Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Happy Trail

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Happy Trail

by John McGee

"Happy Trail" installation view: skis, press for forming wood, 
and wooden ski shapes (Photos: John McGee)

Most people get their skis at a shop with a snowman painted on the window. These three Southern California-based artists, however, found theirs at a lumberyard: Using plywood, epoxy, and trial and error, they made their own. 

Yutaka Sone (b. 1965), one of two artists featured in the Japan Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale, started the snowball rolling. A few years ago, Sone taught a beginners' sculpture class at UCLA (he moved to the Los Angeles area in 2000) in which students built their own skis, snowboards and surfboards. When finished, they fulfilled an LA guidebook cliché: skiing and surfing in the same day. 

For this project, Sone chose collaborators more seasoned than his college students. Eric Allaway (b. 1960) is an artist and grade school teacher. Damon McCarthy (b. 1973) is a filmmaker known for videotaping the performances of his father, artist Paul McCarthy. 

Installation view: videos

Together, they adapted a mantra of American self-reliance: why pay someone to do it if I can do it myself? Just give me a truck and a Home Depot (the DIY megastore). 

But there's little tool-belt swagger in this show. Instead, it bonds the optimism of a bold idea and simple tools with the samui (cold) humor of the pun, "ski ga suki" ("I like to ski" and, in this case, "I like skis"). Three pairs of handmade, slope-tested skis—pink (Sone), black (McCarthy) and white (Allaway)—lie on the floor next to a boxy press that was used to mold them. A wall-mounted rack of nine flat, ski-shaped plywood cutouts look like the tall slats rattling in Buddhist cemeteries. A recreation of a ski shop fills the smaller of Shiseido's two galleries—plywood covers the walls and ceiling, prototype skis lean in racks, production photos, and a painting of a chairlift hang here and there. The smell of P-Tex and wax coming from skis on worktables completes the simulation. 

Though disjointed and with little dialogue, two videos tell an easy-to-follow story. Sone snaps early models while flexing them with his hand. Allaway routers the bases as they get closer to a finished project. The artists confer over a map of ski runs. They watch as the skis load onto their plane. At last they ride chairlifts up the rocky volcanic slopes of Mammoth Mountain, a California resort, for some early-summer skiing on the narrow bands of remaining slush.

Installation view: ski shop

It's not Warren Miller, but it is a kind of extreme sport. All are excellent skiers (Sone used to race) who trust their own handiwork. And the skis seem to perform well. Only McCarthy managed to crack one in a long, rolling wipeout. 

The crack in the exhibition is its inability to fully convey the team's energy and enthusiasm. The assembled objects are like remnants of what was essentially a very long performance, one we get only glimpses of in the videos. 

What does come through is a triumph of the personal—a somewhat goofy, unnaturally Old World dream turned real. Though their skis look like knock-off K2s or Dynastars, they glide a trail less traveled, schussing past the corporate—and factory-made—and into the satisfaction of hobby craft as art.

This exhibition was held Aug-Sep 2003 at Shiseido Gallery in Ginza, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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