"The Pastel Colored Country: on the Necessity of Art" by Eric Mircher
[This is a continuation of my translations of Eric Mircher's original articles. Please read this introduction for the background behind this project.]
Return from Japan -- a land of pastel colors where everything seems so fluid. Tokyo overflows with merchandise, each one more sophisticated than the next, all sold in immaculate malls, brightly lit, and in succession, customers are pulled into them one after another. Unnecessary needs are invented but it works because in this metropolis, there is always someone interested in purchasing next product available. One can buy sleeves, for example, that allow one to avoid direct contact with the subway handrails (even though they appear perfectly clean), innumerable vanity gadgets are available to personalize smartphones, infinite variations, even esoteric ones, are available for any item of clothing, and each one of these products is bought by somebody. Elegance is everywhere, there is sophisticated vanity in this modern City of Sparta. And despite it all, there is a floating lightness in the air that is reassuring and predictable – the gentle and suave boredom of the most populated metropolis of the world.
Japan, and Tokyo in particular, demands admiration for the coordinated management and gentle policing of its millions of citizens. Tokyo, the largest city of the world (and this since the 18th century) lives peacefully, consumes enormously, and proposes endlessly, in all sorts of different ways and in all different price ranges, food, clothes, all that one could wish for. However, in this conglomeration of nearly 130 million people, there is very little if any contemporary art.
Of course, there is Naoshima with its remarkable hotel designed by Tadeo Ado and its museum created specifically to house the work of Lee Ufan. Furthermore, there is the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo with its immense Louise Bourgeois arachnoid sculpture welcoming visitors. There are also some contemporary art galleries in this capital city that never sleeps. They, however, numbers only about fifty store fronts with congruent surface areas. As for the exhibitions shown at the Mori Art Museum, they are infinitely banal. Contemporary Indian, then Chinese, then Arabian art, make up its signature international offerings, but they are shows that one would have seen already elsewhere. Coming full circle, the island of Naoshima provides a package of high class tourism, with its prestigious architecture, preserved landscape and smattering of outdoor art.
There are Japanese artists that are recognized internationally today, from Yayoi Kusama to Takashi Murakami. In reality, however, they may as well be American, German or English as there seems to be no real recognition of their work in their own country. Japan is not known for its audacious museography. Quite the contrary, in Tokyo, this capital city that seems to propose everything in infinite number and variety, the near absence of audacious and living contemporary art is quite noticeable.
It may be due to tradition, Japanese interiors have very few if any images hanging on walls. It's an ancient practice which is no doubt rooted in the uncluttered aesthetic ideals maintained by Shintoism and Buddhism. Sometimes, there may be pale copies of traditional pictures and for the most audacious, very bad copies of work done in a western style, like a bad farce.
And so in the largest city in the world, one lives quite well, very well even, without contemporary art.
All the same, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo is trying to vindicate the importance of early modernism in Japan. The work on view is in fact quite painful to look at. It is saddening to see the results from artists with such an ancient and sophisticated culture as the Japanese being forced to ape the dominant and “modern” art forms of artistic centers in Europe and America. Perhaps only Fujita Tsuguji, an expatriate Japanese artist that is little recognized in his own country, escapes more or less intact.
The Bridgestone Museum of Art has a collection amassed by the genius of Japanese tire manufacturing. Its collection focuses on 19th and 20th century Western as well Japanese Western-style art and it seeks to affirm Japan's openness to modern and avant-garde art movements. Tired, one has the feeling that the collection is very disparate. The company was able only to obtain the weakest examples of the work of famous artists. There was a banal Francis Bacon, a bad Morris Louis, and an anecdotal Picasso which seemed to dominate the collection. The Picasso looked good in no small part thanks to the fact that it was surrounded by so much mediocrity.
Boredom rears its head and shows acutely—and this without any real desire of the museum—the political nature of notions of art. In the West, the universality of art is affirmed, in Japan, art has to do with power, and thus politics. It is a question of stepping backwards really. As such, images and art productions, even if they seem to be indispensable in the West, appear here as vain, over-valued, and the weapon of western influence in a world view that is profoundly recalcitrant. The art that the West has defined and valorized in its history, though relatively short in length, does not appear in Japan as invincible as it appears in the West nor is it looked at with quite the same reverence. Behind the Western discourse on modernism, there is a political will to dominate and dictate a particular vision of what is “contemporary.” It is a belief. But there appears to be no converts in Japan. This in itself is not surprising in a land that expelled Christianity. There is probably a connection between the two.
The lack of contemporary art does not appear to stop the life of the endless tides of Japanese each morning. The land of the rising sun is indifferent to contemporary art despite the omnipresence of images; while Japanese society produces, creates and devours images, as contemporary as they are, they are not the same images that are valorized in the museum circuits of Europe. Images are very much present in contemporary Japan but it is not in the same place and it is different in nature than those that circulate in Europe. They circulate in the ephemeral manga cartoons essentially, the offspring of a long tradition that runs back in time from Hiroshige to Hokusai. Animated images or its reverse, abstracted calligraphy, are both diffused everywhere in Japan, endlessly, and are integral parts of daily life there. They are quite alive though westerners may see them as mere amusements or distractions. And the current Japanese policy of “soft power” as a political tool of expansion has made the export of these images popular worldwide. It should be noted that in France, the country of Pierre Corneille, the number of translated Japanese books are only second to English language tomes.
It is difficult to pray without a church, without a priest and without sacred text. Given the mausoleum-like state of Japanese museums, the only way to convert its citizens into believers of contemporary art is to provide them with museums that have works of real value and a discourse that affirms the importance and universality of art. Recently, the Louvre museum opened an outposts at Lens in Northern France, and the plans for a branch of the museum at Abu Dhabi is becoming reality. Perhaps similar outposts are needed in Japan. The coherence of the western vision of art is based on the presence of great paintings and artworks, supported by adequate discourse, housed within an appropriate architectural structure. Without the presence of these three elements, the coherence of contemporary art falls apart while facing the Sea of Japan.
- Article written by Eric Mircher
- (Translated from French by Roy Forget)
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