imomus | The Yokohama Triennale and art's new quietness

The Yokohama Triennale and art's new quietness

Not so much coverage of the Yokohama Triennale this week in The Moment as coverage of the coverage.

When I mentioned on Tuesday that I was writing this, a Yokohama resident called Kusagauma responded by saying:

"Dear Momus, couldn't you please refrain from writing about art shows that you haven't actually seen yourself? In particular a rather controversial show like this one." He turns out to be called Jan Fornell and to have written an extensive and interesting critique of the Triennale on his own blog (in Japanese only). Basically he found the Triennale dull and elitist, lacking in populist focal points like the huge grasshopper stuck, in 2001, on the side of the Continental Hotel.

Jan and I have been debating this point fiercely. My position is that art is allowed to be introverted and difficult and obscure and even boring, with moments of poetry or obscenity or awkwardness or pretension or whatever. What it shouldn't do -- in a desperate attempt to attract bigger audiences or more local resonance -- is reproduce the flash and clamour of commercial media.

It's interesting that Jan lays some of the blame at the foot of the 2007 Documenta -- another show I gave a rave review without having experienced at first hand. I love everything I've seen and read about the obliqueness and quirkiness of that Documenta, and if Yokohama is copying it (just as the last Berlin Biennial seemed to be) it seems that it really does represent a "new quietness" in art.

But basically, any show that includes Cerith Wyn Evans and Throbbing Gristle, Miranda July, Luke Fowler and Tsunoda Toshiya, Cameron Jamie, Terence Koh, Jonathan Meese, Jim O'Rourke, Nick Relph and Oliver Payne, Tino Sehgal, dancers Kitamari and Saburo Teshigawara, and Pop, the "flesh-searing" music project of Zbigniew Karkowski and Peter Rehberg (who runs Mego in Vienna) gets a thumbs up from me. The Luke Fowler and Tsunoda Toshiya pairing alone makes this a red-letter biennial in my book.

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My position is that art is allowed to be introverted and difficult and obscure and even boring, with moments of poetry or obscenity or awkwardness or pretension or whatever. What it shouldn't do -- in a desperate attempt to attract bigger audiences or more local resonance -- is reproduce the flash and clamour of commercial media.

I'm really interested in this "new quietness." I've seen nothing recently that makes people more angry than work that isn't angry and loud. I find this fascinating and amusing since my art is also very quiet and gentle. Making furious people more furious because it refuses to get furious with them. Personally, I'm also quite tired of work that takes the piss out of pop cultural references.

I'm interested in any people thinking, writing about quiet/gentle work. Do you have any favorites you could recommend? (aside from this blog, obviously)

I've seen nothing recently that makes people more angry than work that isn't angry and loud. I find this fascinating and amusing since my art is also very quiet and gentle. Making furious people more furious because it refuses to get furious with them.

That's a great way of putting it -- one I'd like to quote, actually, in my talk next month at the AA, which is going to be about "the ideology of the iconic" and the development of a backlash against pop apropriation, the emergence of post-pop or unpop, a new taste for the sublime and the hermetic.

It is odd how people rage against quietness. "Documenta 12 is a disaster," Adrian Searle said in his review of Documenta, deriding the curators' perverse streak of autocratic, pedagogic intent, their "quizzical attitude to painting", the strangely subdued atmosphere, the absence in person of Harvey Keitel (who featured in one of the videos), the guards "who inform you not to get too close, not to breathe on the glass, not to lean against the walls, not to carry a bag, not to point, sneer, laugh or break wind".

It's as if farting had become the new etiquette, and the "Bad Lieutant" the new role model. When farting and bad lieutenants are absent, people get "delicacy rage".

Personally, I'm also quite tired of work that takes the piss out of pop cultural references.

Yes. This came up at the MUDAM conference I attended in April, organised by Candice Breitz, who makes a lot of pop culture references in her work (people impersonating Michael Jackson etc). One criticism I made at this conference was that this kind of appropriation is now looking a little "generational" -- it has a 90s, postmodern feel. Whereas the curatorial fashion is more about an eclectic, quirky take on Modernism's old hierarchies, its purist idealism, its austerity and its elitist refusal to pander to the masses. It's almost as though Modernism is our Islam. And I've said before that something like Islam is the only thing that could get us out of postmodernism, which would otherwise smarm and fart its way towards the horizon of eternity unchallenged.

As for who's writing about quiet, gentle work... I'll have to think about that. In the Japanese context, perhaps Roger McDonald (http://rogermc.blogs.com/) and Midori Matsui (http://www.friezeartfair.com/podcasts/details/cultural_cartography_does_art_travel/)?

Luke's work it's truly intriguing mainly because is very hard to get holdd of his documentaries, how did you? I'd love to see them Nick.

I've had to just watch them in shows. I saw the R.D. Laing one at the ICA and the Cornelius Cardew one at the Armory Show. And then -- as I reported in Noise annoys (http://imomus.livejournal.com/321258.html), I saw one film billed as the other at PS1!

Ha, and I've just noticed -- a year too late! -- that Luke Fowler himself left a message (http://imomus.livejournal.com/321258.html?thread=12111082#t12111082) under that Click Opera entry offering to send me preview DVDs of his work! Fuck!

Are you stroking your red pen itching to correct his grammar. You wouldn't dare. Lol

¡¡¡!!! better now than ever, hurry hurry! write him.

you should get hold of him!

your "Noise annoys" post proves how hard is to get to see any of Luke's films, I am particularly interested on the Xentos film he did with K. Koper. "The Way Out", Do you know Fowler in person?

I like Koper's podcast l'etranger very much.
http://ltgpanik.blogspot.com/

!!! oh oh, searching for more info on "the way out" found it on youtube!, dear stevedebock who had the kindness to upload it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQm8hEqYwtg&feature=related

atte. nana
so happy! Sunday grumpyness fading

I haven't met Luke, no. Here he is (on the Artforum Scene and Herd report (http://artforum.com/diary/) of the Yokohama Triennale) looking like the spruce, epicene antithesis to Jonathan Meese's grunge devil:

Great news about the YouTube link, will watch that now!

Oh, and I've been on Koper's show L'Etranger!

oh, great!
Where you at l'etranger. One year ago exactly?
found you: http://www.pluggd.tv/audio/channels/l_etranger__radio_panik__brussels_105_4m/episodes/3dhgg?play=1

content not available :S

I reject the widely-held belief that success is directly proportional to mass adoption and approval, especially in reference to art. Of course, there are many people who aspire to money and recognition, but that doesn't mean these factors are the main motivation of everyone. If your goal is to create, then in creating you have succeeded. End of discussion.

In regards to art that's difficult, quiet and boring -- There's no end to culture that attempts to appeal to our baser appetites for sensuality and spectacle, and for this reason I find art that rejects this exciting and interesting.

I automatically understand why something is instantly gratifying -- it's because it's appealing to instinct or emotion. I'm an animal after all. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but after the millionth time someone has tried to grab your attention using tits or bright lights, you can't help but ask yourself "is this it?". That's where the intellectualisation of art begins and you start to ask questions about yourself and the world around you, which is hugely rewarding.

I have to end this by making something clear though -- Art that appeals to sensuality isn't necessarily devoid of intellectual merit, and abstruse art isn't required to be devoid of sensuality completely.

I think we're pretty much on the same page with this one, Kuma!

Speaking of "boring art" -- I went to Approximately Infinite Universe (http://www.no-signal.net/aiu/) at the ICA last night (nothing to do with Yoko Ono...)

It was very still. lots of people just sat on the floor and talked quietly whilst the bands played. I'm sure ambient music gigs would bore most people, but I really like the way the music is approached; as something to wash over you rather than move you. There was no overbearing focus. I imagine the atmosphere I experienced there would be very similar to the Fujiko Nakaya's artificial fog.

I completely missed it, though I already saw Kevin B. two weeks ago and it was everything but quiet fog, anyhow it's sad that I completely forgot with ticket and all.

~.•

My position is that art is allowed to be introverted and difficult and obscure and even boring, with moments of poetry or obscenity or awkwardness or pretension or whatever.

Absolutely, I totally agree. However, what I'm trying to say is that the Yokohama Triennale is to a large extent financed with tax money, and they will need some 200,000 people to pay 1800 yen each to enter in order to break even, and they simply won't get that by showing almost exclusively introverted, difficult, obscure or boring art! Forgive me for saying so, but putting on a show that appeals to you, second-hand, sitting in Berlin, is totally irrelevant! What matters is what the potential audience thinks, and that audience will to a very large extent be local. If they don't manage to attract a sufficient audience, the local authorities will be extremely reluctant to fork out the money the next time, and the Yokohama Triennale will go out not with a bang, or even a whimper, but with a "So what?"

I'm certainly not suggesting pandering to the lowest common denominator, but a bit of humour in the selection of works and artists wouldn't have hurt. Or how about allocating some of the money spent on ultimately disappointing works by "big name" New York artists to young Japanese artists instead, to see what they would have been able to do with a larger budget? But none of that, unfortunately.
While you may have found the grasshopper the weakest piece in 2001, it was genuinely popular and did draw in the crowds. I can't think of any piece in the current Triennale serving a similar function. Terence Koh's parade that you mention was performed on the invitation-only opening night (what could be more elitist than that?) and I didn't see it. Fujiko Nakaya's fog is great (as I wrote in my review) (and the atmosphere of the fog is damp!) and so is Tino Sehgal's dance piece (which I wasn't allowed to photograph, and consequently didn't mention), but they are both in Sankeien, which is a lovely park but very far removed from the other venues (at least 30 minutes by bus) and rather difficult to get to. (This also means that many visitors will miss these works completely.)

Also, I'm not blaming last year's Documenta, which I also experienced first hand (http://kusagauma.blogspot.com/2007/07/documenta.html). That was in many ways an extremely infuriating show, but perhaps for that very reason it turned out to be quite memorable as well. What I was saying was that the curators of the Triennale might have been aiming for something similar, but if so they haven't really succeeded, neither artwise nor, of course, in creating a major tourist attraction.

"hat I'm trying to say is that the Yokohama Triennale is to a large extent financed with tax money, and they will need some 200,000 people to pay 1800 yen each to enter in order to break even, and they simply won't get that by showing almost exclusively introverted, difficult, obscure or boring art!"

You're making the assumption that it even needs to break even or continue in its current form.

The local authorities might believe that even though it loses money, its of enough cultural importance to warrant funding. That's one option.

Or the organisers and artists might be aware that this Triennale is going to lose money, but regardless put it on for the sake of the art, aware of the fact they wont be able to repeat the event in the long run.

"Terence Koh's parade that you mention was performed on the invitation-only opening night (what could be more elitist than that?)"

I'll agree with you on this one -- if this event was funded by tax money there shouldnt have been any "invitation only" performances.

You're making the assumption that it even needs to break even or continue in its current form.

Exactly. I don't think tax-payers' money should be wasted on funding things which could survive on commercial terms in the free market. Subsidy is all about making things possible despite the fact that they're loss-making, surely?

That is a bit naive, don't you think? This is not Europe, nor the bubble era. Relying heavily on subsidies means relying on the whims of the politicians who happen to be in charge, and in the current economic climate in Japan and with the current administration, contemporary art is not exactly a top priority. It's probably no problem if the Triennale itself runs at a loss, as long as it generates revenue elsewhere, for example by attracting visitors to Yokohama who spend their money in hotels, restaurants, etc. But if the Triennale is not "attractive" enough, that won't happen either.

I guess we have to wait and see. The Triennale has only just started and has two months to go, so there is still hope. There is still a lot of things the organizers could do to improve the situation, starting with trying to explain the works to their own staff, so that they in turn can engage in some sort of dialog with the visitors rather than just answering "I have no idea" to all questions.

As for the "new quietness", this seems like a minor misunderstanding. I interpret Mizusawa as saying that appreciating good art takes time, and that the aim was to create a space where quiet contemplation was possible. Sounds noble, but once again I doubt that they have succeeded (with the notable exception of Sankeien). It's not the case that the works themselves are particularly quiet or calm. For example, both main venues feature huge and shrill (and no doubt hugely expensive) multi-screen installations by Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy respectively, works that I personally found both silly and dated.

obviously a big part of the problem is that,in spite of the fact that it's produced some amazing contemporary art(ists) for the past century or so japan doesn't really have the infrastructure, the base of the pyramid of which the bi(oops, tri-)enale should be the apex. only art-insiders (and foreigners) go to galleries, people go -in the millions- to the big museums for the food or , interestingly, the architecture. the echigo bienale is a joke, right? or a reincarnation of those incredibl(e/y lewd) museums that popped up all over the country side during the bubble.

the situation is somewhat different to the istambul or bangladesh or whatever bienale and it's very much a clasic case of every place being different but japan is more different. (( however, the proper thing for a non-japanese person to do when faced with this is not to stop at the 'weird japan' stage but use their little insight they might have of japan to understand things elswhere from a slightly fresher angle. japan , particularly in its fucked-up-ness, is often ahead of the rest of the world - like those catfish popular during edo times who feel earthquakes just a fraction of a second before everyone else. ))

Wouldn't another post-materialistic way to attend be to send scouts with momus-avatar eye-patches?

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The Yokohama Triennale and art's new quietness

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oh, so sad

OK, let's move the debate here then

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