Art

Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde, MoMA

As usual, my trip to New York included an afternoon at MoMA. I don’t always research the exhibitions in advance, I just show up and sometimes can be happily surprised. And upstairs from much publicized display of Eduard Munch’s The Scream, I found one such surprise. Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde catalogs the art movements that initially rose out of the ruins of post-war Japan, mixed and blended with international avant-garde trends of the 1960s, and ultimately moved more into alignment with Japanese culture at large.


[Nakamura Hiroshi. Upheaval (Nairanki). 1958. Oil and pencil on plywood. 36 1/4 x 72 7/16″ (92 x 184 cm). Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya. © Nakamura Hiroshi, courtesy Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya]

As one might expect, many of the 1950s pieces, only a decade after the end of World War II, are a bit bleak, and in some cases quite absurdist. This is consistent with the rise of butoh in the performing arts during the same period. But we also see examples that share characteristics with abstract expressionism that was happening in the United States at the same time.


[Yamaguchi Katsuhiro. Vitrine: Deep into the Night (Vitorīnu: Yoru no shinkō). 1954. Watercolor on paper, oil on wood, corrugated glass. 25 3/4 x 22 1/4 x 3 9/16″ (65.5 x 56.5 x 9 cm). Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. © Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo.]

At the same time, the architectural pieces associated with the Metabolism movement were quite optimistic. Although some were fantastical in their designs such as Tange Kenzo’s A Plan for Tokyo, 1960 , there were a few that were actually built, such as Kurokawa Kisho’s Nakagin Capsule Tower Building.

The span of the exhibition intersects with Fluxus, and a few of the artists featured in last year’s Fluxus 50th anniversary exhibition made appearances here as well. Many of the Japanese artists that would become associated directly or indirectly with movement crossed paths at the Sogetsu Art Center, including Yoko Ono and Ichiyanagi Toshi. Among the pieces documenting this fertile ground were Ono’s Cough Piece and the graphical score Toshi’s IBM for Merce Cunningham. I still find inspiration in pieces like Toshi’s score four decades later.


[Ichiyanagi Toshi. IBM for Merce Cunningham. 1960 (Fluxus Edition announced 1963). Score. Master for the Fluxus Edition, typed and drawn by George Maciunas, New York. Ink, typewriting, and graphite on transparentized paper. 8 1/4 x 11 9/16″ (21 x 29.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift. © 2012 Ichiyanagi Toshi. Photograph by Peter Butler]

I was not at all surprised to see Yoko Ono represented once again in this exhibition. But I was happy to discover Akasegawa Genpei in the exhibition, though his membership in the Hi Red Center.


[Hi Red Center. Hi Red Center poster (recto). Fluxus Edition, edited by Shigeko Kubota, designed and produced by George Maciunas, New York. Edition announced 1965. Offset printing on paper, double-sided. 22 1/16 x 17″ (56 x 43.2 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift. © The Estate of Takamatsu Jirō, courtesy Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo.]

The Hi Red Center again intersected with the world of Fluxus, even appearing in a Fluxus edition and hosting many associated artists as guests. But beyond that, Akasegawa Genpei was involved in original and sometimes controversial conceptual pieces. In his “Anti Art” objects, I could see that start for his work in the 1980s on “hyperart” or “Thomassons”. (Thomassons have been discussed on this site in earlier articles and will undoubtedly come up again.)

The later section of the exhibition chronicled the transition from the gritty and often monochromatic style of early conceptual art to a brightly colored cartoonish style associated with Japanese Pop Art. It is easy to see the rise of manga and anime in Japanese popular culture in this trend, though the content in these pieces is often more serious and subtle.


[Tateishi Kōichi (Tiger Tateishi). Samurai, the Watcher (Kōya no Yōjinbō). 1965. Oil on canvas. 51 5/16 x 63 3/4″ (130.3 x 162 cm). The National Museum of Art, Osaka. © Estate of Tiger Tateishi, courtesy The National Museum of Art, Osaka.]

Although I quite liked Tateishi Kōichi’s painting shown above and others in this part of the exhibition, overall the pop art did not hold my attention in the way the preceding sections on conceptual art did. But overall, this was a great exhibition that I was happy to come across.

X Libris, Root Division

X Libris opened this past Saturday at Root Division in San Francisco, and I had the opportunity to attend. X Libris is “an exhibition exploring the book as a mode of communication in flux.” More and more of our media is migrating from print to digital form, and even the venerable book isn’t immune from this. But the book as an object still retains value for many of us, even if we do much of our reading via digital media such as e-books. We display books, arrange them carefully in rows on shelves or gracefully positioned on tables. Some of the pieces directly lament the loss of books as a central element in our lives, while others explore the printed page as an artistic medium separate from its traditional function.

One corner of the gallery was taken up with a large “architectural installation” made entirely of books. One could walk in between the undulating walls and look at the titles. Although most of the books were closed, every so often there would be an open one. I encountered at least one or two mathematical texts.

One of the most eerie pieces was Alexis Arnold’s “Flood”, which featured distressed and disheveled encyclopedias encrusted in borax crystals. It could have been a scene from a major natural disaster such as Hurricane Sandy or Katrina, with floodwaters causing first one form of damage as they rise, and then another as they recede leaving behind salt deposits. The knowledge contained in the books is just out of reach behind the translucent crystals. Another piece that treated books destructively, but more humorously was Michael Kerbow’s installation of pages as autumn leaves to be raked.

Pantea Karimi created ink drawings with repeated motifs on heavy paper, arranged in unfolding structures on shelves. The result is a colorful and meticulous tribute to the bookshelves that many people proudly display in their homes, but also a lamentation that such displays are gradually becoming rarer.

If books as source of textual information (or escape into fantasy) is waning, what of the physical form of the book as an artistic medium unto itself? Several pieces presented books that were physically books with pages that one could flip and look at, but intended as objects of abstract or conceptual art rather than something to “read.” These examples by Laura Chenault have color and texture but no text.

Still others were more distance from our expectations of the standard book form. Lauren Bartone’s complementary pieces “Letter Trash” and “Leftovers” presented a jumble of letters pasted onto a background and piled on a shelf, respectively. Steven Vasquez Lopez did away with letters and symbols altogether, using only intersecting straight lines on paper, as in this piece entitled “Jooked”:

One might ask what such a piece has to with books, but for me it did bring to mind the whole genre of “abstract comics”, a topic for another time.

X Libris will be on display at Root Division through December 1. You can visit the exhibition page for more info.

Guy Overfelt #BLACKLIGHT, Ever Gold Gallery

Last weekend I had the opportunity to see #BLACKLIGHT, conceptual artist Guy Overfelt’s solo show at Ever Gold Gallery, before it closed on November 3rd. The main installation of the show was “hesher tribute” to renowned artist Dan Flavin, whose work involves abstract lines of light (you can see an example in this show at David Zwirner in New York in 2009). Overfelt’s tribute uses these light elements arranged in a pentagram in a darkened room with mirrors:


[Courtesy of Guy Overfelt and Ever Gold Gallery.]

It was interesting to peer directly through the infinitely vanishing series both head-on, as in the image above, or from the side. Indeed, the effect of side or oblique views was more disorienting, especially coming into the dark room during an exceptionally bright and sunny afternoon in San Francisco. Indeed the contrast between indoors and outdoors is what made this a particularly strong experience.


[Courtesy of Guy Overfelt and Ever Gold Gallery.]

It is the pentagram element that makes this “hesher” art. The darkened posters from L.A. punk shows that cover the wall before the installation and a curtain in the rear of the gallery would appear be at odds with the hesher theme, which is distinctly different from punk even if they overlapped during the early 1980s.


[Courtesy of Guy Overfelt and Ever Gold Gallery.]

Some rather colorful posters were also presented separately as framed oil-on-linen pieces.

The gallery describe this exhibition as Overfelt’s last exhibition, stating somewhat mysteriously that “You’ll never see Guy Overfelt’s face in San Francisco nor his work after this exhibition.” I hope that is not in fact true, as the work of this 2012 SECA AWARD nominee is growing on me.

Reconnaissance Fly and KREation, Luggage Store Gallery

Last week, Reconnaissance Fly returned the Luggage Store Gallery, with selections from our upcoming album Flower Futures, featuring songs based on spoetry (or spam poetry). We were joined on stage by the piñatas which I reported on at a previous show, including the manatee and the “pyramonster” that appears on the US one dollar bill.

We have played this music often enough now to feel confident, even routine, with what is still a challenging set. As always, we opened with Small Chinese Gong and wound our way through prog rock, jazz and more experimental styles to the closing catchy riffs of An Empty Rectangle.


[Photo by Tom Djll]

The acoustics of the Luggage Store Gallery once again presented a huge challenge for our performance, which requires tight rhythmic integration between players. But I thought we did a great set despite the challenge, including the syncopated unisons in sanse is crede nza and the abstract event-driven Oh! Goldfinch Cage.

We were followed on the program by KREation (Kevin Robinson Ensemble). It was interesting that their line-up for the evening was very similar to ours: two wind payers, keyboard, bass and drums. Neither group had a guitarist. But the music was quite different. Compared to Reconnaissance Fly’s structured set of composed songs, KREation’s performance was free-flowing, shifting between different levels of energy and texture in a continuous whole.


[Kreation]

They started off with the sounds of key clicks, scratches and other soft percussive sounds in a cloud of staccato noise, before shifting in a more tonal free-jazz sound. The rhythms, harmonies and textures shifted every few minutes, with a few instrument changes along the way, and different members of the band taking turns with abstract vocals.

It was a strong performance that kept my attention for the entire duration of the set, and I am glad we had the opportunity to share the bill with them.