Japan saves music, banking, art

[imomus]

The nice folks at Paris / Tokyo label Sonore have drawn my attention to Doddodo, an act worthy of the "Matsuri-kei" label (which I invented fairly arbitrarily, but does seem to sum up a certain sound and attitude). This video by Sonore's Franck Stofer, filmed in May at Earthdom Shin-Okubo, gladdens my heart muchly. Doddodo's enormously fat and primal sound exemplifies all the good things CSS lost by getting too polished on their second album:

[Error: unknown template video]

Sonore are currently looking for somewhere for Doddodo to perform live in Berlin this December, so if you know of a good venue, tell them.

In other Japanese news, the nation has a new prime minister in the form of Taro Aso, has bailed out the American economy by acquiring several American banks and is currently hosting the Yokohama Triennale, which I'll be blogging about for the NYT on Friday.

Comments

Re: Yokohama Triennale

[(Anonymous)]

Dear Momus,
First of all, I'm a regular reader of Click Opera and normally enjoy and admire your writing (and your tremendous energy) a lot. However, writing a review of a show based entirely on second-hand information seems utterly pointless, or even immoral. That's not art criticism - it's just gossip! Surely you can do better than that.

My own review (in Japanese) is here:
http://kusagauma.blogspot.com/2008/09/yokohama-triennale.html

So far, I haven't met a single person who actually liked the show, but as you know, negative criticism is usually avoided in Japan, at least in print. Consequently, the reviews I've seen have been rather few and rather bland.
There are any number of baffling curatorial decisions; from the quite abstruse comments by the director I infer that they were aiming for something like last year's (extremely controversial) Documenta, but unfortunately they have had neither the audacity nor the money to carry it through. However, the biggest failure as I see it is that the show has nothing at all to do with Yokohama, and not much to do with Japan either. I find this particularly sad as I've been a resident (and taxpayer) of Yokohama for over 20 years, and I really would (have) like(d) them to succeed, not least in order to make feasible another triennale in three years time. But I honestly find it difficult to recommend this show to my friends who are not already inside the small circle of aficionados of contemporary art.

Re: Yokohama Triennale

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Nice to see such a thorough review, Jan, and one that moves from global negatives to pieces you did like. Naturally, I'd have liked to see the show in person, but neither I nor my employer (the New York Times, in this instance) have the budget to attend this Yokohama Triennale. I wanted to cover it, or rather cover the coverage. And I did quote, for instance, Andrew Maerkle saying it was "boring".

I suspect I would've enjoyed the show a lot -- just going on the inclusion of so many artists I like, and the foregrounding of performance, which is a particular interest of mine. And personally, I don't like the kind of tokenism whereby local Yokohama artists are included just because of their proximity to the site. That can be covered by ancillary events -- and there are some in Yokohama, seeking to attract with more local stuff the art crowd -- let's not forget -- drawn here by Japan's premier international contemporary art event.

Re: Yokohama Triennale

[(Anonymous)]

I didn't mean to advocate tokenism, but the problem here is that they need to attract some 200,000 paying visitors in order to break even, and you don't do that by putting on a show essentially by New Yorkers for New Yorkers - in Yokohama. The regular art crowd (people who know and follow contemporary art) in Japan is tiny, and it doesn't help that many Tokyoites seem to think that Yokohama is "far away" (it's only 30 minutes).
So you really need to attract the local population. Now, Yokohama is a big city and there are plenty of generally interested people that COULD be attracted, had the curators made a bit more of an effort to do so.

As I wrote in my review, this triennale is noteworthy mostly for what is missing, namely works that are "attractive" in the most basic sense, i.e. public magnets: eye-catching public artworks, works that are immediately enjoyable even without a long art education, photogenic works that look good in reviews and newspaper articles, or works that relate to local issues. Performances are well and fine, but can usually only be seen by a handful of people at a time, and most performances were concentrated to the busy opening weekend and are over already.

You quote one foreign reviewer as saying the show is boring, but that sort of misses the point. Foreign visitors are only a minor fraction of the paying audience anyway. The thing is that if Japanese reviewers also find it boring, they won't write much about it at all. For instance, my morning daily Asahi Shinbun had a token review on the first day, with a small black and white photograph and some quotes from the press kit, but no personal opinion whatsoever, and I haven't seen a single line about the triennale in the two weeks since.

The first triennale in 2001 became a big success mostly by accident, in a way totally unforeseen by the curators. Although a lot of the art was good, attendance was extremely poor for the first month and it looked like a disaster. Then, however, the huge but brittle grasshopper on the front of the Intercontinental Hotel suddenly became the talk of the town and was covered almost daily in the news: will it fly today or not? All of a sudden, the Triennale became a hot date spot for young couples in the Kanto area, and during the last few weeks there were Disneyland-like lines around the corner to several of the attractions (an hour to get into that John Bock room, for instance).
Unfortunately, I doubt that anything similar will happen this time.

Jan

Re: Yokohama Triennale

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Asahi Shinbun had a token review on the first day, with a small black and white photograph and some quotes from the press kit, but no personal opinion whatsoever, and I haven't seen a single line about the triennale in the two weeks since.

Isn't that the nature of the Japanese press, though? They tend not to do criticism in the Western sense. I don't think you can blame that on the YT.

As for the grasshopper on the Continental Hotel, I thought it was the worst piece in the first Triennnale. It might as well have been part of some advertising campaign. Better populism, in 2001, was the use of a shopping centre as venue, and the huge photo of a clogged granny (http://imomus.com/dailyphoto040901.html) by (was it?) Miwa Yanagi.

This year, there were some things that would surely have intrigued the local populace: the Fujiko Nakaya artificial fog, for instance, or Terence Koh's crowd-walk to the sea.

But, frankly, I think trying to make contemporary art populist or locally-relevant would be a big mistake. I think it ought to be a sort of publicly-exhibited research, a sort of esoteric poetry, a rather austere beauty that you adapt to more than it adapts to you, a high church. Play to its weakness (elitism) and you'd get something like tabloid TV in an art context. Play to its strength and you get something no other medium can do. And yes, that does often mean slowness (Tsunoda and Luke Fowler's piece) and pretension (Saburo Teshigawara writhing around in broken glass) and difficulty and obscurity and obscenity (Hermann Nitsche) and spikiness (Cameron Jamie) and taboo (Marina Abramovic with her instructions on nude platform viewing).

There's plenty of room in commercial media for the glib and the flashy, we don't need them in art, and when art does them (Damien Hirst springs to mind) it's at its worst.