“I JUST WANT YOU TO HAVE FUN”

Photo by Olivier Ouadah of Takeshi Kitano at ‘Beat Takeshi Kitano, Gosse de peintre’, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, 2010. From the Gosse de peintre site.

Takeshi Kitano has an art exhibition on until September in Tokyo, the same show that was at Fondation Cartier in Paris, 2010. Being a genuine jack of all trades and master of them all, Kitano is ubiquitous in Japan and something of a national treasure to them. British people could imagine David Dimbleby zipping off from Question Time to blow somebody’s brains out in a gangster film, while also featuring in various items of merchandise, while on another TV channel he’s doing silly and smutty skits about trying to get his end away, and in what little leisure time he has left he’s working on super-saturated paintings and glossy pop art sculptures. In fact I’d love to see David Dimbleby doing any or all of these things. I wonder if there’s any way I could make this happen?

Kitano is known in the West, if he’s known at all, as the washed-up teacher turned sadistic facilitator of a rigged, murderous game in Kinji Fukusaku’s film of Battle Royale (AKA the film and long-running manga/novel series about teenagers being forced to fight each other as a bread and circuses distraction from a fascist regime that the author of The Hunger Games somewhat implausibly denies all knowledge of…) or for occasional films of his that make it to the Anglophone world in the art house Trojan horse (Sonatine, Zatôichi.)

Or if you sign on you’re self employed and you live in the UK, you might know him from the British edits of Takeshi’s Castle that cycle around endlessly on various satellite or cable channels; like most Japanese gameshows, there’s a definite element of sardonic sadism or gung ho masochism– depending upon whether you’re a viewer or a contestant, respectively– although fortunately it stops short of actual homicide. As far as I know, anyway.

I wish I could see this exhibition, but I haven’t. I used to love seeing stuff like this when I was in Japan. That was very wanky, wasn’t it? I had to just drop that in for you all. Yes, I’ve been to Tokyo many times– what about you, plebs? What I’d really like to draw attention to, though, is Kitano’s statement about the exhibition, as seen in the video embedded below.

”I don’t define myself as a contemporary artist. I’m just a modest ideas maker. I feel very embarrassed when people define myself as an artist. I want to show pieces. Easy to understand, funny pieces. I want to share with you the pleasure that I had by creating this exhibition.”

THE DESPERATE UNCOOLNESS OF TAIWAN

Taiwan’s pavilion is in a grim upstairs dungeon attached to the Doge’s palace via the Bridge of Sighs, so called because prisoners passed over it from the palace to meet their usually horrible fates. In Venice, even the torture chambers are on the primo piano in case of floods. Torturers hate getting their feet wet. It may or may not be deliberate that the formerly dictatorial Taiwan’s pavilion is situated where the Doges would have their political or personal opponents browbeaten and tortured. Probably not. Plaques on the wall say “[famous person] was imprisoned here, [year] to [year]”.

Most of the presentation is more enthusiastic than good or exciting, like a commendable effort by enthusiastic A Level students. There’s a wobbly video of sugar mill workers making a sound work that initially doesn’t seem related to anything else. Most of the remaining periphery is occupied by what they call ‘Soundscape Taiwan’ or the ‘Sound Library/Bar’, which is essentially an adolescent audiovisual mix tape of Taiwanese indie bands, performance artists, DJs and so forth, with iPads running a slick interface.

Presumably this is all supposed to be very cool and maybe it is by Taiwanese standards, but it all seems rather naïve, a bit shoddy, blithely amateurish and embarrassing… overall not the worst thing you’ll encounter at the Biennale by an extremely long chalk but not very good either.

I suppose Taiwan can at least be praised for trying to be overtly youthful in a superannuated Biennale where any artist under 35 is considered “young” and “emerging” even if they’ve been in exhibitions for ten years, leaving us without a sensible definition for somebody who’s 22, talented and recently graduated. Some of the Biennale’s PR puffs and written material even crow about the fact that there are several people under 35 in the exhibition, as if it’s the curator’s achievement rather than than a triumph for the artists. Taiwan’s pavilion is also admirably upfront about the fact that the Biennale is (and always has been)  primarily a kind of advertising market for national identity, even if in practice the Taiwan team’s chosen manner of branding themselves seems a bit ill-judged.

One thing that is truly worth the effort of visiting is Hong-Kai Wang’s video installation ‘Music While We Work’; it’s related to the aforementioned sound recording video but is in an entirely different league to it. The installation is compelling and almost painterly, particularly as projected here onto somewhat light-absorbing stone walls that mute and smear out the HD harshness of digital video. The double screen projection features workers at a sugar processing factory in Wang’s home town, and their erstwhile colleagues occasionally lurking around with recording equipment. It’s not quite a documentary, just poetic, languid, nicely shot and well-edited images of factory workers with no commentary, romanticism or condescension. Wang’s work is the only grown up thing in the whole pavilion.

OFF PISTE AND PISSED OFF II: THE CLOUD OF GALLERY ASSISTANT ATTITUDE

The Singapore Pavilion’s ‘Cloud of Unknowing’ will probably remain “unknown” forever because the woman was refusing everybody entry on the grounds that there was too much of a cloud in there. Seriously, she said the smoke machine was making excessive smoke. This seems a bit like saying the sun makes excessive heat: true sometimes, but there are ways around such a problem if one applies a little bit of lateral thinking and common sense. All I can conclude based upon the available information is that the cloud, at least, is an actual physical one. I don’t think nobody being allowed in to “know” it was a conceptual act, though. I may be wrong.

I was sitting outside and gathering my hate I mean thoughts for a few minutes; she refused a steady stream of people who had stupidly made the effort to find the place and dared to assume they could actually visit the art work. I wonder if she ever let anybody in at all.

In short, Singapore Pavilion people, you might want to think about capitalising on being at the Biennale in Venice and hundreds or thousands of people being interested in your artist’s work instead of actively wasting their time and throwing it back in their faces. Five minutes more and she closed up entirely, then went flouncing off.

Basically she didn’t want to do any work that day and having visitors come in was annoying her. Gallery people, you’re not doing visitors a favour by deigning to let them see art. They’re supporting you.

GIARDINI III: GALAPAGOS SYNDROME

For a change, the little précis about the Japanese pavilion nails it: “… Japanese media art, which has been refined as part of a phenomenon known as the Galapagos Syndrome in which Japan, isolated from world standards, has evolved in wholly peculiar manner.”

This is perhaps also a typically Japanese understatement with a slight hint of apology. The Japanese art scene and what they consider proper art are (to my mind, anyway) thrillingly open-minded and unconcerned about the overly serious and self-important stuff that holds sway elsewhere. Sometimes this means that the sense of accessible, jolly inclusiveness disguises content that’s not as interesting as the aesthetic: but that’s exactly my point. Japanese art- and to some extent all east Asian art outside of the mainland Chinese art industry’s brutalising, acquisitive influence- is about ideas and feelings but doesn’t always see the need to go automatically for the very biggest ideas and feelings.  Small ideas and feelings can be beautiful. Sometimes it’s fine for art to just be pretty or clever or fun, whereas Western artists seem to have it drilled into them that all three of these things are strictly verboten and that they always have to pretend they’re the most intelligent person in the room: most especially if they really aren’t very bright at all.

Japan’s mirrored animation installation plays games with optics, space and one’s sense of distance in a similar way to James Turrell’s installation over at the Arsenale, but since it’s Japanese it does so by giving the impression of having your head stuck in a pinball machine instead of Turrell’s puritan minimalism- which I also like in a different way. I got no sense that Tabaimo’s ideas or the experience was anywhere as deep or wide as Turrell’s, or that the content was anywhere near as interesting as the technically accomplished production and set design. I’ve mentioned this kind of failure a few times already, but I’m more forgiving of style over substance victories when people don’t come along afterwards and try to lay down an intellectual smokescreen to cover up the resulting void of intellectual merit.

Nearby, the work in Korea’s pavilion looks like the work of three different artists: enormous fibreglass mannequins and the moulds they were cast from obviously having relationship issues; heavily armed, florally-camouflaged soldiers creep through an equally flowery environment in photos and video works; mirrors shatter themselves when looked into by visitors. Actually it’s all the work of one artist, Lee Yongbaek, and I really liked it all. In my experience, Korean galleries and artists rarely disappoint. Lee obviously skips around and follows his ideas all over the intellectual, artistic and genre landscape (as I try to do and love doing, and often cause bewilderment to art world people by doing), so there’s obviously a personal connection here too. A nice discovery.

Navin Rawanchaikul’s Thai pavilion is a kitsch spew of quasi-communist and cult of personality parody and ridiculous camp, but enjoyable rather than irritating. I don’t know whether it’s strange or entirely fitting that half of the Thai pavilion is actually a cocktail bar.

YUN-KYUNG JEONG: AXONOMETRIC

Sumarria Lunn Gallery, London, 10th May-4th June 2011

Your first visit to this gallery takes you down a long tiled stairway in a sort of genteel Mayfair equivalent of a back alley, all of which arouses strong apprehensions that the whole “invitation to a private view” thing might in fact be an elaborate ruse to lure you into a high class sex dungeon where you’ll be enslaved and chained to the wall as a permanent bum puppet for closeted Tory MPs; the kind of place I’m sure many of Mayfair’s posho art dealers have a more than passing acquaintance with. But no, put your gimp suit and ball gag away Sebastian, because Sumarria Lunn Gallery really is quite a nice little place.