A total of 33 mainly Tokyo-based contemporary art galleries were represented at the "ART@AGNES2008" art fair that was held on 1/11-13 at a hotel in Kagurazaka. With about 4,000 visitors, this fourth installment was reportedly a big success, probably thanks especially to last year’s live broadcast on J-WAVE radio. Regardless of the rainy weather on the second day of this year’s event, sales were reportedly going well according to a number of gallerists I met on the opening day.

 

The booth of Mujin-to Production, who participated for the first time, featured Chim Pom, a group of six young Aida Makoto students aged 30 or under. With a video showing Ellie, the only girl in the team, vomiting pink liquid, a charity project auctioning "private goods" damaged by landmines in Cambodia, or a performance gathering crows in the city with the help of sound recordings and stuffed specimen, Chim Pom are receiving quite some media exposure these says. Here on RT, Kubota Kenji reviewed their first exhibition "Super Rat" about a year ago in volume 41 of his "Tokyo Initiator’s Diary". That was also the first time I encountered their work, but it wasn't until last fall that I began to give another thought to their activities. Concretely speaking, it was after hearing that Costa Rican artist Guillermo Habacuc Vargas had unveiled an "artwork in which a dog is being mishandled".　It wouldn't be totally wrong to say that Chim Pom’s "Super Rat" is a "piece in which a rat is being mishandled". So, what is the difference between the two?

 

Let me first tell you more about Vargas' "work". I haven't seen it myself, so in the place of my own statement I quote Snopes.com, a website analyzing and verifying urban legends and rumors, commenting on a petition website launched with the aim to prevent Vargas from taking part in the Bienal Centroamericana Honduras 2008: "An 'artist' from Costa Rica, named Guillermo Habacuc Vargas, put a starved dog as a work of art, the poor dog died there, he did not want anyone give him food or water. This monster asked some children to chase the dog and he paid them for their dirty work to give him the dog. In that event, (in which the dog died) he was chosen to represent his country in the 'Bienal Centroamericana Honduras 2008', the petition site is to sign up to boycott him, so he won't can participate in the event." (sic)

http://www.snopes.com/critters/crusader/vargas.asp

 

The number of people who signed apparently approaches 400,000, however the Nicaraguan newspaper "La Prensa" is quoted (again on Snopes.com) as reporting that "the gallery’s director asserted that the dog was in fact well-fed, and that it had not died (of starvation or any other cause) but had escaped from the gallery during the night." The status of this case - judging whether or not the dog really died at the gallery - on Snopes.com is "undetermined".

 

Chim Pom, on the other hand, hunted black rats at Shibuya’s Center-gai at night, killed them by drowning, stuffed them, and colored them yellow to look like Pikachu. The finished artwork includes footage documenting the "hunt", and the actual, "posing" Pikachu specimen. The exhibition title refers to the city’s tough, so-called "super rats" that have developed immunity to rat poison, but it seems of course also to be a parody (or criticism) of Murakami Takashi’s "Superflat". The Artscape website published the following review by art critic Fukuzumi Ren.

 

"When kicking up a pile of garbage by the roadside, rats come jumping out in flocks. A group of people try to catch the countless animals that crisscross the streets with nets, but the super rats display astonishing athletic and learning abilities as they run and disappear in gaps, slip through the meshes, or manage to escape with unbelievable jumping power once they're in the net. When watching the footage of this fierce battle of trapping and escape, it looks much more like a 'human vs. rat' kind of fighting game than a bunch of youths during a clean-up campaign to brighten up the city. This kind of game in an urban setting certainly has a bit of a street gang running loose, but at the same time it almost looks like some hedonistic, ecstatic kind of ritual in which both Chim Pom and the super rats frazzle each other’s 'anima' to the maximum."

 

In my view, Chim Pom’s is by far the more elaborate of these two cases of "animal abuse", simply because Vargas' idea is just too worn-out and shallow. According to some other website, the artist himself explained about his work as follows. "The purpose of the work was not to cause any type of infliction on the poor, innocent creature, but rather to illustrate a point. In my home city of San Jose, Costa Rica, tens of thousands of stray dogs starve and die of illness each year in the streets and no one pays them a second thought. Now, if you publicly display one of these starving creatures, such as the case with Nativity, it creates a backlash that brings out a big of hypocrisy in all of us. Nativity was a very sick creature and would have died in the streets anyway." (from http://guillermohabacucvargas.blogspot.com/). In a nutshell, Vargas arguments from a "contextualistic" viewpoint, claiming that even the most ordinary thing can change its meaning and express criticism of the system once it is placed inside a white cube. This statement was again met with strong opposition.

 

Chim Pom, on the other hand, are miles away from even hinting at a contemporary art context. As a matter of fact, "Super Rat" bursts with originality and certainly doesn't lose its devastating impact even in environments as non-artistic as downtown streets. It is clearly the more aggressive piece, whereas in this respect of "aggressivity" it is the winner in an ethical sense as well, since, much different from the man who pays boys for chasing down a dog, in the case of Chim Pom humans (the artists) and rats are fighting in the same arena. It even reminds us of the harmony of man and nature as it used to be when our ancestors were facing bear and isana (whale) on a virtually equal basis.

 

If, as the director claims, the dog did survive, that’s a commendable thing, but it takes place in a dimension that knows no animal protection spirit or humanism, and the entire "work" is of such low quality that it is rather comparable to cheap porn in terms of sensationalism and scandalism. While lacking reference as a piece of contemporary art, Chim Pom’s work is clearly connected to the genealogy of simulationism. Asked about their intention, the artists explained with a complacent smile that it was "a work on the theme of coexistence of wild animals and humans in the city." Now that is one compelling statement!

Ozaki Tetsuya / Editor in chief / REALTOKYO