Pop-Up Mathaf @ Mori Art Museum
Same-Same but Different: The Role of the Artist in the Arab World and Japan
Special supplement to ART iT
Zena El Khalil (on screen), Sputniko! (at right) and moderator Deena Chalabi (at left) during Session 3 of the symposium "Pop-up Mathaf @ Mori Art Museum – Same-Same but Different: The Role of the Artist in the Arab World and Japan." Photo Mikuriya Shinichiro. All images unless otherwise noted: Courtesy Mori Art Museum.
On September 28-29, the Mori Art Museum (MAM) hosted a symposium between artists and curators from the Arab world and their peers in Japan. Part of related programming of the exhibition "Arab Express: The Latest Art from the Arab World," held at MAM from June 16 to October 28, 2012, the symposium, entitled "Pop-up Mathaf @ Mori Art Museum – Same-Same but Different: The Role of the Artist in the Arab World and Japan," was also organized in conjunction with Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, and the Qatar Museums Authority in commemoration of 40 years of diplomatic ties between Qatar and Japan.
Throughout the discussions, the "Arab Express" exhibition was a key touchstone. Curated by MAM Director Fumio Nanjo and Curator Kenichi Kondo as the first major survey of contemporary Arab art held in Japan, the exhibition challenges preconceptions about life in the Arab world that have been shaped by media representations of conflict and terrorism. With 34 artists and artist groups from across the Arab world contributing works in genres ranging from photography and video to painting and installation, the exhibition expresses the diversity of viewpoints and practices in the Arab world today, and also how the "Arab world" in fact extends across the globe through diaspora communities and exchanges such as residencies and international exhibitions.
For "Pop-up Mathaf @ Mori Art Museum," Kondo teamed with Deena Chalabi, former Head of Strategy at Mathaf, to organize three dialogues between participating artists from "Arab Express" and their Japanese peers. Each session addressed a theme that bridged the individual practices of the artists. On September 28, the symposium began with "Bearing Witness," pairing Iraqi-born photographer Halim Al Karim with Ryuta Ushiro and Ellie of artist collective Chim↑Pom. The next day's sessions were "Tracing History," with Syria-born photographer Hrair Sarkissian and the video artist Meiro Koizumi, and "Subverting Kitsch," with Beirut-based writer and mixed-media artist Zena El Khalil and the media artist Sputniko!, followed by a closing discussion with all the symposium's participants, moderated by Fumio Nanjo. As anticipated by the event's title, "Same-Same but Different," the sessions between artists addressed the commonalities and differences in approaches to art between the participants, opening up lively and genuine exchanges, and also eliciting active participation from audience members through questions and comments.
Top: Halim Al Karim - Untitled 1 (from the Urban Witness series) (2002), installation view as presented in "Arab Express: The Latest Art from the Arab World" at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Photo Kioku Keizo, courtesy Mori Art Museum. Courtesy XVA Gallery. Bottom: Halim Al Karim speaks about the influence of Sumerian reliefs on his artistic practice as Ellie and Ryutaro Ushiro of the artist collective Chim↑Pom look on. Photo Mikuriya Shinichiro.
In "Session 1: Bearing Witness," Halim Al Karim took an indirect approach to discussing his practice. He showed slides of the Sumerian reliefs that inspired his personal aesthetic, explaining that his "out-of-focus" photography technique is inspired by the effects of time on ancient artifacts, as well as his own blurry vision. He said that as he studied Iraq's ancient culture, he came to feel that he was living across multiple realities between the past and the present, and that the ancient reverence that Sumerian culture had for women as goddesses informed his own photographing of and empathy for female subjects. But his works are also capable of expressing a strong critical position. He described how he reconsidered his view of humanity while hiding in the dessert for three years after refusing to enter the mandatory military service required of Iraqi citizens under the Saddam Hussein regime, which throughout most of the 1980s was engaged in a costly war with Iran. Series like "Lost Seclusion of the Soul," "Hidden Agenda," "Black Rain," and "Black Bread" variously dealt with issues of the Iran-Iraq War, international support for the Hussein regime, the invasion of Iraq during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and the anger of the Iraqi people at the international embargo that followed.
Representing the six-member artist group Chim↑Pom, Ryuta Ushiro and Ellie framed their practice, which often involves guerilla stunts in public, as a matter of survival. Screening their early video works Super Rat and Black of Death, they explained that they see in rats and crows a symbol of the intense survival pressures faced by all living creatures in an urban environment like Tokyo. These works develop from a fluid practice in which the group members respond to events in their daily lives. They said that the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster of March 11, 2011, was a tremendous shock for both the artists and the broader Japanese society, disrupting daily routines predicated on peace and stability. Wanting to make a statement that could be relevant to future generations, Chim↑Pom felt it was necessary to address the disaster. They traveled to the devastated city of Soma, in Fukushima prefecture, where they filmed the video KIAI 100 with local workers, who gathered with the artists into a circle and each took turns expressing sentiments of hope for the future through boisterous cheers. For Real Times, the group traveled by car and foot to the gates of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, just before the enforcement of the 30km forced evacuation radius took effect. While making this work, the group became aware of their own relationship to video and the media, as no major news agency had entered the disaster zone to film up close. In the work, several of the group members don white radiation suits and walk to a hill overlooking the nuclear power plant, where they then unfurled a white flag that they spray-painted with a red radioactive hazard sign that also evoked the Japanese national flag.
In dialogue, Ushiro and Ellie expressed admiration for Al Karim's life experiences; in turn, Al Karim said that the group's KIAI 100 video exactly met the symposium theme of "Same-Same but Different." He said that even though thousands of kilometers might separate Japan from other countries, just as the workers in Soma city were cheering each other on, so too were people around the world cheering them on. In other words, Al Karim recognized through the video that even though there are multiple differences that separate different people and societies, there are also unique moments of unity - neither difference nor sameness are mutually exclusive.
Top: Hrair Sarkissian - "Execution Squares" (2008), installation view as presented in "Arab Express: The Latest Art from the Arab World" at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Photo Kioku Keizo, courtesy Mori Art Museum. Collection Sharjah Art Foundation. Bottom: Hrair Sarkissian, with Meiro Koizumi in background. Photo Mikuriya Shinichiro.
In "Session 2: Tracing History," the Damascus-born, Armenian-Syrian photographer Hrair Sarkissian explained how the history of the Armenian Genocide (1915-23), during which authorities of the Ottoman Empire systematically persecuted their Armenian subjects, resulting in an estimated 1-1.5 million deaths and massive social displacement, extends into the present for many people of Armenian origin, and is now one of the main structures of Armenian identity. The Genocide is still not officially recognized by Turkey, the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, and Sarikissian has made several works in Istanbul dealing with this erased history. For the series "Istory," he visited public libraries and archives in Istanbul and photographed them, as a way of confronting the absent historical evidence. For his latest project, "Unexposed," he researched Armenians who were forcefully converted to Islam during the Genocide, and whose descendants remain in Turkey today, living their lives with adopted names and religion. However, some of these Armenians are secretly reconverting to Christianity and reclaiming their Armenian names. After three years of research, Sarkissian found nine such people and had them pose for portraits in their homes, with their features intentionally obscured to reflect the way that Turkish society, as well as the resentment of Armenians who did not convert to Islam, still forces them to hide their identities.
Having studied art in the Netherlands from 2005-07, the video artist Meiro Koizumi became interested in understanding his identity as a Japanese person and his relationship with the society and nation of Japan, and how that could shape the kind of work he wanted to make. His return to Japan in 2007 coincided with his impression that Japanese society was shifting to conservatism, and one of the topics that he began to investigate was the figure of the Kamikaze suicide squadron pilots during World War II. For Koizumi, the Kamikaze pilot represents an ambivalent window into Japan's past, as when considered from an objective perspective, it is impossible to say conclusively whether these pilots truly volunteered for their suicide missions or whether they were forced into it by the authorities. Surviving testimonies suggest it was a mixture of both. This history inspired his video Portrait of a Young Samurai, which shows a young man in a pilot outfit giving an impassioned farewell speech to his parents off-camera. Then an off-camera voice gives directions to the man to further seek out his "samurai spirit," revealing that what is depicted is a stage with an actor and director. The man repeats his monologue and then receives more directions from the off-camera voice. This process repeats, each time escalating the tension between actor and director. Koizumi also introduced the two-channel video Defect in Vision (2011), with multiple takes of a couple discussing the war over dinner in their home. There is a total of eight versions of the same scene, with the couple's movements becoming increasingly awkward with each scene, until it becomes evident that although they appear normal at first, the actors are actually blind.
Top: Zena El Khalil - Xanadu, Your Neon Lights Will Shine, Skip the Light Fandango and Peace Will Guide the Planets and Love Will Steer the Stars (2010), installation view in "Arab Express: The Latest Art from the Arab World" at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Photo Kioku Keizo, courtesy Mori Art Museum. Courtesy Galerie Tanit. Bottom: Moderator Deena Chalabi speaks about the work of Zena El Khalil as El Khalil (lefthand screen) and Sputniko! listen. Photo Mikuriya Shinichiro.
In "Session 3: Subverting Kitsch," both Beirut-based Zena El Khalil and Tokyo-based Sputniko! expressed affinities for each other's practices. With both artists dealing with pop culture and exploring alternative ways of popularizing their work through social media and multiple creative platforms, they perhaps had the most in common of all the symposium's participants. Providing context about her origins, El Khalil explained that she grew up between Lagos, Nigeria, and Beirut, and was exposed to many different cultures in her childhood. Pop culture became for her a way to bridge these differences. Now, she said, she uses pop culture to expose the superficiality of war, and to create an alternate reality through love and humor. For her, the color pink is an important symbolic color. Even though it can be cloying, it is also a symbol of non-violent protest, used by the Code Pink woman-initiated peace and social justice movement and the Think Pink breast-cancer awareness movement and, in the form of a pink triangle, as a symbol of gay pride. She also uses art as a place of meditation and escape from the conflict around her. She makes her mixed-media collage pieces from thousands of small pins, which delicately hold the different elements in place. She explained that this reflects the instability of the region and the problem of collective amnesia that has arisen in Lebanon since the Civil War of 1975-1990. At any time, someone else could rearrange the paintings to tell a completely different story. In a similar way she re-appropriates contentious religious symbols. She made a giant disco ball with the word Allah in Arabic script, inviting participants to dance rather than kill under the light of God. She also brought a monumental sculpture of the word Allah to a church in Italy, where again people were invited to dance. She explained that the Allah sculpture is inspired by a real monument in Tripoli, where people often convene for protests. Her pieces in the "Arab Express" exhibition, she said, were inspired by Israeli propaganda flyers that were distributed during the war in 2006. And she revealed that this practice of inverting violent imagery into beauty also has a precedent in her grandfather, who during the Civil War refused to leave his village despite the heavy fighting that took place there. Every time a bomb fell near his home, he would take the next opportunity to plant a tree in the crater, and now there is a beautiful line of trees leading to his home, and his street has been renamed Flower Street.
The child of a Japanese father and a British mother - both mathematics professors - Sputniko! like El Khalil grew up between cultures. She initially planned to study computer science and mathematics at Imperial College London, but then switched to studying art. This change in interest was partly inspired by her concern over the social roles of women in Japan, and questions about her own biology and issues relating to menstruation and pregnancy. She says that she wanted to become a cyborg, and combined her technological and scientific background to address these problems through art. The first work she introduced as Menstruation Machine Takashi's Take, for which Sputniko! pretended to be a boy who likes to dress up as women but wants to develop an even deeper connection to the opposite sex, and so invents a machine that use electrodes and a vial of blood to recreate the pain and discomfort of menstruation. Building an actual menstruation machine with the help of scientists, Sputniko! photographed herself wearing the machine in the role of the fictional character Takashi, and also created a song and music video about the project. Although the aesthetic of the music video is inspired by pop musicians such as TM Revolution and by media artists like Laurie Anderson, the work also questions the social pressures shaping technology. Sputniko! said that even though doctors knew when they were first invented that contraceptive pills would also stop menstruation, they marketed a program by which women would take the pills for three weeks and then rest a week to maintain the natural menstruation cycle. She cited information that in Japan it took nine years to approve a new contraceptive pill, Libro, which can be used for an entire four-week cycle, whereas it only took five months to approve Viagra. Sputniko! also introduced Sushi Borg Yukari, also realized through photos and a short film, about a "nyotai mori" cyborg, in the shape of an attractive woman, which serves sushi to businessmen from a rotating belt attached to her waist. In the work's premise, the cyborg decides to attach knives to the service belt and slaughter all the men. The artist's most recent project is Nanohana Heels, responding to the ongoing aftereffects of the March 11 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Sputniko! is developing a pair of fashionable high-heel shoes that will plant rape flower seeds, which are contained in a dispenser attached to the shoe, with each step the wearer takes. Sputniko! was inspired by information observed in Chernobyl that rape flowers absorb radioactive substances from the soil. The flowers, which can also be used to create biodiesel, could thus be used to clean up the area around Fukushima and to provide local farmers with a new agriculture that could offset the loss of their crops and livestock due to radiation and also provide an alternative to nuclear energy.
In dialogue, both El Khalil and Sputniko! asserted that although they both draw inspiration from pop culture, they find in art specifically a space to reflect deeply on issues that concern them and to move at a slower pace than commercial artists whose work is driven by sales and visibility.
The participants of "Pop-up Mathaf @ Mori Art Museum – Same-Same but Different: The Role of the Artist in the Arab World and Japan" during the closing roundtable discussion of the symposium, with MAM director Fumio Nanjo at far left and MAM curator Kenichi Kondo at far right. Photo Mikuriya Shinichiro.
The symposium concluded with a roundtable discussion with all the participating artists, as well as curators Chalabi and Kondo. In his opening remarks, the moderator, Fumio Nanjo, touched on themes of identity and questions about how to negotiate the potential hegemony of "common languages," whether defined as English or contemporary art. The artists had diverse views about these topics. Sarkissian said he felt identities such as "Middle Eastern Artist" which are determined by criteria established in the US and Europe, are counterproductive for both the individual artist and meaningful international exchange. Koizumi used the example of the filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu to suggest that, even where artists begin with a common reference point, such as Hollywood films, they still are able to create their own personal artistic languages. The discussion also touched upon points of how contemporary art is now consumed through both markets and international exhibitions, with the curators Nanjo, Kondo and Chalabi reflecting candidly on the responsibilities that exhibition organizers have to protect the individuality of the artists and to reach out to audiences.
Pop-up Mathaf @ Mori Art Museum
Same-Same but Different: The Role of the Artist in the Arab World and Japan
Special supplement to ART iT
Zena El Khalil (on screen), Sputniko! (at right) and moderator Deena Chalabi (at left) during Session 3 of the symposium "Pop-up Mathaf @ Mori Art Museum – Same-Same but Different: The Role of the Artist in the Arab World and Japan." Photo Mikuriya Shinichiro. All images unless otherwise noted: Courtesy Mori Art Museum.
On September 28-29, the Mori Art Museum (MAM) hosted a symposium between artists and curators from the Arab world and their peers in Japan. Part of related programming of the exhibition "Arab Express: The Latest Art from the Arab World," held at MAM from June 16 to October 28, 2012, the symposium, entitled "Pop-up Mathaf @ Mori Art Museum – Same-Same but Different: The Role of the Artist in the Arab World and Japan," was also organized in conjunction with Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, and the Qatar Museums Authority in commemoration of 40 years of diplomatic ties between Qatar and Japan.
Throughout the discussions, the "Arab Express" exhibition was a key touchstone. Curated by MAM Director Fumio Nanjo and Curator Kenichi Kondo as the first major survey of contemporary Arab art held in Japan, the exhibition challenges preconceptions about life in the Arab world that have been shaped by media representations of conflict and terrorism. With 34 artists and artist groups from across the Arab world contributing works in genres ranging from photography and video to painting and installation, the exhibition expresses the diversity of viewpoints and practices in the Arab world today, and also how the "Arab world" in fact extends across the globe through diaspora communities and exchanges such as residencies and international exhibitions.
For "Pop-up Mathaf @ Mori Art Museum," Kondo teamed with Deena Chalabi, former Head of Strategy at Mathaf, to organize three dialogues between participating artists from "Arab Express" and their Japanese peers. Each session addressed a theme that bridged the individual practices of the artists. On September 28, the symposium began with "Bearing Witness," pairing Iraqi-born photographer Halim Al Karim with Ryuta Ushiro and Ellie of artist collective Chim↑Pom. The next day's sessions were "Tracing History," with Syria-born photographer Hrair Sarkissian and the video artist Meiro Koizumi, and "Subverting Kitsch," with Beirut-based writer and mixed-media artist Zena El Khalil and the media artist Sputniko!, followed by a closing discussion with all the symposium's participants, moderated by Fumio Nanjo. As anticipated by the event's title, "Same-Same but Different," the sessions between artists addressed the commonalities and differences in approaches to art between the participants, opening up lively and genuine exchanges, and also eliciting active participation from audience members through questions and comments.
Top: Halim Al Karim - Untitled 1 (from the Urban Witness series) (2002), installation view as presented in "Arab Express: The Latest Art from the Arab World" at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Photo Kioku Keizo, courtesy Mori Art Museum. Courtesy XVA Gallery. Bottom: Halim Al Karim speaks about the influence of Sumerian reliefs on his artistic practice as Ellie and Ryutaro Ushiro of the artist collective Chim↑Pom look on. Photo Mikuriya Shinichiro.
In "Session 1: Bearing Witness," Halim Al Karim took an indirect approach to discussing his practice. He showed slides of the Sumerian reliefs that inspired his personal aesthetic, explaining that his "out-of-focus" photography technique is inspired by the effects of time on ancient artifacts, as well as his own blurry vision. He said that as he studied Iraq's ancient culture, he came to feel that he was living across multiple realities between the past and the present, and that the ancient reverence that Sumerian culture had for women as goddesses informed his own photographing of and empathy for female subjects. But his works are also capable of expressing a strong critical position. He described how he reconsidered his view of humanity while hiding in the dessert for three years after refusing to enter the mandatory military service required of Iraqi citizens under the Saddam Hussein regime, which throughout most of the 1980s was engaged in a costly war with Iran. Series like "Lost Seclusion of the Soul," "Hidden Agenda," "Black Rain," and "Black Bread" variously dealt with issues of the Iran-Iraq War, international support for the Hussein regime, the invasion of Iraq during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and the anger of the Iraqi people at the international embargo that followed.
Representing the six-member artist group Chim↑Pom, Ryuta Ushiro and Ellie framed their practice, which often involves guerilla stunts in public, as a matter of survival. Screening their early video works Super Rat and Black of Death, they explained that they see in rats and crows a symbol of the intense survival pressures faced by all living creatures in an urban environment like Tokyo. These works develop from a fluid practice in which the group members respond to events in their daily lives. They said that the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster of March 11, 2011, was a tremendous shock for both the artists and the broader Japanese society, disrupting daily routines predicated on peace and stability. Wanting to make a statement that could be relevant to future generations, Chim↑Pom felt it was necessary to address the disaster. They traveled to the devastated city of Soma, in Fukushima prefecture, where they filmed the video KIAI 100 with local workers, who gathered with the artists into a circle and each took turns expressing sentiments of hope for the future through boisterous cheers. For Real Times, the group traveled by car and foot to the gates of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, just before the enforcement of the 30km forced evacuation radius took effect. While making this work, the group became aware of their own relationship to video and the media, as no major news agency had entered the disaster zone to film up close. In the work, several of the group members don white radiation suits and walk to a hill overlooking the nuclear power plant, where they then unfurled a white flag that they spray-painted with a red radioactive hazard sign that also evoked the Japanese national flag.
In dialogue, Ushiro and Ellie expressed admiration for Al Karim's life experiences; in turn, Al Karim said that the group's KIAI 100 video exactly met the symposium theme of "Same-Same but Different." He said that even though thousands of kilometers might separate Japan from other countries, just as the workers in Soma city were cheering each other on, so too were people around the world cheering them on. In other words, Al Karim recognized through the video that even though there are multiple differences that separate different people and societies, there are also unique moments of unity - neither difference nor sameness are mutually exclusive.
Top: Hrair Sarkissian - "Execution Squares" (2008), installation view as presented in "Arab Express: The Latest Art from the Arab World" at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Photo Kioku Keizo, courtesy Mori Art Museum. Collection Sharjah Art Foundation. Bottom: Hrair Sarkissian, with Meiro Koizumi in background. Photo Mikuriya Shinichiro.
In "Session 2: Tracing History," the Damascus-born, Armenian-Syrian photographer Hrair Sarkissian explained how the history of the Armenian Genocide (1915-23), during which authorities of the Ottoman Empire systematically persecuted their Armenian subjects, resulting in an estimated 1-1.5 million deaths and massive social displacement, extends into the present for many people of Armenian origin, and is now one of the main structures of Armenian identity. The Genocide is still not officially recognized by Turkey, the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, and Sarikissian has made several works in Istanbul dealing with this erased history. For the series "Istory," he visited public libraries and archives in Istanbul and photographed them, as a way of confronting the absent historical evidence. For his latest project, "Unexposed," he researched Armenians who were forcefully converted to Islam during the Genocide, and whose descendants remain in Turkey today, living their lives with adopted names and religion. However, some of these Armenians are secretly reconverting to Christianity and reclaiming their Armenian names. After three years of research, Sarkissian found nine such people and had them pose for portraits in their homes, with their features intentionally obscured to reflect the way that Turkish society, as well as the resentment of Armenians who did not convert to Islam, still forces them to hide their identities.
Having studied art in the Netherlands from 2005-07, the video artist Meiro Koizumi became interested in understanding his identity as a Japanese person and his relationship with the society and nation of Japan, and how that could shape the kind of work he wanted to make. His return to Japan in 2007 coincided with his impression that Japanese society was shifting to conservatism, and one of the topics that he began to investigate was the figure of the Kamikaze suicide squadron pilots during World War II. For Koizumi, the Kamikaze pilot represents an ambivalent window into Japan's past, as when considered from an objective perspective, it is impossible to say conclusively whether these pilots truly volunteered for their suicide missions or whether they were forced into it by the authorities. Surviving testimonies suggest it was a mixture of both. This history inspired his video Portrait of a Young Samurai, which shows a young man in a pilot outfit giving an impassioned farewell speech to his parents off-camera. Then an off-camera voice gives directions to the man to further seek out his "samurai spirit," revealing that what is depicted is a stage with an actor and director. The man repeats his monologue and then receives more directions from the off-camera voice. This process repeats, each time escalating the tension between actor and director. Koizumi also introduced the two-channel video Defect in Vision (2011), with multiple takes of a couple discussing the war over dinner in their home. There is a total of eight versions of the same scene, with the couple's movements becoming increasingly awkward with each scene, until it becomes evident that although they appear normal at first, the actors are actually blind.
Top: Zena El Khalil - Xanadu, Your Neon Lights Will Shine, Skip the Light Fandango and Peace Will Guide the Planets and Love Will Steer the Stars (2010), installation view in "Arab Express: The Latest Art from the Arab World" at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. Photo Kioku Keizo, courtesy Mori Art Museum. Courtesy Galerie Tanit. Bottom: Moderator Deena Chalabi speaks about the work of Zena El Khalil as El Khalil (lefthand screen) and Sputniko! listen. Photo Mikuriya Shinichiro.
In "Session 3: Subverting Kitsch," both Beirut-based Zena El Khalil and Tokyo-based Sputniko! expressed affinities for each other's practices. With both artists dealing with pop culture and exploring alternative ways of popularizing their work through social media and multiple creative platforms, they perhaps had the most in common of all the symposium's participants. Providing context about her origins, El Khalil explained that she grew up between Lagos, Nigeria, and Beirut, and was exposed to many different cultures in her childhood. Pop culture became for her a way to bridge these differences. Now, she said, she uses pop culture to expose the superficiality of war, and to create an alternate reality through love and humor. For her, the color pink is an important symbolic color. Even though it can be cloying, it is also a symbol of non-violent protest, used by the Code Pink woman-initiated peace and social justice movement and the Think Pink breast-cancer awareness movement and, in the form of a pink triangle, as a symbol of gay pride. She also uses art as a place of meditation and escape from the conflict around her. She makes her mixed-media collage pieces from thousands of small pins, which delicately hold the different elements in place. She explained that this reflects the instability of the region and the problem of collective amnesia that has arisen in Lebanon since the Civil War of 1975-1990. At any time, someone else could rearrange the paintings to tell a completely different story. In a similar way she re-appropriates contentious religious symbols. She made a giant disco ball with the word Allah in Arabic script, inviting participants to dance rather than kill under the light of God. She also brought a monumental sculpture of the word Allah to a church in Italy, where again people were invited to dance. She explained that the Allah sculpture is inspired by a real monument in Tripoli, where people often convene for protests. Her pieces in the "Arab Express" exhibition, she said, were inspired by Israeli propaganda flyers that were distributed during the war in 2006. And she revealed that this practice of inverting violent imagery into beauty also has a precedent in her grandfather, who during the Civil War refused to leave his village despite the heavy fighting that took place there. Every time a bomb fell near his home, he would take the next opportunity to plant a tree in the crater, and now there is a beautiful line of trees leading to his home, and his street has been renamed Flower Street.
The child of a Japanese father and a British mother - both mathematics professors - Sputniko! like El Khalil grew up between cultures. She initially planned to study computer science and mathematics at Imperial College London, but then switched to studying art. This change in interest was partly inspired by her concern over the social roles of women in Japan, and questions about her own biology and issues relating to menstruation and pregnancy. She says that she wanted to become a cyborg, and combined her technological and scientific background to address these problems through art. The first work she introduced as Menstruation Machine Takashi's Take, for which Sputniko! pretended to be a boy who likes to dress up as women but wants to develop an even deeper connection to the opposite sex, and so invents a machine that use electrodes and a vial of blood to recreate the pain and discomfort of menstruation. Building an actual menstruation machine with the help of scientists, Sputniko! photographed herself wearing the machine in the role of the fictional character Takashi, and also created a song and music video about the project. Although the aesthetic of the music video is inspired by pop musicians such as TM Revolution and by media artists like Laurie Anderson, the work also questions the social pressures shaping technology. Sputniko! said that even though doctors knew when they were first invented that contraceptive pills would also stop menstruation, they marketed a program by which women would take the pills for three weeks and then rest a week to maintain the natural menstruation cycle. She cited information that in Japan it took nine years to approve a new contraceptive pill, Libro, which can be used for an entire four-week cycle, whereas it only took five months to approve Viagra. Sputniko! also introduced Sushi Borg Yukari, also realized through photos and a short film, about a "nyotai mori" cyborg, in the shape of an attractive woman, which serves sushi to businessmen from a rotating belt attached to her waist. In the work's premise, the cyborg decides to attach knives to the service belt and slaughter all the men. The artist's most recent project is Nanohana Heels, responding to the ongoing aftereffects of the March 11 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Sputniko! is developing a pair of fashionable high-heel shoes that will plant rape flower seeds, which are contained in a dispenser attached to the shoe, with each step the wearer takes. Sputniko! was inspired by information observed in Chernobyl that rape flowers absorb radioactive substances from the soil. The flowers, which can also be used to create biodiesel, could thus be used to clean up the area around Fukushima and to provide local farmers with a new agriculture that could offset the loss of their crops and livestock due to radiation and also provide an alternative to nuclear energy.
In dialogue, both El Khalil and Sputniko! asserted that although they both draw inspiration from pop culture, they find in art specifically a space to reflect deeply on issues that concern them and to move at a slower pace than commercial artists whose work is driven by sales and visibility.
The participants of "Pop-up Mathaf @ Mori Art Museum – Same-Same but Different: The Role of the Artist in the Arab World and Japan" during the closing roundtable discussion of the symposium, with MAM director Fumio Nanjo at far left and MAM curator Kenichi Kondo at far right. Photo Mikuriya Shinichiro.
The symposium concluded with a roundtable discussion with all the participating artists, as well as curators Chalabi and Kondo. In his opening remarks, the moderator, Fumio Nanjo, touched on themes of identity and questions about how to negotiate the potential hegemony of "common languages," whether defined as English or contemporary art. The artists had diverse views about these topics. Sarkissian said he felt identities such as "Middle Eastern Artist" which are determined by criteria established in the US and Europe, are counterproductive for both the individual artist and meaningful international exchange. Koizumi used the example of the filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu to suggest that, even where artists begin with a common reference point, such as Hollywood films, they still are able to create their own personal artistic languages. The discussion also touched upon points of how contemporary art is now consumed through both markets and international exhibitions, with the curators Nanjo, Kondo and Chalabi reflecting candidly on the responsibilities that exhibition organizers have to protect the individuality of the artists and to reach out to audiences.
Pop-up Mathaf @ Mori Art Museum
Same-Same but Different: The Role of the Artist in the Arab World and Japan
How Physical
The 4th Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions
'How Physical'
February 10-26, 2012
Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
Carolien Teunisse and Bram Snijders [Sitd] - RE: (2010), 360°projection mapping installation. All images: Photo ART iT.
For those who remember last year's "Daydream Believer!!" and 2010's "Searching Songs," the theme of the 4th Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions had the unfortunate association of evoking Olivia Newton-John's camp 1981 hit "[Let's Get] Physical." Although the Japanese version of the theme, Eizou no fijikaru, could have been translated more directly to "the physicality of images," which might have at least avoided what one would assume to be an unintended connotation, there was little in the exhibition itself that could assert a more meaningful understanding of the curatorial framework.
Indeed, the idea of "physicality" was alternately too specific or too open-ended with regard to the works. Both made using technically impressive "crane shots" that impart a visceral floating sensation, Marijke von Warmerdam's two-channel projection Couple (2010), in which a camera circles an elderly couple sitting on a bench overlooking a river amid a verdant garden, and Yuan Goang-ming's three-channel projection Disappearing Landscape - Passing II (2011), with multiple cameras simultaneously passing through a family home, a forest, a water channel and other landscapes, seem to address more the idea of optics and the illusory space of images rather than physicality per se. On the other hand, in his recent short film Other Faces (2011), William Kentridge in an almost sculptural way experiments with the physicality of how images are constructed. Loosely relating the events surrounding a car accident in Johannesburg, the hand-drawn animation interweaves scenes of the city's street life and its monuments and architecture into a fantastic narrative that communicates the fraught tensions of a still racially divided society. But Kentridge also uses devices such as animation within the animation, which in the narrative becomes a film "projected" onto an outdoor backdrop, as well as hints of the artist's actual creative process - suggested, for example, by the edges of a work table bordering another sequence of images otherwise composited on a single paper surface - to fracture and recompose the diegetic space of the film.
Top: Yuan Goang-ming - Disappearing Landscape - Passing II (2011), three-channel video installation (sound, color), dimensions variable, 9 min. Bottom: William Kentridge - Other Faces (2011), single-channel video (sound, color), 10 min.
Illustrating the potential of the "hand-made film," the combination of narrative impact and innovative expression manifested in Other Faces could have been a rich vein of physicality to expand upon and counteract through other works, all the more so as we enter an era in which the 3D effects and digital renderings of studio productions implicitly define the moving image as a terrain of technical proficiency and massive resources, off-limits to anyone without the most advanced skills and capital, even as the actual ability to produce films is more democratized than ever through the popularity of digital cameras and smart phones. Instead, this implication gets lost in relation to works ranging from Julius von Bismarck's The Space Beyond Me (2010), in which an automated 16mm film camera projects UV light images - of a naked man walking through a romantic landscape - around a darkened, circular chamber, to an archival presentation of educational science films produced in the 1950s and '60s by Tokyo Cinema Co, shot in handsome 35mm color film with nostalgic vintage voiceover narrations, like Beer (1954) and The World of Microbes: In Quest of the Tubercle Bacilli (1958).
Similarly, the exhibition's basement level is dedicated to projects that engage with the intersections between images and architecture, namely the multimedia installation Experience in Material No 53: DUBHOUSE KINO (2012) by the architect Ryoji Suzuki, which is both a large-scale model of a building and a labyrinthine projection surface, and the film Points on a Line (2010) by Sarah Morris, dedicated to two icons of American Modernism, the Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe and the Glass House by Philip Johnson. This too could have been an interesting sub-theme to expand further, but as realized only appends another possible association to the "Physical" of the exhibition title, without building upon or clarifying those that come before it.
Top: Ryoji Suzuki - Experience in Material No 53: DUBHOUSE KINO (2012), wood, acrylic lacquer, tempered glass, hard rubber, aluminum, steel, plywood, floor support, drawings, projector, model 570.5 x 574.5 x 365 cm. Bottom: Sarah Morris - Points on a Line (2010), single-channel video installation (sound, color), 35 min 44 sec.
From the physics of film technology to the materiality of film itself and the dimensionality of the spaces in which it is presented or of the spaces and processes that it can capture, it felt throughout the exhibition that the framework of "How Physical" was always at one remove from what the works could potentially communicate, as though it were simply a convenient catch-all. Certainly it should be noted that the exhibition proper was only one component of the festival, which also included a screening program of works by artists including Jonas Mekas, Walter de Maria and Tony Conrad, and compendiums like "The Art of Flight: Physicality of Action Sports Movie Today" and "Deep Structure - Korean Contemporary Art." But the exhibition is also the one arena where the festival's curatorial team can put forward a cohesive statement on what they find to be interesting, compelling or simply current about images today, and in this sense this year's edition was ultimately disappointing and insipid compared to the promise of previous editions.
'How Physical'
February 10-26, 2012
Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
Carolien Teunisse and Bram Snijders [Sitd] - RE: (2010), 360°projection mapping installation. All images: Photo ART iT.
For those who remember last year's "Daydream Believer!!" and 2010's "Searching Songs," the theme of the 4th Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions had the unfortunate association of evoking Olivia Newton-John's camp 1981 hit "[Let's Get] Physical." Although the Japanese version of the theme, Eizou no fijikaru, could have been translated more directly to "the physicality of images," which might have at least avoided what one would assume to be an unintended connotation, there was little in the exhibition itself that could assert a more meaningful understanding of the curatorial framework.
Indeed, the idea of "physicality" was alternately too specific or too open-ended with regard to the works. Both made using technically impressive "crane shots" that impart a visceral floating sensation, Marijke von Warmerdam's two-channel projection Couple (2010), in which a camera circles an elderly couple sitting on a bench overlooking a river amid a verdant garden, and Yuan Goang-ming's three-channel projection Disappearing Landscape - Passing II (2011), with multiple cameras simultaneously passing through a family home, a forest, a water channel and other landscapes, seem to address more the idea of optics and the illusory space of images rather than physicality per se. On the other hand, in his recent short film Other Faces (2011), William Kentridge in an almost sculptural way experiments with the physicality of how images are constructed. Loosely relating the events surrounding a car accident in Johannesburg, the hand-drawn animation interweaves scenes of the city's street life and its monuments and architecture into a fantastic narrative that communicates the fraught tensions of a still racially divided society. But Kentridge also uses devices such as animation within the animation, which in the narrative becomes a film "projected" onto an outdoor backdrop, as well as hints of the artist's actual creative process - suggested, for example, by the edges of a work table bordering another sequence of images otherwise composited on a single paper surface - to fracture and recompose the diegetic space of the film.
Top: Yuan Goang-ming - Disappearing Landscape - Passing II (2011), three-channel video installation (sound, color), dimensions variable, 9 min. Bottom: William Kentridge - Other Faces (2011), single-channel video (sound, color), 10 min.
Illustrating the potential of the "hand-made film," the combination of narrative impact and innovative expression manifested in Other Faces could have been a rich vein of physicality to expand upon and counteract through other works, all the more so as we enter an era in which the 3D effects and digital renderings of studio productions implicitly define the moving image as a terrain of technical proficiency and massive resources, off-limits to anyone without the most advanced skills and capital, even as the actual ability to produce films is more democratized than ever through the popularity of digital cameras and smart phones. Instead, this implication gets lost in relation to works ranging from Julius von Bismarck's The Space Beyond Me (2010), in which an automated 16mm film camera projects UV light images - of a naked man walking through a romantic landscape - around a darkened, circular chamber, to an archival presentation of educational science films produced in the 1950s and '60s by Tokyo Cinema Co, shot in handsome 35mm color film with nostalgic vintage voiceover narrations, like Beer (1954) and The World of Microbes: In Quest of the Tubercle Bacilli (1958).
Similarly, the exhibition's basement level is dedicated to projects that engage with the intersections between images and architecture, namely the multimedia installation Experience in Material No 53: DUBHOUSE KINO (2012) by the architect Ryoji Suzuki, which is both a large-scale model of a building and a labyrinthine projection surface, and the film Points on a Line (2010) by Sarah Morris, dedicated to two icons of American Modernism, the Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe and the Glass House by Philip Johnson. This too could have been an interesting sub-theme to expand further, but as realized only appends another possible association to the "Physical" of the exhibition title, without building upon or clarifying those that come before it.
Top: Ryoji Suzuki - Experience in Material No 53: DUBHOUSE KINO (2012), wood, acrylic lacquer, tempered glass, hard rubber, aluminum, steel, plywood, floor support, drawings, projector, model 570.5 x 574.5 x 365 cm. Bottom: Sarah Morris - Points on a Line (2010), single-channel video installation (sound, color), 35 min 44 sec.
From the physics of film technology to the materiality of film itself and the dimensionality of the spaces in which it is presented or of the spaces and processes that it can capture, it felt throughout the exhibition that the framework of "How Physical" was always at one remove from what the works could potentially communicate, as though it were simply a convenient catch-all. Certainly it should be noted that the exhibition proper was only one component of the festival, which also included a screening program of works by artists including Jonas Mekas, Walter de Maria and Tony Conrad, and compendiums like "The Art of Flight: Physicality of Action Sports Movie Today" and "Deep Structure - Korean Contemporary Art." But the exhibition is also the one arena where the festival's curatorial team can put forward a cohesive statement on what they find to be interesting, compelling or simply current about images today, and in this sense this year's edition was ultimately disappointing and insipid compared to the promise of previous editions.
Claude Cahun
Claude Cahun
May 24 - September 25, 2011
Jeu de Paume, Paris
Left: Autoportrait (1928), 13.9 x 9cm. Jersey Heritage Collection, © Jersey Heritage. Right: Autoportrait (1929), 14 x 9cm. Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, © Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris / Parisienne de Photographie.
A Jewish, lesbian intellectual who collaborated with Bataille, Breton, Michaux and Tzara, lived through the German occupation of Jersey during World War II and was sentenced to death by the Nazis for resistance activities, Claude Cahun is an ideal candidate for the kind of retrospective exhibition that shakes up narratives of Modernity by introducing an under-recognized artist back into public consciousness. Indeed, the current exhibition at Jeu de Paume seemingly has this in mind, as it is the largest presentation of Cahun's work in France in 16 years.
The exhibition focuses on black-and-white photographic self-portraits and Surrealist compositions from the 1920s and '30s, as well as a few works from the post-war period (Born Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob in 1894, Cahun survived her Nazi incarceration, dying a free woman in 1954). Cahun is best known for self-portraits that anticipate the work of contemporary artists like Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura. In these we see her alternately conjuring Alpine dairy girls, resplendent gurus, rosie-cheeked coquettes, gypsy mystics and dashing playboys - scenarios often set against stark backdrops and accentuated by ghostly double-exposure and mirror effects that suggest Cahun found in splitting her gender a way to double her self. Although her costuming has an undertone of Flapper hedonism, it is pushed beyond the realm of dilettantism by Cahun's awareness of the relationship between lens and body, and her striking features (with her aquiline nose and severe profile, she evokes a cross between Tilda Swinton and David Bowie).
Left: Autoportrait (1939), 16 x 11 cm. Jersey Heritage Collection, © Jersey Heritage. Right: Combat de pierres (1931), 21 x 15.5 cm. Collection particulière, © Photo Béatrice Hatala.
Among later works, a self-portrait from 1939 finds Cahun standing in a lush garden path perched atop a promontory overlooking a bay; in this double exposure, the setting is flipped upon itself so that two images of Cahun find themselves head-to-head and enclosed by a funhouse organic architecture with columns of palm fronds framing a vista that explodes into an uncanny mirror horizon. However, Cahun's doubles wear different clothing and strike different poses, the one standing and the other sitting; the backdrops themselves are revealed to be different sites in what can now only be assumed to be the same location; the identity of the image (its relations between negative and positive, self and projection) comes undone in the parallax of juxtaposition. Cahun exploited the intrinsic fiction of the camera, and her Surrealist compositions reinforce this sense, as with the print Combat de pierres (1931), in which outstretched arms superimposed over images of rocks suggest a pair of stony wrestlers, or in staged arrangements of disparate objects.
However, the exhibition suffers from an oddly claustrophobic layout of works installed one after the other along two narrow corridors and in a third room. The result is that one feels simultaneously overwhelmed and yet unsatisfied. With many photographs apparently destroyed by the Nazis after they ransacked her home in Jersey searching for evidence of resistance activity, Cahun's oeuvre is necessarily fragmentary. The curators struggle with this out-of-contextness. In organizing the exhibition chronologically and filling it out with supporting material such as the informative but more or less conventional film Playing a Part: The Story of Claude Cahun (2005), they gloss over the discontinuities in the existing documentation when these could have been physically deployed in creating a better understanding of who Cahun now is, and what she has become in history. An artist who shifted so dramatically between feminine and masculine, self and other, Cahun proves an elusive figure to sum up. If this makes it unlikely that she will ever be institutionalized in a reformed canon of 20th-century art, this is hardly a failure. As she wrote to Breton a year before her death, "Legalism is an abomination. I loathe it...remain anarchic."
The exhibition tours to La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona, from October 27, 2011, to January 29, 2012; and the Art Institute of Chicago from February 25 to June 3, 2012.
May 24 - September 25, 2011
Jeu de Paume, Paris
Left: Autoportrait (1928), 13.9 x 9cm. Jersey Heritage Collection, © Jersey Heritage. Right: Autoportrait (1929), 14 x 9cm. Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, © Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris / Parisienne de Photographie.
A Jewish, lesbian intellectual who collaborated with Bataille, Breton, Michaux and Tzara, lived through the German occupation of Jersey during World War II and was sentenced to death by the Nazis for resistance activities, Claude Cahun is an ideal candidate for the kind of retrospective exhibition that shakes up narratives of Modernity by introducing an under-recognized artist back into public consciousness. Indeed, the current exhibition at Jeu de Paume seemingly has this in mind, as it is the largest presentation of Cahun's work in France in 16 years.
The exhibition focuses on black-and-white photographic self-portraits and Surrealist compositions from the 1920s and '30s, as well as a few works from the post-war period (Born Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob in 1894, Cahun survived her Nazi incarceration, dying a free woman in 1954). Cahun is best known for self-portraits that anticipate the work of contemporary artists like Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura. In these we see her alternately conjuring Alpine dairy girls, resplendent gurus, rosie-cheeked coquettes, gypsy mystics and dashing playboys - scenarios often set against stark backdrops and accentuated by ghostly double-exposure and mirror effects that suggest Cahun found in splitting her gender a way to double her self. Although her costuming has an undertone of Flapper hedonism, it is pushed beyond the realm of dilettantism by Cahun's awareness of the relationship between lens and body, and her striking features (with her aquiline nose and severe profile, she evokes a cross between Tilda Swinton and David Bowie).
Left: Autoportrait (1939), 16 x 11 cm. Jersey Heritage Collection, © Jersey Heritage. Right: Combat de pierres (1931), 21 x 15.5 cm. Collection particulière, © Photo Béatrice Hatala.
Among later works, a self-portrait from 1939 finds Cahun standing in a lush garden path perched atop a promontory overlooking a bay; in this double exposure, the setting is flipped upon itself so that two images of Cahun find themselves head-to-head and enclosed by a funhouse organic architecture with columns of palm fronds framing a vista that explodes into an uncanny mirror horizon. However, Cahun's doubles wear different clothing and strike different poses, the one standing and the other sitting; the backdrops themselves are revealed to be different sites in what can now only be assumed to be the same location; the identity of the image (its relations between negative and positive, self and projection) comes undone in the parallax of juxtaposition. Cahun exploited the intrinsic fiction of the camera, and her Surrealist compositions reinforce this sense, as with the print Combat de pierres (1931), in which outstretched arms superimposed over images of rocks suggest a pair of stony wrestlers, or in staged arrangements of disparate objects.
However, the exhibition suffers from an oddly claustrophobic layout of works installed one after the other along two narrow corridors and in a third room. The result is that one feels simultaneously overwhelmed and yet unsatisfied. With many photographs apparently destroyed by the Nazis after they ransacked her home in Jersey searching for evidence of resistance activity, Cahun's oeuvre is necessarily fragmentary. The curators struggle with this out-of-contextness. In organizing the exhibition chronologically and filling it out with supporting material such as the informative but more or less conventional film Playing a Part: The Story of Claude Cahun (2005), they gloss over the discontinuities in the existing documentation when these could have been physically deployed in creating a better understanding of who Cahun now is, and what she has become in history. An artist who shifted so dramatically between feminine and masculine, self and other, Cahun proves an elusive figure to sum up. If this makes it unlikely that she will ever be institutionalized in a reformed canon of 20th-century art, this is hardly a failure. As she wrote to Breton a year before her death, "Legalism is an abomination. I loathe it...remain anarchic."
The exhibition tours to La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona, from October 27, 2011, to January 29, 2012; and the Art Institute of Chicago from February 25 to June 3, 2012.
54th Venice Biennale
54th International Art Exhibition - Venice Biennale
ILLUMInations
June 4 - November 27, 2011
Multiple venues, Venice
Jack Goldstein - The Jump (1978), 16mm film, colour, silent, 26 sec. All Images: Photo ART iT.
Entitled "ILLUMInations" and organized by Bice Curiger, the artistic director's exhibition of this year's 54th Venice Biennale looks at light both as a sensory and a metaphoric phenomenon in contemporary art, while also attempting to address the Biennale's identity as an event organized around the concept of national presentations. Based in Switzerland, where she is curator of Kunsthaus Zürich, Curiger has produced an exhibition that is generally meticulously installed to elicit the specific characteristics of each work as well as the interactions between different works and venues. However, for non-Europeans the scope of "ILLUMInations" comes off as somewhat parochial, with only three artists from South and East Asia, and can be seen as part of a retrenchment of the biennale format after the celebration of multiculturalism and diversity that in recent years had come to characterize such large-scale international surveys. Curiger, evidently, chose to focus on deepening her theme within a specific tradition rather than affecting worldliness, picking up a curatorial standard that has been raised elsewhere at events like the Berlin Biennale that are rooted in a European as opposed to "global" discourse.
The figurative and literal core of "LLUMInations" is the suite of three paintings by Jacopo Tintoretto that occupy the central gallery of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini. On Tintoretto, Curiger wrote in her curatorial statement, "These paintings exert a special appeal today with their almost febrile, ecstatic lighting and a near reckless approach to composition that overturns the well-defined, classical order of the Renaissance," and, certainly, they are visually stunning. Yet placed in a white cube environment far removed from the religious and architectural contexts of sites where they are usually on display, such as the Galleria dell'Accademia and the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, these works come across as a perfunctory gesture to the host city and the possibility of alternative readings of history. They may serve to illustrate the exhibition theme, but fall short in contributing to the coherency of the exhibition experience.
Rather, two works presented across from each other directly preceding the Tintorettos suggest a richer, more complex starting point for "ILLUMInations." The first of these is Jack Goldstein's short film The Jump (1978), made using altered footage taken from Leni Riefenstahl's documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Olympia (1938). Only 26 seconds long, Goldstein's version captures in its starburst of kinetic energy both the promise of the European Enlightenment and the underlying darkness that would define 20th-century Europe. The other is Gianni Colombo's Spazio Elastico (1967-68), an installation of a darkened room divided up by a grid of glowing cords that are subtly shifted in space by a hidden pulley mechanism, and which in fact was awarded a Golden Lion at the 1968 Biennale. Wondrous and brooding, these works understand the capriciousness of light - its capacity to act as both beacon and lure - and its interdependency with darkness. Other impressive moments from the Central Pavilion include paintings by Sigmar Polke and a sequence of rooms connecting a sculptural installation by Gabriel Kuri, a group of clay sculptures by Fischli/Weiss and Karl Holmqvist's maquette of the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, a remnant from Benito Mussolini's plans for Rome to host the 1942 World Expo.
Both: Andro Wekua - Pink Wave Hunter (2010-11), installation of 15 sculptures on plinth.
In contrast to the refinement of the works in the Central Pavilion, the Arsenale is home to those that emphasize materiality, in consideration of the spatial characteristics of the site. Visitors enter through Song Dong's Song Dong's Parapavilion (intelligence from poor people) (2011), one of four "para-pavilion" structures Curiger commissioned to host the works of other Biennale participants and break up the additive nature of the mega-exhibition. Originally intended to host works by the conceptual photographer Yto Barrada (which ultimately were installed separately), Song's structure made primarily from the components of a traditional Chinese home was one of the only displays that recalled the exoticism of past Biennales.
While much of the Arsenale held fast to the literal "ILLUMInations" of lights and mirrors, some of the exhibition's most affecting works were also on display here, such as Andro Wekua's installation of architectural models Pink Wave Hunter (2010-11), for which the artist recreated almost exclusively from memory a group of buildings from his hometown of Sochumi, Georgia. As can be expected, the models differ from the actual buildings, veering at times into sheer abstraction. These chimerical divergences lyrically manifested the subjective gaps in memory, and the tensions between remembrance and trauma, that have developed over the course of Wekua's 17 years of exile after his father was killed during the civil war in Georgia that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the then-teenager fled the country with his mother and brother.
Elsewhere, Nick Relph's Thre Stryppis Quhite Upon ane Blak Field (2010) employs triple CRT projection - which breaks up images into separate red, green and blue channels that are then recombined on the projection surface - to scramble footage taken from documentaries on the history of the Tartan check pattern, Ellsworth Kelly and Commes des Garçons, respectively. Through its distortion of the overlapping source footage and the resulting patterns of blocks of elementary colors, the work creates attractive formal juxtapositions while also prompting reflection on the production and reception of light-based media. Emily Wardill's Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck similarly explores the layering of video to brilliant effect, interspersing footage of stained glass windows from medieval English churches with scenes from amateurish, community-drama-style sketches about love and faith. With the allegorical images in the stained glass compositions unfolding on the same screen as the moralistic oratory of the sketches, the contrast between light passing through colored glass and its abiding association with the transmission of knowledge fits the exhibition theme perfectly, performing an elegant excavation of language and its evolving means of communication.
Top: Nick Relph - Thre Stryppis Quhite Upon ane Blak Field (2010), triple CRT projection, 3 projectors, 3 DVD players, 3 DVDs, speakers, 44 min 1 sec. Bottom: Emily Wardill - Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck (2007), 16mm film.
Yet there were also a number of works that seemed to respond to "ILLUMInations" at only the most superficial of levels. Burning slowly over the course of the Biennale period, Urs Fischer's recreation of Giambologna's marble Rape of the Sabine Women (1574-82) as a monumental candle piece, and a second, life-scale portrait of the artist's friend, Rudolf Stingel, bring an element of spectacle to the exhibition, but also, in their easy irony, a degree of cynicism. In other cases Curiger overextends the metaphor. In a spacious hall at the very end of the Arsenale is a group of sculptural works by Monica Bonvicini, an artist who has long grappled with the physical and societal restraints imposed upon women. At first glance the installation exudes an austere beauty, the three sets of steps leading to nowhere that constitute 15 Steps to the Virgin (2011) holding the space with minimalist aplomb. But this effect also aestheticizes the confrontational elements of Bonvicini's work, leading one to question whether it has been included only for its formal qualities and its use of neon lights.
Another disappointment is the para-pavilions, a new initiative that Curiger has introduced to the Biennale. As previously mentioned, Song Dong apparently made no effort in conceptualizing his para-pavilion to interact with or accommodate the work of Yto Barrada. Entitled Extroversion, Franz West's para-pavilion is a reconstruction of the artist's art-filled kitchen in Vienna, turned inside out so that its walls and accompanying artworks now form the exterior of a small booth, inside of which is placed a slideshow projection by Dayanita Singh. Interesting as an attempt to invert the relations between container and contained, West's para-pavilion nevertheless does not measure up to the compelling oddness of the artist's large, pink, tubular sculpture Eidos (2009), standing like an exposed intestinal tract in the lawn of the nearby Giardini delle Virgini. More successful is Oscar Tuazon's effort, placed outdoors near the Central Pavilion. Made of concrete slabs propped like cards against each other, this formally impressive intervention provided a fitting site for a series of performances that took place there during the Biennale preview.
Oscar Tuazon - Para-pavilion for the 54th Venice Biennale, "ILLUMInations," 2011.
Ultimately, while the exhibition displays a high degree of technical competence and curatorial rigor, one can't help but feel that Curiger missed an opportunity to either expand "ILLUMInations" to a more universal perspective or to more assiduously question the nature of universality, and how it is projected in contemporary exhibition practice. Particularly given Tintoretto as a starting point, Curiger could have done more to look toward future horizons. Instead, along with Fischer, her inclusion of artists like Ryan Gander, Maurizio Cattelan and Philippe Parreno who engage in a kind of clubby, prankster conceptualism meant that the exhibition's stated intention of unflinchingly addressing Venice's relationship to contemporary nationhood glimmered at the margins of the Biennale as only the dimmest of faint lights.
ILLUMInations
June 4 - November 27, 2011
Multiple venues, Venice
Jack Goldstein - The Jump (1978), 16mm film, colour, silent, 26 sec. All Images: Photo ART iT.
Entitled "ILLUMInations" and organized by Bice Curiger, the artistic director's exhibition of this year's 54th Venice Biennale looks at light both as a sensory and a metaphoric phenomenon in contemporary art, while also attempting to address the Biennale's identity as an event organized around the concept of national presentations. Based in Switzerland, where she is curator of Kunsthaus Zürich, Curiger has produced an exhibition that is generally meticulously installed to elicit the specific characteristics of each work as well as the interactions between different works and venues. However, for non-Europeans the scope of "ILLUMInations" comes off as somewhat parochial, with only three artists from South and East Asia, and can be seen as part of a retrenchment of the biennale format after the celebration of multiculturalism and diversity that in recent years had come to characterize such large-scale international surveys. Curiger, evidently, chose to focus on deepening her theme within a specific tradition rather than affecting worldliness, picking up a curatorial standard that has been raised elsewhere at events like the Berlin Biennale that are rooted in a European as opposed to "global" discourse.
The figurative and literal core of "LLUMInations" is the suite of three paintings by Jacopo Tintoretto that occupy the central gallery of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini. On Tintoretto, Curiger wrote in her curatorial statement, "These paintings exert a special appeal today with their almost febrile, ecstatic lighting and a near reckless approach to composition that overturns the well-defined, classical order of the Renaissance," and, certainly, they are visually stunning. Yet placed in a white cube environment far removed from the religious and architectural contexts of sites where they are usually on display, such as the Galleria dell'Accademia and the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, these works come across as a perfunctory gesture to the host city and the possibility of alternative readings of history. They may serve to illustrate the exhibition theme, but fall short in contributing to the coherency of the exhibition experience.
Rather, two works presented across from each other directly preceding the Tintorettos suggest a richer, more complex starting point for "ILLUMInations." The first of these is Jack Goldstein's short film The Jump (1978), made using altered footage taken from Leni Riefenstahl's documentary of the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Olympia (1938). Only 26 seconds long, Goldstein's version captures in its starburst of kinetic energy both the promise of the European Enlightenment and the underlying darkness that would define 20th-century Europe. The other is Gianni Colombo's Spazio Elastico (1967-68), an installation of a darkened room divided up by a grid of glowing cords that are subtly shifted in space by a hidden pulley mechanism, and which in fact was awarded a Golden Lion at the 1968 Biennale. Wondrous and brooding, these works understand the capriciousness of light - its capacity to act as both beacon and lure - and its interdependency with darkness. Other impressive moments from the Central Pavilion include paintings by Sigmar Polke and a sequence of rooms connecting a sculptural installation by Gabriel Kuri, a group of clay sculptures by Fischli/Weiss and Karl Holmqvist's maquette of the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, a remnant from Benito Mussolini's plans for Rome to host the 1942 World Expo.
Both: Andro Wekua - Pink Wave Hunter (2010-11), installation of 15 sculptures on plinth.
In contrast to the refinement of the works in the Central Pavilion, the Arsenale is home to those that emphasize materiality, in consideration of the spatial characteristics of the site. Visitors enter through Song Dong's Song Dong's Parapavilion (intelligence from poor people) (2011), one of four "para-pavilion" structures Curiger commissioned to host the works of other Biennale participants and break up the additive nature of the mega-exhibition. Originally intended to host works by the conceptual photographer Yto Barrada (which ultimately were installed separately), Song's structure made primarily from the components of a traditional Chinese home was one of the only displays that recalled the exoticism of past Biennales.
While much of the Arsenale held fast to the literal "ILLUMInations" of lights and mirrors, some of the exhibition's most affecting works were also on display here, such as Andro Wekua's installation of architectural models Pink Wave Hunter (2010-11), for which the artist recreated almost exclusively from memory a group of buildings from his hometown of Sochumi, Georgia. As can be expected, the models differ from the actual buildings, veering at times into sheer abstraction. These chimerical divergences lyrically manifested the subjective gaps in memory, and the tensions between remembrance and trauma, that have developed over the course of Wekua's 17 years of exile after his father was killed during the civil war in Georgia that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the then-teenager fled the country with his mother and brother.
Elsewhere, Nick Relph's Thre Stryppis Quhite Upon ane Blak Field (2010) employs triple CRT projection - which breaks up images into separate red, green and blue channels that are then recombined on the projection surface - to scramble footage taken from documentaries on the history of the Tartan check pattern, Ellsworth Kelly and Commes des Garçons, respectively. Through its distortion of the overlapping source footage and the resulting patterns of blocks of elementary colors, the work creates attractive formal juxtapositions while also prompting reflection on the production and reception of light-based media. Emily Wardill's Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck similarly explores the layering of video to brilliant effect, interspersing footage of stained glass windows from medieval English churches with scenes from amateurish, community-drama-style sketches about love and faith. With the allegorical images in the stained glass compositions unfolding on the same screen as the moralistic oratory of the sketches, the contrast between light passing through colored glass and its abiding association with the transmission of knowledge fits the exhibition theme perfectly, performing an elegant excavation of language and its evolving means of communication.
Top: Nick Relph - Thre Stryppis Quhite Upon ane Blak Field (2010), triple CRT projection, 3 projectors, 3 DVD players, 3 DVDs, speakers, 44 min 1 sec. Bottom: Emily Wardill - Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck (2007), 16mm film.
Yet there were also a number of works that seemed to respond to "ILLUMInations" at only the most superficial of levels. Burning slowly over the course of the Biennale period, Urs Fischer's recreation of Giambologna's marble Rape of the Sabine Women (1574-82) as a monumental candle piece, and a second, life-scale portrait of the artist's friend, Rudolf Stingel, bring an element of spectacle to the exhibition, but also, in their easy irony, a degree of cynicism. In other cases Curiger overextends the metaphor. In a spacious hall at the very end of the Arsenale is a group of sculptural works by Monica Bonvicini, an artist who has long grappled with the physical and societal restraints imposed upon women. At first glance the installation exudes an austere beauty, the three sets of steps leading to nowhere that constitute 15 Steps to the Virgin (2011) holding the space with minimalist aplomb. But this effect also aestheticizes the confrontational elements of Bonvicini's work, leading one to question whether it has been included only for its formal qualities and its use of neon lights.
Another disappointment is the para-pavilions, a new initiative that Curiger has introduced to the Biennale. As previously mentioned, Song Dong apparently made no effort in conceptualizing his para-pavilion to interact with or accommodate the work of Yto Barrada. Entitled Extroversion, Franz West's para-pavilion is a reconstruction of the artist's art-filled kitchen in Vienna, turned inside out so that its walls and accompanying artworks now form the exterior of a small booth, inside of which is placed a slideshow projection by Dayanita Singh. Interesting as an attempt to invert the relations between container and contained, West's para-pavilion nevertheless does not measure up to the compelling oddness of the artist's large, pink, tubular sculpture Eidos (2009), standing like an exposed intestinal tract in the lawn of the nearby Giardini delle Virgini. More successful is Oscar Tuazon's effort, placed outdoors near the Central Pavilion. Made of concrete slabs propped like cards against each other, this formally impressive intervention provided a fitting site for a series of performances that took place there during the Biennale preview.
Oscar Tuazon - Para-pavilion for the 54th Venice Biennale, "ILLUMInations," 2011.
Ultimately, while the exhibition displays a high degree of technical competence and curatorial rigor, one can't help but feel that Curiger missed an opportunity to either expand "ILLUMInations" to a more universal perspective or to more assiduously question the nature of universality, and how it is projected in contemporary exhibition practice. Particularly given Tintoretto as a starting point, Curiger could have done more to look toward future horizons. Instead, along with Fischer, her inclusion of artists like Ryan Gander, Maurizio Cattelan and Philippe Parreno who engage in a kind of clubby, prankster conceptualism meant that the exhibition's stated intention of unflinchingly addressing Venice's relationship to contemporary nationhood glimmered at the margins of the Biennale as only the dimmest of faint lights.
Happy Mind - my pleasure
'Happy Mind - my pleasure'
April 17 - May 29, 2011
Misako & Rosen, Tokyo
Installation view of works in "Happy Mind - my pleasure": mixed-media sculpture Smooth & Creamy (2010) by Ken Kagami; altered US national flag libya intervention study (2011) by Stephen G Rhodes; and partial view of drawings by Kaoru Arima. Courtesy Misako & Rosen, Tokyo.
The first in a two-part series of group shows at Misako & Rosen, "Happy Mind - my pleasure" brings together an arresting mix of works by both Japanese and international artists. The exhibition makes dramatic use of the gallery's unique theater-style plan with its wall-to-wall steps leading down from a broad reception area to a narrow, sunken open space below. Suspended vertically from the central point of focus on the far wall across from the reception area is Stephen G Rhodes' US flag painted over with the neon green paint used for Hollywood virtual effects backdrops. Titled libyan intervention study (2011), this simple but striking work alludes through its green screen overlay both to the US government's projection of power into the world arena as well as the way that viewers variously project their own identities, aspirations and anxieties onto national emblems.
If at first somewhat incongruous with the exhibition's stated premise of looking at "manifestations consequent of both suppression and repression" in contemporary Japanese culture, the flag as alternately absorptive and reflective surface quickly becomes a conceptual axis along which to consider the other works on view. Placed in front of it are two sculptural works by Ken Kagami making use of found objects: one a lifelike, synthetic bust of the American conservative politician Newt Gingrich placed on a pedestal and modified by a telephone receiver resting on its crown and a pair of wooden fingers jammed up its nostrils, and the other a single men's leather shoe - placed unobtrusively on the floor - that has been split open and garnished with plastic vegetables and cheese slices to resemble a sub sandwich.
Top: Ken Kagami - Subway (2010), mixed media. Bottom: Trevor Shimizu - Girls (2025/2010) at left and Nurse (2025/2010) at right, both oil on linen, 100.5 x 108cm. Both: Photo ART iT.
Descending along one side of this arrangement are a pair of Jim Shaw's small-scale "Dream Drawings" (1992 and 1996, respectively) with grids of finely rendered images that shift storyboard-like from exterior street views to close-ups of faces but never cohere into distinct narratives; a figurative painting by Maya Hewitt of two young girls and a sitting wolf against a black backdrop; and Kaoru Arima's delicate mixed-media sketches of faces, done on loose paper and pinned to the wall by plastic binder clips.
On the far wall are two paintings by Trevor Shimizu on unstretched linen and a video by Barry Johnston. Made with loosely applied pastel hues that add to their erotic whimsy, Shimizu's paintings depict a pair of girls and a nurse, respectively. Dated "2025," they are the result of the artist's projection of himself into the future, and are executed so as to evoke the faltering hand and diffused libido of an aging artist. Incorporating handheld footage shot at the spontaneous vigil that convened outside the hospital where Michael Jackson's body was taken the day he died, Johnston's short video loop is interspersed with fleeting scenes of a lone figure - the artist - singing into a microphone, and is accompanied by a soundtrack of droning singing and metal music.
Collectively, these works make the case for a reprocessed surrealism in which the relations between images and their referents are doubly divorced, obscured or otherwise alienated. It's not clear, for example, whether Kagami's bust, entitled Smooth & Creamy (2010), is meant to satirize Newt Gingrich or whether the object was chosen because of the absurdity of its preexisting satirical characteristics. Similarly, the intimacy of Arima's faces - some of which reappear across multiple sketches - is undermined by a subtle line-play that stretches the figures into odd proportions, as though the pencil was attempting to escape the discipline imposed on it by the mind and body. While it's never explicit how this specifically relates to contemporary Japanese culture, that hardly matters. Representations not content with their being representations, like Rhodes' flag these works inherently subject themselves to their viewers.
"Happy Mind - my pleasure" is followed at Misako & Rosen by "Happy Mind - my view," opening June 10 and continuing through July 17 with works by Masahiko Kuwahara, Naotaka Hiro, Soichiro Murata and Roe Etheridge.
April 17 - May 29, 2011
Misako & Rosen, Tokyo
Installation view of works in "Happy Mind - my pleasure": mixed-media sculpture Smooth & Creamy (2010) by Ken Kagami; altered US national flag libya intervention study (2011) by Stephen G Rhodes; and partial view of drawings by Kaoru Arima. Courtesy Misako & Rosen, Tokyo.
The first in a two-part series of group shows at Misako & Rosen, "Happy Mind - my pleasure" brings together an arresting mix of works by both Japanese and international artists. The exhibition makes dramatic use of the gallery's unique theater-style plan with its wall-to-wall steps leading down from a broad reception area to a narrow, sunken open space below. Suspended vertically from the central point of focus on the far wall across from the reception area is Stephen G Rhodes' US flag painted over with the neon green paint used for Hollywood virtual effects backdrops. Titled libyan intervention study (2011), this simple but striking work alludes through its green screen overlay both to the US government's projection of power into the world arena as well as the way that viewers variously project their own identities, aspirations and anxieties onto national emblems.
If at first somewhat incongruous with the exhibition's stated premise of looking at "manifestations consequent of both suppression and repression" in contemporary Japanese culture, the flag as alternately absorptive and reflective surface quickly becomes a conceptual axis along which to consider the other works on view. Placed in front of it are two sculptural works by Ken Kagami making use of found objects: one a lifelike, synthetic bust of the American conservative politician Newt Gingrich placed on a pedestal and modified by a telephone receiver resting on its crown and a pair of wooden fingers jammed up its nostrils, and the other a single men's leather shoe - placed unobtrusively on the floor - that has been split open and garnished with plastic vegetables and cheese slices to resemble a sub sandwich.
Top: Ken Kagami - Subway (2010), mixed media. Bottom: Trevor Shimizu - Girls (2025/2010) at left and Nurse (2025/2010) at right, both oil on linen, 100.5 x 108cm. Both: Photo ART iT.
Descending along one side of this arrangement are a pair of Jim Shaw's small-scale "Dream Drawings" (1992 and 1996, respectively) with grids of finely rendered images that shift storyboard-like from exterior street views to close-ups of faces but never cohere into distinct narratives; a figurative painting by Maya Hewitt of two young girls and a sitting wolf against a black backdrop; and Kaoru Arima's delicate mixed-media sketches of faces, done on loose paper and pinned to the wall by plastic binder clips.
On the far wall are two paintings by Trevor Shimizu on unstretched linen and a video by Barry Johnston. Made with loosely applied pastel hues that add to their erotic whimsy, Shimizu's paintings depict a pair of girls and a nurse, respectively. Dated "2025," they are the result of the artist's projection of himself into the future, and are executed so as to evoke the faltering hand and diffused libido of an aging artist. Incorporating handheld footage shot at the spontaneous vigil that convened outside the hospital where Michael Jackson's body was taken the day he died, Johnston's short video loop is interspersed with fleeting scenes of a lone figure - the artist - singing into a microphone, and is accompanied by a soundtrack of droning singing and metal music.
Collectively, these works make the case for a reprocessed surrealism in which the relations between images and their referents are doubly divorced, obscured or otherwise alienated. It's not clear, for example, whether Kagami's bust, entitled Smooth & Creamy (2010), is meant to satirize Newt Gingrich or whether the object was chosen because of the absurdity of its preexisting satirical characteristics. Similarly, the intimacy of Arima's faces - some of which reappear across multiple sketches - is undermined by a subtle line-play that stretches the figures into odd proportions, as though the pencil was attempting to escape the discipline imposed on it by the mind and body. While it's never explicit how this specifically relates to contemporary Japanese culture, that hardly matters. Representations not content with their being representations, like Rhodes' flag these works inherently subject themselves to their viewers.
"Happy Mind - my pleasure" is followed at Misako & Rosen by "Happy Mind - my view," opening June 10 and continuing through July 17 with works by Masahiko Kuwahara, Naotaka Hiro, Soichiro Murata and Roe Etheridge.
Kaza Ana / Air Hole
'Kaza Ana/Air Hole: Another Form of Conceptualism from Asia'
March 8 - June 5, 2011
National Museum of Art, Osaka
Shimabuku - Installation view of My Teacher Tortoise (2011). All images: Photo ART iT.
Despite the ambitious-sounding title "Kaza Ana/Air Hole: Another Form of Conceptualism from Asia," the National Museum of Art's current exhibition of nine artists and artist groups addresses both conceptual art and Asia in only the loosest, most superficial of terms.
The exhibition begins with Haegue Yang's wheeled assemblages of light bulbs, synthetic tubing and found objects ranging from plastic vines to hair curlers, and continues with works by Yuki Kimura from a solo project made in 2010 for the Izu Photo Museum featuring enlarged found photographs integrated into furniture-like sculptural arrangements. Next is a multimedia installation by Qiu Zhijie incorporating a free-standing video projection with a group of cardboard stencils of words in Chinese and English like "construction," "development," "award" and "revolution" affixed to one wall and a grid of vintage Cultural Revolution-era diplomas hung on the other wall, their commendations making references to the Revolution itself as well as recipients' contributions to the "establishment of socialist modernization." Also included are the confrontational street performances of the young Japanese collaborative Contact Gonzo, displayed as video projections in the midst of a chaotic environment complete with a chain-link fence, a tent and a makeshift wooden hut, as well as the deadpan sculptural interventions of Shimabuku and an archival presentation on the artist group The Play, formed in Kyoto in 1967. These are followed by rooms for photographic and sculptural works by Dinh Q Le and large-scale video projections by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, respectively, on one end of the bifurcated gallery layout, and an installation by Fumio Tachibana of cut-up and rearranged printed matter and furniture on the opposite end.
The Play - Installation view.
The artists have apparently been selected only for the coincidences of their shared interest in non-traditional approaches and their Asian heritages, and not because they particularly offer an alternative to conceptual art as developed in the US and Europe, or even because they engage with each other in a broader, regional discourse. This is underscored by the overly cautious exhibition design that allocates to the artists individual spaces, shifting the dynamic from dialogue to comparison and undermining any curatorial rationale for why these particular works were selected and not others, why these particular artists were selected and not others. The result is touristic at best, a kind of exhibition-as-slideshow effect.
In attempting to establish a new context for its artists, "Air Hole" ironically puts them out of context - out of context with the trajectory of an essentialized international conceptualism that becomes the de facto mutual reference, and out of context with the specifics of their own localities. A more provocative approach might have been to use this inherent out-of-contextness as a starting point. Indeed, the exhibition's one moment of clarity is an installation by Shimabuku that awaits in an atrium beyond the galleries proper. Here, the artist has designed a minimalist white enclosure that contains a large, live tortoise. Visitors are invited to enter the enclosure and interact with the animal. Nearby, a poster, partially quoting from astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, reads: "Stop / Stop and Think / Return / Occasionally Run / 'Man should try to avoid contact with alien life forms.'" A wry commentary on conditions of spectatorship, self and communication, this work and its makeshift dispensary of latex gloves and hand sanitizer get right to the heart of the complications of otherness.
March 8 - June 5, 2011
National Museum of Art, Osaka
Shimabuku - Installation view of My Teacher Tortoise (2011). All images: Photo ART iT.
Despite the ambitious-sounding title "Kaza Ana/Air Hole: Another Form of Conceptualism from Asia," the National Museum of Art's current exhibition of nine artists and artist groups addresses both conceptual art and Asia in only the loosest, most superficial of terms.
The exhibition begins with Haegue Yang's wheeled assemblages of light bulbs, synthetic tubing and found objects ranging from plastic vines to hair curlers, and continues with works by Yuki Kimura from a solo project made in 2010 for the Izu Photo Museum featuring enlarged found photographs integrated into furniture-like sculptural arrangements. Next is a multimedia installation by Qiu Zhijie incorporating a free-standing video projection with a group of cardboard stencils of words in Chinese and English like "construction," "development," "award" and "revolution" affixed to one wall and a grid of vintage Cultural Revolution-era diplomas hung on the other wall, their commendations making references to the Revolution itself as well as recipients' contributions to the "establishment of socialist modernization." Also included are the confrontational street performances of the young Japanese collaborative Contact Gonzo, displayed as video projections in the midst of a chaotic environment complete with a chain-link fence, a tent and a makeshift wooden hut, as well as the deadpan sculptural interventions of Shimabuku and an archival presentation on the artist group The Play, formed in Kyoto in 1967. These are followed by rooms for photographic and sculptural works by Dinh Q Le and large-scale video projections by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, respectively, on one end of the bifurcated gallery layout, and an installation by Fumio Tachibana of cut-up and rearranged printed matter and furniture on the opposite end.
The Play - Installation view.
The artists have apparently been selected only for the coincidences of their shared interest in non-traditional approaches and their Asian heritages, and not because they particularly offer an alternative to conceptual art as developed in the US and Europe, or even because they engage with each other in a broader, regional discourse. This is underscored by the overly cautious exhibition design that allocates to the artists individual spaces, shifting the dynamic from dialogue to comparison and undermining any curatorial rationale for why these particular works were selected and not others, why these particular artists were selected and not others. The result is touristic at best, a kind of exhibition-as-slideshow effect.
In attempting to establish a new context for its artists, "Air Hole" ironically puts them out of context - out of context with the trajectory of an essentialized international conceptualism that becomes the de facto mutual reference, and out of context with the specifics of their own localities. A more provocative approach might have been to use this inherent out-of-contextness as a starting point. Indeed, the exhibition's one moment of clarity is an installation by Shimabuku that awaits in an atrium beyond the galleries proper. Here, the artist has designed a minimalist white enclosure that contains a large, live tortoise. Visitors are invited to enter the enclosure and interact with the animal. Nearby, a poster, partially quoting from astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, reads: "Stop / Stop and Think / Return / Occasionally Run / 'Man should try to avoid contact with alien life forms.'" A wry commentary on conditions of spectatorship, self and communication, this work and its makeshift dispensary of latex gloves and hand sanitizer get right to the heart of the complications of otherness.
Quiet Attentions
'Quiet Attentions: Departure from Women'
February 12 - May 8, 2011
Art Tower Mito+Contemporary Art Gallery
View of Art Tower Mito plaza as seen from the position of the loudspeaker installed for Susan Philipsz's site-specific sound installation Did I Dream You Dreamed About Me (2007/11). Photo ART iT.
A recent trend in international contemporary art has seen the emergence of the disingenuous non-identity identity-based group show, exemplified by the survey of African-American artists organized in 2008 by the private Rubbell Family Collection in Miami, "30 Americans." While the politics are entirely different, the latest survey organized by curator Mizuki Takahashi for Art Tower Mito achieves a similar effect in its title and conceptualization, "Quiet Attentions: Departure from Women." Comprising works by 11 women and a collaboration between the female artists Yuki Kimura and Jutta Koether and a lone male participant, Ei Arakawa, the exhibition both indexes its identity-based origins even as it attempts to address something else entirely, contemporary sculpture and installation. This self-negating framework leads to an exhibition that is stylish, airy and pleasant but unable to say anything about post-feminist art - if that was ever an objective to begin with - or indeed new approaches to sculpture and installation.
Visitors enter through Fumiko Kobayashi's Node Point (2011), an environment harnessed together from bicycle parts and other detritus found among the local environs, and breeze past Tatiana Trouvé's room of prints and an abstract sculpture into Midori Mitamura's gothic environment combining what appear to be fragments from a Victorian domestic interior with video and sound elements, Before the Daybreak (2011), and then Nobuko Tsuchiya's room of sculptures assembled from disparate types of synthetic and organic junk, 11th Dimension Project (2011), followed by Hwayeon Nam's diagrammatic wall drawings, Atomic (2011), before reaching the apparent literal and figurative heart of the show, the collaborative work Boycott Women (2011) by Kimura, Koether and Arakawa, in which an environmental sculpture of scattered beams and scaffolding doubles as a platform for performances, after which things wind down with Su-Mei Tse's dysfunctional record player, White Noise (2009), and group of oversized, automated, wall-mounted hourglasses, Personal Times (2003-09); a hallway-long sound installation by Sachiko M; a rec-room cum interactive environment by Kanghyun Ahn; a hanging, ornamentally abstract carving by Ranjani Shettar; and site-specific installations by the installation artist Laura Belém and the sound artist Susan Philipsz.
Top: Yuki Kimura+Jutta Koether+Ei Arakawa - Installation view of the collaborative work Boycott Women (2011). Bottom: Kanghyun Ahn - Installation view of Throwing a Dice (2011). Both: Photo ART iT.
It's hard to see how the works of these artists of disparate nationalities, ages and reference points relate beyond purely formal concerns, the inevitable coincidences of an era when worldwide art education is more uniform than ever. Compare, for example, "30 Americans," in which many of the artists chosen for what might be called their "non-blackness" were members of a shared creative community, or the 2007 survey "Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution," which investigated the work of female artists in a historical context. At Mito, viewers may be drawn to this or that work. They might be absorbed by the whispering sands funneling at different rates through Tse's hourglasses, lose themselves assembling miniature sculptures from clay and broken toy parts in Ahn's rec-room or rediscover the dimensions of public life on the gallery plaza, where Philipsz's Did I Dream You Dreamed About Me (2007/11) casts a plaintive, haunting melody from a loudspeaker installed above the green where girls practice dance routines, children run and squeal, smokers smoke and, in a private nook somewhere, a musician strums a ukulele. These exercises in "quiet attention" are certainly rewarding. What is missing overall, though, is a work, or works, that can disrupt or depart from the underlying orthodoxy of the exhibition - its recurring variations of material, form, volume and physics - that ultimately make it so easy to sum up as an artistic experience, in spite of the contradiction of what is stated in its title. (Made doubly contradictory when comparing the English "departure," unequivocally connoting the idea of "leaving behind," and the word shuppatsu used in the Japanese version, more suggestive of taking women as a starting point.) Instead of basing her theme on a non-identity, Takahashi might have come up with a messier, more compelling exhibition had she genuinely committed to exploring what it means to be a woman making art in an international context today.
Related:
Photo Report - "Quiet Attentions: Departure from Women" (JP)
February 12 - May 8, 2011
Art Tower Mito+Contemporary Art Gallery
View of Art Tower Mito plaza as seen from the position of the loudspeaker installed for Susan Philipsz's site-specific sound installation Did I Dream You Dreamed About Me (2007/11). Photo ART iT.
A recent trend in international contemporary art has seen the emergence of the disingenuous non-identity identity-based group show, exemplified by the survey of African-American artists organized in 2008 by the private Rubbell Family Collection in Miami, "30 Americans." While the politics are entirely different, the latest survey organized by curator Mizuki Takahashi for Art Tower Mito achieves a similar effect in its title and conceptualization, "Quiet Attentions: Departure from Women." Comprising works by 11 women and a collaboration between the female artists Yuki Kimura and Jutta Koether and a lone male participant, Ei Arakawa, the exhibition both indexes its identity-based origins even as it attempts to address something else entirely, contemporary sculpture and installation. This self-negating framework leads to an exhibition that is stylish, airy and pleasant but unable to say anything about post-feminist art - if that was ever an objective to begin with - or indeed new approaches to sculpture and installation.
Visitors enter through Fumiko Kobayashi's Node Point (2011), an environment harnessed together from bicycle parts and other detritus found among the local environs, and breeze past Tatiana Trouvé's room of prints and an abstract sculpture into Midori Mitamura's gothic environment combining what appear to be fragments from a Victorian domestic interior with video and sound elements, Before the Daybreak (2011), and then Nobuko Tsuchiya's room of sculptures assembled from disparate types of synthetic and organic junk, 11th Dimension Project (2011), followed by Hwayeon Nam's diagrammatic wall drawings, Atomic (2011), before reaching the apparent literal and figurative heart of the show, the collaborative work Boycott Women (2011) by Kimura, Koether and Arakawa, in which an environmental sculpture of scattered beams and scaffolding doubles as a platform for performances, after which things wind down with Su-Mei Tse's dysfunctional record player, White Noise (2009), and group of oversized, automated, wall-mounted hourglasses, Personal Times (2003-09); a hallway-long sound installation by Sachiko M; a rec-room cum interactive environment by Kanghyun Ahn; a hanging, ornamentally abstract carving by Ranjani Shettar; and site-specific installations by the installation artist Laura Belém and the sound artist Susan Philipsz.
Top: Yuki Kimura+Jutta Koether+Ei Arakawa - Installation view of the collaborative work Boycott Women (2011). Bottom: Kanghyun Ahn - Installation view of Throwing a Dice (2011). Both: Photo ART iT.
It's hard to see how the works of these artists of disparate nationalities, ages and reference points relate beyond purely formal concerns, the inevitable coincidences of an era when worldwide art education is more uniform than ever. Compare, for example, "30 Americans," in which many of the artists chosen for what might be called their "non-blackness" were members of a shared creative community, or the 2007 survey "Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution," which investigated the work of female artists in a historical context. At Mito, viewers may be drawn to this or that work. They might be absorbed by the whispering sands funneling at different rates through Tse's hourglasses, lose themselves assembling miniature sculptures from clay and broken toy parts in Ahn's rec-room or rediscover the dimensions of public life on the gallery plaza, where Philipsz's Did I Dream You Dreamed About Me (2007/11) casts a plaintive, haunting melody from a loudspeaker installed above the green where girls practice dance routines, children run and squeal, smokers smoke and, in a private nook somewhere, a musician strums a ukulele. These exercises in "quiet attention" are certainly rewarding. What is missing overall, though, is a work, or works, that can disrupt or depart from the underlying orthodoxy of the exhibition - its recurring variations of material, form, volume and physics - that ultimately make it so easy to sum up as an artistic experience, in spite of the contradiction of what is stated in its title. (Made doubly contradictory when comparing the English "departure," unequivocally connoting the idea of "leaving behind," and the word shuppatsu used in the Japanese version, more suggestive of taking women as a starting point.) Instead of basing her theme on a non-identity, Takahashi might have come up with a messier, more compelling exhibition had she genuinely committed to exploring what it means to be a woman making art in an international context today.
Related:
Photo Report - "Quiet Attentions: Departure from Women" (JP)
Reviews & Picks Timeline: February 2011
2.25: "Daydream Believer!!" 3rd Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions
Established in 2009, the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions investigates the intersections between contemporary art and media practices. Also known as Yebizo, and hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Photography (Syabi), the annual event has quietly developed into one of the more promising festivals in Japan, combining an international outlook with a pared-down, tightly-focused framework. More.
2.14: Masayoshi Hanawa - "HANAWANDER - Liberation"
Possessing one of Tokyo's more characteristic gallery spaces - located in a two-story single-unit building overshadowed by the Kanda area's drab office high-rises, and with the sliding doors of the ground level exhibition space thrown open to the elements - Zenshi is known for his program of eclectic, outsider-style artists. Closing Feb 19, Masayoshi Hanawa's solo show "HANAWANDER - Liberation -" is a mesmerizing example of this aesthetic. More.
2.12: Kawamata/Kawai
With not one but two exhibitions in Tokyo related to their publications, the independent art press schtucco/edition nord are currently enjoying some well-earned visibility. At NADiff a/p/a/r/t, the basement gallery of the eponymous art book distributors in Ebisu, "Field Sketch: Tadashi Kawamata Early Photo Works" features a wall-sized grid of snapshots taken by the artist in his early 20s...At Higashi-Azabu's Take Ninagawa, "Enpitsu Taisou" is a site-specific installation by Misaki Kawai. More.
2.11: "Le Surréalisme"
Having gone to the lengths of creating a unique website with interactive Twitter-feed features and a tie-in with the French puppy characters Gaspard et Lisa to make the content more accessible to a broader audience, Tokyo's National Art Center clearly has blockbuster expectations for its just-opened exhibition of works from the Centre Pompidou collection, "Le Surréalisme." However, these bells and whistles do nothing to detract from the exhibition itself. More.
Established in 2009, the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions investigates the intersections between contemporary art and media practices. Also known as Yebizo, and hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Photography (Syabi), the annual event has quietly developed into one of the more promising festivals in Japan, combining an international outlook with a pared-down, tightly-focused framework. More.
2.14: Masayoshi Hanawa - "HANAWANDER - Liberation"
Possessing one of Tokyo's more characteristic gallery spaces - located in a two-story single-unit building overshadowed by the Kanda area's drab office high-rises, and with the sliding doors of the ground level exhibition space thrown open to the elements - Zenshi is known for his program of eclectic, outsider-style artists. Closing Feb 19, Masayoshi Hanawa's solo show "HANAWANDER - Liberation -" is a mesmerizing example of this aesthetic. More.
2.12: Kawamata/Kawai
With not one but two exhibitions in Tokyo related to their publications, the independent art press schtucco/edition nord are currently enjoying some well-earned visibility. At NADiff a/p/a/r/t, the basement gallery of the eponymous art book distributors in Ebisu, "Field Sketch: Tadashi Kawamata Early Photo Works" features a wall-sized grid of snapshots taken by the artist in his early 20s...At Higashi-Azabu's Take Ninagawa, "Enpitsu Taisou" is a site-specific installation by Misaki Kawai. More.
2.11: "Le Surréalisme"
Having gone to the lengths of creating a unique website with interactive Twitter-feed features and a tie-in with the French puppy characters Gaspard et Lisa to make the content more accessible to a broader audience, Tokyo's National Art Center clearly has blockbuster expectations for its just-opened exhibition of works from the Centre Pompidou collection, "Le Surréalisme." However, these bells and whistles do nothing to detract from the exhibition itself. More.
Daydream Believer!!
The 3rd Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions
'Daydream Believer!!'
February 18-27, 2011
Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
Javier Tellez - Still from Caligari and the Sleepwalker (2008), Super-16mm film transferred to HDV Blue-ray, sound, b&w, 27 min 7 sec. Collection of the artist, courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich.
Established in 2009, the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions investigates the intersections between contemporary art and media practices. Also known as Yebizo, and hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Photography (Syabi), the annual event has quietly developed into one of the more promising festivals in Japan, combining an international outlook with a pared-down, tightly-focused framework. Indeed, while large-scale art events like the Setouchi International Art Festival or the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial have trended towards employing only the vaguest of organizational concepts, the constraints of Yebizo's 10-day exhibition run and compact venue have pushed it towards embracing a more articulated curatorial identity. In this context, the inaugural edition in 2009 featured historical insertions such as Andy Warhol's "Screen Tests" and an installation by the Canadian group General Idea, while the second edition in 2010, addressing the theme "Searching for Songs," looked at the use of music in media art, but also took that further to investigate how artists appropriate - cover or re-mix - their peers and predecessors.
This year's third edition of Yebizo - entitled "Daydream Believer!!" - is again directed by Syabi curator Keiko Okamura, who has overseen the previous two editions as well. This year's theme turns the daydream into a metaphor for the overlaps between fantasy and reality, revery and consciousness produced by images in the age of electronic media. Many of the works Okamura has chosen explore the fractalization of images, including Daniel Crooks' cutting-edge slow-motion video of an elderly man practicing Tai chi in which the traces of movements swirl into surreal digital patterns, Static No. 12 (Seek Stillness in Movement) (2008), as well as Harold Eugene Edgerton's pioneering stroboscopic photographs from 1936 capturing a bullet shattering a lightbulb and Chikara Matsumoto's room-sized installation of frames and artifacts from the production of his in-progress feature-length hand-drawn animation That which illuminates the end, vol I & II (2010-11). In other cases works reproduce disparate, coexisting layers of reality, as in Javier Tellez's Caligari and the Sleepwalker (2008), for which the artist worked with patients at a psychiatric hospital to reinterpret the 1920 film about delusional inmates in an insane asylum, or Cao Fei's RMB City Opera (2010) in which footage shot in the virtual reality site SecondLife is incorporated as a back projection into a live performance.
Top: Installation view of Cao Fei's single-channel video RMB City Opera (2010) at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, 3rd Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions, 2011. Bottom: Installation view of Harun Farocki's two-channel videos Serious Games 1: Watson's Down (2009, left) and Serious Games 3: Immersion (2010, right) at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, 3rd Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions, 2011. Both: Photo ART iT.
Perhaps Okamura's greatest achievement this year is her polished exhibition design. From the exhibition's start on the third floor of Syabi with Apichatpong Weerasethakul's floating, single-channel projection of shadows and light playing together on a window pane, Windows (1999), to its conclusion in the basement level with Harun Farocki's pair of two-channel synchronized projections incorporating video of US soldiers training with video-game style simulation technology, Serious Games 1: Watson's Down (2009) and Serious Games 3: Immersion (2010), each work is given a generous amount of individuated display space, as opposed to being crammed side-to-side. This generosity transforms the boxy, awkwardly proportioned Syabi galleries into a series of encounters, inviting visitors to linger with each video - a number of which have significant run-times - and to contemplate works in more conventional, still media. This is a marked improvement over the two previous editions of Yebizo and a convincing argument for allowing a single curator to develop exhibitions in series, instead of the revolving-door approach typical to recent art festivals.
Yet at times the curation feels heavy-handed. Some works fit the theme - itself a superficial quotation - too literally or exactly, or the connections between groups of works develop too linearly in obvious terms of like and unlike. Even accounting for constraints of preparation time and usable space, one still wishes that Okamura could have allowed the exhibition to develop in a more meandering, digressive fashion. And while curators often justify their selections for international festivals by arguing that local audiences cannot be held to the expectations of art's jet-set circles, a cavil with "Daydream Believer!!" is that too many of its works can be traced to recent exhibitions and art fairs, ranging from Cao Fei's RMB City Opera originally produced for the 2009 Artissima to Daniel Crooks' video last seen at the 2010 Biennale of Sydney and Harun Farocki's video and Edgerton's photographs from the 2010 Gwangju Biennale (the latter, to be fair, are drawn on this occasion from the Syabi collection). Increasingly common and particularly endemic to moving image media, this kind of curatorial outsourcing and redistribution undermines the unique opportunities that exhibition makers enjoy - in contrast with their audiences - to develop intimate, collaborative relationships with artists and bodies of work, and perhaps explains the patness of the exhibition theme.
Nevertheless as with the two previous editions of Yebizo, "Daydream Believer!!" is a heartening reminder in an age of grotesquely-funded projects (visions of grandeur stapled together with post-Lehman reality checks) of the potential to experiment with the right amount of resources.
Not addressed in this review is the screening program of "Daydream Believer!!" For more general information in English, see here; for further commentary in Japanese, here.
'Daydream Believer!!'
February 18-27, 2011
Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
Javier Tellez - Still from Caligari and the Sleepwalker (2008), Super-16mm film transferred to HDV Blue-ray, sound, b&w, 27 min 7 sec. Collection of the artist, courtesy the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich.
Established in 2009, the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions investigates the intersections between contemporary art and media practices. Also known as Yebizo, and hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Photography (Syabi), the annual event has quietly developed into one of the more promising festivals in Japan, combining an international outlook with a pared-down, tightly-focused framework. Indeed, while large-scale art events like the Setouchi International Art Festival or the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial have trended towards employing only the vaguest of organizational concepts, the constraints of Yebizo's 10-day exhibition run and compact venue have pushed it towards embracing a more articulated curatorial identity. In this context, the inaugural edition in 2009 featured historical insertions such as Andy Warhol's "Screen Tests" and an installation by the Canadian group General Idea, while the second edition in 2010, addressing the theme "Searching for Songs," looked at the use of music in media art, but also took that further to investigate how artists appropriate - cover or re-mix - their peers and predecessors.
This year's third edition of Yebizo - entitled "Daydream Believer!!" - is again directed by Syabi curator Keiko Okamura, who has overseen the previous two editions as well. This year's theme turns the daydream into a metaphor for the overlaps between fantasy and reality, revery and consciousness produced by images in the age of electronic media. Many of the works Okamura has chosen explore the fractalization of images, including Daniel Crooks' cutting-edge slow-motion video of an elderly man practicing Tai chi in which the traces of movements swirl into surreal digital patterns, Static No. 12 (Seek Stillness in Movement) (2008), as well as Harold Eugene Edgerton's pioneering stroboscopic photographs from 1936 capturing a bullet shattering a lightbulb and Chikara Matsumoto's room-sized installation of frames and artifacts from the production of his in-progress feature-length hand-drawn animation That which illuminates the end, vol I & II (2010-11). In other cases works reproduce disparate, coexisting layers of reality, as in Javier Tellez's Caligari and the Sleepwalker (2008), for which the artist worked with patients at a psychiatric hospital to reinterpret the 1920 film about delusional inmates in an insane asylum, or Cao Fei's RMB City Opera (2010) in which footage shot in the virtual reality site SecondLife is incorporated as a back projection into a live performance.
Top: Installation view of Cao Fei's single-channel video RMB City Opera (2010) at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, 3rd Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions, 2011. Bottom: Installation view of Harun Farocki's two-channel videos Serious Games 1: Watson's Down (2009, left) and Serious Games 3: Immersion (2010, right) at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, 3rd Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions, 2011. Both: Photo ART iT.
Perhaps Okamura's greatest achievement this year is her polished exhibition design. From the exhibition's start on the third floor of Syabi with Apichatpong Weerasethakul's floating, single-channel projection of shadows and light playing together on a window pane, Windows (1999), to its conclusion in the basement level with Harun Farocki's pair of two-channel synchronized projections incorporating video of US soldiers training with video-game style simulation technology, Serious Games 1: Watson's Down (2009) and Serious Games 3: Immersion (2010), each work is given a generous amount of individuated display space, as opposed to being crammed side-to-side. This generosity transforms the boxy, awkwardly proportioned Syabi galleries into a series of encounters, inviting visitors to linger with each video - a number of which have significant run-times - and to contemplate works in more conventional, still media. This is a marked improvement over the two previous editions of Yebizo and a convincing argument for allowing a single curator to develop exhibitions in series, instead of the revolving-door approach typical to recent art festivals.
Yet at times the curation feels heavy-handed. Some works fit the theme - itself a superficial quotation - too literally or exactly, or the connections between groups of works develop too linearly in obvious terms of like and unlike. Even accounting for constraints of preparation time and usable space, one still wishes that Okamura could have allowed the exhibition to develop in a more meandering, digressive fashion. And while curators often justify their selections for international festivals by arguing that local audiences cannot be held to the expectations of art's jet-set circles, a cavil with "Daydream Believer!!" is that too many of its works can be traced to recent exhibitions and art fairs, ranging from Cao Fei's RMB City Opera originally produced for the 2009 Artissima to Daniel Crooks' video last seen at the 2010 Biennale of Sydney and Harun Farocki's video and Edgerton's photographs from the 2010 Gwangju Biennale (the latter, to be fair, are drawn on this occasion from the Syabi collection). Increasingly common and particularly endemic to moving image media, this kind of curatorial outsourcing and redistribution undermines the unique opportunities that exhibition makers enjoy - in contrast with their audiences - to develop intimate, collaborative relationships with artists and bodies of work, and perhaps explains the patness of the exhibition theme.
Nevertheless as with the two previous editions of Yebizo, "Daydream Believer!!" is a heartening reminder in an age of grotesquely-funded projects (visions of grandeur stapled together with post-Lehman reality checks) of the potential to experiment with the right amount of resources.
Not addressed in this review is the screening program of "Daydream Believer!!" For more general information in English, see here; for further commentary in Japanese, here.
Tadasu Takamine
'Too Far to See'
January 21 to March 20, 2011
Yokohama Museum of Art
God Bless America (2002), video, 8 min 18 sec.
In 2004, Tadasu Takamine's video Kimura-san was preemptively removed from the group exhibition "Non-Sect Radical Contemporary Photography III" scheduled to be held at the Yokohama Museum of Art. The video, which has previously also been included in a performance piece, shows Takamine masturbating the titular figure, a handicapped man who is physically unable to perform the act himself. "Too Far to See" is in part a response by the artist to that incident - as explained in an introductory message from museum director Eriko Osaka - and in part, one can surmise, a mea culpa by the institution.
Not quite a survey, the exhibition brings together two recent projects alongside a selection of works made over the past decade, ranging from a group of kitsch blankets mounted on canvas stretchers and accompanied by analytical wall-texts in a deadpan examination of the architecture of museum displays, to multimedia installations incorporating programmed lights and music. With Japanese censorship laws prohibiting the representation of genitalia, it comes as no surprise that Kimura-san is once again absent here.
Instead making an appearance is God Bless America (2002) - featured in the Arsenale at the 2003 Venice Biennale - a large video projection following the attempts of Takamine and a female assistant to model two-tons of clay into a time-lapse animation of a monumentally scaled bust singing the titular song. Sequestered in a red-covered studio space with the clay, the two artists move at warp speed, manipulating the material with hands and feet, checking a computer, eating with friends, sleeping and fucking (as no genitalia are apparent, this footage is legally beyond reproach). Juxtaposed against the central animation moving in "real time," these peripheral actions gradually accumulate a reverse significance in which living and everything that goes with it becomes the Herculean/Sisyphean task, instead of the continuous shaping of the resistant mass - this heroic futility that defines art, as opposed to industry.
Nearby, Do what you want if you want as you want (2001/11) splits video footage of fleeting hand movements shot from different angles across three monitors, accompanied by a soundtrack of a woman talking about her documentation of Israeli atrocities committed in occupied Palestine, and Japanese subtitles that flash across a "news ticker"-style LED display; almost easy to miss, a wall-text included in the installation relates the story of Takamine's failed friendship with a Palestinian activist. Comprising a row of photographic panels centering on images from a wedding ceremony overlaid with text in Japanese, Korean and English, the installation Baby Insa-Dong (2004) traces Takamine's reflections on identity and prejudice in the days leading up to his marriage to his Zainichi ethnic Korean wife and the subsequent birth of their child.
These experiments in art, sexuality, politics and identity converge in the life-scale video installation (dated 2011) that shares the exhibition title, in which male and female silhouetted figures walking on- and off-screen periodically stoop down to simulate fellatio using phallic shapes that have been arranged around them. Upon leaving the darkened room of this installation, visitors discover that the phalluses, displayed in vitrines, are made of white glazed ceramic in a variety of shapes, from lifelike renderings to grotesque, stunted contortions. In these interlocking mechanisms of exposure and concealment - first through its use of silhouette and then through the ambiguity of the actual "fellated" objects - this work can be read in the specific Japanese context as a willful circumvention of the regimes of censorship and control that permeate institutional policy and continue to affect the exhibition of Kimura-san to this day.
The collected works display Takamine's admirable commitment to paradoxically baring all in order to seek the layers of humanity that unfold beyond everyday social façades. Yet as perhaps predestined by its title, "Too Far to See" is itself a tease, leaving visitors just short of being able to explore in similar depths the ideas behind the artist's practice.
January 21 to March 20, 2011
Yokohama Museum of Art
God Bless America (2002), video, 8 min 18 sec.
In 2004, Tadasu Takamine's video Kimura-san was preemptively removed from the group exhibition "Non-Sect Radical Contemporary Photography III" scheduled to be held at the Yokohama Museum of Art. The video, which has previously also been included in a performance piece, shows Takamine masturbating the titular figure, a handicapped man who is physically unable to perform the act himself. "Too Far to See" is in part a response by the artist to that incident - as explained in an introductory message from museum director Eriko Osaka - and in part, one can surmise, a mea culpa by the institution.
Not quite a survey, the exhibition brings together two recent projects alongside a selection of works made over the past decade, ranging from a group of kitsch blankets mounted on canvas stretchers and accompanied by analytical wall-texts in a deadpan examination of the architecture of museum displays, to multimedia installations incorporating programmed lights and music. With Japanese censorship laws prohibiting the representation of genitalia, it comes as no surprise that Kimura-san is once again absent here.
Instead making an appearance is God Bless America (2002) - featured in the Arsenale at the 2003 Venice Biennale - a large video projection following the attempts of Takamine and a female assistant to model two-tons of clay into a time-lapse animation of a monumentally scaled bust singing the titular song. Sequestered in a red-covered studio space with the clay, the two artists move at warp speed, manipulating the material with hands and feet, checking a computer, eating with friends, sleeping and fucking (as no genitalia are apparent, this footage is legally beyond reproach). Juxtaposed against the central animation moving in "real time," these peripheral actions gradually accumulate a reverse significance in which living and everything that goes with it becomes the Herculean/Sisyphean task, instead of the continuous shaping of the resistant mass - this heroic futility that defines art, as opposed to industry.
Nearby, Do what you want if you want as you want (2001/11) splits video footage of fleeting hand movements shot from different angles across three monitors, accompanied by a soundtrack of a woman talking about her documentation of Israeli atrocities committed in occupied Palestine, and Japanese subtitles that flash across a "news ticker"-style LED display; almost easy to miss, a wall-text included in the installation relates the story of Takamine's failed friendship with a Palestinian activist. Comprising a row of photographic panels centering on images from a wedding ceremony overlaid with text in Japanese, Korean and English, the installation Baby Insa-Dong (2004) traces Takamine's reflections on identity and prejudice in the days leading up to his marriage to his Zainichi ethnic Korean wife and the subsequent birth of their child.
These experiments in art, sexuality, politics and identity converge in the life-scale video installation (dated 2011) that shares the exhibition title, in which male and female silhouetted figures walking on- and off-screen periodically stoop down to simulate fellatio using phallic shapes that have been arranged around them. Upon leaving the darkened room of this installation, visitors discover that the phalluses, displayed in vitrines, are made of white glazed ceramic in a variety of shapes, from lifelike renderings to grotesque, stunted contortions. In these interlocking mechanisms of exposure and concealment - first through its use of silhouette and then through the ambiguity of the actual "fellated" objects - this work can be read in the specific Japanese context as a willful circumvention of the regimes of censorship and control that permeate institutional policy and continue to affect the exhibition of Kimura-san to this day.
The collected works display Takamine's admirable commitment to paradoxically baring all in order to seek the layers of humanity that unfold beyond everyday social façades. Yet as perhaps predestined by its title, "Too Far to See" is itself a tease, leaving visitors just short of being able to explore in similar depths the ideas behind the artist's practice.
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