On the day the Olympic torch relay was underway in Nagano, in Aomori the Towada Art Center opened its doors. I attended both the press preview and the opening ceremony on the following day, and later had a look at the exhibited works by a total of 21 artists plus the "Yoko Ono Entrance" exhibition (4/25-26).
The museum is located on Kanchogai Dori, an avenue lined with pine and cherry trees that was once selected as "one of Japan’s 100 most beautiful roads". No less beautiful a sight than the blossoming cherry trees, the museum itself was designed by Nishizawa Ryue. Every piece of the museum’s collection is a commissioned work, and I must say that Nishizawa’s idea to give each item its own building worked out well. In the evening, the facade of white painted steel plates is decorated with Takahashi Kyota’s colorful projections. There are of course several other projections on museum walls, such as Hiro Yamagata’s work for the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, but Takahashi’s simple, minimal yet powerful visuals are definitely among the better examples.
Including that projection by Takahashi Kyota, the exhibited works are all either "huge" (Choi Jeonghwa, Suh Do-Ho, Paul Morrison, Ron Mueck, Mariele Neudecker, Takahashi and Tsubaki Noboru), "colorful" (Choi, Federico Herrero, Jim Lambie, Michael Lin and Takahashi), "mysterious" (Ana Laura Alaez, Herrero, Kim Changkyum, Kuribayashi Takashi, Morikita Shin, Mueck, Ono, Hans Op de Beeck, Tomas Saraceno, Borre Sathre, Jennifer Steinkamp and Yamamoto Shuji), or "humorous" (Kuribayashi, Morikita and Yamagiwa Mitsuhiro). Comparable also to this year’s Singapore Biennale with its "Wonder" theme, the selection of artworks reflects an obvious attempt to appeal not only to art lovers, but lower the threshold for a broader audience. The strategy here is to make people wonder, "What the hell is that?" and then ask themselves, "So why is it 'art'?"
The assignment of Nishizawa came probably on the coattails of his success with the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. Like in the case of the reopened New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Nishizawa worked out the design together with his partner, Sejima Kazuyo. It remains to be seen, however, whether the future of the Aomori museum is as bright as that of the one in Kanazawa. Even after merging with Yamagata City in 2005, the population of Towada is still only about 68,000, so the circumstances surely can't be compared to Kanazawa, a city of more than 450,000. In Towada, there’s a campus of a farming university, and four high schools. The nearest art university is the Tohoku University of Art & Design in Yamagata, 270 kilometers (linear) away, so I guess the city has to rely on the roughly three million tourists that reportedly visit Towadako (Lake Towada) every year. That probably also played a role in the selection of works to exhibit at the museum.
The day after the opening, I rented a car and went to Osorezan (Mount Osore), one of the three major holy sites in Japan. It was still before the main season, so I was more or less the only visitor. Although the wind was strong, the weather was basically fine (just until it started raining cats and dogs as soon as I got in the car), as I drove through the sulfurous smell of volcanic gas and a scenery that looked pretty much like it must look like in hell, just to get knocked down by an army of pinwheel-carrying jizo guardians of aborted fetuses, and Buddhist graves with handmade grave markers, nameplates or just stones. The same kind of overwhelmingly nihilistic native power that no half-baked artwork can ever compete with I had witnessed before when visiting Auschwitz shortly after seeing Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin.
That, however, was only the beginning. On my way back from the mountain to Misawa Airport, from where I was going to fly back to Tokyo, I found out that the car was obviously equipped with a very old navigation system, as it refused to work along the way and fecklessly asked me to "consult an atlas" instead… Well, we're living in an age when every car is equipped with a navigation system, so there wasn't the slightest hope of finding something like a map in my rental car. Without anybody on the peculiarly neatly maintained road to ask for the way, I had no choice but to trust my intuition, or better, fly by the seat of my pants. Then, out of nowhere appeared a giant windmill, which turned out to be part of a wind turbine system comprised of several dozen tall, white towers with three-bladed rotors. I entered a windbreak forest of cedars and cypresses at the foot of the wind-power plant, and got totally lost.
For a moment I thought I was in the middle of a nightmare, just when I saw an ominous black shadow flying toward me on the road that was hardly lit by the few sunrays that made it through the dense forest. "It’s gonna hit me!!!" I caught myself screaming, which it didn't of course, because it was just a shadow. But as soon as it was gone, the next one appeared like the Grim Reaper in person with his big black scythe, while the car stereo played Ligeti’s "Atmospheres". You might know this eerie piece of obsessively reverberating sounds between ppp and fff from the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey." I felt how I was slowly going mad and screamed more…
Even after realizing that those were the shadows of a windmill that was driven by the strong wind, my pulse didn't really slow down. The next thing I saw was a legion of huge oil tanks, blue as Federico Herrero’s artwork, hemmed in violent colors like the one by Jim Lambie. This, as I learned later, was the "Mutsu-Ogawara National Oil Storage Base". The 50+ tanks contain about the same amount of crude oil as the entire nation is consuming in a week. The wind plant that had just scared me to death was the "Mutsu-Ogawara Wind Farm", one of the biggest in Japan, and not far from there is a nuclear fuel cycle facility, operated by Japan Nuclear Fuel Limited. I was in fact in "Rokkasho Village", the forefront of national energy politics, and the aim of Sakamoto Ryuichi’s "Stop Rokkasho" project. Two days earlier, on the morning of the press preview at the museum, Amari Akira, the Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, had handed a pledge to the Governor of Aomori Prefecture, Mimura Shingo, claiming that "Aomori will not become a final disposal site of high-level radioactive waste."
With my emotions still running high, I thought about whether there could be a piece of art that beats the surprise attack I had gone through. If things like this do happen in reality, then what do we need art for? Had I seen any piece of art at Towada that was more emotionally stirring? That reminded me of a certain artwork that I'd seen quite recently.
[ To be continued ]
Ozaki Tetsuya / Editor in chief / REALTOKYO