A day in Tokyo
Dec. 21st, 2007 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
Berlin today is cloudy, hovering between minus 4 and minus 5 centigrade, and lightly brushed with snow. It's perfect weather for, well, staying in and dreaming you're somewhere else. You're sitting at your desk, but you can travel anywhere on an electronic magic carpet. Naturally, you pick Tokyo. Let's imagine you're there; where do you go? What do you see?In Tokyo it's 10C -- much more tolerable. You might head out first of all to Work People Not Allowed, the Bruno Munari show at Shiodome Italia Creative Center (transferred from the Milan Triennale, where it originated). Munari, the veteran Italian designer, maker of charming children's books and wooden toys, is a good example of the genre-crossing that -- you have a feeling -- is going to become today's theme. It's something that Tokyo does well, because of the way it tends to structure things. Cross-genre exhibitions mix up
practical commercial stuff like design with fine art, erasing the dividing line just as Japanese culture has tended to do. It's tempting to think of that erased line as a class divide in other countries, and its erasure as part of Japan's massive middle-classness. But of course its erasure is also a way of financing art exhibitions, because, in the absence of local collectors and art institutions, it's useful to have corporate sponsors -- who of course want you to put their products in the show. What's more, there's a utopian cheerfulness in cutting-edge design (or cutely retro cutting-edge design, in Munari's case) which sits well with Japan's love of novelties, its refreshingly benign sense of the future and of technology.
After the Munari show at Shiodome (you lunch rapidly on lip-blackening squid ink pasta amongst svelte office workers in the faux-Italian piazza) you ride the Oedo line out to MOT -- the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, set in Kiba Park. They've got a big show on called Space for your Future, vaguely inspired by Buckminster Fuller. It's divided into four parts, Body Inner Space, Metaphor, Body Sensation and Memory / Data. The blurb says it "aims to give a spatial execution to a variety of concepts and projects that propose future spaces able to stimulate and transform the sensibilities, sensory perceptions, and intellectual curiosity of those within them. The idea of space implied in the exhibition's title does not simply mean physical space but rather space as an environment which envelops the individual; space as a being possessing both physical and spiritual sensibilities." Wow, space as a being with a spirit! How very Shinto! But overall, the show with its personalized micro-architecture theme (lots of nice little cyber-huts to explore!) reminds you of Takako Minekawa's Roomic Cube concept ("does your way of life require a room?") and a similar show at Tokyo Opera City a few years back called My Home is Yours / Your home is mine.
The MOT show is super-inter-disciplinary, and it's nice to see people like Bless and Cosmic Wonder in it. Sure, they're the same old faces (people you see every time you open Here and There magazine,
for instance), but they're the right faces, the ones who deserve to be repeated. They don't seem to be very successful, commercially, so although they're "fashion and design" in an art gallery, they're very much at the art end of that, the non-profit end, the lab end. You also like the bouncy bean / cocoon chairs that become a part of your body. Comfortable!In the MOT bookstore you flip through the new edition of Art It magazine. They've changed the cover design! The editor's theme is Tokyo: city of chaos and transformation. "What is it about Tokyo suddenly inspiring such a blossoming of artistic creativity? In this issue, we test the pulse of the Japanese capital's ever-evolving art scene, focusing on three major 'cross-genre' exhibitions. Just what constitutes evolution in Japanese, and in world art?" Woah, they're on this "cross-genre" tip too! Something in the air!
Dusk is falling now (the days are short in December!) so it's time to head to Roppongi, where you're going to ride to the 53rd floor of a skyscraper, have a quick look at Tokyo's nightscape, then catch Roppongi Crossing 2007: Future Beats in Japanese Contemporary Art, the Mori art museum's annual survey of new Japanese art. No rush, the museum's open till 10pm. Here too the theme is fusion -- "For Roppongi Crossing 2007 four curators focused on the idea of intersection, selecting 36 artists whose work has an energy and sphere of influence that spreads beyond the confines of conventional artistic categories. Their art takes a variety of forms, including painting, sculpture, photography, design, video, manga, games, and even unlikely genres such as dollmaking and bathhouse mural painting". As usual, you're a bit nervous about earthquakes as you walk round on top of the Mori skyscraper. But your mind is taken off imminent death (and it would be a glamourous one, at least) by Koichiro Tsujikawa's video for Cornelius' "Like A Rolling Stone", a twirling field of formal synergies played out by stiff little figurines (or, if you prefer, a visual metaphor for a society waltzing in harmony) -- and the perfect way to end the perfect December day.
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(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 12:53 pm (UTC)I don't know but I feel that with the death of Neomarxisme, things have seem to reach an end of history stage here on Click Opera.
Meanwhile, Marxy seems to be having fun with his mates over on NeoJaponisme.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 01:14 pm (UTC)I think there are still daily battles, thanks to my infuriating but intelligent Anonemeses, who, yesterday, were trying to educate me about recent developments in clusterfuck theory or whatever. It seems there's no shortage of usefully well-informed people with different points of view, and that's what makes for good debate here.
It's also quite nice that it's expanded beyond the rather tedious "You think this about Japan and I think that, but I'm right because I speak Japanese better" debates. It can now be about a much wider array of topics. Thank you, Anonemeses!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 12:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 01:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 01:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 09:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-22 10:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-23 04:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 01:17 pm (UTC)without commenting on the toys and wooden books involved, this sort of practise, to me, represents all that is wrong with the mainstream art scene. It further confirms my suspicions that is is just another extension of the leisure industry. In such a scenario, artists no longer produce critical discourses but products, even at times trivial and frivolous consumer commodities. The gallery is not a space for empowerment of the audience,seeing them as creative human beings; it is more like a place for making them the target of marketing strategies. And the end product : a gadget, something which is permanently outdated and as such the ideal commodity from business' point of view. As the situationsist said:
" Production, once it is no longer answering any real needs at all, can only justify itself in purely aesthetic terms. The work of art - the completely gratuitous product with a purely formal coherence - provides the strongest ideology of pure contemplation possible today. As such it is the model commodity. A life which has no sense apart from contemplation of its own suspension in a void finds its expression in the gadget: a permanently superannuated product whose only interest lies in its abstract techno-aesthetic ingenuity and whose only use lies in the status it confers on those consuming its latest remake. Production as a whole will become increasingly 'artistic' insofar as it loses any other raison d'etre."
This to me is not 'utopian cheerfulness' or a 'benign sense of the furture'. It's more sad evidence of the emasculation of art as ann emancipatory force.
sorry about the rant, but given the fact that one of my favourite art spaces in Madrid, which offered a real alternative experience and discourse, not to mention supporting work by the likes of myself, has been forced to close down this evening so you could say this has caught me on the defensive !
( i have translated the closure text into english and posted it here if anyone is interested: http://groups.google.com/group/alt.art.scene/browse_thread/thread/e3a8e82f1cb2dd42/aaef58a5a23a7d99?hl=en#aaef58a5a23a7d99
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 01:35 pm (UTC)* Is there really a neutral critical space?
* Can the artist really step "outside" of his own society?
* Perhaps society is quite happy for everybody to be "critical" in this way, as long as they play by various institutional rules at the same time?
* Perhaps the celebration of dissent is a form of propaganda, a way for an open, liberal society to boast about its tolerance? "Look, we have a Mike Kelley show at our museum. Iran would never allow that!"
* What happens to a society so wedded to the idea of the negativity of its own underpinnings, the bleakness of its own future? Does it make people "moronic cynics", perhaps even less politically active than they already were? "The artists are thinking about this stuff for us, but it's bleak, man."
* We organize the Iraq War, and lots of people get holes in their heads. We organize the Gothenburg Biennial, and there's a Thomas Hirschhorn installation with pictures of people in Iraq with holes in their heads. Are they really so different because one is "an intervention" and the other "a critical intervention" with a stapled philosophical essay for you to take away?
* Maybe the big critical "No!" we think represents our "freedom" actually represents something else, a kind of post-Protestant reflex programmed into us?
* Perhaps the only thing more tedious than complicity is complicity posing as rebellion.
So, with these doubts in mind, you follow the opposite trajectory through to its ultimate conclusion, and you reach the Japanese situation where, as Nakako Hayashi (http://www.tokyoartbeat.com/tablog/entries.en/2007/11/here-and-there-an-intimate-journal.html) puts it, there is endless "discovery without judgement". It's actually not a bad thing at all.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 01:58 pm (UTC)For instance, note what I said about the erasure of the line between commercial and fine art being, also, an erasure of a class line (because in the West fine art is still the preserve of super-rich, if not aristocratic, collectors, and commercial art belongs to "the commercial classes). This erasure reflects Japan's much higher levels of social equality-- itself a huge political plus point.
Then there's the much less conservative attitude to the future we see here. If artists only see a dark future, a dark future is what we'll get. A positive vision of the future is extremely important, and politically very relevant.
What's more, I'm always impressed by Japan's amazing skill as a filter. It removes all the toxicity from the West and presents the good stuff. So no gory exhibits of people with their heads shot off in Iraq -- instead we get shows inspired by Bucky Fuller. Well, you know, that filtration in itself is important. As is the soft and friendly tone of many of these shows. This is all political in its way. It brings to mind Aesop's fable of the wind and the sun -- the warm, friendly sun can achieve what the angry, forceful wind can't.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 02:58 pm (UTC)"Then there's the much less conservative attitude to the future we see here. If artists only see a dark future, a dark future is what we'll get. A positive vision of the future is extremely important, and politically very relevant."
absolutely. but the first step is showing an unpleasant reality so as to identify what needs to be improved. if it is all sunshine and smiles then how is anyone supposed to feel the need to - and make them see that they the can- make things better? people generally feel positive when they are empowered and capable of doing things. I'd start there, if you want to make people, happy and optimistic. it is a simple matter of morale. incidentally what is is the suicide rate in japan these days? one of the most hieracrchial societies on the planet, where many people work a 7 day week?
"What's more, I'm always impressed by Japan's amazing skill as a filter. It removes all the toxicity from the West and presents the good stuff. So no gory exhibits of people with their heads shot off in Iraq --(...) that filtration in itself is important. As is the soft and friendly tone of many of these shows. This is all political in its way. It brings to mind Aesop's fable of the wind and the sun -- the warm, friendly sun can achieve what the angry, forceful wind can't."
that is irrational to me. If you don't show the reality of the war, then how is that going to help build a brighter future' or avoid the errors of the past? i don't see much evidence that the 'soft and friendly' approach ever changed anything in history, that seems to be very naïve.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 03:24 pm (UTC)Twenty-seven out of every 100,000 people in Japan commit suicide, according to figures from 2004 -- one of the highest rates in the world.
You're quite wrong about "one of the most hierarchical societies on the planet", though. Almost every Western society is more hierarchical than Japan's, in terms of Gini co-efficients, salaries of CEOs in relation to average employee salaries, and other measures. Japan ranks as the world's fifth most equal society. What's more, while inequality in nations like the UK, US is growing rapidly (http://www.tcf.org/list.asp?type=NC&pubid=1403), in Japan it's staying at pretty much the same level.
i don't see much evidence that the 'soft and friendly' approach ever changed anything in history
So you're advocating harshness and violence, then? Great solution, friend!
Do you really think there is no such thing as a virtuous circle? Perhaps you're more inclined to believe that vicious circles exist, downward spirals of violence? Or do you think that a little burst of violence can turn a vicious circle into a virtuous one?
You're probably busy setting up for this evening, but this question of the shape, size and texture of a real commitment to peace comes up in my article Rocking and Awful (http://imomus.livejournal.com/191956.html), about the attempts, in 2006, to restage the 1966 Peace Tower at the Whitney Museum.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 03:48 pm (UTC)"So you're advocating harshness and violence, then? Great solution, friend!"
whoa there! Don't put words into my mouth. I don't think it is productive to try and discredit those you disagree with by taking their idea to its logical extreme and lampoon that rather than the argument they actually made! you're being all 'binary' again!
I was only pointing out that 'soft and friendly' , at least when employed in situations like stuggling against powerful institutional pressures, is demonstrably useless as a tactic as the experience of so many in this city indicates. That does not equate to endorsing violence, at least not in the sense of harming people. harshness maybe necessry, I think that is entirely legitimate as an option.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 03:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 02:47 pm (UTC)"Is there really a neutral critical space?
* Can the artist really step "outside" of his own society?
for me is more a matter of identifying and getting problems (institutional or whatever) onto the agenda for debate which powerful forces really don't want you to think about.even if you cant step outside a reality, you can still try to shape it.
* Perhaps society is quite happy for everybody to be "critical" in this way, as long as they play by various institutional rules at the same time?
that depends on the society concerned, and the institution: what it does and how it came about and who it benefits, so I can't really make a meaningful response to that. Reminds me of a lyric from stereolab : "originally they set out to serve society; Now the roles have been reversed; (that wants) society to serve the institutions."
* Perhaps the celebration of dissent is a form of propaganda, a way for an open, liberal society to boast about its tolerance?
that seems to be what you see in certain areas of the art world. However if those discourses really are being used in such crude ways, they can't be taken seriously! that has not been my experience of the art spaces I value, though. such cynical activity sounds like the sort of 'PR' thing the local right wing government have been doing here in madrid with their iconographic unrepresentaive art centres, which has generated so much criticism.
* What happens to a society so wedded to the idea of the negativity of its own underpinnings, the bleakness of its own future? Does it make people "moronic cynics", perhaps even less politically active than they already were?
that has not been my experience at all. I think there is widespread curiosity to find out what is really going on and hear why things are like they are, even if that needs to be awakened first. That's not optimism Vs pessimism, nor promoting bleakness, its trying to explain or reveal a reality which is kept hidden. The point is, what's needed for change is a bit less fun and a bit more rage. Above all the message that, as history shows, things needn't be like that and that they can change and that people can change them despite the difficulties. This of course runs contrary to the static , unchanging vision of the world promoted by the media and other spheres.
that said, like everything, it depends how it is presented. if you want to inspire people to act for change, you have to allow them to be a part of something, to be active, to create , not to be alienated and defined purely as consumers.
* We organize the Iraq War, and lots of people get holes in their heads. We organize the Gothenburg Biennial, and there's a Thomas Hirschhorn installation with pictures of people in Iraq with holes in their heads. Are they really so different (...)?
I think that, leaving aside the whole debate on the effectiveness of art's representative function, one benefit of things like that is that it at least allows people to come away from that event with an image of the war that the media don't want them to come away with. and from there, who knows what effect on their way of thinking ....
* Maybe the big critical "No!" we think represents our "freedom" actually represents something else, a kind of post-Protestant reflex programmed into us?
Freedom is a relative not an absolute value , as it is conditioned by so much and also so many 'freedoms' actually collide, even within a legal framework. that is interesting but seems to be a whole other debate.
* Perhaps the only thing more tedious than complicity is complicity posing as rebellion.
This mirrors what you mentioned earlier about the 'tolerant ' society celebrating dissent. Instead of focusing on the end 'product' on show, it may be more revealing to look at the issues of power surrounding the institution concerned and the economic factors which help determine what gets done and by whom. as you mentioned, the economist is an enlightening read in this sense - it probably reveals more about the reality of 'who gets to do stuff!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 01:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 02:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 02:03 pm (UTC)What's the point of reviewing shows that you haven't seen yourself? Isn't that the worst possible kind of criticism?
The Munari show was surprisingly tiny, and hence a bit disappointing.
Space for your Future was, the snazzy poster notwithstanding, badly curated junk! Sure, there were some pieces that might be OK in some other setting, but not at MOT. A truly awful show, and a ripoff at 1300 yen.
Roppongi Crossing is an extremely idiosyncratic collection of the four curators' personal favorites. Fine, if you have a similar taste, otherwise well... There are a few great pieces (for instance, the amazing metal city by Enoki Chu), but most of the stuff left me indifferent. Most of the works aren't even very new, nor do they (I would think) point to the future. A "survey of new Japanese art" it is most certainly not.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 02:13 pm (UTC)I think you answered your own question there. The shows are much better when you just imagine visiting them!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 08:31 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 09:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 10:27 pm (UTC)A terrarium (http://lord-whimsy.livejournal.com/2007/12/09/) or greenhouse (http://lord-whimsy.livejournal.com/275331.html) can have charms that a wilderness (http://lord-whimsy.livejournal.com/2007/12/16/) can lack. Sometimes. (http://lord-whimsy.livejournal.com/278159.html)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 10:29 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 02:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 03:00 pm (UTC)I actually wasn't that scared. It's more of a psychological thing for me, and has to combine with other phobias -- claustrophobia, vertigo. So I think about earthquakes when I'm in lifts, or up in high places.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 03:20 pm (UTC)It would be interesting to experience a small earthquake or something. Not that it would be nice to get debris all over you or the likewise.
I think there was some game about the aftermath of an earthquake to be made but I don't remember what it was called...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 03:53 pm (UTC)Well, clearly they have them. Tokyo 1923. Kobe 1995. They can level entire cities. But what most people will experience in their Japanese lifetime will be tremors that don't go much beyond "alarming".
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 04:26 pm (UTC)I'd greet a tremor with: "Good morning earthquake spirit, how are you today?".
(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 04:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 05:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 09:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 10:17 pm (UTC)Life beyond exhibitions...
Date: 2007-12-21 04:38 pm (UTC)Here's a recommended place to eat that also happens to fit perfectly with the Japanese habit of taking only the nice bits from other cultures:
http://westfearneon.com/2007/12/18/the-worlds-problems-solved-by-japanese-theme-dining/
Bloody images of Iraq are not on the menu here either.
Re: Life beyond exhibitions...
Date: 2007-12-21 05:32 pm (UTC)Re: Life beyond exhibitions...
Date: 2007-12-21 05:51 pm (UTC)Said's "new sin" was supposed to make us value other cultures more highly, not become a pretext to banish even those few positive representations remaining. The PC movement underpinning the emergence of terms like "orientalism" was supposed to make people more voluble about other cultures. All too often, though, it's made us more silent. It's led to a fear of any representation of the other. Combine that silence with actual wars on the other, wars liberals (US Democrats, for instance) failed to vote against partly because they'd been trained to think that any argument for the other's irreducible difference (its right not to have a cut-down, enforced version of our political and economic system imposed via a puppet regime, for instance) was "orientalism".
Re: Life beyond exhibitions...
Date: 2007-12-21 06:00 pm (UTC)Positive representations of another culture are better than nothing.
Positive and informed representations of another culture are even better than that.
To be negative about someone else's positive representations of another culture helps nobody and just makes you look bad, especially if your own representations of the culture in question are more negative than the ones you're critiquing, and especially especially if your troops are occupying the culture in question.
Re: Life beyond exhibitions...
Date: 2007-12-21 11:24 pm (UTC)Said was especially worried about the "positive representations". Where in your later ranking would you put "Positive but wrong"? (i.e. positive for the wrong reasons)
Re: Life beyond exhibitions...
Date: 2007-12-22 01:12 am (UTC)One result of the "success" of Said's concept of orientalism is that representations of the other cannot ever be anything but embarrassing and guilty while a state of orientalism is said to exist (ie still today). Therefore representations of the other disappear from the liberal West, although they persist in the illiberal parts of the West. That means that Said has effectively removed the images of the good other but not the images of the bad other. We now urgently need to restore this image of a "good other" -- not just for the sake of the other itself, but for the sake of difference -- the validity of the idea of persistent differences at the group level, which is to say of cultures. "Positive but wrong" is at least a start. Full marks for attitude, more work required on the content. The main thing is to return the other to visibility as an other and not a differently-coloured version of ourselves.
Re: Life beyond exhibitions...
Date: 2007-12-22 08:25 am (UTC)that's still the voice of (the white) god speaking. the main thing would be to pull back a bit from the meta realm and let the other (assuming he exists - and this indeed might be a test) decide what's to be done for a minute.
Re: Life beyond exhibitions...
Date: 2007-12-22 10:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 08:44 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-21 09:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-12-22 12:35 am (UTC)