The Lunatics Have (Not Quite) Taken Over the Asylum

For a long time it's been said that internationalization is nothing more than a buzzword here in Japan. But with the opening of Yokohama 2001: International Triennale of Contemporary Art this month, that could be about to change. The event will be the first large scale international art show to be held in Japan on a regular basis, with works by over 100 artists, mostly from overseas.

Its basic mission, explains Fumio Nanjo, one of the artistic directors, is for the Japanese people to know what contemporary art is. To do this the organizers, like Nanjo, a free-lance curator whom I caught up with at Narita airport, have taken it upon themselves to directly visit the different regions of the World to observe and select the most outstanding artists. So what were they looking for?
"The two keywords when we were selecting were collaboration and interdisciplinary," Nanjo explains. "Many artists were chosen because they work with other people from other fields, not just other artists."

This all sounds good and proper, but as Nanjo admits the personal taste of each of the four artistic directors was a very important factor. The question, then, is how much can we trust their judgment?

Among those invited are Zhang Huan (pictured), a Chinese artist, who has built his reputation doing self-torturing performances; Marina Abramovic, a Yugoslavian artist who wowed the 1997 Venice Biennale with her performance scrubbing animal bones; and Joelle Ciona, a Canadian artist renowned for making and living in a giant insect-like nest made from paper and her own saliva!

By calling such people artists, their psychopathies, which would be quite capable of getting the rest of us safely locked away, are transformed into 'genius.' Indeed, it’s not surprising that some of the artists here have actual histories of mental illness and institutionalization. Perhaps the most famous in this respect is Yayoi Kusama, a top Japanese artist who has lived in a psychiatric hospital since the 1970s and whose dot-covered works exist, on one level, as a kind of therapy for her.

What is the value of such insane artists?
“Sometimes it just looks stupid,” Nanjo concedes. “But it tells people that there is another way of looking at things.”

Indeed, in a society obsessed with the superficial and with its nose buried in trivia of everyday life, real lunacy can prove very valuable. Using the behaviour of insects as a metaphor for human behaviour, as Ciona does, is not as absurd as it may at first seem. It could be argued that through her madness she arrives at a true perspective of humanity’s place in the Universe as a race of small, inward-looking creatures more dependent on their fragile environment than they are capable of knowing. While Kusama’s uncontrollable urge to cover everything with dots, might be nothing more than an instinctive realization of the atomic nature of matter.

The problem faced by contemporary art is not the presence of a few bona fide lunatics or cherished eccentrics within its ranks, but the fact that many people see it as something removed from any kind of external standard moral, social, national, or commonsensical, and with little relevance for their lives. Its values also seem arbitrarily determined by a self-serving coterie of cognoscenti who favour talentless novelty because it provides the greatest scope for spin and hype. Networking, cronyism, political correctness, and the lukewarm water mentality generated by artistic committees are often perceived as the dominant forces.

Yokohama 2001 may also fall foul of such negative perceptions and the realities which often underlie them, but the organizers have made an effort to take the event beyond the art world.

“We have invited not only artists but creators from other fields, including architects, fashion designers, musicians, composers, and philosophers,” Nanjo explains. “These people also participated in making art. In this way we have made more links between art and our reality, or daily life. We are not trying to say that art is for art's sake. Our attitude is that art is completely different from that.”

But connecting art to everyday reality implies that it should be judged by the standards of that reality. What then are we to make of the Spaniard Alicia Framis? In her former Dreamkeeper project, she visited the homes of lonely city dwellers and stayed at their side as a ‘dream keeper’ for twelve hours while they slept. Maybe she just had insomnia and found this a novel way to get an arts grant!

On a similar level of mind-numbing dullness is MANUS-CURE, a recent work by another participating artist, Emiko Kasahara from Japan, who has arranged and labelled 1,050 shades of nail polish on 30 pages of paper. Nor must we forget Korean artist, Joeng-a Koo, who adds anonymous objects, like a baseboard, to the walls of exhibition rooms, so that the spectators don’t even realize that they are looking at an artwork. Well, that’s probably because they aren’t!
All this makes as much sense as reconstructing your entire New York apartment, fully functional and down to the smallest detail in a German gallery, an entirely pointless act, which, of course, adorns the resume of one of the other participating artists.

A major problem with contemporary art is that interpretation and labelling are often of vital importance. Toshikatsu Endo’s installation for Yokohama 2001 is a room surrounded by high walls with water springing out in the centre of the space.
"The circular outlet of water is dark," the pre-exhibition publicity informs us. "It is an ominous spring that connects our time to the darkness of ancient times."
How profound! If you hadn’t read that, you might have thought it was merely a case of bad plumbing.

The essence of much contemporary art has been reduced to the words and meanings we impose on it. Tatsumi Orimoto’s recent work Art Mama has documented his daily life spent with his Alzheimer-afflicted parent. Bearing in mind the relationship between the artist and the subject, we are perhaps inclined to be generous, and conclude that this is a work of strong compassion and humour. But photographing a poor old woman with various props, including a tire around her neck, is closer to degradation than art informed with love. How you see the art depends on which label you accept or reject.

If you accept the pre-exhibition publicity that the Chinese artists Sun Yuan and Peng Yu are dealing with fundamental issues such as life and death and body and spirit, then their project for the Triennale of applying human body grease to 100 sheets of paper and then binding them into a huge book might seem profound. But if you don’t, all you will be aware of is a big greasy book, and wonder what you’ve been paying your money for.

Nanjo makes a good case for this work by referring to the way human DNA is able to store vast amounts of information, underlining once again how important labelling and interpretation are in the success of artworks. Without the correct formula of words to unlock the objects’ secrets, it remains mute.

“This is because contemporary art is a form of thinking,” he explains. “If you don’t think, it’s not interesting at all. I want people to ask why, and to start talking about it with their friends. Japanese society doesn’t have a tradition of arguing or discussing. Everybody shuts their mouth, which has caused a lot of problems now for democracy, big organizations, and venture businesses. Young people cannot argue, they cannot explain, and just because they are young they are not being listened to. Our society needs to start thinking and asking why.”

To get the best out of the Triennale, go there with an open and active mind, allow yourself to be surprised, amused, bored, confused, enraged, or even inspired by the exhibits on display. And remember, if someone comes up and starts arguing with you, they’re doing you a favour.

Tokyo Journal
September 2001