Chagall

Marc Chagall, Mounting the Ebony Horse

What can you say about him that hasn't already been said thousands of times before...? Yet it's never enough to repeat it, because it doesn't cease to amaze: how the work of someone whose life spanned the whole of the twentieth century and witnessed its unspeakable atrocities, preserved throughout such a childlike outlook on life, on memory, on the world. Such a sense of wonder, despite all the tragedies and losses.

An unmissable opportunity to revisit it at the University Art Museum, Tokyo University of the Arts, in Ueno. Till October 11th.
 

Marc Chagall et l'avant-garde russe dans les collections du Centre Pompidou

the beauty of temporariness

Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Umbrellas (Japan)

While I'll always prefer the small-scale, solitary, pastoral, whimsical approach of British earth artists - Andy Goldsworthy, Chris Drury, David Nash, Richard Long, and Hamish Fulton are my faves - to the megalomaniac American Earthworks, I very much enjoyed visiting the Christo & Jeanne-Claude retrospective LIFE=WORKS=PROJECTS in Tokyo this weekend. A most felicitous title indeed, for this identification runs through everything they lived & did together. No matter how much you dislike their self-importance and extravaganzas, you have to admit that they did manage to merge what most of us, mere mortals, are forced to keep separate: life and work, work and pleasure, love and work, life and love... And is there a nobler aspiration for an artist?

But besides this, their crazy, obsessive large-scale projects have an undeniable beauty of their own, which the artists perceptively attributed to their 'nomadic' temporariness (they always insisted that their projects be temporary and exist for a very limited number of days) - an ephemerality that has an awesome power to change forever your way of perceiving a certain landscape. Here are a couple of moving lines I copied - by hand! - from one of the captions at the exhibition:

'In the thousands of years of art history,' [Christo & J-C] explained, 'artists have introduced various elements of beauty into their works. There have been religious themes and abstract designs, colours and shapes, marble and wood used as materials. But there is one element of beauty that no one has used until now. That is temporariness. That is what we have in our works.'

[On the 'nomadic':] 'The nomads of Tibet and the Sahara desert pitch their tents in the desert,' [Christo] said, 'and instantly create a village. But the next day there is no trace of the village. We want to incorporate the quality of nomadic life into our projects.'


They did. And I, for one, shall never forget the image of Christo dashing between Ibaraki and California, shouting at everybody, throwing tantrums, between despair and exhilaration, childishly enjoying his 3,000 thousand blue and yellow umbrellas...

the uselessness of labels, or: the mind's eye

Yesterday I went to see a fine exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Mind’s Eye: Photographs by Koichi Inakoshi, who passed away last February.

There is always something ghostly about photography, but this exhibition had the particularity of having been prepared when the photographer was still alive, which reinforced the eerie feeling as you moved through the chronologically ordered series and came to realize the contrast between his early inhabited cityscapes and the final natural landscapes, blurred and devoid of all human presence.

What struck me, however, as I was walking along the neat walls was that, apart from the sparse titles of the various series - from the first maybe, maybe (1971) to the the final never-seen-before China (2008) and basho-kei - the photographs had no captions (you had to refer to the catalogue to identify the various locations). I was reminded of a recent conversation with an artist friend, who confessed that one of the things that most upsets her is when visitors to her exhibitions focus their attention mainly on the captions, having only a cursory look at the works of art, or virtually disregarding them.

Likewise, Debussy didn't want his listeners to focus on the titles of some of his pieces, and deliberately placed them at the end of the programme, in the smallest type and in parenthesis, so that the work could be taken as music - not as something else...

And I thought this might be precisely why there were no captions under the exhibits yesterday. To encourage each viewer to judge for her/himself, by walking along, being responsive to the images and their worlds, imagi(ni)ng, establishing lines, continuities, differences. Following the "mind's eye", not some pre-arranged script. Refusing ready-made labels. Preferring the soft tentativeness and ambiguity of a "maybe, maybe" to the harshness of biased judgements and snap decisions.

I was thereby also reminded of the hallmark of the best, most powerful works of art: their ability to draw us to a unique world, to extend to us a subtle invitation that is much more than visual, requiring a total response. And, most important to me personally, a timely reminder that in life & love, as in art, labels and rigid scripts do more harm than good, and that there is nothing like an unencumbered intuition allowing information to freely, gradually flow to the "mind's eye" from all the senses, to paraphrase a dear poet.


Maybe, maybe...

twelve travels

Andy Goldsworthy, Maple Leaves

Ouchiyama-mura, 19 November 1991*

Amidst all the hustle and bustle of this most hectic of months, it is just so good to find an archipelago of peace and quiet, especially in the company of a friend. An imaginary archipelago that bears, of course, little resemblance to the geographical Britain from where these twelve artists come or through which they have passed. They take us not just on twelve, but on innumerable travels in space and time, from the picturesque and pastoral landscapes of Constable and Turner, through Mona Hatoum's exilic territories, to Andy Goldworthy's and David Nash's ephemeral encounters with the natural elements: stone, snow, frost, water, leaves, wood...

An afternoon is too little time to take it all in, and I do hope to return - at least to be astounded again by Goldsworthy and Nash. Words fail me when I try to describe the moving, inspirational beauty of their art. I shall return there - and here, as soon as time allows.

The exhibition Twelve Travels: British Art in Sensibility and Experience is currently at the Setagaya Art Museum in Tokyo, and will be running till March 1.

*Image taken from the website of the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts.

experiencing time

Extracts from "SWIMMING IN QUALIA - ASCENT"
Visuals by Shoko Ise / Audio by Steve Jansen

Speaking of all-time favourites, and of Sylvian, Jansen et alia, I have suddenly recalled this most unforgettable exhibition that was being hosted by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography exactly one year ago, STILL / ALIVE. All the works on display - by artists Shoko Ise, Jin Ohashi, Koki Tanaka and Toshihiro Yashiro - were remarkable in their own way and linked by the common theme "images of time" - stillness and movement. I was, however, absolutely mesmerised by Shoko Ise's video installation "Swimming in Qualia", with the original soundtrack by Steve Jansen. I must have spent a couple of hours there, transfixed, looking, listening, sensing. Here is an excerpt from an illuminating text by Tetsuro Ishida, the Museum curator, included in the exhibiton catalogue:

Swimming in Qualia is the name of the new work created by Ise for this exhibition. A host of shivering silhouettes beside a blue window, railroad tracks seen through the window of a speeding car, trees in a dim forest, waves on the shore, a random mass of lotuses in bloom, a withered landscape, all presented in a monotone video. These are not things that people go out of their way to look at, things normally only seen in momentary glances. "Qualia", however, is a scientific term in brain and cognitive science, where, in contrast to things in themselves it refers to the qualities perceived in things. Qualia include not only visual qualities but also physical experiences created when all five senses are involved, so that even when the same things are in question, perceptions of them can vary without limit. As subjects for scientific investigation, qualia are not yet well understood. This work swims instead in the sea of ambiguity created by what we sense. Two videos use the same video footage in scenes in which sequence, duration and tempo differ. One is 20 minutes long, the sequencing is relaxed, the music lacks rhythm. The other is short, the sequencing is up-tempo, the rhythm is minimal, 72 beats per minute. Musician Steve Jansen was in charge of the soundtrack. The videos are projected on the two walls of a corner on screens five meters wide, allowing visitors to experience in parallel the two different temporal feelings created using the same footage. It is impossible for the audience to focus on both screens at once or to grasp the whole in a single gaze. The structural elements of both are controlled digitally, by numbers, and, while the images are in digital high definition format, there is also an ambiguous physical quality, like cheeks being stroked by a breeze. Emphatically speaking, there is a multifaceted unease to this experience of time. (p. 99)


I am so glad to have found a downloadable extract of this work on You Tube. A similar piece can be found on the samadhisound website.

STILL / ALIVE

'Swimming in Qualia' (video work)

Visuals by Shoko Ise / Audio by Steve Jansen

STILL/ALIVE is the sixth in the annual series of exhibitions of work by contemporary photographers in Japan held by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. In this year's exhibition, the focus is on contemporary lives and times and their expression in a group exhibition presenting the work of four artists, all in their thirties, who work in photography and video.

People living today must keep up with an ever-accelerating pace of life, yet recognize that speed is not all. Our values are shifting towards recognizing the merits of the “slow life,” towards appreciating a more leisurely approach. We also now have more options for how to live and ways to spend our time than ever before. The option of the innocent faith in progress that once prevailed is, however, denied to us. As individuals, children and adults both experience an inchoate despair, a pall devoid of hope hanging over the future.

In the world of photography and imaging, the rapid development of digital media and communication tools has made it possible to edit our experiences freely and to take it for granted that we can replay them over and over as well as share them with others. At the same time, however, those changes undermine our sense of living in the here and now. Time itself is invisible and conceptual, but as human beings we do, or expect to, experience the times we live acutely and as very real. Is that possible in our digital, fast-moving world? In our ever-more-complex, multi-layered reality, how is time being transformed? What does that mean?

The exhibition title, STILL/ALIVE, implies immobility and motion, and, in terms of time, synchronic and diachronic: still and video photography. Artists give form to their images of time, stimulated by their constant interaction with the everyday world of reality. Those images are sculpted by memories of times past, intimations of the future, and time now. The title is also a metaphor for the place an exhibition is held and the real world going about its business outside its walls. The exhibition’s goal is that the many senses of time and expressions of it incorporated in the works on display and the time that visitors to the exhibition and the many people involved in it spend conjoin in a shared sense of living in the here and now.

(Text taken from the website of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography)