Exhibition view at Yokohama Museum of Art
2009 / Video Installation
(C) Ufer! Art Documentary / Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Koyanagi
Exhibition view at Yokohama Museum of Art
2009 / Video Installation
(C) Ufer! Art Documentary / Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Koyanagi
Exhibition view at Yokohama Museum of Art
2009 / Video Installation
(C) Ufer! Art Documentary / Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Koyanagi
At the end of 2009, we published again each RT contributor’s own "top ten events of the year". As usual, it was extremely difficult to narrow my choice down to only ten, and this time there was another problem that made the selection additionally frustrating. As the deadline was in mid December, I was unable to include some of the events that I managed to catch "last-minute" in the second half of December. Let me just introduce five of those that should have been in my top ten.
Naito Rei: Tout animal est dans le monde comme de l'eau a l'interieur de l'eau
This new installation piece managed to absolutely blow me away with a minimal arrangement. The display made of ready-made articles of daily life lured the visitor to a place disconnected from all worldly things, and while it created a sense of "fugacity" in the museum’s exhibition hall, it projected a feeling of "eternity" into the sky over Kamakura.
Yang Fudong: The General’s Smile
This was the first major exhibition in Japan of the standard-bearer of Chinese contemporary art. His videos incorporating aspects reminiscent of Robert Frank ’s epic poetry and the lyricism of Naruse Mikio were truly overwhelming. Such early works as "Backyard - Hey, Sun is Rising!" reflected very well the structural characteristics of Yang’s art.
The film works on display were all brand new and brilliant without exception. The various grotesque deformities looked more refined than ever, while the sense of eroticism that in Tabaimo’s previous work was hidden in the back came to the front this time. The sensual and rather "animalistic" plant-like figures' delicate movements sent shivers down my spine.
This was a mixed affair, whereas Kuroda Ikuyo, who danced again like mad, and Shiba Yukio’s experiments with looped recordings that even managed to express something like pathos, were quite exciting to watch. This event reminded me of the obvious fact that a well-trained body and a thought-out concept are essential for a compelling presentation of performing art.
The Forsythe Company member Ando Yoko’s improvised dance against a backdrop of bursting light and sound generated with LEDs and a computer was a spectacular sight. Ando’s exploration of the balance, coexistence and mutual neutralization of technology and the human body is ceaselessly developing and evolving.
dance performance with Yasumoto Masako & Tucker (at Yokohama Museum of Art, 2009.12.25)
It was Naito Rei’s exhibition that left the strongest impression on me, but in terms of mixing different genres, the efforts of Tabaimo, Fujimoto/Manabe/Ishibashi and Ando/Hirai were commendable as well. Especially notable were the dance and theatre performances by Yasumoto Masako with musician Tucker and Kyoto-based company Wandering Party respectively, which took place in connection with the Tabaimo exhibition (on 1/16 and 1/17). While there is obviously a high compatibility of performing and visual/plastic arts, Tabaimo exhibited only a homage-like animation to Wandering Party’s theatre performance in a separate display, but did not collaborate directly. What’s the point of staging a performance then, you might ask. Well, that’s simply because the piece "total eclipse" was inspired by the murder of the Toyota Shoji President.
I will not go into details about this incident that occurred in 1985, but to sum it up briefly, it’s about a man who made 200 billion yen with vicious business practices tricking mainly elderly people out of money just prior to the so-called "bubble" era, and was eventually killed by two self-professed right-wingers in front of the mass media that had gathered around the apartment where the culprit had taken refuge before his arrest. By employing such novel methods as letting multiple actors simultaneously speak the same lines, or having the same roles played by different actors one after another, playwright/director Ago Satoshi highlighted in the play the bizarre incident’s currentness and universality. Such stylized forms of vocalization as the chorus or nagauta (long epic folk song) reflect perhaps something like the pressure of a conforming "public mind" that is amplified through the media.
Photo: Hiwatashi Takahisa
Tabaimo refers to the Toyota Shoji incident and "total eclipse" as "an important inspiration while [she] was thinking up a concept for the exhibition" (in an interview with "ART iT" magazine), which she explained(in a talk session after the "total eclipse" performance on 1/17) through a number of keywords such as "housing complex", "individual and media" and "generation". "danDAN",which lets the viewer take a peek into (a cross-section of) one apartment of a housing complex, and other new works unveiled in the "Danmen" exhibition reveal obvious similarities to "total eclipse" (which to me look like periodical rather than generational paralleles, so the exhibition probably refers not only to the "danmen generation" but to the "danmen era" as well), whereas I thought it particularly commendable that the artist chose creators from totally different fields to feature in events related to the exhibition. The Yasumoto/Tucker dance performance was watched by numerous dance fans, and Wandering Party’s theatre performance attracted the theatre crowd. It is still an unsolved issue that the groups of dance and theatre fans aren't necessarily overlapping, but considering the current state of culture in this country, this event was certainly an epoch-making occasion. I really hope that more artists will forge ahead with crossover approaches mixing art, theatre, dance and music.
Anyway, when looking at these five events that I would like to add to my top ten, and in addition, at the top ten lists that other contributors supplied, it seems to me that our selections are reflecting how the times keep changing, if only subtly. In a nutshell, I would describe it as a shift "from the light to the heavy", or perhaps "from the instant to the continuous", plus "from the inside to the outside". As a matter of course, each contributor made his/her selection according to his/her own taste, whereas personal expectations surely played a role as well, so you'll perhaps blame me for being a bit hasty talking about the "change of the times" based on these data alone. Nonetheless, as history has taught us, whenever one certain trend continues for a certain amount of time, it is always followed by a swing-over to an opposite trend. "Light", "instant" and "inside" aren't necessarily bad things, and likewise, "heavy", "continuous" and "outside" aren't free from undesirable aspects. For me personally, however, this "smell of transformation" has something throbbing, and it raises my expectations toward a continuing trend that includes the amalgamation of different genres.
Ozaki Tetsuya / Editor in chief / REALTOKYO