Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Encounter

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

Encounter

by John McGee

Anne Daems, Untitled, 1999, color photograph
(Image courtesy the artist and Galerie Micheline Szwajcer)

An encounter may be adversarial ("encountering resistance") or unexpected ("strange encounter"), but usually is an aberration, a tear in the fabric of the ordinary. In the 1960s, many performance art events (Fluxus shows, Happenings, etc.) embraced chance as a means to seek the unknown within the unpredictable. Some events asked the public to follow nonsensical instructions. In others, the artists forced themselves to find novelty by hybridizing traditional art media or undergoing extreme conditions.

"Encounter," a group show at Tokyo Opera City Gallery, uses this history as a jumping-off point. Each artist, or pair of artists, in this show investigates different aspects of chance, unwitting collaborations, and the limits of autonomy and control.

Belgian artist Anne Daems documents happenstance and circumstantial remnants. In her "supermarket series" (1999), she photographed misplaced items at the grocery store--a looped kielbasa among pies with criss-crossed crusts, fluffy pale-blue slippers atop stacked reams of paper. The obvious wrongness of these misplacements illustrates a weak transgression (a haphazard and illicit mixing), simple entropy (nature's charge toward chaos), and Daems' own scrupulous monitoring of the ordinary.

Eiji Watanabe's sculpture clashes expectations against unforeseen realities. In Nudist (2000), beach balls have been rent at the seams (a failed attempt at reverse-engineering?) and reduced to flat, splayed limbs--Matisse's cutouts in bright-colored plastic. Yet they retain the encoding of their original forms: the machine-cut curves are like DNA--elemental but flexible. In Garden of Appellation, hundreds of tiny plant illustrations (cut from books) are propped vertically on the floor, facing visitors like placards at an ant rally.

Eiji Watanabe, Nudist, 2000, rubber ball,
dimensions variable (Image courtesy the artist)

If corporate sponsorship of art is often simple underwriting of exhibitions, Vienna-based artists Plamen Dejenov and Svetlana Heger's ongoing collaboration with BMW is more like overwriting. The car company's logos, product numbers and glossy marketing stills are everywhere. In their shows, the couple produces a colored platform which they rent out to a company, displaying corporate gifts and items that the artists have bought through this money-raising scheme. Here, it's a BMW mountain bike, a hanging lamp with BMW model numbers, and clear casts of BMW wheels and golf club heads.

Jun Yang (also from Vienna) confronts cross-cultural issues, most notably in his altered airline safety placards  [1998-2001]), which graphically outline the proper way to greet people in different cultures--how to shake hands and how to bow without knocking heads. Shimabuku and Makoto Nomura are an artist/musician team who engage and form temporary creative bonds with strangers, usually through an exploration of the everyday. For this show, they established  from..., Takototanuki (2000), an art foundation to find potential collaborators or others with ideas they find interesting.

In Jan Fabre and Ilya Kabakov's video, the two mid-career artists wear homemade bug suits (their alter egos, a beetle and a fly), face each other with big bug goggles made from screen, and talk in their respective native tongues, Flemish and Russian. It couldn't be called conversation, but it is communication, however abstract and unwieldy.

This exhibition was held Feb-Mar 2001 at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in Hatsudai, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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