'Space for Your Future' was 'Space of the Museum'.

A Good New Year.

January 5th 2008, and my first outing to a museum exhibition is ‘Space For Your Future’ at Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (MOT), curated by Yuko Hasegawa. Although I arrived early at around 11am, the galleries were buzzing with visitors. This is a show about a curator trying to probe new aesthetic criteria for new times, a show brazenly wearing its ‘future-vision’ goggles, and a show with not a single painting in it. Curatorially, Hasegawa proposes that we are living in an age when different genres and disciplines must engage one another and actively feed off one another, encouraged by the speed and ubiquity of the internet and new technologies. It is, though, an age of few visions or optimism, an age when no one quite knows where to head. I would like to write at more length on the phenomenon of cross-genre exhibitions etc. at a later stage, so here I will simply note what I thought worked best in the show.
SANAA’s ‘Flower House’ (2007) was for me the centre piece of the exhibition. Poised gracefully on the uppermost floor of the museum, the installation comprised a half scale model of a house made out of curving transparent Perspex materials covered by a flat roof. Inside the house were little chairs, tables, a bed and dozens of potted plants with dried flowers in them. The entire house was surrounded by green potted plants, and a few chairs. I sat in a chair and surveyed the house, imagining myself strolling through its shapely spaces.

SANAA, 'Flower House', 2007, installation at MOT.

The gallery lighting had, moreover, been replaced by hanging tungsten lamps to presumably keep the potted plants growing. This small detail really got me excited about the installation. It was a detail which pushed the boundaries and codes of the museum so that it could sustain life. John Cage used to say that exhibitions should include plants and stones here and there to make them livable spaces, and in its own way, SANNA’s installation perfectly captured a sense of life in the normally austere surroundings of museum galleries. Great cheers for potted plants in galleries!

Exceedingly good mushrooms.

It was good to see works by Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Bless and Hussein Chalayan. The psychedelic Brazilians made a two-storey wooden construction adorned with their usual colorful patterns, mobiles, sand and fluorescent paint. One could go upstairs or into small rooms with little cushions to sit on. The installation should have served as the show’s café or tea shop so that people could actually spend time relaxing in its nests. Simply constructing it inside one of the museum’s galleries really deadens it, makes it mute. I felt something similar with the installation and video documentation of Bless. Their work felt like a contemporary version of Thomas Couture’s massive painting hanging in the Orsee Museum entitled ‘Romans of the Decadence’ (1847) which depicts a huge orgiastic feast. I understand that the video documentation playing in their space was from a fashion show in Paris where the models played a game loosely based on soccer while wearing the clothes.

Bless, still from video of fashion show.

Thomas Couture, 'Romans of the Decadence', 1847.

For an exhibition which purported to expound and explore new aesthetic directions and ‘genes’ for art, Space For Your Future remained well behaved in the sense that much of the work was restrained from flowering fully, from becoming. The limitations and restrictions of the museum institution seemed to blunt many of the works, which needed to be touched, sat on, mulled over, slouched on and generally engaged with on more than a visual level. The experience of seeing the show became a bit like flipping through one of those cross-genre magazines which adorn the shelves of Tsutaya or Aoyama Book Center. I wanted to feel more heat. I presume that heat is generated when two or more foreign objects begin to vibrate closely to one another. However, the show had a strangely clean and cool air to it which made me think that some bigger power or force was preventing the vibrations from taking place.

'0-10, The Last Futurist Exhibition of Pictures', Petrograd, 1915.
"The exhibition was to display a complete renewal in art, as Malevich wrote to the composer Matiushin in May 1915, 'we intend to reduce everything to zero...and will then go beyond zero'. It was to be the Last Futurist Exhibition, the end of Western European domination of the Russian avant-garde, and the beginning of a new age". (from The Avant-Garde in Exhibition. New Art in the 20th Century, Bruce Altshuler, University of California Press, 1994, p. 78.)