Dogs and vegetables

[imomus]

Today I have a loose canine theme to my entry. Animator Joji Koyama is based in London (where he studied Fine Art at Goldsmith's) and has made pop videos for Four Tet. His pseudonym is Woof Wan-Bau, a name which combines the sound of a dog barking in the English, Japanese and German languages. You can watch his latest film, an animation entitled Watermelon, on the Mesh page of Channel 4's website. It uses a sliver of music by the talented Tujiko Noriko, whose sexuality becomes ever more stiflingly Bardotesque as she ripens. (Wolf whistle!) By the way, Noriko's fifty minute radio broadcast is worth a listen, even if you don't speak Japanese. It gives a good overview of her music, whose strangeness makes the perfect counterpoint to the silliness of her giggle. (Showbiz gossip: last thing I heard, Tujiko Noriko, who lives in Paris, was dating Julien Loquet, the very talented figure behind musical projects Gel and Dorine_Muraille.)



Atelier Bow Wow is an architecture practise in Tokyo. They also sometimes call themselves Atelier Wan Wan, after the sound of a dog barking in Japanese. (I love the word 'atelier', by the way. I hope one day to have an 'atelier' of my own.) The animal theme continues in Atelier Bow Wow's designation of a certain kind of haphazard, domestic, small-scale architecture found in Japanese cities: they call it 'pet architecture'. I've chosen an early project by Atelier Bow Wow to illustrate what they do, 1992's 'Kiosk for Vegetables'.



Vegetables now take over as the theme of this entry. The highlight, for me, of Osawa Tsuyoshi's 'Answer with Yes and No!' exhibition at the Roppongi Hills art gallery this September was a greenhouse filled with photos of women all around the world holding 'vegetable machine guns' made up of the contents of their favourite recipes, in a cross between Patty Hearst and a cookery show.



I'm sure there are some vegetable clothes somewhere in On Conceptual Clothing, an interesting-looking group show by artists and clothes designers currently being held at Tokyo's Musabi University.

Comments

pet architecture

[(Anonymous)]

atelier bow wow made a bookcase for the exhibiotn space here. the bookcase was inpired by the manga-pod you (I assume, never visited japan) have at tube stations in japan, where peolpe leave their manga after reading and pick out new copies for the next journey. I think it's a wonderful system of book cicrculation.

I sometimes leave books behind on the tube, but alas,never find anything nice in return.

pet architecture was also the name of the exhibition they held here, where they printed pictures oftheir book about small size buildings on t-shirts.

erik
the netherlands

Re: pet architecture

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I've personally never seen those manga pods in Japanese subway stations. I just asked a Japanese person if she had and she said no, although sometimes there are shelves where people leave bunko books they've read. But mostly, these days, people chuck old mangas and books in the paper recycling bin on the platform. And you do see people scrabbling about in there for something to read, because they're spotlessly clean and contain only books and magazines and papers.