ArtGig Hospital

Chim ↑ Pom

Two big prosthetic thumbs up, Ebert and Roeper Style, to curator/art producer Shai The Great for the brilliant and spooky ARTGIG "Mommy I'm Scarred" oddball art installation/event at the abandoned Tamai Hospital in Honmachi tonight. Sure, there were too many snotty prep-school American East Coast exchange students in attendance, and an abundance of halloweened-up Japanese kids who looked like they might run a mile if they saw a real ghost, but this was a truly inspirationally dingy, screwed up location for an art show on a rainy Sunday night, costumes or not. With little or no security in evidence, and certainly health and safety out the broken window, the punters had the full run of a totally gothic, dead and still dangerous hospital, that is full of abandonned terminal wards, cancer scan technology out of the sixties, and that je ne sais quoi of prefab shabbiness familiar to all Japanese public buildings of the cheap pre-Bubble years. Apparently, it has been lovingly "preserved" as a location for horror movie film shots, hence rentable for off the cuff left field art events such as this. This was Echigo-Tsumari re-shot as a cheap budget Hammer horror. Sponsored by Electrolux.

The building was the star: for starters since to see the show you had to descend into the dark, inferno like hell of the basement, a kind of maze of no way out corridors in which in which the artists had been invited to set up works, create or perform. With barely no lighting except flash lights, no obvious exit in case of fire, earthquake or stampede, and no end of broken windows, putrifying latrines, and random twists of broken machinery and hospital trash shoved into every corner, it was not for the claustrophobic. Artworks on show, the highlights: a class act as always from Satoru Aoyama, with a "bearded" Madonna in a dead-end corridor (see below); a cute video by Akino Kondoh; Matsukage impaling himself à la Mishima; and a Jim Lambie neon light offering his pop fan homage to Jason The Spaceman's Spiritualised. This room remained shut a lot of the time: few of the kids here would know that this was the only work here worth stealing.

Top of the bill was Chim ↑ Pom. They out-spooked everyone with their starving buddha sculpture in a back room, but apart from smashing a couple of wondows, they seemed to baulk when it come to perform to the adoring masses. Instead, we just had a lame "kampai" from Ellie chan with Ushiro and bemused organizer Shai looking on. The music later on didn't recapture the vibe that Jim Bingham had brought with a fabulous techno set at around 8pm. Still: it was an evening that vindicated Shai's worry that it is no wonder no one ever hears about Tokyo art internationally, because there's no scene. This was, for one night only, a scene.

Not too many art world ghouls in evidence; except me, that is; although Johnnie Walker and ex-Mori Art Museum director, David Elliott, swung by briefly at around 10pm, for the costume prize award, and by the end it was the drunken expats propping up the bar, all on average ten years older than any of the Japanese here, the invited Brits having passed out on booze far too early in the evening.

Please enjoy the photo show below:


Kowa-Kawaii from Mizuma's Akino Kondoh


Satoro Aoyama's Madonna, which miraculously grows a Jesus Christ beard with flash photography


Hammer House Hospital fun with Shibuhouse and friends


Chim ↑ Pom 3 in "You're Only as Good as the Last Great Thing You Did" dilemma at 10:25pm


Shai The Great and Ellie-chan


Ellie Chan and Ushiro's "Kampai"


Jim Lambie: Steal this one Kids


Scary Monsters and Super Creeps: the crush on the dancefloor


Its a Dead Hospital really

ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com