Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 33

Painter and ‘counterfeiter’ – On ‘Makoto Aida: Monument for Nothing’ (Part 3)


Aida Makoto + 21st Century Cardboard Guild – Monument for Nothing II (2000-). Installation view: Mori Art Museum, 2013. All images: Courtesy Mizuma Art Gallery.

 

Caught between burning ardor and the void, I couldn’t abolish my solitude as long as this living girl’s body called me to a kind of death. Like God for Chieko, this futile solitude constituted the whole of my existence. Futile, yes, it was. But it was pure. (1)

Over a month has passed since the closing of “Makoto Aida: Monument for Nothing” at the Mori Art Museum. The various controversies surrounding it that caused such a fuss have also faded away, almost as if they never occurred. The exhibition has nowhere else to go, and the various issues that arose in the course of the exhibition were not raised constructively by the organizers at any other platforms. That a large-scale retrospective of Makoto Aida, something that is unlikely to be repeated given the current situation at public institutions, was even held is of no small significance. But I am left wondering to what extent philosophizing with regard to Japanese art’s “various designs” deepened as a result of this exhibition. I think perhaps the “forgetting and repeating” of these same issues is destined to recur again and again in different variations wearing the same feigned, brazen face peculiar to this “bad place.”

It is for this reason that what I really want to do at this point is at least look back at the essence of Makoto Aida the artist that emerged as a result of the Mori Art Museum exhibition. During the exhibition, the positive opinions concerning the artist I came across tended to be along the lines of “Makoto Aida is an intelligent artist.” On the surface, his work appears “erotic, grotesque and Lolita-esque,” but notwithstanding the fact that similar tendencies can be observed to some extent in the artist himself, these characteristics are the results of a deliberately chosen examination of himself, and the ironical hand behind this is none other than the hand of the Modernist who deals with his subjects whether beautiful or ugly by formalizing them in an intellectual way.

However, it is precisely within such a reasonable understanding that there in fact lurks the fallacy against which we must guard the most. At a glance it appears correct, and to an extent it is, but if we reduce the essence of this artist to this one point, Aida’s output will waste away before our very eyes, and will no doubt lose most of its “appeal.” We do not look at Aida’s paintings because we want to understand them successfully. We are “captivated” without really understanding why, and it is for this reason that the least we want to do is “understand” them. However, while the above kind of interpretation serves as a foothold to interacting with Aida’s artwork, it does not uncover the secret of its fascination. If this were all there was to it, it would be a loss too great to be compensated. In which case it would be better not to “understand” them at all.

Of course, some of the responsibility for this kind of superficiality lies with the artist himself. Take, for example, the “Dog” series, which attracted the most attention (ie, notoriety) at the Mori Art Museum exhibition. Yes, those paintings of young girls on all fours smiling with all four limbs amputated. Or the group painting Picture of Waterfall, a work that has become synonymous with the artist and that was featured on billboard-sized posters that were posted extensively around subway stations. Both could probably be counted among Aida’s representative works. And yet despite this, compared to his other works they are merely mediocre, or even below average.

Why? Because these “pictures” are not “paintings” in the sense that they do not rise above the level of illustrations, or in other words conceptual art diagrams. At a glance, the former may appear to be the sublimation of eros asserting itself as the artist’s desire dictates even if it means trampling on the human rights of women. Its essence, however, lies in the value reversal-like repetition of the peculiar style of Léonard Tsugouharu Foujita – the most successful Japanese painter in Paris of the Modern era – a style developed by unifying the division between “Nihonga” and “Western-style painting,” through the depiction of nudes with a different kind of maliciousness but with the “milky-white skin” synonymous with Foujita.

As for the latter, it calls to mind the posthumous work by one of the pioneers of contemporary art, Marcel Duchamp, Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas. This “posthumous work” required the viewer to “peep” through two holes in a door at a naked woman with her legs apart, in the course of which the normalcy of the fulfillment of desire hidden in nudes throughout the history of Western art was revealed. Similarly, through the “waterfall” in his own painting, Aida secures for the viewer in the name of art “even” the pretext of “peeping” at young girls in school swimsuits. In the case of the former it is Foujita’s “style” that is cleverly adapted to contemporary popular morals, while in the case of the latter it is Duchamp’s “concept” that receives this treatment. Once one fully “understands” this, however, there is no other reason to remain in front of these works. This is why Aida calls himself a “conceptual artist.”


Aida Makoto – Picture of Waterfall (2007-2010), acrylic on canvas, 439 × 272 cm. Photo Kazuo Fukunaga, © Makoto Aida.

Even if a great deal of effort in terms of time and labor has been put into them, these works are still no more than illustrations (or “designs,” as Aida puts it) in the form of paintings of concepts or compositions that entered the artist’s mind. This being the case, even if during the exhibition those incapable of viewing these works formalistically were only able to see in them the violation of human rights (extremeness) or the fulfillment of desire (dissatisfaction), this would probably have been expected. These paintings were not produced based on some personal preference to begin with. To put it another way, such criticisms (ie, wishes) and the formalistic “understanding” referred to above highlight perfectly the two sides of the coin with respect to these works. In a sense the two are complicit, and that opinion is divided in this way is probably the very thing Aida expected. But the reason such a contentious division was able to occur was none other than because the works in question are not “difficult to understand contemporary art” but nominally “paintings” able to be understood by anyone.

This ingenious side of Aida has long been camouflaged by the artist himself. After all, this is a person who in the early 1990s, when the post-Mono-ha tendency was still very noticeable, made a point of referring to himself as a “painter.” Who on earth would regard him as a conceptual artist? Moreover, this “simulation” has been consistent throughout his career, with exhibitions such as “E-BAKA” held at the Mizuma Art Gallery in 2010 clearly following in this tradition. It goes without saying, however, that this very attitude of identifying himself anachronistically as a “painter” and belittling himself by using the term “e-baka” (literally, a painting fool) is the outgrowth of a romantic sense of irony. By reverting imaginatively to the long-obsolete term “painter” (ekaki) he is being “reactionary,” which has the effect (in itself contemporary) of bringing to his work an attitude of resisting politically the artistic status quo (contemporary art).

The most important thing, however, is that despite such ingenious craftiness, this is still not regarded as an essential quality of Makoto Aida the artist. That Aida uses such terms as “painter” or “painting fool” to describe himself is undoubtedly because he politely shuns painters or painting fools in the real sense of these terms. Aida’s incredibly warped true nature of avoiding painting by camouflaging himself as a painter and in so doing only just maintaining the dignity of producing paintings has resulted in this pure, solitary pursuit finding fruition in unexpected ways. Ironically, however, forming as they do part of a larger oeuvre, these works are often dismissed as “poor work.” And yet this is in fact the very reason why Aida says he insists quietly yet strongly on his rights as an artist.


Aida Makoto – Untitled (2001), street rubbish, tissues, silicon caulking, handbag, kimono waist cord, baby’s bib, Buddhist wooden grave tablets, varnish, wood preservative, wood glue, boiled rice, instant noodles, other foodstuffs, creosote, etc on tatami mats, 270 × 450 cm. © Makoto Aida.


Aida Makoto – ? Ogre (from “Minna to Issho” series) (2003), inkjet print on paper, 150 × 110 cm. Photo Keizo Kioku, © Makoto Aida.

Of the works he exhibited at Yokohama Triennale 2001, for example, Untitled (2001) (2), which has already been disposed of as oversized trash and is no longer extant, is more purely painterly by far than the much talked about Blender (2001). The same could probably be said of the “Minna to Issho” series, in which Aida sought to put down on paper as extemporaneously as possible the ideas that crossed his mind (3). In these works, Aida suppresses the concept completely. Attempts to achieve something similar can also be seen in such filmic works as Ueno Pantaloon Diary (1990) and Tairappyo (1995). To the extent that in both these works the artist stakes everything on the question, “How can I lose my reason?” they can be considered as of the same dimension as works such as the aforementioned Untitled and Minna to Issho. In this sense, perhaps the most significant of the works included in the Mori Art Museum exhibition was the artless collaborative work/collaborative exhibit, Monument for Nothing II (2008–). It is for this reason that I regard the outcome of this work as far more important than the numerous newly created large paintings.


Aida Makoto – Ueno Pantaloon Diary (1990), video, 1 minute 10 seconds. © Makoto Aida.


Aida Makoto – Tairappyo (1995), video. © Makoto Aida.

Of course, there is no doubt that the very idea of ridding one’s mind of concepts as much as possible when painting arises from the “feelings of guilt” the artist senses at being steeped in conceptual art. However, it is this very position of moving towards a state of “selflessness” arising from such feelings of “gratitude” towards pure painting that Makoto Aida now occupies. It is here that there are so many things that really need to be viewed. In fact, isn’t the artist himself saying as much? That “it is in the poor work alone that you find the real me.”

“Aida Makoto: Monument for Nothing” ran from November 17, 2012 to March 31, 2013 at the Mori Art Museum.

 

 

    1. Takehiko Fukunaga,

Flowers of Grass

    1. , trans. Royall Tyler, Dalkey Archive Press, 2012, p. 198.

  1. The original title was Arakawa kasenshiki no homuresu “Yoshio-san” no isaku (jinseiga series), (Posthumous work by “Yoshio,” a homeless person by the Arakawa River riverbed (Life picture series).
  2. In this sense, the exhibition at the Mori Art Museum of copies instead of the real things in the case of most of the works from the “Minna to Issho” series was a huge mistake from the point of view of the composition of the exhibition. According to Aida’s own Twitter messages, this was the result of overscrupulousness with regard to the “concept” of pinning work directly onto walls, but considering that these works involved putting ideas down on paper as quickly as possible with absolutely no regard for concepts, they have no value other than their being the real thing. By a strange irony, one could say that these exhibits revealed the antagonism within Makoto Aida the artist between the “concepts” and the “painting fool.”

Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 1-6

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