Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Venice Biennale 2001

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

Venice Biennale 2001

by John McGee

Naoya Hatakeyama, Untitled (Osaka Stadium, 1998), 2001, color photograph
(Image courtesy the artist)

As if its canals, architecture and romance weren't enticing enough, Venice, Italy hosts its biennial international art exhibition this year. Lyon, Kwang-ju, Melbourne—art biennales are a dime a dozen these days. La Biennale di Venezia, however, is the undisputed grand dame of them all. First held in 1895, the Venice Biennale celebrates the 49th installment in its ongoing exploration of the most important innovators and trends of the moment. This Olympics of the arts, covering architecture, music, dance, cinema and theater in addition to visual art virtually canonizes older artists and all but guarantees success for younger artists chosen to participate. 

Within the Biennale there are two main exhibitions—a thematic show and the individual shows within the 29 national pavilions. This year's theme show, "Plateau of Humankind," was conceived by curator Harald Szeemann to consider "what is eternal within humankind" and to look into artists' current optimism in spite of ongoing social fragmentation and conflict. (Szeemann was the director of Documenta 5 in 1972 and invented the now defunct Aperto, a special Biennale show for younger artists). Artists include Joseph Beuys, Vanessa Beecroft, Ilya Kabakov, Gerhard Richter, Georgina Starr, Cy Twombly, Bill Viola and "Bread Mama" Orimoto among many others.

The second type of show takes place in the national pavilions. From Argentina to Venezuela, the pavilions are basically free-standing, private galleries clustered like luxury vacation cabins among the trees and marine-scented breeze of the Castello Gardens. With designs by Alvar Aalto, Gerrit Rietveld and Carlo Scarpa, the pavilions themselves are often noteworthy showcases of 20th-century architecture. This year, the British pavilion will show Mark Wallinger and the US, Robert Gober. 

Each country has a slightly different way of deciding which artist or artists to exhibit in their pavilion. The Japan Foundation—the national cultural body—chooses the Japanese pavilion's art commissioner. For 2001, it's Eriko Osaka, chief curator at Art Tower Mito. 

Yukio Fujimoto, Sugar 1, 1995, mixed media (Image courtesy the artist)

Under the theme "Fast & Slow"—an evocation of the shifting speeds of urban life—Osaka selected three artists: Masato Nakamura (sculpture), Naoya Hatakeyama (photography), and Yukio Fujimoto (sound). By dividing the pavilion into "fast" and "slow" galleries, Osaka hopes to address the simultaneous acceleration and deceleration of information, communication and other exchanges inherent in contemporary urban society. 

Nakamura, a main coordinator of Akihabara's Command N Gallery, is known for appropriating the iconic McDonald's golden arches—the "M"—as a ready-made sculpture, a sign of global standardization and cross-cultural communication. For the Biennale, he'll arrange five large, 4.4m fiberglass and 400 small, 12cm crystal versions of the glowing yellow symbols.

Hatakeyama's two pieces, a diptych of the dismantling of Osaka Stadium and a grid of 70 different horizonless overviews of Tokyo, capture a unique Japanese urban sensibility—absurdly pragmatic yet unabashedly cluttered—that differentiates Japanese cities from their North American and European counterparts. 

Fujimoto's sound installations tie the spaces together. One piece uses sounds and harmonics fluctuating between four keyboards placed throughout the room to embody the "speed, energy, uniformity and electronic sounds of a city." The other, a slowly rolling glass cylinder filled with sugar cubes, emits a soft, delicate sound that requires close listening.

This exhibition was held in Jun-Nov 2001 in the Japanese Pavilion in Venice, Italy.

©2006 John McGee

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