Roppongi Crossing 2010
Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
During the height of Beatlemania in the USSR, despite having been denounced as capitalist pollution and officially banned, the Fab Four’s songs found an unlikely way through the Iron Curtain. With guitars made from bits of old furniture and receivers stolen from public telephones, The Beatles’ tracks were re-recorded onto used X-ray plates, allowing desperate fans to listen to ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ on someone’s lungs or ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ pressed on a skull. Of course, the songs didn’t have such a hard time penetrating Japan, which is cited as having released the greatest number of (legitimate) Beatles album pressings of any country, ever, while boasting its own elaborate history of Beatles imitation.
Teruya Yuken, Notice-Forest (2005)
According to artist Aikawa Masaru, ‘I am a Japanese and therefore I am good at mimicry.’ His mimicry of The Beatles’ Abbey Road (1969) features the album artwork and liner notes meticulously hand-painted and drawn, and a burnt CD with the entire track list reproduced by the artist’s vocals alone. It represents an act of obsessively laborious affection, where the idea of karaoke as the ‘empty orchestra’ (from the Japanese karappo for ‘empty’ and okesutura) finds unique resonance. The work is on show in the top floor of a Tokyo skyscraper for the Mori Art Museum’s third edition of their triennial exhibition of new Japanese art, ‘Roppongi Crossing’, along with dozens of other original fakes by Masaru. Set up to resemble a CD shop, his listening booth comprises duplications of albums by the likes of Kraftwerk, The Ramones, Primal Scream and Patti Smith; and even a hilarious a cappella rendering of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Aikawa Masaru, CDs (2007)
Under the co-curatorship of Kinoshita Chieko, Kubota Kenji and Kondo Kenichi, the subtitle of the show, ‘Can There Be Art?’, was selected as a reference to the late Furuhashi Teiji of the Kyoto-based collective Dumb Type. The show culminates with Teiji’s S/N (1995), an 85-minute documentary of a stage performance made in the wake of the artist’s diagnosis with HIV, in which he asked if it was ever possible for artists to be socially engaged, or whether they could only exist as narcissistic commentators.
His question was posed amongst the ruins of Japan’s burst bubble, and it is supposed to have found new relevance today as we consider the role of art in times of social/economic upheaval. As such, the curators had a pre-determined preference for works that express some level of physical or ideological engagement with the world, rather than existing in an art-vacuum. This opens up a broad spectrum of possibilities, but their stated sub-themes of ‘reference to society’, ‘creativity of genre-crossing’, ‘significance of collaboration’, ‘expressions of the street’, and ‘aesthetics of the new generation’ are as vague and superfluous as they sound.
UJINO, The Ballad of Backyard (2008)
From 57 artists and groups in the first ‘Roppongi Crossing’ to 36 in 2007, the third presents only 20, which means many artists have the privilege of a whole room, and several are able to showcase numerous works. Still, the spatial configuration is at times confusing and with so many artists using sound there are some serious issues with overlap. In particular, UJINO’s enormous, blaring noise sculpture, The Ballad of Backyard (2008), comprising electric tools, household appliances, an old station wagon and other rescued junk, can be heard throughout the entire museum. Referred to by the artist as part of his ongoing ‘modern material research’, their anarchic appearance is offset by how beautifully choreographed their automated movements and sounds are. But while their sonic invasiveness is presumably the point, it is to the detriment of several other works in the show.
contact Gonzo, We’re Gonna Go Dancing!’ Vol. 9 (2008), performance view
UNIJO’s assemblages are situated in a cluster of artworks brought together around the idea of ‘the street’, including a skate ramp from the graffiti duo HITOTZUKI and works from a prolific, anonymous graffiti artist identified by a stencilled candle symbol. While the uptake of (and the art world’s subsequent recognition for) graffiti was several decades delayed in Japan, it’s still not a particularly current issue. What’s more interesting here are the various records of ephemeral public interventions, like Kato Tsubasa’s simple ‘pulling down’ works, part of an ongoing project to create shared sensational experiences within local communities, or contact Gonzo’s impromptu public performances that exist somewhere between fist fights and choreographed dance, drawing from what they term their ‘philosophy of pain’. Transported to white cubes, the irony lies as much in how distanced these works are from their urban origins culturally as physically, at precisely 53 stories above street level.
Amelia Groom
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