Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Peter Bellars: Par for the Course

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

Peter Bellars: Par for the Course

by John McGee

Peter Bellars, "Par for the Course" logo golf ball teed up for the first hole, kindergarten
(Images courtesy the artist)

Talk about a challenging school district. Most people need at least three tries to pass junior high. High school is worse and you can forget college—almost nobody gets in through the front door. Not even the visiting Asian mini-golf champ. 

Peter Bellars' model of the Japanese education system is an eight-hole miniature golf course. It's not so different from what you'd find in suburban America, at the seaside in Bellars' native England (where they call it "crazy golf") or on top of nearby World Porters mall in Yokohama (the headquarters of the Japanese professional sport bahn-golf). Bellars kept the slippery slopes and octagonal greens. But rather than windmills and dragons, he constructed simple, beige models of boxy school buildings on his blue, artificial "fairways." 

Pray hard at the jinja (in front) so that
you'll make it into daigaku (rear) 

Even kids won't have trouble on the first hole, youchien (kindergarten). The surface is flat and straight, and the only obstacle—a broad, open shed-like building—has a doorway wide enough to drive a Tonka through. But, like school, the game gets progressively harder. To pass through chugakko (junior high), you first have to negotiate a narrow, undulating ramp. Kotogakko (high school) has a steep ziggurat slope that requires a very straight putt. Getting into the front door of the last hole, the Todai-inspired daigaku (college), is pure luck. 

Two special rules encourage players. Everyone gets automatically "promoted" to the next hole if they can't get in after six shots. And good performances on the juku and yobiko (cram schools) holes can lower your score. 

Unlike students, players can relax on park benches between the holes and watch videos. One is a five-minute documentary of the only golf temple in the world, Zenshoji in Gunma. Duffers stop by to make golf ball offerings to a stone relief of the "golf Kannon," a Buddhist god with a full set of clubs spread like rays of light behind him. 

Cynical, sarcastic, ironic or just British, Bellars uses his work to playfully satirize Japanese culture. "I play with what I see but twist it slightly," says the artist. Bellars, 42, has lived in Japan for 16 years, giving him an outsider's inside view of Japan. 

Golf Kannon at Zenshoji temple in Gunma 

And as an English teacher at various local universities, Bellars knows how the system handicaps prospective students. The crazy golf he remembers as a kid, he says in his artist statement, "required no real understanding of golf, no particular talent, just masses of luck or skill gained from endless practice of the particular obstacles on the course." 

According to Bellars, Japanese school entrance exams operate the same way. Students improve their admission chances by practicing for one specific test, acquiring the necessary information to pass by studying special guidebooks. This, says Bellars, reflects the goal-oriented nature of the system. "Parents are not interested in what kids learn but in passing the test," he says. In Japan, as the artist points out, playing the game is par for the course. 

Bellars' insights about the Japanese education system may not be novel, but his irreverent repackaging of it is well-designed and keenly detailed (the logo is a modified Japanese school zone sign—a boy and a girl in profile carry golf clubs in addition to their schoolbags). It's also fun, frustrating and free. Bring the kids and the ole Billy Barrew.

The Peter Bellars: Par for the Course exhibition was held Sept-Oct 2002 at the Yokohama Museum of Art, Art Gallery in Yokohama, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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