Takashi Murakami, DOB JUMP 1999, Silkscreen 40 x 40 cm, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo collection

Japan is utterly strange, if we are to follow in the footsteps of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) as visitors to a country for whose culture and language have (nor do they want to have) absolutely no affinity. Yet their acute sense of dislocation and turmoil in which we are caught up simply play out at the fringes of a site of metaphorical impenetrability that is Japan, like storms in teacups that fleetingly detract from an unimaginably large and unknowable entity. As the film unfolds in an exterior, immense site of unfamiliarity where space is dizzying extended vertically and horizontally, there is an incredible abundance of sights (billboards, people, temples, shrines, bright neon lights) that the panopticon of Tokyo affords as the landscape stretches out for Johansson’s character and the audience. But like her, we the audience, look at images and concepts associated with all things “Japanese,” but can’t understand the sum total of their meanings.

Transcool Tokyo feels like a snapshot of Coppola’s Japan, where the range of exhibited works is diverse enough to constitute a multitude of signs that are likely, directions for us to form personal but also contradictory conclusions of what is meant by contemporary Japanese art. Transcool Tokyo is an open invitation to appreciate the mundane to the point of ridicule (such as the oft-ignored effects of everyday sounds), the obsession with saccharine uber-cuteness, the impressiveness of Japanese technological progress, and the oblique pride in ancient Japanese craft traditions that are paid tribute to, in the exhibited artists’ oeuvres.

Michihiro Shimabuku, Tour of Europe with One Eyebrow 1991, Type C-print, text 70 x 103 cm, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo collection

But at times, it’s just about sheer entertainment and incredulous laughter. Michihiro Shimabuku, on the other hand, shaves off an eyebrow on a tour to Europe and brings an octopus on a tour of Japan in a creative exploration of the meaning of community and social norms. In Criticism and the Lover A, B, C (1990), Yasumasa Morimura grafts his faces into the surfaces of Cezanne’s Apples and Oranges (c. 1899), a narcissistic and Freudian interruption to a cultural paradigm that is western art.

Yasumasa Morimura, Criticism and the Lover A, B, C, 1990.

At other times, the works exhibit a preoccupation with the limits of human perception, the destabilisation of traditional conventions and the profound relativism that ensues – themes that typically recur in contemporary art. For instance, Ryoji Ikeda’s reductively precise video installation Data.matrix [n°1–10] (2006/9) reinforces the paradox that the infinite and indescribable universe can be summarised with mathematical data. Using 2-dimensional sequences of patterns derived from hard drive errors and studies of software code, the imagery transforms into 3-dimensional rotating views of the universe that eventually open up into infinity. Plastered on ten screens, we walk into a sublime, mesmerising project that explores the potential to perceive the vastness of the universe in the multitude of interplanetary constellations and as well as the daily sounds of traffic – brought under the precise but accessible realm of mathematical figures, all in a small space.

Ryoji Ikeda, Data.matrix n1–10, 2006/9, 10 projectors 360 x 2480 cm. Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo collection.

Strangeness however, is never more apparent in the singularly unique Japanese fixation on the cult of cuteness (or “kawaii” in Japanese). Neutered and sweetly naïve, the curious case of cuteness in contemporary Japanese culture finds its roots in the defeat and subsequent disarmament of the country after World War II, in which symbols of capitulation, escapism and renewed innocence were codified into populist media images and contemporary artistic practices. The reconstruction of a post-war, non-violent collective identity based on conventional Western representations of stereotypical ideals of pre-pubescence and innocence, yet hybridized with traditional Japanese drawings, contributed soon enough to the rise of a particular pop culture iconography more commonly associated with anime or manga. Within the cult of cuteness, the trend of miniaturization – this peculiar emotional attachment to small objects reminiscent of childhood and playtime – is layered and gendered, an expression of masked innocence beneath which lies the opposite.

To Takashi Murakami, arguably the Japanese art world’s most famous export, the kawaii aesthetic is merely a part of “Superflat” Japan, a theory postulated by Murakami himself to emphasize the flatness of a particular drawing aesthetic derived from popular culture but valorized in galleries and museums, thereby erasing the distinction between “high” and “low” art. In Murakami’s Flowers (2006), grinning flower-heads explode outward from the canvas in a visual amalgam of colors, packed tightly and superimposed against each other as the epitome of flatness and Japanese quirkiness. Trailing the route of pop artists like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein to appropriate commercial imagery to hang in art galleries, Murakami’s alter ego and eventual house brand Mr. DOB in DOB Jump (1999) satirically insists on the arbitrariness of originality and the acceptability of appropriation.

Takashi Murakami, Flowers, 2006, Silkscreen and platinum foil 70 x 70 cm, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo collection.

Colorful, flat and at times contextually rootless, the images of the popular subculture of kawaii extend to behavioral attributes of childlikeness, docility, without the capacity for detestation. But cuteness is also uncanny and menacing, when doll-likeness stamped onto the gauzy-surfaced canvas hint at all that that is not playfulness and innocence. The simple shapes that form Yoshimoto Nara’s fey, two-dimensional cast of cartoonish children in White Night (1998) and Sayon (2006) are incongruent with the apparent incorruptibility of childhood, refusing the infantile and insouciance of adolescence by their defiant posture and suspicious gazes. Nara’s rejection of physical resemblance undermines the claim of portraiture’s alleged truthfulness. The unreliability of the portrait’s exterior consequently forces us to register instead the opposite: the interiority of portraiture and its implicit connotations. Situated – or suspended – in the middle of the canvas’s bare space, they raise a tangle of questions about childhood and cynicism, kitsch and realism. Resembling mulishly silent anime characters that stand isolated and estranged, Nara’s cartoonish children reveal more in that which is not said.

Yoshitomo Nara Sayon, 2006, Acrylic on canvas 146 x 112.5 cm, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo collection.

Transcool Tokyo is a collaborative effort between the Singapore Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and will run at SAM at 8Q until 13 February 2011. The exhibition features established artists such as Yayoi Kusama, Takashi Murakami, Yoshitomo Nara, Kiichiro Adachi and Haruka Kojin. Working across all mediums, from painting and sculpture, to performance, photography and video, the artists have created work in response to the onset of the information age and the greater freedoms and uncertainties that are available in contemporary society.

It feels like a thousand years, though I know it’s only been about five minutes. Feet balancing atop five-inch heels on the loose gravel floor, my ankles quiver unsteadily as I clench every muscle in my legs to avoid toppling into Jeffrey Deitch’s back. This misstep would surely initiate a domino-like collapse of the well-coiffed Who’s Who that is gathering inside Regen Projects’ main gallery for Doug Aitken’s opening solo exhibition, House. My breath becomes shallow as I am awash with a zen-like focus on maintaining my balance, and partially so as not to disturb Beck – who is intently fixated on the picnic table in the center of the room.

“Do not move,” I tell myself. “And for God’s sake, do not inflict bodily harm on Beck should you fall.”

Plumes of dust swell overhead as more spectators shuffle into the gallery. The freshly lain gravel proves to be logistically problematic for others with similarly unfortunate choices in footwear, as they timidly navigate the sierra of debris that borders the gallery walls. Splintering two-by-fours, jagged shards of windowpanes and fractured tiles create a mountainous rubble potpourri.  I stare in astonishment (and mild jealousy) as one guest nimbly scales a nearby detritus summit to circumnavigate the throng of people blocking the entrance of the gallery. We all encircle the picnic table, which features a double-sided monitor protruding from its surface that showcases Aitken’s newest film, also titled House. I occasionally lock eyes with guests on the other side of the table, and we both hurriedly return our gaze to the monitor – nervously aware of one another’s actions. Some poke at the glowing screens of iPhones and Blackberrys; the woman next to me updates her Facebook status. Despite being communally immersed within an unprecedented space of conceptual and physical transformation, each member of the crowd seems fragmentally participatory.  Conversely, Aitken’s video depicts his parents sitting across a table from one another – silent, hands neatly folded, eye contact unwavering – as the artist’s house literally crumbles around them. We stand within those remains, uncannily disengaged, while Aitken’s parents remain solely occupied with an immediate frame of actuality: each other. It is in this ironic conundrum that Aitken’s astute poetics are at work.  We seemingly struggle to achieve personal archive and immutability through obsessive self-documentation, but is it ultimately performative? If we cannot avert our focus from the immediately framed image, can we truly be aware of our greater context? Or will it simply disintegrate around us under the weight of desultory cognizance?

Aitken, in speaking about his work, has asserted, “I would like the permanence of my process to be as temporary as possible.” This constant state of flux is oftentimes cited in his multi-media canon, and dramatically percolates through the impassioned components of House. His fascination with our own manipulation of memory and time typifies our simultaneous repulsion and preoccupation with decay and mortality. By distorting context, Aitken achieves a kind of fluidity that seizes that which defines humanity in a modern era: a mercurial state of being that is both isolating and interdependent. A related departure from projects like MoMA’s “Sleepwalkers,” (2007),  House utilizes the notion of public and private space as a reflection of its inhabitants and the inversion (or destruction) of contained micro-realities. Without a constructed sense of boundaries, we make ourselves vulnerable to happenstance and transience, a temporal randomness that Aitken embraces. As the video draws to a close, and the empty lot in which Aitken’s house once stood fades to black, it seems a sagacious foreshadow to the impending provocations to come from the iEra. Will the construction of space and unmitigated narrative only be achieved through destruction of artifice, a kind of regress in order to progress? The inquiries manifested by the wreckage at Regen Projects may merely be the foundation for larger queries, but for Aitken, the foundation is all that remains.

House is on view through December 18th, 2010.

Today on the DS Archives is a reintroduction of  Vienna based artist, John Gerrard.  Gerrard’s most recent work, Cuban School is currently on view at the Simon Preston Gallery in New York through December 19^th.  The work is a hand built virtual world—or portrait—of the building made by using extensive photographs and topographical satellite data.

This article was originally written by Rebekah Drysdale in February, 2009.

Simon Preston Gallery in the Lower East is currently presenting two impressive new media works by John Gerrard in his first New York solo exhibition. Oil Stick Work is a virtual sculpture that manifests itself as a projection on the main wall of the gallery. This projection depicts an aluminum corn silo which was digitized based on several photographs taken at the building’s physical site in Richfield, Kansas. The virtual sculpture exists in real time, with simulated weather patterns based on those in Kansas. Angelo Martinez, a Mexican American builder arrives to the silo at daybreak with a single oil stick crayon. He colors a black square on the exterior of the structure, working six days a week, slowly covering each facade in oily black pigment. The builder will continue this simulated job until the year 2038 when he will complete his task, leaving a black slick punctuating the pristine landscape, a powerful farewell to an age of oil.

A second virtual sculpture, Grow Finish Unit, is based on a large pig production factory in Kansas. The cycle of this work is 6-8 months, the amount of time pigs (themselves largely sustained by petroleum) spend in these facilities before a truck comes for removal and replacement. Commenting on the automated husbandry of farm animals, Gerrard’s prophetic use of time as medium in both works deepens a sense of discomfort as our own ethics of consumption are disturbingly questioned.

Gerrard lives and works in both Vienna and Dublin. Oil Stick Work will be included in the Venice Biennial in June 2009 as part of an independent project by the RHA, Dublin.

DailyServing.com selects two notable artists each month from the submissions we receive to be featured in our series, Fan Mail. For a chance to have your work appear below, with an article written by one of the DailyServing contributors, please submit a link to your website to info@dailyserving.com, subject: Fan Mail. You could be the next artist in the series! (We will try to contact chosen artists prior to publication, but please be sure to check the site everyday.)

I am always interested in the fine line between design and art. The conversation usually erupts in pursed lipped dialogues that are wonderful in their tenuous confusion.  Designers and artists too often set up in one rigidly defined camp or another and fly flags proclaiming the value of the emotional emphasis of art or the pragmatic necessity of design. The ideologically large—but practically small—ravine separating the two is fiercely guarded and both worlds potentially (depending on the stringency of ones alliance) suffer for it.  The new work of German artist Sabrina Siedt is a lovely tightrope between the two worlds and one she walks with great elegance. Identifying herself as both a fashion photographer and conceptual artist, Siedt weaves the ideal bodies of her subjects with sculptural elements, the purpose of which is not immediately identifiable nor necessary.

Siedt says, “I connect values with the environmental material and create photos with an emotional language and absurd aspects.”  The photos are clearly influenced by and arguably benefit from Siedt’s training in fashion photography and while they come with editorial trademarks—contorted bodies, gravity defying hair and disjointed story lines—they ultimately read as a set of art works.

Siedt studied photography at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Dortmun. She has exhibited at  Vernissa Ge KSK-Ausstellung in Bochum and at the Welten Am Fluss in Recklinghause.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

Ger van Elk, "The Co-Founder of the Word O.K.-Hollywood," 3 color photographs, 1971.. Courtesy the Artist and Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: by Brian Forrest.

The first time I visited downtown Los Angeles, I was surprised by its bareness. A friend and I, both of us art students, had driven in from Claremont for an opening, tackling the congested Santa Monica freeway for the first time, too. A fellow student and L.A. veteran had warned us that, even if we experienced smooth sailing through Covina, we’d hit an out-of-nowhere stand still once we’d “cleared that hill and past the Westfield [mall].” He was right, and we slowed to a laborious crawl 20 miles from the city. Braving traffic felt like initiation and we were proud of ourselves. However, once we arrived in the city proper and exited the I-10, all the people seemed to evaporate. The galleries we wandered through may have been well-populated, but, otherwise, downtown felt weirdly gutted of life.

At one point, my friend and I stood outside a café, staring up into the windows of what looked like an abandoned warehouse. A transient stopped to stare with us. “Amazing how they built this city up, huh? There’s no space left nowhere,” he commented, misinterpreting the source of our awe. We agreed, however—it was amazing that a city that had been so recently and extensively built up and out could feel both congested and desolate at the same time.

A comparable sense of lived-in bareness characterizes The City Proper, an exhibition of contemporary photography of SoCal’s urban landscape currently on view at West Hollywood’s Margo Leavin Gallery. Curated by James Welling, known for translucent and prismatic photographic experiments with color,  the show mainly features L.A. artists and loosely responds to New Topographics, a now seminal exhibition that first appeared at the Eastman House in 1975 and was rephrased by LACMA in 2009. The photographers in New Topographics, among them Lewis Baltz, Frank Gohlke (who also appears in City Proper), and Robert Adams, were preoccupied with man-altered landscape and replaced the humanitarian poetics of the West’s earlier documenters—think Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, or Dorthea Lange—with calculated, uninhabited aloofness.

Zoe Crosher, "LAX Courtyard by Marriott," Lightjet print, edition of 5, 2005. Courtesy the Artist.

The City Proper is perhaps less aloof than coolly curious. It includes an array of angular buildings, empty city streets and urban nooks and crannies. Ger van Elk, an artist whose fascination with man’s role in modern landscape once led him to travel a canal via a small rubber dinghy and, later, navigate the Atlantic, has contributed a series of three color photographs, collectively titled The Co-Founder of the Word O.K.-Hollywood (1971). Each image has that vintage, William-Eggleston-worthy orange-heavy coloring, and each shows van Elk posed in profile to the right of a framed bubble letter “O.” He has propped up against a pole, column or building facade, and raised his own arm and leg to turn his body into the letter “K”–so he is “O.K.” on a residential street, outside a convenience store and a block from the Hollywood Colonial. Though cars line the streets and colorful signs interrupt the skyline, few other bodies appear in the shots. It’s as if van Elk is a pioneering tourist in a man-made but barely occupied amusement park.

Zoe Crosher’s series of LAX prints also have a vintage ambiance to them, though they were made between 2002 and 2005. They depict slightly gaudy hotel rooms near the airport, which means seas of cars and the occasional ascending plane can be seen from the windows. The camera always looks out—out the window, or out the sliding door—and the result is a vague feeling of yearning, but since there is no specified subject to attribute the feeling to, it just floats languidly on the image’s surface.

Brandon Lattu’s  angular, faux-minimalist boxes take bareness into three dimensions, presenting squares or rectangles covered by a solid color except for the murky photographic images of palm trees or city drags that peek out from the boxes’ edges. A similar nonsensical formalism characterizes Shannon Ebner’s Fixed Knot Fence, Los Angeles (2010), which shows a chain link fence crowned by barbed wire standing in front of a bare white concrete wall. Dry knotty tree branches create a formal frame around the perimeter of the image, making the scene geometrically, romantically rustic.

Brandon Lattu, "Random Composition 12-105," Pigment, polypropylene, paper, polystrene, and wood, 2010. Courtesy of Artist and Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Brian Forrest.

In his quietly sentimental book, Why People Photograph, Robert Adams, one of the first to train his lens on the man-altered landscape, tells a story about a friend, a photographer who remains unnamed. This friend used to take pictures along country roads by sticking his body up through the sun roof and steering with his feet. No one could convince him to abandon this practice, because, to him, the view felt so right and so real. I imagine the resulting photographs showed little direct evidence of the recklessness that made them. In fact, they may have been as austere as Adams’ own images, or as uninhabited as the images in The City Proper. But when Adams says his reckless friend inspired him to take “grand, unsafe pictures,” he more or less means he wanted his images to feel right, to capture the mood of a space as uninhibitedly as possible. The photographs in The City Proper are insouciant, open, and characterized by a certain bravery. They show the cityscape to be a technological, gridded construction that, while made by humans, does not necessarily need a human presence to sustain it, but they also seem bent on conquering the city in a way that suggests urban impassivity can be subverted by those determined to understand it.

From Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life” (1983)

Happy Thanksgiving from everyone at DailyServing!!!  We hope you go big this holiday season… real big.  Enjoy!

Verão (Summer), 2007. Courtesy of Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo.

The calling card of artist Rodrigo Matheus is double-sided: a enchantment of the everyday on one side, the reverse, a wry disillusionment. My first encounter with the work of Matheus was not his own artwork, but a curatorial project for the gallery Mendes-Wood in São Paulo. He brought together pieces that engaged perception and representation; there were works that played with optics and material, works that looked at the gallery structure, and a minimalist aesthetic that seemed to be strategy for incorporating the maximum amount of pieces to build up to a grand moment without overwhelming the exhibition space. This interest in representation and perception carries through in his own art. Matheus has often utilized the apparatuses of corporations, the mechanism of identity development and also everyday equipment and furnishings, to examine representation and perception, most often that of nature and art.

Criptonita (Kryptonite), 2008. Courtesy of Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo.

In his solo show Handle with Care at Galeria Fortes Vilaça in São Paulo, which runs through December 18th, Matheus expands and complicates his assimilation of the corporate institution by utilizing the accoutrements of art circulation within the gallery system. Here, the notion of a box, an apparatus used for both containment and circulation, is used as both raw subject matter and as a vessel to house videos. In a work reminiscent of Walead Beshty’s FedEx kraft and copper boxes, Caixa Pirâmide (Pyramid Box) are wood boxes that will bare the marks of their passage, the accumulation of stamps and labels reminding the viewer of the often invisible circuit operating behind artworks. Also exhibited among boxes is the video piece Patenon (Parthenon). 24 hours of Google Earth images of the Greek ruin are distilled into a 30 second loop creating a video that sits somewhere between postcard picture and video surveillance.

Handle With Care, 2010. Courtesy of Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo.

Hollywood, a concurrent solo show in Rio de Janeiro at Silvia Cintra + Box 4 will be up until December 11. Again, time and passages are looked at, but here through the imaging of the landscape of Rio de Janeiro. Delicately idyllic painting of the tropical environment partially cover concrete, neo-classical, decorative forms. Hollywood, as the title suggests, takes on the construction of representation, specifically an imagined colonial iconography.

Travel Expenses, 2008. Courtesy of Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo.

Matheus’s work is most successful when it embodies a topography of accessible, every-day technology that upends the construction of landscape – when the viewer, despite a framework of familiar technology and artificiality, still discovers a sense of wonderment. Representations of nature are often pushed through the sieve of technology to produce simulacra, but Matheus’s artworks are also a distillation of grand sensations into the human scale, carrying with them the legacy of Brazilian sensorial exploration. The use of industrially designed objects like humidifiers, fans, and spotlights to contain, organize, and model natural phenomena is a micro-scale experiment in forces, both natural and corporate. Work Station, 2008, is an installation environment that relishes in and transforms the everyday office. Computer monitors exhibit silent, uninhabited nature imagery from video games while artificial stone speakers play actual nature sounds. The non-functionality of the work station which runs parallel to an invented natural system asks the question: how do we apprehend the world?

Work Station, 2008. Courtesy of Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo.