A tale of two cities
Jun. 11th, 2006 08:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusMy hopes for the Berlin Tokyo, Tokyo Berlin show at the Neue Nationalgalerie hadn't been high -- in early March Hisae wrote to me from Japan:
"I went to see Tokyo-Berlin exhibition at Roppongi Hills, but it was a bit disappointing. Too many works especially paintings which are not appealing much. I liked the flyer of the exhibition better. The rain made Tokyo view foggy and mysterious."
It may have helped that Berlin had a beautiful sunny day yesterday, and that Mies Van Der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie is an airy, elegant glass box (I find the Mori -- the world's highest museum, a windowless space atop a skyscraper that sways in earth tremors -- pretty claustrophobic). Anyway, I loved the show. Sure, there were rather too many boring paintings. But this is a vast, academically thorough and very ambitious show falling into three parts.
On the ground floor architect Toyo Ito has made a billowing, undulating carpented carpet of low hills into which contemporary Japanese artworks are sunk. This is where Shintaro Miyake's beehive can be found -- Shintaro himself was dressed as a bee, making bee drawings inside a honeycomb, but apparently he got too hot in his costume and gave up before I got there. Next to it, hidden in a higher rise, was a kind of burial mound, a linked structure of rooms visitors could crawl through "at their own risk", a mixture of capsule hotel, homeless shelter and rabbit warren. This work was by Tsuyoshi Ozawa, who of course had a big solo show at the Mori back in 2004.
In this light and airy upstairs part of the exhibition there was also an Atelier Bow Wow installation about Pet Architecture. All the usual suspects, right? (With the notable exception of Takashi Murakami, represented only by protegee Chiho Aoshima downstairs in the manga art section.) But it was nice to see them. The Pet Architecture "msueum" was a series of pages of text and pictures of cute, haphazard architectural improvisations in Tokyo's awkward corners, all hanging on gauze at an awkward height, like a series of tablecloths on washing lines, themselves forming irregular shapes, blind alleys, tiny clumsy spaces.
Atelier Bow Wow also began the downstairs section: I finally got to see the mediapod I blogged about back in October. Like the Ozawa work upstairs, and like Pet Architecture, this pod is all about turning a lack of space into an advantage. There's an elegance in economy here, but also a way of turning mere storage into a space, a room devoted to fantasy (the ultimate virtual space-enlarger).
As you leave contemporary stuff behind (and it's interesting how the exhibition doesn't really make clear distinctions between design, art, whimsical didactics, documentary, popular culture, and so on -- very much as Japanese culture doesn't), you get into the academic core of the show: a detailed documentation of links and influences between German and Japanese culture over the last century or so. It's almost too much to take in. After all, Germany has influenced so much in Japan, from school uniforms to the subway system to their word for sperm (sahmen).
You go from Fluxus events to a big architecture section (suddenly Tokyo station, love hotels and Gropius' weirdly Japanese villas all make sense), to a film room running Japanese silent Jujiro alongside The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. You get Japanese Dada in the form of a group called Mavo (I'd never heard of them), or you see how an influential photography and film show in Berlin in 1928 opened in Tokyo in 1929 and had a huge influence. You learn which of the German expressionists were merely influenced by Japonism from afar (Kirchner) and which actually made the trip to Japan in person (Nolde on his way to New Guinea). You see Berlin-Tokyo sailor-pierrot fashions -- the liberated styles of the moga, the "modern girl", in her "strandpajamas", flared trouser suits.
You also see how the devastation and destruction of World War II affected both cities (amazing to see how occupied Japan still looked in the 50s, with Ginza street signs all in English before they're in Japanese, presumably for the benefit of the American forces). One lacuna, though, is the show's omission of artistic links during the fascist period, seen, like the devastation by the Allies, as twinned misfortunes the Germans and Japanese had to deal with for a few years. (Actually, I think I prefer this "brief anomaly" approach to the essentialist "original sin" approach which says that there's something inherently fascist deep in Japanese and German souls.)
"Fruitful encounters within the avant garde came to an abrupt end," says the introduction, "with the closely-related totalitarian systems that took hold in Japan and Germany during the 1930s and 1940s. The result was war, suffering, and severe destruction in both cities, as well as the division of Berlin. These events set the themes for German and Japanese artists alike." Well, so we aren't going to see the links between fascist-friendly artists in the two cities during the 30s and 40s? I'd imagine something must have been going on, kitschy history painting or sub-porno celebration of muscled Spartan youths. Anyway, history is written by the avant garde, not by retro fascist losers.
The third and final section of the show is a series of dark rooms displaying video art. A "Tokyo Pop" documentary about students at the Avex Music Academy, some scenes of people walking backwards through busy Tokyo subway stations, a funny video of Japanese people trying to have conversations using the few phrases of Japanese a Westerner might know (Salaryman: "Kurosawa karaoke kamikaze!" His colleague: "Ah, kamikaze? Geisha!"). I found particularly fascinating a
piece by Scandinavian artist Annika Eriksson, who simply went through all the staff at the Mori Museum asking them what their job was. Everyone, from director David Elliot (who talked about art as a combination of ethical and aesthetic value) to humble greeters, carpenters and security staff, got to deliver a few sentences to camera about their job. Eriksson left in a few seconds on either side of their speech, some dead time in which we could see them preparing what to say, and this turned out to be very revealing, a kind of pre- and post-mask vulnerability. What came through in a lot of the statements was typical Japanese self-effacement ("I am lucky that my boss overlooks the many mistakes I make!") and a touching concern that visitors should leave the museum happier.
I certainly did.
"I went to see Tokyo-Berlin exhibition at Roppongi Hills, but it was a bit disappointing. Too many works especially paintings which are not appealing much. I liked the flyer of the exhibition better. The rain made Tokyo view foggy and mysterious."
It may have helped that Berlin had a beautiful sunny day yesterday, and that Mies Van Der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie is an airy, elegant glass box (I find the Mori -- the world's highest museum, a windowless space atop a skyscraper that sways in earth tremors -- pretty claustrophobic). Anyway, I loved the show. Sure, there were rather too many boring paintings. But this is a vast, academically thorough and very ambitious show falling into three parts.
On the ground floor architect Toyo Ito has made a billowing, undulating carpented carpet of low hills into which contemporary Japanese artworks are sunk. This is where Shintaro Miyake's beehive can be found -- Shintaro himself was dressed as a bee, making bee drawings inside a honeycomb, but apparently he got too hot in his costume and gave up before I got there. Next to it, hidden in a higher rise, was a kind of burial mound, a linked structure of rooms visitors could crawl through "at their own risk", a mixture of capsule hotel, homeless shelter and rabbit warren. This work was by Tsuyoshi Ozawa, who of course had a big solo show at the Mori back in 2004.
In this light and airy upstairs part of the exhibition there was also an Atelier Bow Wow installation about Pet Architecture. All the usual suspects, right? (With the notable exception of Takashi Murakami, represented only by protegee Chiho Aoshima downstairs in the manga art section.) But it was nice to see them. The Pet Architecture "msueum" was a series of pages of text and pictures of cute, haphazard architectural improvisations in Tokyo's awkward corners, all hanging on gauze at an awkward height, like a series of tablecloths on washing lines, themselves forming irregular shapes, blind alleys, tiny clumsy spaces.
Atelier Bow Wow also began the downstairs section: I finally got to see the mediapod I blogged about back in October. Like the Ozawa work upstairs, and like Pet Architecture, this pod is all about turning a lack of space into an advantage. There's an elegance in economy here, but also a way of turning mere storage into a space, a room devoted to fantasy (the ultimate virtual space-enlarger). As you leave contemporary stuff behind (and it's interesting how the exhibition doesn't really make clear distinctions between design, art, whimsical didactics, documentary, popular culture, and so on -- very much as Japanese culture doesn't), you get into the academic core of the show: a detailed documentation of links and influences between German and Japanese culture over the last century or so. It's almost too much to take in. After all, Germany has influenced so much in Japan, from school uniforms to the subway system to their word for sperm (sahmen).
You go from Fluxus events to a big architecture section (suddenly Tokyo station, love hotels and Gropius' weirdly Japanese villas all make sense), to a film room running Japanese silent Jujiro alongside The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. You get Japanese Dada in the form of a group called Mavo (I'd never heard of them), or you see how an influential photography and film show in Berlin in 1928 opened in Tokyo in 1929 and had a huge influence. You learn which of the German expressionists were merely influenced by Japonism from afar (Kirchner) and which actually made the trip to Japan in person (Nolde on his way to New Guinea). You see Berlin-Tokyo sailor-pierrot fashions -- the liberated styles of the moga, the "modern girl", in her "strandpajamas", flared trouser suits.You also see how the devastation and destruction of World War II affected both cities (amazing to see how occupied Japan still looked in the 50s, with Ginza street signs all in English before they're in Japanese, presumably for the benefit of the American forces). One lacuna, though, is the show's omission of artistic links during the fascist period, seen, like the devastation by the Allies, as twinned misfortunes the Germans and Japanese had to deal with for a few years. (Actually, I think I prefer this "brief anomaly" approach to the essentialist "original sin" approach which says that there's something inherently fascist deep in Japanese and German souls.)
"Fruitful encounters within the avant garde came to an abrupt end," says the introduction, "with the closely-related totalitarian systems that took hold in Japan and Germany during the 1930s and 1940s. The result was war, suffering, and severe destruction in both cities, as well as the division of Berlin. These events set the themes for German and Japanese artists alike." Well, so we aren't going to see the links between fascist-friendly artists in the two cities during the 30s and 40s? I'd imagine something must have been going on, kitschy history painting or sub-porno celebration of muscled Spartan youths. Anyway, history is written by the avant garde, not by retro fascist losers.
The third and final section of the show is a series of dark rooms displaying video art. A "Tokyo Pop" documentary about students at the Avex Music Academy, some scenes of people walking backwards through busy Tokyo subway stations, a funny video of Japanese people trying to have conversations using the few phrases of Japanese a Westerner might know (Salaryman: "Kurosawa karaoke kamikaze!" His colleague: "Ah, kamikaze? Geisha!"). I found particularly fascinating a
piece by Scandinavian artist Annika Eriksson, who simply went through all the staff at the Mori Museum asking them what their job was. Everyone, from director David Elliot (who talked about art as a combination of ethical and aesthetic value) to humble greeters, carpenters and security staff, got to deliver a few sentences to camera about their job. Eriksson left in a few seconds on either side of their speech, some dead time in which we could see them preparing what to say, and this turned out to be very revealing, a kind of pre- and post-mask vulnerability. What came through in a lot of the statements was typical Japanese self-effacement ("I am lucky that my boss overlooks the many mistakes I make!") and a touching concern that visitors should leave the museum happier.I certainly did.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-11 07:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-11 07:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-11 08:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-11 02:16 pm (UTC)How did you feel about the sections covering the war years? I felt as though it was somewhat of a missed opportunity to create a conversation about that time-period in the Tokyo show. It seemed like they just censored themselves.
Curiously though I found all those old academic "boring" paintings more interesting in Tokyo. Just perhaps, they started to seem exotic in someway, as though they were revealing something from a dream I once had.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-11 03:52 pm (UTC)that would have to be a different show, a whole museum rather, in itself. This show is already crumbling under its own weigth. i personally felt there was (more than) enough war stuff and appreciated the way fascism was only, yet quite powerfuly, implied. arguably japan could do with some but who needs more display of german guilt in galleries - on my visit last year at the pinakothek der moderne in munchen yet another show of nazi stuff took about a third of the gallery.
japanese facist art
Date: 2006-06-11 03:12 pm (UTC)http://japanfocus.org/article.asp?id=199
it looks like art art continued under facism
this page has wood prints from the 1930s and 1940s
https://www.artelino.com/articles/hanga.asp
I could find little of actual posters from that period in Japan
this exhibition seems to magically cut off coverage of japanese
posters at 1928:
http://oohara.mt.tama.hosei.ac.jp/senkyo01/enposb017.html
this one is nice and a little futurist too:
http://oohara.mt.tama.hosei.ac.jp/senkyo01/enposb021.html
Might add while I could find articles on communist and futurist arts very little on the actual nationalists/facist. I remember boing boing posting a link to japanse military posters from WWII awhile back.
-
A
Re: japanese facist art
Date: 2006-06-11 03:16 pm (UTC)WWII disaster posters from Japan:
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/08/japanese_wwii_duckan.html
and American anti-japanese posters from WWII
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/06/30/antijapanese_wwii_pr.html
Re: japanese facist art
Date: 2006-06-11 03:23 pm (UTC)Hitler's favourite artists are usually said to be Adolph Ziegler (http://info-poland.buffalo.edu/socrealism/tot07/07) and Franz von Stuck (http://www.holocaust-history.org/questions/von-stuck-franz.shtml).
Re: japanese facist art
Date: 2006-06-11 03:26 pm (UTC)Re: japanese facist art
Date: 2006-06-11 03:39 pm (UTC)BTW Saddam's art reminds me heavily of the covers of roleplaying games especially Dungeons and Dragons.
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~dbi9m/fantasy/dreamverses/adnd/parkinson/01/
Re: japanese facist art
Date: 2006-06-11 05:39 pm (UTC)"After all, Germany has influenced so much in Japan"
Date: 2006-06-11 03:42 pm (UTC)being "zeni geva hitler" = being money greedy
(zeni = old japanese word for "money", geva = german "gewalt" (= force), and hitler = an austrian who loved "eintopf" (= "hot pot") and mickey mouse)
meanwhile, in the united kingdom hipster metrosexuals under the influence of compatriots momus and david beckham, show an unprecedented "twee" take on their soccer teams first world cup victory.
the fascist avant-garde in italy
Date: 2006-06-11 05:57 pm (UTC)alas, sometimes the history of art is also made by avant-garde fascists...
in italy under mussolini there was certainly a lot of retro fascist art, but there were also many avant-garde fascist artists.
unlike german nazism, which banned all avant-garde as "entartet"- mainly because most of these artist, as you said, were political opponents, but also because their art was somehow "disruptive", and hitler's esthetic vision was based on a "sanitized" idea of perfection and harmony-, italian fascism co-opted avant-garde art to gain prestige: it was part of mussolini's nationalist plan to bring italy to the forefront of every field of human knowledge. moreover, key avant-garde figures such as mario sironi, or the 2nd generation futurists (e.g. depero, or prampolini), or most modernist architects, were enthusiastic supporters of fascism.
the most emblematic example was fascist regime architecture, which was also the most advanced in the western world at the time, so much so that even hitler's architect, albert speer, imitated it.
Re: the fascist avant-garde in italy
Date: 2006-06-11 06:41 pm (UTC)Re: the fascist avant-garde in italy
Date: 2006-06-11 09:36 pm (UTC)in germany the music was quite different, yes. i believe one of the things that made a difference was the strong jewish presence, not only in the bauhaus, but in the cultural (& scientific/economical/political) life of the weimar republic and the pre-nazi era, which made it so progressive and advanced. george steiner often says that utopian socialism is "a footnote to judaism".
god only knows what benefits the european jews could have brought to the europe of today if they hadn't been exterminated, and if the brightest minds hadn't escaped to america.
again in the words of george steiner "by killing its jews europe committed suicide"
Re: the fascist avant-garde in italy
Date: 2006-06-11 09:47 pm (UTC)By the way, I'm pretty sure Mori Museum director David Elliott is Jewish, although I haven't been able to verify that by googling.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-12 02:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-12 03:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-12 06:53 am (UTC)Germans influenced the Japanese sexual lexicon - with sahmen for semen - as much as Germans influenced English with dirndl being the word for "girl." Both are not exactly what you hear on the street.
Although between the gakuran and the 19th century school songs, Prussia may be more alive in Japan than in Germany.
Mori should not waste his precious real estate on all that worthless art. They should have just made the Louis Vuitton exhibit permanent. Then when they get sick of that and cycle through Gucci, Tiffany and Co., and Mercedes Benz, they can just put dollar bills in glass cases and we can all fawn over wealth in a less mediated way.
Marxy
(no subject)
Date: 2006-06-12 08:23 am (UTC)If you go to this page (http://www.mori.art.museum/eng/organization.html) you'll see a statement by Minoru Mori and his wife about how they "very much hope that the new Museum will become a place for enjoyment, stimulation and discussion -a place where what is important in our culture and society is openly debated, not only through the exhibitions that are shown there but also through a wide range of Public Programs."
In David Elliott, they've appointed a serious-minded public intellectual to direct their museum. Elliott comes from MOMA Oxford and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, both excellent museums with stronger intellectual and moral interests than commercial ones. The shows I've seen so far at the Mori have been in this tradition: the Archilab show, for instance, and now this Berlin-Tokyo show (a show which actually teaches Berliners a lot about their own past). Sure, there have also been some fashion tie-in shows too, but to say that's all the Mori should do is just perverse.
hello
Date: 2006-06-30 03:37 am (UTC)