Thomas Struth, National Museum of Art, Tokyo, 1999

Thomas Struth, National Museum of Art Tokyo, 1999

I have been critical of Thomas Struth in the past, primarily because I am not always convinced of the novelty of what he is doing. Is the ultimate significance of his work the same, no matter the museum, no matter the old master painting on display? In each of his museum photographs we see images of an audience looking, or more likely, not looking, at an icon of Western art in what is meant to be its sanctuary environment of a world renowned museum-cum-theme park. 

However, this image, National Museum of Art, Tokyo, from 1999, on display in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of their “Between Here and There: Passages in Contemporary Photography” exhibition is in a category all its own. National Museum of Art is layer upon layer upon layer of representation: a photograph of a painting, mounted on a white board, against a curtain drawn to create a temporary gallery wall, all of which is further photographed with an audience looking on in darkness. And as if that were not enough, the layers of meaning and potential for interpretation are multiplied when the painting is recognized as Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) on loan to the National Museum of Art in Tokyo from the Louvre. Delacroix’s is a painting in which Liberty leads people of all classes out of the chaos and confusion of the French revolution in 1789. The painting is huge, it is flush with intense emotion, colors, building to the crescendo of Liberty forging onward and upward, the French flag proudly and unerringly at the helm. And in Tokyo, 1999, a world far removed from the passion, the political and cultural ideals of France two hundred years earlier, the audience in Struth’s photograph stands in darkness, silent, still, and distant from the image they cannot possibly understand, activities that must seem incomprehensible to their present moment.

Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, 1830 Oil on canvas, 102 1/4 x 128 in. (260 x 325 cm) Musee du Louvre, Paris

As if in reflection of the diminished intrigue and significance of the French Revolution to the unsuspecting Japanese audience, in Struth’s photograph, the Delacroix painting is small, minimized by the layers of backdrop, mounting, photograph, audience that are all given equal weight in the huge photographic representation. The painting, its frame, the glass in front of the painting, which is then mounted on a panel, is kept at a distance from the perfectly posed, presumably immaculate Japanese audience in Tokyo. A barrier stands between them and the painting such that the movement of and in the painting is framed, trapped, not important in the face of the layer upon layer of protection given the French national treasure that is, really, now, a photographic representation of its display in Tokyo. A guard stands next to the painting, keenly observing the people who, in turn, stand at a distance, clearly separated by the barrier we nevertheless do not see. And I assume that somewhere in Struth’s conception of his photograph he is fascinated by the mechanisms of distanciation that ensure we never get too close — in time or in space — to a work or art that might, ultimately, celebrate our own liberation.

Then, as I look at Struth’s image in the hallowed halls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, yet another discordant layer is added to an image already bursting with impossibility, conflict, an image in which everything is out of place. I become the audience who watches the audience in Japan who, in turn, pays homage to the French who put their faith in Liberty all those years ago. In true Metropolitan Museum style, I am allowed to wander around the photograph, move extremely close, lounge on the bench placed right before it. My interaction with Struth’s photograph could not be more different from the cold, static audience in Tokyo, and again from the passionate, fiery participants in 1789 Paris. So in tune with the institution and the city in which I encounter this image, just as are the represented audiences, I behave as though these pasts, these other worlds did not exist, so caught am I in my own present perception of Struth’s enormous photograph. Me, my experience, my present time and place is all that matters in my encounters with great works of art in famous museums, if I am to believe Thomas Struth. 

Toshiki Okada, Hot Pepper; Air Conditioner; The Farewell Speech

Hot Pepper

On Saturday I had my first Festival d’Automne adventure for 2010 with the journey to Théâtre de Gennevilliers to see Toshiki Okada’s latest trilogy of short scenes, Hot Pepper; Air Conditioner; the Farewell Speech.

My first and most immediate response to these Okada works was a sense of alientation thanks to their relentless repetition. Okada’s is not repetition in the Philip Glass or Sol Lewitt vein of American modernism, where repetition leads ultimately to a place of insight and revelation even when the work itself does not reach that place. Okada’s repetition frustrates, cringes and could easily irritate an unsuspecting audience. This is a repetition that entraps and alienates, and as the characters are at the mercy of the inhumanity of their work place, so might we become hostage to the repetitions of the performance. In each piece the two or three characters repeat the same lines over and over and over again. They repeat their gestures, the intonation of their voices, they repeat their ideas, and their questions to each other. The repetition creates an insistence on the part of characters who are either not heard, or not understood in the alienating work environment of contemporary Japan. The three pieces cohere around the laying off of a young woman named Erika from her job in what we assume to be a large, inhumane, Japanese corporation.

The piece I “enjoyed” the most was Air Conditioner perhaps because it was the most frightening. A young woman and equally young man stand at the center of the stage while she writhes in self-conscious agony explaining to him that someone keeps turning the air-conditioner down to 23 degrees, even as she turns it up, and so she is always cold in the office. The disrespectful and misogynist male employee dismisses her as he keeps insisting that she is cold because she is a woman as he gyrates his hips and makes obvious sexual advances. The young woman is so self-conscious that she continues to grab her arms, and rub her legs to warm them, it is as though she wants to make her body disappear from before the man. The uncomfortable distance at which she stands from him, her inward turned feet, and everything else about her gestures and words, registers with the audience as “abuse” “disenfranchisement” and sexism in the office. The power of this piece comes in its passing on to us of the pain and agony she experiences in the office.  

Air Conditioner

For all the sparsity, there is an adornment to the three workers’ discussion about, for example, in Hot Pepper where to go for Erika’s farewell dinner, or in Air Conditioner the question of who keeps lowering the temperature of the air conditioner. Namely, the unpredictability of the lighting, the organicism of the characters’ movements and the lilting, almost singing, quality of their voices elevates the pieces to sophisticated representation. Although my only access to the language is the French surtitles, the dialogue in these pieces is apparently colloquial, fractured, code-like. Thus, the banality of the characters’ conversations is, on the one hand, the banality of most of our conversations on most days. And, on the other hand, their performance is highly aestheticized. The speech rhythms are determined by the music — looped pieces by John Cage, Stereolab, Tortoise und John Coltrane — the unconnected, seemingly random body movements by the interaction of the words, speech and music. And the multi-colored lighting effects appear customized to the individual performer.

The Farewell Speech

Thus, while the three pieces might appear to be laced with banality and inanity, their complex and sophisticated presentation far exceeds the said entrapment through repetition to create a searing critique of the sheer hell of the capitalist workplace. The fact that these young people are doomed to one of two social states — unemployment or discrimination in the workplace — is all the more impressive because of the way their inevitable disenfranchisement is performed.

Ryoji Ikeda, +/- [ the infinite between 0 and 1], Museum Of Contemporary Art Tokyo

Back from Tokyo nearly three weeks now, and with one foot on the plane to NY, there are elements of my trip to Tokyo still on my mind. The Ryoji Ikeda exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo being foremost among them.

Part of my attraction to Ikeda’s work is that I don’t really understand it. Something about his engagement with the infinite makes it impossible to grasp, let alone master in the way we like to with art. I have been reading Jeanette Winterson’s Art and Objects which has brought me back to why it is that I write, why I look at art, why I write about art, and how my relationship to art is at the core of who I am. I go to see myself in art, and it is my goal, always, to lay myself open to art as a gesture of my humility to the world. I look to it to move me, to challenge me, to change my view on the world, to tell me who I am, who I could be. Winterson is interested in the relationship between me and a painting, me and my writing, me and all art, a relationship that exists purely, at a level beneath consciousness, in a place “where the balance of an ordinary day is overturned.” Great art strives in the breakdown between language and our emotional state. I believe Winterson.


However, this is not what Ikeda is doing. Still it is great art. Because he visualizes something which cannot be visualized. He gives the experience of a reality outside of the time and space of my daily life, a reality that exists only in the intensity of the relationship between me and the work, the point at which vision, audition, tactility is no longer. It’s something like an experience of the sublime, but unlike the sublime, I do not turn away from Ikeda’s works in the same instant that I experience their “beauty.” Rather, I recoil slowly, reluctantly, as they imperceptibly and gradually disturb me.

Ikeda imagines another kind of not looking. It’s distinct from the relay of glances around Velasquez’ Las Meninas. Or the consumption of distraction that is captured so imaginatively in Thomas Struth’s photographs of the same paintings. And it’s different again from the kind of not looking that we confront in Paul Strand’s Blind in which only one of us owns up to looking, the photograph seeing us through blind eyes. In Ikeda, we find a kind of not looking that is somewhere between that of conceptual art — in which there is nothing to see — and the turning away from a very violent image because it is too painful to watch. This is a sensory experience that is constantly mitigated by the desire to master, and to know what it is we cannot see. Because we never really let go to the senses, always insisting on comprehending the incomprehensible. Likewise, this same desire to rationalize is relentlessly stymied by the nauseating discomfort that pushes away when the sounds start to become recognizeable as sine waves, and we are blinded by the strobe effect of the constant turning over of pixels and data.


Ironically, this ineffability that is realized through the tension between medium (sound and light) and our desire to rationalize is best illustrated in the most tactile of his works. Take, for example, the transcendental (e) [no. 2-a], 2009 in which an infinite series of numbers is etched into a stainless steel plinth, and Data Film [no.1-a], 2007, a light sensitive film strip bearing the same infinite series of numbers against a light box strip that runs the length of the room. In both works we are drawn up close, physically, studying them for logic, familiarity, for a single place from which to hear and see. Our inability to see, even though we are right up close, is just the point, both the form and the media are endless enigmas, transcending anything we could ever cognize. And still I tried. As I watched myself looking up close to the film strip – I saw the absurdity of it – what did I think I was seeing or, better still, looking at? Whatever it is, takes me way beyond my existing perceptual experiences, and thus, maybe Winterson is right after all. Maybe the real insights of Ikeda’s work come from not looking, hearing, or thinking. What we really need to “see” is that the subliminal experience of being in the presence of these compositions in sound and light take us to another realm. Because Ikeda’s sounds and images are located outside the limits of perception, cognition, they are other to our familiar perceptual and linguistic dominion. First they conjure and then they curtail our sovereign gaze, our pretentions to omniscient authority, only to ask us not to look, not to hear, not to speak, not to think, but simply to “be.” These works ask us to experience the limits as they are on display, and as a consequence, experience our own boldily and perceptual limits. This is an environment that requires a whole new experience of art, and in turn, a whole new experience of ourselves.
That’s what makes them masterpieces.

Shibuya: At the Center of the World

Many times I have seen the pedestrian crossing, and felt its energy in movies and music videos. But it's like the rest of this city - being in the middle of Hachiko is like nothing else I have ever experienced. The hoards of people are inconceiveable, the density of the people traffic so inspiring that it felt like I had been on a lifelong pilgrimage to be there, only I didn't know it till I got there. After one week, I think I am getting used to being in Tokyo, but still, the same things never cease to amaze me. And in Hachiko I am still astounded by the ease and comfort of being in the midst of these teaming crowds as they pour onto the pedestrian crossing in front of Shibuya train station. No one pushes, no one is in such a hurry that they need to be frustrated by my pace. I am slowed down by awe at the magnificence of the neon clad buildings, deafened by the noise of nightclubs, some kind of political speeches over loudspeakers, and wanting to absorb the thrill of being at what feels like the center of the world. And the Japanese remain as courteous and pleasant as ever, minding their own business, but when asked, ever ready to assist with my most inane enquiries. It is really the greatest privilege to be immersed in this civilized world - sorry G.W. you have no idea what that word means.

Today, for the first time I got lost, though it is a wonder it hasn't happened earlier. I went to visit a friend of a friend who lives in a building by the tracks of Shinjuku station. Always eager to be above ground, I made the fatal mistake of leaving the train station a few exists too early. Naoko had given me a map and very clear directions on how to find her building, but I learnt today that this system of locating an address is still liable to baffle me. Nevertheless, I was only five minutes late because I asked at a store and with the courtesy and respect I have now come
to expect, the lady telephoned Naoko, got the directions, and escorted me to the end of the street and pointed in the right direction - and we wonder why the Japanese think the French are rude!

Fumbling with the street map, negotiating exits from a train station, looking for a building that sits next to a big hotel, making sure to keep the train tracks on the right (even though it is not always above ground), I realized that, once again, this is a culture in which images make more sense than words. Space, movement through space, conceptions of space, direction, physical orientation and location are all conceived visually - just like the language. See My Day in Asakusa. The experience of looking for a building that has a number, but a number not displayed, on a street with no name, in a neighborhood divided into 15 sections means that I am always looking at and for where I am going. In anticipation of my arrival, I envisage or imagine myself in that space, I don't see it as the goal at the end of a journey. And when I get there, I see it and am in the space, rather than thinking or knowing I have arrived.

This said, if I am honest, I am way too Western to believe that I have adapted to the Japanese experience of space and their city. Later this afternoon, as I sat, immersed in the enthrall of being in the futuristic bubble of Shibuya's dazzling facades, I felt as though I was at the center of the world. I had arrived. I was at a place that is an end of a journey, a place from where every other pedestrian crossing must now forever pale in comparison.

"What's she saying?" A day in Asakusa

Today my mother and I visited the oldest temple in Tokyo, Senso-ji. The neighborhood is meant to be old-world Tokyo, but as is often the case, that speaks only for the street between the subway station and the major tourist attraction. The rest is very like a regular neighborhood: as my friend Keisuke described it "where real Japanese people live." The shrine was wonderful - mostly because there were lots of fun activities: lighting votive incense and candles, drawing fortune sticks (mine was "no. 91 good fortune" and mother refused to play for fear of what she might draw), cleansing the hands and mouth, throwing money to Buddha. What struck me throughout the day was the fascination of the Japanese language, mostly because, despite my protestations, mother behaved as though I was fluent, could read all signs and understand every conversation in Japanese.


Every sign we saw, and every voice we heard, she turned to me and asked "what did she say?" As though I had acquired fluency in Japanese by osmosis. As we left the restaurant where we had sushi lunch, she instructed me to take the name of the restaurant (left) so she could note it in her diary - as though she was asking me to pass the soy sauce. And when the water bus didn't arrive, she asked me what time the next one was due (below). On it went.



So I spent a lot of time looking at the langauge even though I don't read it. I can nevertheless appreciate its aesthetic. It is a beautiful language to look at, and delightful to listen to. It is indeed a visual language, not a semiotic language. It is conceptual and abstract, vertical in its presentation - though not always I realized when dutifully attending to my mother's needs this afternoon - and vertical in its logic, moving from one layer to the next, not along a horizontal axis. Like the series of images that it is, Japanese doesn't have a cause and effect narrative logic, it doesn't have a compositional telos, sentence structure or forward motion. More like an experimental film, it is a series of image grabs that, taken together, communicate concepts and ideas.


And all over the temple are written characters, symbolizing something important, ancient, divine. Perhaps the banners that decorate buildings and walls, the streets, the subway cars are also decoration? Where in the West we might fight images, in Japan, the language seems to function as both image and text. Given how language dictates our identities, our culture, our beliefs, our prejudices, even our desires, I wonder if the "real Japanese people" - as opposed to those masquerading in Shinjuku and Harajuku! - live their lives in imitation of their language? And what then does this life look like? A life in which the on going search for identity is given an image, not a narrative, in which notions of ambition, success, and the relations between people are not overtaken by accummulation (of wealth), a rise to the top of a corporate ladder, and the desperate need to be better than the neighbors?

All this would be to assume that, in spite of the characters, that is, the visualization of the Japanese langauge, there has been no impact of the West's overblown (super) ego on Japan. And judging by the number of men in the "women only" subway car (left) and the hoards of Japanese people with dyed hair and makeup (below), we have indeed managed to taint the images with our words.

What to believe: the spread of H1N1 .... or empty hysteria?

My friend Keisuke reassured me tonight that most Japanese people share my frustration at the inability to grasp Tokyo. The longer I stay here, the more daunting and mesmerizing it becomes as each day offers insights and information that I have no idea of how to process. It's the ultimate postmodernist conglomeration of surfaces reflecting off surfaces, no matter how contradictory, or incompatibile.

The daily irreconcilabilities are everywhere: take the baffling hysteria around Swine Flu. The conference I was scheduled to attend in Tokyo was cancelled due to Swine Flu. Daily, schools and universities are closing across the country. The government continues to issue warnings as the pandemic supposedly spreads. And yet, there is not a single sign of this panic in the streets. True, there are people with masks - but aren't there always? I watched one of the sushi chefs sneeze tonight, and though he did it away from the counter, he turned right back round and continued making maki. Someone coughed irregularly on the subway this morning and no one around him batted an eye. Clearly no one on that train was concerned about catching swine flu, and neither were the other diners in the restuarant. As a result, I remain suspicious of the government's assiduous effort to deter movement and tourissm. Perhaps it's the people on the street who I should treat with suspicion? The dilemna of who and what to believe.

Then again, maybe I need to take what I see and hear at face value instead of diving into suspicion. Tonight, my mother and I ended up in a restaurant on the basis of the design of the calligraphic sign out the front. I asked the woman at the door if she had a menu, to which her reply was a simple "we serve chicken." Of course, I immediately assumed that her English was poor and she didn't know any other words. Afterall, what restaurant serves just chicken? That would be absurd. So mother and I propped ourselves at the bar, were lavished with pickles and some kind of radish mash with a raw egg in the middle, water, tea, empty bowls and plates. The glass counter in front of us was filled with rows and rows of skewers each with different meats (or so we thought). Dutifully, feeling like locals, but definitely not looking like them, we pointed to the safest option - chicken. I got adventurous and pointed to another with what looked like meat balls - it was chicken. When the man next to me had what I thought was shrimp, I asked for one of those - it was chicken. Mother joined in the adventure and pointed to what looked like lamb - it was chicken. We ordered soup - chicken, and by the time I glanced down to the other end of the counter to see eggs, I knew who had produced them. Why did I not believe the woman in the first place? Because like the swine flu, something about it didn't gel with my cultural conditioning.

However, given my mother's reaction when I suggested we ask the couple next to us if they could tell us what they were eating, as they were obviously not Japanese, I can't even be certain it's cultural conditioning - I certainly don't get my healthy dose of suspicion from her. She looked at me in horror - as though I had suggested she walk to the top of Mt Fuji: "hell no, they might be Mexican!"

Harajuku Art Walk

Today, my Australian friend joined me on a walk through Harajuku's streets in search of the contemporary Japanese art on exhibition in small, supposedly experimental galleries. It was clear from the minute we stepped outside Harajuku station that the art was not going to be on the walls, but on the streets. While we dutifully followed the path to what are supposed to be Japan's up and coming artists,
we just kept coming back to the
freaks on Takeshita-dori. This is dolly girl, cutesy heaven. It was infectious enough to have me madly searching for my size socks and shoes so I could go part way to imitating their crazy teen girl style.









However, what I found more striking was that Tokyo has a place for the costume drama of identities in motion where so many major European cities do not. It's true that teen style is at its most flamboyant on Takeshita-dori, spilling over onto neighboring streets, but it also infuses much of the city with cool abandon. This may be a world in which public behavior is rigidly and complexly coded, but it is also a city where certain codes are flexible and fluid. Gender and sexuality being the most visible on the streets. The teen-girls in their fancy dress costumes, the young guys with outrageous hairstyles, some wearing women's clothing, others in tight tight jeans and t-shirts, make up and piercings are not given second glances on Tokyo's streets.


That said, even in their chintzy girl costume, women always remain excessively feminine, while it is men who seem to cross the gender and sexuality lines with ease. It's a city that is so audacious in its visual aesthetic, that the lurid performance of gender and sexual identity among the young - and often the older - is easily absorbed by the bright lights.



If then, the surface is so carefully chosen and so well-polished to reflect uncertainty and confusion for me, the Western viewer of Tokyo, the question I came away with from my day in Harajuku, is: what exactly lies beneath the facade? I have no idea, and given my lack of access to the language, I don't imagine I will be finding out over the next week. My only task is to sit back and receive the visual stimulation, be inspired by the aesthetic .... and find those shoes!

The Ease of Tokyo Tourism

Hearing of my impending trip to Tokyo, people who had been before me set about describing the city, and invariably ended up emphasizing its overwhelm, intensity, its difference from anything we know. And these descriptions came with a look of trepidation, and the vibrations of uncertainty in their voices. Despite having travelled untrodden ground such as Cold War Soviet Union, I was prepared for cultural alienation, geographical/spatial disorientation, energy draining days and nights sequestered in the hotel. After only two days, my experience couldn't be more different.



It's true, there is a language barrier, the Japanese speak little to barely to no English. And yet, it's easier to communicate with them than it is with the French whose language I speak. There is a lot to be said for the communicative powers of respect, good manners and politeness. There may be no such thing as an address of a building or location in Tokyo, but finding where I am going has not been a problem thanks to the Japanese efficiency: where we give metro stops and door codes, the Japanese give metro stops, name of the line, no. of the exit from the station, exact distance in meters from that exit, and a street map. And if all else fails, the man in the police box will get out of his box and personally escort you to your destination.

This, contrary to the warning of a man I sat next to on the plane who told me I couldn't possibly step foot outside my door in Tokyo without buying a map. Given the meticulous instructions on how to get anywhere, it's unclear to me why I would need to buy a map. And I could go on - there's absolutely nothing draining about this city. It may be overflowing with people, have an energy like no other, its scale mesmerizing, its facades dazzling and its beat insanely fast, but being in amongst it all is a very pleasant experience. In two days, I have heard one siren, not one person has elbowed me, pushed in front of me, snarled at me, stared at me or given me the proverbial "absolument pas." Neither have I had to hold onto my bag for fear of having it stolen, or apologize to car drivers for crossing the street on the pedestrian green light. Given the safety of the streets, and the good nature of the people here, the respect for personal space, and the ease with which people move through this dense urban conglomeration, I have never felt more relaxed in a big city than I do here in Tokyo.