Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Tom Friedman

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

Tom Friedman

by John McGee

Tom Friedman, Untitled, 2001, paper, clay, wire, plastic and paint 
(Images courtesy the artist and Tomio Koyama Gallery)

Tom Friedman's art makes you snicker...and then run home to tell your friends about it. If you took a big, black trash bag and stuffed it with a bunch of the same bags, how many would fit? If you sharpen a brand-new pencil with a small, single-blade sharpener, continuing carefully all the way down to nothing, what does the resulting spiral shaving look like? These are just a couple of the ways Friedman twists the mundane into the unexpected, curious and funny. With roots in minimalism, Process Art, and mad science, Friedman reinvents ordinary objects from the ground up. 

According to a recent interview with his New York gallery, Feature, Inc., Friedman starts by making a "closer and closer investigation inside of something, like looking into its molecular makeup." He says, "I like the thought of breaking something down... to its ingredients... [its] building blocks. Finding that place is like an intersection of possibilities." 

But Friedman's essential elements aren't on any periodic table. A good example is the photograph in this show. Multiple copies of the same self-portrait are sliced into overlapping grids, separated and reassembled into one extra large image. The result is a Fresnel lens magnification with too much reverb and delay—the image ripples in all directions, but with a rectilinear, fragmented, proto-digital surface. "When I describe things, my vantage point tends to keep shifting on me," the artist explains. 

Friedman lives and works in Northampton, Massachusetts. A lot of his work is self-portrait. "I play both the scientist and the experimental subject," he says. The result might be an aspirin carved into a tiny cameo or sugar cubes stacked into a life-sized statue. 

Tom Friedman, Untitled, 2001,
16 color photographs of the artist

Or for this show, a reprise of one of his more famous sculptures—a splattered accident victim fashioned mostly from colored construction paper. Here, the man has started to decompose, blood and guts further melding with paper. Also, some of the paper parts—a shoe, his watch—have miraculously transformed into the genuine article.

Friedman's shows always satisfy, probably because he doesn't ask for a lot of patience, PhD-level art knowledge or cynicism from viewers. Only good humor, an open mind and perhaps a sense of wonder. And if you've never seen any of Friedman's work, don't fret. For this show, he has reproduced his entire oeuvre. In clay miniature. It's just about the right size for a mid-career retrospective at a model train-sized museum. Alternatively, you could pick up the monograph recently published by Phaidon (available at fine art bookstores like Nadiff in Omotesando and On Sundays in Jingumae).

Oh yeah, about 3,000 plastic bags can be shoved into one of their own.

This exhibition was held May-Jun 2001 at Tomio Koyama Gallery in Saga-cho, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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