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:

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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

[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.