TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/073189/07318900.018

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 105 lines

ART, Page 68

No More Tributes to Mount Fuji

A Japanese show explodes Western preconceptions

By Edward M. Gomez


    For centuries, a deeply rooted appreciation of nature has
played a central role in the spiritual and cultural life of Japan.
Japanese artists traditionally reflected this reverence not in
intellectual abstractions but concretely, in highly stylized
representations of specific rivers, mountains, plants and animals.
As in other aspects of Japanese thought and behavior, artists were
expected to remain respectful of the past and concentrate on
certain well-established forms and techniques. But during the Meiji
era (1868-1912), modernism was introduced from the West, knocking
major dents in this rigid system with an emphasis on innovation,
individualism and the search for new forms. Japanese artists,
emulating European easel painting, began to produce portraits and
still lifes in oil -- new subjects in a new medium. Later in the
20th century and especially after World War II, some continued to
keep up with modernism's evolutionary twists and turns through
surrealism and paint-splashing abstract expressionism.

    Now a valuable and timely exhibition at the San Francisco
Museum of Modern Art demonstrates just how much further Japan's
children of the postwar "economic miracle" have gone in breaking
the old rules. "Against Nature: Japanese Art in the Eighties"
affords American audiences an overdue opportunity to examine some
30 paintings, sculptures and mixed-media works made by nine artists
age 40 or younger, plus one artists' collective. The first major
U.S. museum showing of new art from Japan in nearly two decades,
the exhibition was organized by Thomas Sokolowski of New York
University's Grey Art Gallery and Study Center and Kathy Halbreich,
formerly of M.I.T.'s List Visual Arts Center, along with Fumio
Nanjo of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Nagoya, Japan, and
Shinji Kohmoto of the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto. It
will run in San Francisco through Aug. 6, then travel to Akron,
Boston, Seattle, Cincinnati, New York City and Houston through
early 1991.

    The survey will probably blast many viewers' assumptions about
what Japanese art should look like. Forget about tributes to Mount
Fuji or poetic evocations of the changing seasons. These members
of what one Japanese critic has called "the post-Hiroshima
generation" have grown up in a technology-driven, fiercely
consumerist, information-saturated urban setting far removed,
spiritually if not physically, from Mother Nature. They are city
dwellers accustomed at cherry-blossom time each year to seeing
decorative artificial flowers attached to electric poles -- right
next to real trees. Those based in Tokyo, for example, would be
hard-pressed to find any sizable patches of green in the
neon-drenched, congested concrete megalopolis that sprawls around
their tiny studios. All of the featured artists' works, in subject
matter as well as execution, not only defy tradition but in some
cases tear it to shreds.

    "I'm an urban creature; the countryside frightens me," says
Kyoto-born Noboru Tsubaki, whose Fresh Gasoline, 1989, a 9-ft.-high
bulbous yellow pod, is the most startling work in the show. The
creepy beauty and rich surface texture of Tsubaki's monstrous blob,
with tentacle-like branches sprouting from its top, recall a
fascination with the grotesque that characterized some Japanese
avant-garde art of the 1950s and early '60s. Its inspiration:
Japan's bombed-out landscape after World War II. Strains of this
extreme aesthetic are still visible today in the ghoulish makeup
and gestures of butoh dancers. Similarly, Shoko Maemoto creates
souvenirs from a nightmare alley where fairy-tale fantasy meets a
haunting eroticism. Meticulously executed, her work has a grisly
elegance, as in Silent Explosion, 1988, a mannequin-less burlap
hoopskirt from which a torrent of "blood" cascades, blazing, to the
floor.

    Other artists in the show use the real world as raw material.
Charred, rough-edged and yellowed, Shinro Ohtake's mixed-media
assemblages and collage-filled scrapbooks seek an awkward beauty
in combinations of found objects and unwanted rubbish. Such pieces
as his Family Tree, 1986-88, serve as vivid symbols of the
appropriationist free-for-all that is Japanese pop culture today
-- a tsunami of Mickey Mouse trinkets, teriyaki burgers, Picasso
calendars, Swatches and more. They are also dispassionate records
of life in what Ohtake calls an "information supermarket," an
environment in which traditional Japanese cultural values are up
for grabs, along with everything else.

    This includes Western art history and aspects of Japan's own
cultural past. Osaka native Yasumasa Morimura, for example, places
himself as the main character in carefully staged and photographed
"reproductions" of well-known Western paintings like Manet's
Olympia. Tomiaki Yamamoto melds brushy abstract expressionism with
the pattern-oriented design sensibility of traditional Japanese
textiles. Often his splashy tableaux resemble spread-out kimonos.
Typically, as in Untitled, 1985, they are covered with an
obsessive, all-over rash of heavily impastoed, drippy dots. Far
less theatrical but also keenly focused on subject matter and
technique, sculptor Katsura Funakoshi creates blank-faced portraits
of everyday people whose looks betray neither race nor nationality.
Made from camphorwood, his torsos are as skillfully carved as the
ancient Buddhist sculptures whose construction they recall.
Psychologically intense, they are also a little bit spooky.

    Ultimately, even without the thematic weight imposed on these
works by the somewhat arbitrary title "Against Nature," this is
very much an exhibition about Japanese artists' continuing
tug-of-war with the forces of modernism. Its organizers obviously
believe that, in responding to the world around them, today's
Japanese artmakers are answering to a personal, not a prescribed,
vision of how to depict it. Perhaps, in a modern world, this
approach is only natural.