Genre-crossing collaborations are tricky ventures. A few years ago, I went to see a piece that was realized in cooperation between a certain fashion designer, a composer of film scores, and a choreographer/dancer. Each of them was a distinguished master of his trade, and I like all their respective own works, so I was expecting quite a lot from their collaboration, but as it turned out, the visuals, music and dance didn't match at all, and the beautiful costumes looked as if they didn't belong there either. The most impressive thing of the evening was the nice color of the venue’s walls, and apart from that, it was a rather tenuous and plain forgettable affair.
After the show I met the producer, and quickly understood what was the problem. The visuals weren't ready until just a few days before the performance, and up to that point, the three of them hadn't met even a single time to work together. I know that they're all busy as hell, but these were just abnormal circumstances. When watching the news on TV and hearing the head of the Japanese Olympic committee say about the poor performances of the Japanese baseball and soccer teams at the Beijing Olympics, "Hoping to win by throwing some strong players together and doing a little training is way too optimistic," I remembered the producer’s glum face.
At the begin of the second term of Otomo Yoshihide’s "Ensembles" exhibition that is currently on view at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM), on 8/23 I went to catch a performance co-produced by Otomo and Takamine Tadasu. What I witnessed there was the outstanding result of an excellent collaboration (shown until 10/13). The piece is titled "Orchestras", which along with the exhibition’s main title reflects precisely Otomo’s orientation. Since it’s an "exhibition", the pieces shown necessarily have to be classified as "artworks", but as it seems, the leader of such bands as the Otomo Yoshihide’s New Jazz Orchestra (ONJO) opted to try and approach this event and the artworks exhibited in the same way he usually approaches his live concerts and recordings.
"Orchestras" is staged at Studio A, which usually serves as a venue for theatre and musical performances. While the artists make use among others of a little basement space under the stage, a looped visual installation of 40-minute sequences is shown on the upper floor. When I entered the dark studio, luckily the piece had just started. While my eyes were still struggling to deal with the darkness, a low frequency sound of a wind instrument began to fill the room like a wave that comes rolling from afar. The swell became stronger, and at the crescendo the sound abruptly stopped. At the same time, a light like a lightning flashed across the studio.
In the upper half of the studio, I spotted countless (well, quite a lot of) objects I couldn't identify suspended from the ceiling. On the floor in the center, there was a platform that resembled an Olympic cauldron, mounted on which were five mirrors of about 10x10 centimeters. Supposedly computer-controlled, they were spinning and moving up and down while reflecting the light of a spotlight on the ceiling. That little searchlight moved around as if licking over the unidentified objects, and this visual spectacle was at once a rousingly irritating sort of experience. Right when I looked at one object and almost knew what it was, the faint light moved over to the next and left me literally in the dark. Following "A Big Blow-Job", which Takamine exhibited at Art Tower Mito in 2004), and "Kagoshima Esperanto" at the Yokohama Triennale in '05, this is another remarkable example of controlling technique.
Once the lights in the studio went on, I saw that I'd looked at tables, desks, chairs, truck doors and body parts, snare drums and globes, short dresses, pants, etc. - in short, nothing but garbage and waste. Among them were (about 60, as I learned later) speakers, playing sounds that were of course created and arranged by Otomo himself, and then piano, drum, noise and chime sounds, various telephone conversations, and others. The way the piece built to the climax in the second half was phenomenal, and I dare say that there exist only a few artworks that stimulate the senses and emotions as intensely this. The explosion-like climax was followed by Ichiraku Madoka’s na_ve and simple glockenspiel rendition of "Stardust". Evoking images between womb and cosmos, and making me think of such expressions as "from the cradle to the grave", this was the only part that was in my opinion slightly over the top, but still I have to confess that I was genuinely moved. After the show I felt like having watched a movie rather than a work of art.
Both Otomo and Takamine are artists who I believe hide some sort of madness behind their calm and sometimes funny appearances. In this case, however, they took on the roles of co-producers in a way, to balance out each other’s artistic insanity. In an interview in the current issue of "ART iT" magazine, Otomo said, "If we were in a band, then I suppose I'd be something like the bandmaster," and Takamine replied, "Even in Dumb Type, of which I was a member, organizational theory was always an important topic of conversation." As a matter of fact, Takamine also makes pieces of performing arts (see "Out of Tokyo" 122), and his talent and sense as a producer are remarkable as well. My impression of the show was that main player Otomo took his guest Takamine by the hand, to set up a playground where the two of them could have some serious fun.
This exhibition, by the way, was reportedly the first occasion for the two artists to meet. Much different from the above-mentioned fashion designer, composer and dancer though, the hard-drinking artist and the abstinent musician spent night after night talking to pinpoint each other’s interests and tastes, and exchanging email after email in order to put their piece together in a painstaking but ultimately highly successful manner. Members of the YCAM team expressed their surprise and happiness, stating that they'd "never thought the project would inflate to this scale!" Two exceptionally gifted artists teamed up for the best collaboration in years, and I warmly recommend to go and see it if you have the chance. The basement exhibition was an interesting counterpart, but unfortunately I ran out of space…