Chim↑Pom @ NADiff a/p/a/r/t

[imomus]

I've been planning to write about Japanese art collective Chim↑Pom for a while, but their performance on Monday night at the opening of the new NADiff a/p/a/r/t store gives me the perfect excuse. It was, in some ways, a strange choice. NADiff is short for "new art diffusion". Chim↑Pom, on the other hand, is short for penis. In fact, you can think of the little arrow symbol in the middle of their name as a tiny, cute, erect one if you like.



Monday's NADiff opening and Chim↑Pom performance, at a new five-floor gallery complex near Ebisu station, was queued around the block, and got blogged by regular Tokyo art scene observers Roger McDonald and Ashley Rawlings. Chim↑Pom made a performance called "Japanese Art is 10 Years Behind", which -- according to Ashley -- involved a rubbish-strewn, graffiti-covered basement lit by fireflies, with Chim↑Pom garu-star Ellie rowing about in a rubber dinghy. Outside a "future van" was parked, and members of the collective dressed in shirts painted with the motto "GO FOR FUTURE!" invited guests to write their wishes on it.



For the last ten years NADiff has been right at the heart of my own personal Tokyo. The bookstore, cafe, record shop and gallery space just off Omote Sando was where I bought the CDs that provided the samples for my "Oskar Tennis Champion" album, and where I met outsider musician Yximalloo for the first time (his forthcoming album, by the way, is called Unpop after this essay). Chim↑Pom, on the other hand, are brand spanking new: they only formed in August 2005. Before that, as they relate in this YouTube interview, they were just a bunch of art groupies who used to hang around Makoto Aida's house.

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"We'd hang around Makoto's house, drinking late," they tell the interviewer, "then wake up in the morning, still there, demanding food. We didn't really consider how busy he was. Then we started making art."

Chim↑Pom's ascension to the position of "young Tokyo art stars to watch" marks a swing from the Koyama-Ishii stable of galleries (representing, amongst others, the Takashi Murakami constellation) to the Mizuma-Mujinto stable (Makoto Aida is represented by Mizuma, Chim↑Pom by Mujinto). The Mizuma-Mujinto group are younger, more fiercely Japanese, more humorous, less oriented to bling, less anally career-fixated, more socially-conscious. Since the Murakami school made a big deal about the power of otaku, Chim↑Pom start their interview by marking a certain distance from the idea. They began quite dark and nerdy, they say, a boy's club. But that was too otaku, and otaku "is not everything". Then (a bit like the Human League) they recruited Ellie, a gal -- or garu -- who lives for clubbing (she sleeps all day and dances all night).



Since then -- as PingMag reported back in January -- they've posed real rats they collected in Shibuya in cute Pikachu poses, filmed Ellie spewing pink vomit, blown up their possessions, staged an auction in which the prices went down instead of up (a protest against Damien Hirst’s diamond skull and Takashi Murakami’s Miss Ko2, which both went for record sums), gathered a cloud of crows over 109 Shibuya using a motorbike (the action Hisae and I reported last week during our London-as-Tokyo event), turned Tokyo's Disney Sea simulacrum of Venice into their own personal Venice Biennale, and made a Princess Diana-style anti-landmine video in Cambodia.



“How many prosthetic legs could be bought with the $100 million that Hirst’s work got?" they ask. It's a good question, but Chim↑Pom aren't puritans. Bling culture is there to be used: "In the spirit of Diana we channel the lineage of the volunteer spirit and the girly culture from Hepburn to Madonna via Angelina Jolie." Individual expression is boring, the collective thinks, and doesn't matter. Happiness is decided by your heart; it's best to be poor but happy. Only one issue divides the group at present: whether they wish everyone in the world to feel galaxy (Ellie's wish) or universe (Ushiro's).

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Mike Parr did the vomit thing in the 1970s. I'm surprised you haven't heard of it.

As for singling out art, I think it's you that's content to give contemporary art a free ride! When it's art, you'll talk about recontextualising for another age. When it's pop music, it's necro retro, it's reminiscing about the good old days of 1981 and all the great new music that was around then, when the kids of today are just content with bands that sound like Joy Division or whatever... To a certain extent anything new is just a recontextualisation, yes. The problem comes when the difference between the recontextualisation and the original is not that great or that interesting, which is very often the case now in both art and pop/rock. I guess I don't find a Japanese woman throwing up pink vomit in the noughties sufficiently different from an Australian man throwing up blue vomit in the seventies to be interesting. I wouldn't at all be surprised to learn that there was a Japanese woman throwing up pink vomit back in 1975 or whatever, or even that Yoko Ono was doing it in 1964. My criticism here is really no different from your criticism of Oasis trying to sound like the Beatles or Vampire Weekend sounding like Talking Heads.

I think you simply find the art world more congenial than the pop/rock world these days, so you're more indulgent with it!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You have at least half a point -- I do tend to dismiss the repetitions of the pop world more readily, perhaps because I know it better. But, when it comes down to it, we assess originality by our own lights, and intuitively. There's no sliderule for this.

Why is it okay for Sebastien Tellier to regurgitate the early 80s, but not for Oasis to regurgitate The Beatles? There's no programmatic way to distinguish them, but there is a kind of critical inner ear that weighs all sorts of factors (how long they've been recycling their respective sources, how successful they've been, the current interestingness or transgressiveness of the periods they've chosen to pastiche, etc) and decides what's fresh and what's stale.

It's my estimation that Chim↑Pom's ideas -- taken as a whole -- are fresh and interesting. I'd relate them to Makoto Aida more than Yoko Ono, though the rowing boat performance and the penis fixation might include a wink in the direction of avant granny Yayoi Kusama. The landmine action in Cambodia -- Thank You Celeb, I'm BOKAN! -- is probably their most original work, because it gives them a way to critique the art system (the auction they held later, with prices going down) as well as mainstream celebrity culture, but also to harness the positive energy in those things and swing it around into something useful. A clever judo roll.

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I'd say Chim↑Pom's cheekiness and energy level also make them a better set of rivals to the Kaikai Kiki gang than the Supereveryday (http://imomus.livejournal.com/162731.html) crew, hobbled by formalism. The main danger I see for Chim↑Pom is of being too easily integrated into the mainstream culture they're pastiching. They really have to keep their distance from its values to be, themselves, of value.

[(Anonymous)]

There's no accounting for taste, I guess. On the one hand Chim Pom sound fun, but on the other the whole idea of art that "critiques the art system" has me stifling a yawn. Talk about easy targets. Next thing you know bands will be singing about the evils of the music industry! Oh wait...

[eclectiktronik.livejournal.com]

"the whole idea of art that "critiques the art system" has me stifling a yawn. Talk about easy targets. Next thing you know bands will be singing about the evils of the music industry!"

I think there's something healthy about critiques of this kind, but I think some people would do well to read more stuff like Guy Debord if they want to do it seriously!

[eclectiktronik.livejournal.com]

Agree with your last point. I think we need to be careful not to see this collective as anything too 'subversive'. Basically, (and I may be wrong here as I don't have much to go on) it seems that rathher than overturn the art world, they are seeking to become celebs inside it - look at their origins as self confessed 'art groupies'; they have a nice photogenic clubbing-obsessed female figurehead, and do openings for shops. Don't get me wrong, I like the nature of their events, but I see nothing revolutionary there!

[akabe.livejournal.com]

take my word and listen to momus anonimus , ellie's pink vomit is not as far from martin parr's as a rothko rectangle is from a malevich one but as far as kusama yayoi's new york love boat is from the boats in ueno park.