Sept. 24: Yokohama

Robb had suggested I head to Yokohama for the Triennial down there, and that seemed to be a good plan. He said I just had to get to Shibuya and then it was an easy fast train from there, so that seemed simple enough. I left the hotel about 11 and headed into hell again. But this time, I vowed, I’d negotiate Shibuya more efficiently.

Trouble was, although I found the line the lady at the hotel said would take me to Yokohama, it wasn’t a JR line, so I couldn’t get in. Nick’s book had said you could get there from Tokyo Station, which was yet another ride around the circle, but in the end, I got there and a nice woman at the tourist info booth told me that the trip from Shibuya required a change of trains somewhere down the line, and JR was faster -- 25 minutes, against 45 with a transfer. And sure enough, there was a train leaving almost immediately, as they seem to do every few minutes.

Yokohama has it over Tokyo in one aspect: it’s got a dramatic skyline, probably because there’s a large harbor to frame it against, and it seems to have been built all at once. And I must say, nobody does skyscrapers like the Japanese. Here, the big attraction is the Queen Towers, three buildings connected by one little walkway each, with a scalloped effect at the top. Thre’s also a very oddly-shaped building next to them, a hotel that looks like a salt-shaker with a big V cut out of one side of it. To enhance the surrealism, a couple of Japanese artists had hung their Triennial piece, a mammoth inflated cricket, in the V.

A helpful lady in the tourist office in the train station showed me which bus to take out to the Triennial, which is in two buildings, one the convention center, the other an old red brick warehouse which must date from the 19th Century. It was expensive to get in, something like ¥3000, but next to most of the contemporary art shows I’ve seen in the past year, it was light-years ahead.

Some notes on the Triennial:

* Forced into Images, by Destiny Deacon, Australia. Photos of Aborigine souvenirs of various sorts frame a video installation of Aborigine kids putting on masks and other commercial images of Aborigines. Display cases show a wonderfully-laid-out panoply of souvenirs of the Aborigines Deacon’s bought in Australia, each labelled with its country of manufacture -- mostly India and China.

* Arena, by Anri Sala, Albania/France. The first work of his I’ve seen since “Finding the Words,” although I missed a one-man show in a gallery on Chausseestr. earlier this year. This one’s a mysterous video which pans around some sort of place that’s hard to figure out. Thre are lots of dogs lounging around, plus dirty cages which seem to contain apes and big cats. There are a couple of palm trees on the grounds, plus deciduous trees. Hard to figure out where or what this is, and the whole effect is odd and disturbing.

* Endless Narcissus Show, by Kusama Yayoi. A mirrored room filled with mirrored spheres, which induces vertigo while reflecting the viewer all over the place. I wonder that more people don’t walk into the walls, and there are spheres for sale in the souvenir shop, along with t-shirts showing the artist lying around the installation.

* A number of works by Orimato Tatsumi, the Bread Man. As the Bread Man, he walks around various places with a mask made of various breads on his face, while a photographer documents the reactions of the people around him. He’s also the guy behind Art Mama, which the Aktionsgalerie in Berlin has been showing. This odd-looking little woman turns out to actually be his mother, who has Alzheimer’s. Despite the fact that his younger brother lives a ten-minute walk from her, he refuses to see her, so Tatsumi has taken over her care. He’s photographed her in various weird situations, which she doesn’t seem to mind at all, and he even took a picture of me shaking her hand after I introduced myself as someone who’d seen his work back home. He also has a couple of series called Pull an Ear and Wear a Bracelet, where he’s photographed people wearing ear-clips and bracelets he’s made with the names of colors on them. Weird, but appealing.

* Berg Series, by Florian Claar, Sweden (I think). These are simulated mountain landscapes made of some gritty material with shiny stuff in it, on which he projects changing colors in shapes whose contours react with the shape of each landscape, producing a sort of moire effect.

* Pillar of Civilization, by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, China. Disgusting! But fun: these guys went around the world collecting human fat from liposuction clinics, then “purified” it and cast it into a cylindrical column about ten feet high. It’s yellow and doesn’t smell, at least.

* Unrecallable Now, by Mariele Neudecker. A huge construction with white mountains emerging from a glass sea, which is made from some kind of white acrylic solution. Very eerie, very effective .

* Two Kinds of Food, by Huang Yong Ping. Two 20-foot long fishing lures, reproduced exactly. Sort of a dumb idea, but the size is still impressive.

* The Chinese artist who was showing the installation with the large dresses with water running down them at Asia Fine Arts in Berlin has another version here where the dresses are about 40 feet high. Wow.

In the warehouse:

* Save Paradise$, by Sergio Vega, Venezuela. Two sort of Jeff Koons-y kitsch leopards, male and female, rearing up in front of the warehouse with “shrines” in their stomachs centered around bottles of Rain Forest Mango Tea and Forbidden Fruit beer, with collection boxes in front of them saying “Clean your Guilt.”

* Man To Man, Mats Hjelm, Sweden. A video installation with pictures of people walking along the street, a speech by someone who may be H. Rap Brown, pictures of the Swedish countryside and coast, a brass band in some Third World country playing, an interview in black and white by some Swedish guy...it looks like it’s going somewhere, but the longer I stayed, the more incoherent it seemed to get. I might want to see it from the beginning, but I don’t think Hjelm himself knows what the hell is going on here, to be honest.

* My Grandmothers, by Miwa Yanagi. An elaborate installation of huge, staged photos of various old women doing odd things like riding in a motorcycle sidecar on the Golden Gate Bridge, goofing with a lesbian lover, being a guru on the Japanese coast, and standing on a runway-cum-gravestone. There are captions which purport to be statements or explanations by the women about what we’re seeing, but they’re as obviously faked as the photographs, and the whole thing looks like it cost tons of money to realize. Still, a very witty work, a postmodern Auntie Mame.

* St. Sebastian, by Fiona Tan. A big, two-sided screen showing close-ups of Japanese girls on their Coming of Age Day doing their archery. Moves quite slowly, although it’s real-time, and with the spooky soundtrack I found it much more effective than anything she’s shown in Berlin.

* Petite, by Dominique Gonzales-Foerster. My favorite in the show. There’s a room made out of glass, through which the viewers have to look. Projected on the back wall is a video which seems to show big windows, as if we’re looking into a building. In the lower right-hand corner, a little girl eventually comes into focus, looking melancholy. She pretty much stays there, although she goes in and out of resolution, while other images appear and disappear. It seems very sad and very charming at the same time: at one point, what looked like the branches of a tree came out of the girl’s head and vanished quickly, which seemed to give her a lot of dignity, At other times she seemed to be yearning for the world beyond the window. Complex, and I wish I’d stayed with it for more than the 20 or so minutes I spent there.

* Angel Ears, by Grönland and Nisunen, Finland. Two parabolic reflectors placed on either end of the warehouse’s courtyard, emitting a very high-pitched tone which changes volume and texture as you walk around its field. Actually could be dangerous, I think.

There were plenty of other pieces, of course, but since I wasn’t working, I didn’t note down the ones I didn’t like, although in the park outside, Yoko Ono had that hateful Boxcar work, the Deutsche Bahn boxcar riddled with bullet holes shot from inside. I really wonder about this. Is it some sort of Holocaust comment? If so, how does someone from a country like Japan which barely even acknowledges the war dare to make such a comment: is this some fantasy of Jews shooting their way out? It was, I guess, less obnoxious sitting in a park in Yokohama than it had been in Schlossplatz in Berlin, by virtue of having been decontextualized, but only by a few degrees.

All in all, it was a pretty wonderful show, even if they didn’t give me a map, or give any indication how one got from one hall to the other. Okay, there were a few signs, but they were all in Japanese, which given the internationality of this show and the likelihood of its attracting international visitors, is totally inexcusable. But I was very, very glad I went, although the fact that it was a holiday (first day of fall) meant that as the day went on tons of families with noisy and disruptive kids showed up, pushing and jostling and making it difficult to see the stuff, and I almost forgave Robb for his misdirection.

I even got back to Tokyo and back to the hotel easily, only to find a message from Robb that a narratation job had come up and he couldn’t make dinner. I called him, and told him that if he finished before 8:30, I’d meet him, and if not, not. He called at 8:15, and said the gig was over. It turned out to be narration for a documentary about Horiyoshi, the great tattoo artist, but he didn’t seem to know much about it except that it was headed to the Rotterdam Film Festival. Hell, I didn’t even know they had a film festival in Rotterdam.

We met again at Bel Common, and he demonstrated how the doCoMo phones work, by selecting his own Tokyo Restaurant Page and going throught he menu, which was fascinating. We then went looking for a restaurant he knew in the vicinity, but it was closed due to the holiday. Next place he chose was, he said, a chain based in Kyoto which specializes in chicken of various sorts, and they had a table. It was amazing, and since the courses were small, we had lots of them: tempura of those huge expensive mushrooms I’ve seen around (disappointing: didn’t have much flavor), a couple of kinds of skewers, a magnificent dish which was a big thin flat sheet of something which turned out to be a paste of chicken and chicken skin rolled extremely thin and deep-fried -- amazing! Fried chicken without the chewy stuff! -- and a dish of tofu lees in a sesame-flavored cream. The whole thing, with my having had several beers due to the application of chili powder on some of the dishes and the appearance once again of those Kyoto-style chicken wings redolent of black pepper, came to ¥8000 and change for both of us.

Robb impressed me, someone who’s been here 18 years and made a decent living at it, a committed expat, unlike poor Cal last night who really needs to get outta here and find some place to get his head back in shape. Robb moves between two worlds easily, and seems to have fun doing it. More power to him.

Naturally, after a meal like that on top of all the walking I’d done, I went back and crashed.