UP ON SKYWALK WHERE ART IS AT
Up on Skywalk, upon the fifty-second floor gazing out as far as the eye can peer, carpet shag takes on concrete construction, boxes, cubes--ziggurats, and columns, and, even, I cannot lie--in some places patches of grass-green as far as the eye can tell.
Tokyo is a reckless spray of high-density low-to-ground sprawl. Down on the streets the color of billboard and moving image on maxi-screens vibrate and twist to the same pulse as those keen to take it all in. Tokyo, after all, is one of the most gratingly exciting cities in the world.
Up here looking out you miss all the noise that teaches Inner Science--the trucks, the cars, and loud speaker sales--pop songs blasting out on major intersections in Shibuya and Shinjuku. By night, life is agog around Roppongi, drawing lovers and life from around the world. By day in Ginza, Omotosando, Shinjuku and Shibuya, hungry shoppers, millions converge, chatting above the sirens, find a place that boasts reasonable price to eat-in, and talk until the nightlife. Grooves and sects, manga-la bodies on streets, salaries, all mingle in melodious ominous flow--and let's not forget good old Goth in Harajuku. It's been there for as long as I can remember.
Up on Skywalk it's different. You get a gentleman's murmuring hum--you can see it all except you arrive at a different dumbfounding realization. Looking out over the serene pastures of cement hiding all the life--like it or not--up here, not down there, is where the art is.
Roppongi Hills, the chrome in which Mori Art Museum is located, doesn't have too much in common with Roppongi Crossing, located in a very different zone away. Roppongi Crossing is a place where people meet, converge and head off to go their separate way--usually not returning until the wee hours of the morning. Roppongi Crossing is famous for the people and the cars that cross, while the actual physical presence is incredibly nondescript. Roppongi Hills, on the other hand, is spank new and has a more tailored traffic. There is a great cinema-plex, hundreds of shops, many ways to get from one to the other, one to the other businesses and television and expensive apartments, and some street-art just to sit on or take a photo next to.
The most important cultural attribute of Roppongi Hills is The Mori Art Museum, better known now simply as MAM.
Roppongi Crossing: New Visions in Contemporary Japanese Art, 2004 is the second major exhibition to open since MAM's start. The exhibition is accessed by Skywalk, and actually is a great way to enter the palace--come to think of it.
The royal court with escalators that lead us up to Roppongi X on the fifty-third floor dons a Ban recycle pet bottle arch. What a start to an exhibition and what a way to reappraise the dull sight of escalators that Japan currently is so in love with--installed whether they need to be or not. Ban Shigeru's recycle is a celebration of life, no matter how it is bottled or re-consumed--and as arch, per Ban's usual, is elegant and intelligent--not a scratch off.
Up the escerlators inside jammed packed lay all the art you need to see, at least for the time you can spend there. It's varied, its eclectic, there are grand hikes and yikes, though all together, what? A celebration of Art?
I was back at street level again--some art made noises. A girl with funny brows gyrates ala hula-hoop. Honey in a long flow globs while a la-la la insect eating-type sits upon a branch occasionally bringing in a meal with the quick slip of the tongue. It's all Odani Motohiko.
Furry things are everywhere this winter and they were here too thanks to Sanada Takehiko.
Bridge building and the urban mind and the building of yet another idea is tracked vigilantly in the form of art--small balsa bridge structures building across one wall just to get to the other--reams of paper printed with text as another kind of sculptural stream. I could have guessed this was Pol Malo.
Atomization at street level--Sasaguuchi Kazz's silent and austere black particles build people tracked from different events and lifestyles. A computer plots all the points in space, and the rest is done by hand. Walking into the space at first just looks like black dots beautifully suspended in space, and then it takes a lot of navigation to pull things back to a figure and an event.
Some art fares better than another does. DVD works had their boxes, though there was so many boxes each had to battle with the other just to be a box?
A box that belched better than another was Tanaka Koki's bloody burping suitcase. Tanaka's DVD movie of repetitive action of a suitcase gurgling and spewing out buckets of blood as it is violently pushed, and re-pushed, dropped and re-dropped, turns out to be shockingly funny.
No matter where you are, when you put 60 or so artists together with no real thread, each battling for recognition, and space, you are bound to get tired. After walking around 'Roppongi Crossing' for some hours, finally exiting the other way through Ban's arch, I can tell you --I was beat.
I will remember, though, Kimura Yuki's DVD's playing on two Mac notebooks, placed wonderfully to take the look of a regular picture frame. One had a frozen image of a boy, the other a girl--each one occasionally blinked.
I don't think I'll see another plastic garbage can and lid look so good as Imamura's did, and the cell like growths and internal long fine inverted root and plant are forever stored inside.
A large and powerful image and equally moving text, part of Yanagi Miwa's Grandmothers, woos the senses through experience and lens to the other side of age. As I read the text and looked up respectfully all I could think was wow.
I was also given back some fine 'ki' just by standing by Kosugi Takehisa's Interspersion of Light and Sound, small shallow trays containing LEDs and sound oscillators which are then covered with different sized granules of refined white sugar. There was a micro opera in each small case. It was nice to just stand above and pick the fine difference.
I'll also remember the flow of visitors, and this was the second day, all ages from the very young to those who had to make a choice, battle the escalators or take a small elevator one floor up. Actually I have never seen such a full and mixed crowd before in Tokyo. You either get the empty, so often the case at MOT in Kiba, or, and truth is I have never entered but have seen, long queues to see Van Gogh or Matisse.
As memory can only hold so much, and I didn't take notes, I have to end it here. I enjoyed Hoki Nobuya's small drawings on colored paper; the odd positioning of objects to photograph, and tradition, in the work of Yasumura Takashi; the demolition C-prints by Hatakeyama Naoya; the funny huge bonsai beings c/o the recycle and Nakagawa Masahiro's fashion brand label 20471120; the smell of grass never smelt so good coming across the only opening where some natural light came in on Tokyo Picnic Club; and finally just before the exit an exit sign by Fukasawa Naoto, which ran a DVD, a person exiting, then a family, someone walking back in; not an exit but a recording of a passage and human current. Really the show is up for grabs.
When you make it there you'll find out that this is a show where the visitor can make a difference.
