Projects featured Yuko Amano, Hiroaki Morita, Yasuko Watanabe and Josh Tonsfeldt, while the tiny basement of Talion Gallery saw Toru Arakawa, Hirohisa Koike, Kenshu Shintsubo and Beat Streuli each survey and speculate upon landscape and time (‘Geography / History’).
The title is intentionally provocative. The camera only knows what it collects, either on camera film or smart card. What struck me however were the politics and terminology defining these experiences in such broad terms along with the value these experiences offered, with the catalogue referring to types of professionalism, “new-amateurism” and a “de-terratorialisation”, the compatibility of photography and art, and the “modest extraordinariness” of banal images.
Yumiko Chiba Associates’ contribution was in my mind the most succinct, perhaps due to the level of work explored. In a recent interview Wolfgang Tillmans describes seeing photography as object-like with the purpose of exhibition to be uncovered and openly reinterpreted. Work is loosely connected by narrative, colour, form, geometry and so on but not necessarily scale, with the arrangement of one wall squared off against the other. With this interview in mind, the territory of YCA’s ‘Production Process / Auxillary Equipment’, Tomii and Oppenheim could each be seen to take material from similar landscapes in entirely different ways; Tomii being intuitive and Oppenheim as measured and analytical.
Between these three satellite shows an interesting question remained unanswered: what does the camera forget or fail to see? Hiroaki Morita (‘Environment / Observer’ at Hagiwara Projects) gets the closest to suggesting this question. His talks of whats hidden, masked and unseen introducing his own queries that speculate on the legitimacy of contained and dark processes photography needs to exist and its generally failure in the production of art — existing beyond itself to incorporate more than it excludes. Yet for an overall project which begins with the camera and a universal all-encompassing perspective, the results were fairly disappointing.
Fukushima Traces 2011-2013, Shuji Takagi (Osiris)
Masaru struggled to think of a question, head in hands and microphone sandwiched between both. By his reckoning Art is awkward, a pain-in-the-arse, but the work on display at Studio 35 Minutes needed talking about on those terms. Attempting to conceptualise, reason and reverse ideas of a worldly nature. In fact the great earthquake and meltdown at Fukushima-Daichi power plant in 2011 were far from conceptual but very real and still apparent. There’s no reason to rethink or reframe, reposition or replace feelings because for a great many people, the effect of those events still linger, and a great many are still unable to return home, and perhaps never will.
Shuji Akagi’s book — Fukushima Traces 2011-2013 published by Osiris — and the landscape it’s set within, unravels through his constant observation but as he explains he finds himself caught between ‘rock and hard place’ wanting to stay and record whats happening around him. Yet he sent his family to live with his parents far from Fukushima City further inland and over the mountains. He is now half way between them and the crippled nuclear power plant, the vast expanding containers or irradiated water and a tract of land that has become a no-go area.
xxx photos of animals and places before and after “6months?”
there is this argument that says ‘art’ projects only abstract events and situations, failing to represent the human scale of things. thats simply untrue. if anything art compounds the dumbstruck and powerlessness of people amidst these events. in Akagi’s book, blue tarpaulin is everywhere, soil bagged and piled on top of each other. these blue sheets take on a stranger sense of new meaning. At summer and winter time, festivals (matsuri) pop up everywhere through Japan. food and alcohol locally produced appear to fanfare. makeshift structures stand erect and wrapped in wriggle tin and drapes. convenient if it rains and shelter for the inebriated, overcome by the mountains of food, generous company and ever-flowing beer and shochu. the tarpaulin now doubles in action, now wrapping topsoil and tree bark, stripped back and buried beside playgrounds and between buildings in the spirit of some kind of communal black comedy, the comedy being theres no real escape. The residue is literally swept under the carpet, or in the case Akagi notices, underneath climbing frames and beside school buildings.
each photograph carries with it commentary in both english and Japanese. the notes bare witness to not only the tragic but the alarmingly stupid as well. How many times can you say “Keep going on Fukushima!” (“Gambarou Fukushima”) ? — ‘Carry on Fukushima’, perhaps — After a while it becomes meaningless, and when signs that carry these slogans get sandwiched between advertisements for local restaurants and traffic directions, their familiarity and impact becomes even more obtuse, as much as the 2-for-the-price-of-1 offer that straddles them all.
In Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s writing on architecture Learning From Las Vegas ‘the duck’ or decorated shed? became models for an architecture that celebrated the banal and ridiculous; as ‘heroic’ as it was ‘free’ from constraints of permanence and meaning in a place dominated by mobility and an uninterrupted horizon.
Photos from a previous exhibition at the same gallery reappear in place. They marked the beginning of Akagi’s book.
http://www.osiris.co.jp/ft.html
Inside Architecture: A Challenge to Japanese Society (documentary film)
Initial release: May 23, 2015
Dir: Tomomi Ishiyama
Duration: 1h 13m
P3, 1984
inside architecture presents an alternative viewpoint.
but its not an attractive one. out of all the characters interviewed the best that comes across is izosaki. the rest are either indifferent or hesitant and at times dismissive. I’m talking about peter eisenman, who said the name of his conference in charlotssville borrowed from XXX and adapted is actually a stealth masthead echoed through the number 3 or
backward letter E that has his claim of ownership very much present. how true that really is or whether a fortunate coincidence that does him no harm whatsoever — forever the self promoter — eisenman perks the passing of isozaki’s talent at the hand of Post Modernism. but its here that we see by how much he misses the point.
as hedjuk once said “you cant get in them” in response to eisenman’s remark of his then newly completed berlin XXX “how are people meant to get in”
perhaps the most humble figure is koolhaas whose empathy with toyo ito in his curatorial role as director of kumamoto artpolis curating architectural projects that the shift from importing talent has been to figure out how to function following disaster — the disaster here is the tohoku earthquake tsunami and nuclear melt down at Fukushima Daiichi. the greatest critics though levelled at ito has been he’s not been nearly as successful in exporting talent as his predecessor had been in. but as koolhaas testifies the role of the architect has been lost on most people for a while and under-valued. perhaps ito and how architecture in procured and built needs a radical rethinking, not only in the shadow of massive environmental change but in the way things get built period. the architect has over the last twenty years been replaced by the developer. in japan thats more than evident, where land prices elevated and collapsed to such an extreme extent the developer found itself best placed to insert extruded floor plates and call them buildings before the architect noticed.
in one sense the architects and observers chosen are an odd bunch though familiar faces. and though while the film illustrated one reason for the way the west received japanese modernism in the late ’70s early ‘80s, theres no real attempt to say where it exists now. a few new faces would have very quickly shown the legacy of both the P3 conference and how the economic bubble ruptured in the early ‘90s and what it led to. in one respect japan has had to respond to more than any other place so while you could say the state is very safe and polite, that in itself is a causal reading of a more volatile condition that is as much cultural as it is architectural.