Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 28

A Restatement: The Art of ‘Ground Zero’ (Part 9)
Nukes and Niigata II


Otomo Yoshihide x Ameya Norimizu tachi – Smile (2012). Photographed July 16, 2012. All photos: Isamu Murai, courtesy the Water and Land – Niigata Art Festival organizing committee

Curiously, this summer for one reason or another I was blessed with several opportunities to visit Niigata. In addition to the Nagaoka Fireworks Festival, which, as I noted in my last column, I was invited to attend in connection with the Nobuhiko Obayashi movie Casting Blossoms to the Sky, this year I also attended the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale 2012, held over a wide area centered in Tokamachi, and the Water and Land – Niigata Art Festival, staged on a grand scale in Niigata City.

Traveling back and forth over such a short period of time between Tokyo and these various locations in Niigata, I was struck by the geographical and climatic variety of its administrative jurisdiction, a variety one cannot possibly comprehend from looking at a featureless map: the hilly topography of Tokamachi, known around the world as an area of record high snowfall; the scenic beauty of Nagaoka, which sprang up along the Shinano River; and the key port city of Niigata, which faces the Japan Sea. Considering that the prefecture also includes Sado Island, the country’s sixth largest island in terms of area after Okinawa Island, it would be no exaggeration to say that Niigata prefecture is a microcosm of the entire Japanese archipelago.

Actually, until this summer I had never actually visited Niigata City itself, something that surprised even me. After passing Nagaoka on the shinkansen and feeling the gradual change in elevation during the descent into Niigata, the first thing I noticed was the salt tang of the sea. Perhaps this was because the main venue for the Water and Land – Niigata Art Festival was the harbor district not far from the station known as the former Bandaijima Fish Market, which meant that the venue fronted directly onto an ocean canal. It was this physiological sensation that made me think that the place name “Niigata,” which literally means “new lagoon,” actually derives from a “newly” opened up “tidal flat.”

In fact, this sensation I felt in Niigata City was also closely related to the concept of the Water and Land – Niigata Art Festival. But why “water and land,” which exist everywhere there are people living, in Niigata City? The answer is probably because the stretch of land known today as Niigata is itself what one might call a “newly developed area” formed by “land” carried down from the mountains by the abundant “waters” of the Shinano and Agano rivers. So rather than the theme being set because Niigata City is a place blessed with land and water, it was based on the fact that the city itself was formed by “water and land.” In this sense, for Niigata City, water and land are more than simply a theme for an art festival. They are so important they could be likened to the city’s mother and father.

Another thing I sensed while slowly wandering around the site of the old fish market that served as the festival’s main venue before nightfall was how high up and how far away the sky seemed when I looked up. It was in the middle of a heat wave and so autumn was still a long way off, and yet facing the water and looking up at the sky I sensed the kind of expansiveness that almost seems to draw one in. It was completely different from the sky I saw over Nagaoka that was pitted with cumulonimbus clouds. So translucent was it that I got a real sense of how, just as if I followed the canal in front of me I would eventually be carried around the world, so too the sky linked me with every other place on earth.

It seems it was not by accident that I immediately thought, “This is the northern sky.” Because more than a few of the exhibits at the main venue explored links between Niigata City and the Ainu culture of the north. This was unexpected given what I had assumed in advance to be image of the festival, but in a sense it was completely understandable.

If Niigata City were indeed a “newly” opened up “tidal flat” (ie, a “newly developed area”) formed by the accumulation of land carried down rivers, then it would be no surprise if this place that thrived as a port were once a relay point on the Japan Sea side of Honshu for people and things traveling back and forth by sea to avoid having to cross the steep mountains. Come to think of it, this place is similar to the port of Otaru, which by coincidence I visited some time later. Almost certainly exchanges between Niigata and Hokkaido would have been far more vigorous and intimate before the development of overland railway links and air routes than they are now,.


Otomo Yoshihide x Ameya Norimizu tachi – Smile (2012) Photographed July 16, 2012.

Of all the works in exhibition, I think Smile by “Otomo Yoshihide x Ameya Norimizu tachi,” which takes up a good deal of the space at the main venue, best summarizes the sentiments expressed here.

On setting foot inside the venue, one’s eyes were immediately drawn to what looked like an abandoned house, or perhaps a bombed house would be a better description, which had been erected in the middle of the space. It appeared to have been relocated from somewhere in Niigata City. All of the remains in the venue of what appeared to have been an office and warehouse were transformed into completely foreign matter by being combined with sounds and objects by the two artists concerned.


Otomo Yoshihide x Ameya Norimizu tachi – Smile (2012) Photographed July 17, 2012.

The technique of reconstructing an abandoned house based on memories left behind as vestiges probably took its cue from Ameya’s work since The Shape of Me, the installation using abandoned buildings scattered around Nishi-Sugamo, staged for “Festival/Tokyo 2010.” This time, however, the thing that attracted my interest in relation to the art festival was that the floor of the venue was flooded throughout, with the flooding widest at the part facing the water so that it formed a kind of shoal allowing water to flow freely to the sea.

One would think that the combination of abandoned buildings and large volumes of water would inevitably call to mind the earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, but for some reason this association struck me as inapt. Ameya has repeatedly placed large volumes of water around abandoned buildings in his installations to date, and the venues for his work are always redolent of water. This time, however, it was not so much this, perhaps, but the fact that the origins of the city of Niigata itself owe so much to water and its movement that precluded me from viewing the exhibit in the context of images of natural disasters. To put it more succinctly, it was because I interpreted from the coexistence of destruction and fertility that permeated every aspect of this installation that the very existence of this city, which was built up by masses of earth and sand carried from rivers, is the outcome of a natural phenomenon that is indistinguishable as either a disaster or a blessing.


Noriyuki Haraguchi – Niigata-Kei 12 (2012)

Other works in this main venue, such as Noriyuki Haraguchi’s Niigata-Kei 12, in which the surfaces of water and waste oil laid flat like mirrors reflected the surroundings as if they were another world, and Yukihiro Yoshihara’s Shibita, which captured in meticulous visuals the flow of water on the Shinano River and changes in the topography, pulled against and resisted each other using the same theme of water as their medium, giving rise to an extraordinary space the likes of which has rarely been seen in recent years.

Yoshihara’s Shibita was particularly memorable. Inspired by the theory that the name of the artist’s own hometown of Shibata derives from the Ainu for “a place where salmon can be caught,” and the artist’s conviction that “for the Ainu of old, a ‘river’ was a single life form that rose from the sea onto the land and flowed past villages before penetrating deep into the mountains,” this work is based on scenes captured during Yoshihara’s own journey along the 367 kilometers from the mouth of the Shinano River to its source on Mount Kobushigatake.


Video stills from Yukihiro Yoshihara – Shibita (2012).

As the work unfolds, scenes of sites of flooding and monuments to these events, ancient battlefields, ruins, hydroelectric dams, factories and so on appear in rapid succession to the accompaniment of the sound of raging waters, making it impossible to avert one’s gaze. “Viewed from the perspective of the Ainu of old,” notes Yoshihara, “this river would probably be the equivalent of a creature with wounds all over its body. Looking at the current state of what is Japan’s longest river, my thoughts constantly turned to what it might look like in the future.” In a manner that was never anything but coolheaded, Yoshihara traced the origins and history of his hometown as it appears today, having been transformed into a complex that is indistinguishable between something natural, the site of a disaster, and the vestige of human activity.

And it was as an extension of viewing these exhibits that I would encounter in Niigata for the second time after Nagaoka the vestige of nuclear misadventure. (To be continued)

Water and Land – Niigata Art Festival runs from July 14 to December 24, 2012.

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

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