A couple of shows just opened at the Mori Museum - 'The Smile in Japanese Art' organised by Yuji Yamashita and 'All About Laughter' curated by Mami Kataoka. Both take humor and laughter as hubs from which to survey various forms of art.
Haniwa, rabbit (6th-7th Century Japan.)
On entering the Museum, one first passes through the 'Smile in Japanese Art' exhibition, installed in dark rooms and containing what seemed to be a treasure trove of works on scrolls, carvings and paintings. Visitors are greeted by ancient earthen figurines and animal sculptures (see above), which seem to smile enigmatically through simply made eye holes. They made me ponder the whole culture of cute characters in Japanese society, and how perhaps they are, in the end, ingenious methods to delay or avoid having to think too deeply about our inevitable end. In fact what struck me throughout this exhibition was how the smile as seen in many of these traditional works seemed to be strongly related to death, dying and fate - very often through the medium of some religious parable or metaphor. The laughing faces of various Zen monks painted energetically on scrolls seemed to know something that perhaps we have forgotten, or choose to ignore. And, so fittingly, I found myself thinking about such things as I entered the second exhibition focusing on contemporary artists works.
It is a huge show with many single video projections, monitors and works sharing open spaces, at moments too tightly crammed into even the large galleries of the Mori. But I think this is how Mami likes it - in fact the exhibition felt somehow familiar and halfway through, I realised why: it felt like The Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery while Mami was Director there.
The exhibition is divided into four sections, beginning with a small but wonderfully displayed survey of Fluxus, Hi-Red Center and 1960s works. After this initial historical prelude, in effect, the rest of the show could almost have been one large continuous parade of artists working today. The section dividers seemed to fade into the background, I think partly because of the sheer scale of the show which made one adopt a browsing posture rather than a slow, learning one. In this sense the exhibition display was carnivalesque and Bacchanalian, a visual and physical assault. At times it was hard to relate certain works with the thematics of the show but, like biennales, a certain scale probably loosens curatorial formalities. There was a moment when a small girl with her mother put a white handbag, part of Erwin Wurm's silly postures installation, over her head spontaneously and her mother kept saying in hushed tones to her to take it off because it looked ridiculous. Standing next to this small drama (pictured above), I was made aware of how momentary and fleeting laughter is.
The other moment I found myself laughing out loud was watching John Bock's video 'Dandy', in which John plays a character inspired by a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. Having worked with John on the first Yokohama Triennale and knowing something of his character no doubt affected by watching, but he is without question a master of a certain mutated slapstick. In the video he was collecting the farts of his assistant maid into a strange looking machine and having an epiphany sniffing it - yes, admittedly it is very 'Benny Hill' or 'Drifters'.
Fun aside, the exhibition prompted questions about the act of laughing today, and whether there is indeed anything really to laugh about now. I tend to agree with the great Woody Allen on this - he says that everything is a tragedy in the end, moving towards some kind of collapse, and that comedy or laughter is always done to mask or bear this reality. I also thought about laughter as something we actually never do alone - it seems to be an act we do at something or someone, with someone, for someone, in relation to something or someone. Laughing seems to be something we do because we are social creatures, trying somehow to make the best out of the situations we find ourselves in.
A surprise for me was the omission of Martin Kippenberger from the show - one of the key Jokers of contemporary art? 'All About Laughter' is an enjoyable exhibition with a certain 'magazine' quality about it. But I was unsure if it really managed to investigate the various aspects of laughter it set itself through the sections - I ended up reflecting on the smiling faces from the traditional show and thinking that laughter is probably, in the end, something deadly serious.
I had to take a picture of this sign in the museum shop.
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