I'm just back from another busy journey across western Euope, visiting three major cities: Luxembourg, Brussels and Paris. There might (or might not) be occasion to write about Rosas' new piece "Keeping Still" that I saw in Brussels, the new art space "WIELS" that opened near Rosas' performance space, and a couple of exhibitions I saw in Paris sometime later. This time I'd like to focus on the "Tomorrow, Now" exhibition at the Musee d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg (MUDAM).
MUDAM is a new museum that just opened in July 2006 after several years of preparation. It was designed by I.M. Pei, and the director is Marie-Claude Beaud, the first director of The Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain. In a country that is known for being rather conservative, it’s a cutting-edge kind of space that is collecting high quality contemporary art, and organizing numerous ambitious exhibitions and workshops. The "Tomorrow, Now" show is the first design exhibition hosted by MUDAM, encompassing also several displays at places throughout the city prior to the museum’s official opening. With "science fiction and design", the makers chose a strange but quite exciting theme for this event.
What I admittedly didn't know until my trip is that the term "science fiction" was coined by Luxembourg-born American Hugo Gernsback. When launching the world’s first SF magazine "Amazing Stories" in 1926, he attempted to establish a new genre by combining "science" and "fiction" into "scientifiction". The magazine — a typical pulp magazine of the time — was renamed several times, and finally settled down with "Amazing Science Fiction".
The "Tomorrow, Now" exhibition starts with a large number of displays related to "Amazing Stories". The floor of the exhibition space was covered with black plastic grains that made visitors feel like walking on the moon or some other planet, and the white walls with gaudily printed magazine covers lined up on cheap paper. Shown in the next room were photographs of a large-scale future city diorama made for the 1939 New York Expo. When turning my eyes to the side, I realized that I was standing in front of a real 1953 (or somewhere around that year) Studebaker coupe, the prototype of a streamlined car that immediately became a top star in automobile heaven.
Displayed in the spatious center hall was a "Futuro House", only 100 of which were reportedly produced in the 1960s and early '70s. Again, it wasn't a reproduction, but a real one that was sitting there. Eight meters in diameter and three meters high, the UFO-like residential construction looked as if tailor-made for the hall. I learned that it belonged to a Belgian collector, and it was extremely well-preserved. Just clean up a little, and I'd move in right away!
In line with the "science fiction and design" theme, the exhibition included also a number of works of contemporary art presented from an SF and futuristic design point of view. In tandem with the rapid economic growth since the 1960s, Japan has been experiencing a boom of all things SF and futuristic. As if in reference to this fact, there were a handful of Japanese artists and designers represented as well. On display among tothers were Kawashima Hideaki’s paintings, Mori Mariko’s and Tsuzuki Kyoichi’s installations. I was actually looking for something by the late Otomo "Dr. Monster" Shoji, known for his illustrations for the good old "Shonen magazine", but all I found were three tiny sectional sketches of some alien called "Barutan-seijin" (Baltanian from the "Ultraman" series), disarmingly tucked in between a poster for Karel Capek’s "RUR" and a photo from Matthew Barney’s "Cremaster Cycle".
More imposing was a display of modern to contemporary chair design, from Bauhaus via Charles & Ray Eames to Mark Newson. Well, OK, a chair design exhibition, I thought without any deeper thoughts at first, but what I realized only later was that the idea behind this section was hidden in a Bauhaus movie poster on the wall. Shown there were photographs of chairs, demonstrating how over the course of only a few years an excessively ornamented chair made in 1921 gradually took on a very simple look. The photos included the dates the respective chairs were made, and one dated "19??" showed only a woman sitting obviously very comfortably, but nothing to sit on.
"There are thousands of exhibitions that just introduce outstanding designs from each era, but wwe thought that MUDAM’s first design show would have to come with a proper meaning and significance. In future-oriented furniture and design since Bauhaus, the desire to go "faster, higher, lighter" has always been involved. As shown in that poster, what designers were probably aiming at was some sort of invisible furniture. In my view, thanks to the advancements of technology and the development of new materials, this dream might in fact come true. For example, just look at this…"
Curator Alexandra Midal could have talked for hours if I let her. She spent three years traveling around the globe collecting pieces for the exhibition, and what she was pointing at in that moment was a stool designed by Kuramata Shiro. Enclosed in an — indeed almost "invisible" — acrylic body is, as if symbolizing the object’s lightness, a colored quail’s feather. Now is this the future we're grasping? Both Midal and museum director Beaud are of course no naive optimists. Plans of Superstudio’s "12 Ideal Cities" (1966) negating consumption incentive design and architecture serving the bourgeoisie, which were displayed in the "Protest: Dystopia" section, and Ettore Sottsass' illustration "The Planet as Festival" ('72-'73) hinted at the organizers' twisted thoughts. Our infinitely linearly developing society is in fact already miles away from the illusion of a rosy future.
1960s to early '70s, that’s when SF and futurology boomed, but it’s also the time the Vietnam War escalated, and antiestablishment movements were fluorishing in many advanced nations. While remembering such facts, I was hoping to catch some response from the conservative local media on Tsuzuki Kyoichi’s scandalous "Sperm Palace" (Toba SF Sex Museum), but I'm already out of time and writing space anyway. I might (or might not) be touching upon this again later anyway, and share some further thoughts once they've crystallized. One thing that I'd just like to mention is MUDAM’s cafe and museum shop distinguishes itself from those of most other museums around the world with originality that embraces everything from livery to dishes and drinks to art and design goods for sale. According to director Beaud’s policy, those aren't simply commissioned external businesses, but the shops are run by selected, talented cooks and artists. The "Tomorrow, Now" exhibition is another example of the same policy’s huge success. In the small capital with a population of under 80,000, of a small country with a population of just above 400,000, there is a small but highly ambitious museum that will have my undivided attention.
Ozaki Tetsuya / Editor in chief / REALTOKYO