Impromptu 'pork flu' performance art & other observations from Tokyo

By Joshua Mack

An unintended piece of performance art relating to what one local friend called “the pork flu” greeted passengers arriving from North America around the time I landed at Narita. While my fellow passengers and I remained seated and immobile – as instructed by the crew – health officials dressed in outfits recalling 1950s sci-fi flicks bustled through the plane scanning passengers with heat-sensitive cameras and collecting cursory health questionnaires – distributed during the flight – seeking information about fevers and runny noses. As they raced up and down the aisles – it took 40 minutes and six attempts to match the number of passengers to that of the surveys collected – I noticed that in addition to latex gloves, Perspex goggles and a gauzy mask, one official was wearing white plastic rain boots. Others wiped their sweaty foreheads with hands in theory exposed to incoming contagion. Passengers were encouraged to don loose-fitting and flimsy paper masks of the sort I noticed an increasing number of commuters using – masks as effective against infection as Coca-Cola douches are against conception. In the meantime, while schools in Kobe, nexus of the pandemic’s manifestation in Japan, were closed to slow its spread, students were eagerly lining up to spend their accidental holidays in Karaoke bars.

But in Japan, more than in most other places, it's the performance of the rituals of conformity that matter, the theatre of courtesy that binds society. In many ways, the country is a careful confection of neon and choreographed behaviours, all of Tokyo a theatre, from the jingles that play on train platforms to announce arrivals and departures to the TV monitors and loudspeakers that beam adverts to street corners, a system that delivers and controls experience and provides some of the most refined consumer goods – and fabulous food – anywhere on the planet.

This calibration became staggeringly clear as I stumbled, jet-lagged, through the selection of work from the Thyssen-Bornemisza contemporary collection at the Mori Art Museum in Roppongi Hills. For those who don't know it, Roppongi Hills is a Japanese Getty Center, the top of a hill levelled and developed into luxury highrises replete with offices, condos, restaurants, boutiques and movie theatres that put your locals to great shame. In other words, it's the kind of place that makes work like Cerith Win Evans’s neon columns, Jim Lambie's striped floors and Jeppe Hein's reflective ball twirling disorientingly on the floor look embarrassingly low-tech. When the whole place elevates ersatz to city planning, Do-Ho Suh's gauzy rendition of the traditional gates to his family's Seoul home comes off as quaint.

Of course, work like Carsten Holler's Y-shaped walkways festooned with lights and reflected in multiple mirrors and Olafur Eliasson's reflective discs seemed chosen to appeal to a public used to structured experience. And the messages inherent in such work – ‘What is reality?’ ‘Question your perceptions!’ – fits Western ideas of what's amiss in Japanese conformity. But within the Tokyo context, it comes off as a 101 version of something the Japanese have taken to a whole new level.

Take +/- (the infinite between 0 and 1), Ryoji Ikeda’s show at MOT, the museum of contemporary art. Moving on from Tatsuo Miyajima's counting machines, Ikeda elevates the swirl of information and graphics, patterning and equating spit out by our computers daily into compelling moving images that nail the new spatial and temporal dimensions set up between microchips and the human mind. Watching his multiscreen installations is like tracking the pulse of binary calculation as processors transform it into information; it is also like envisioning thoughts and impressions forming inside the space you sense exists within your head. Space, time and information unite.

Then there’s his matrix (5th version) (2009), a gallery-size installation of speakers that produced a sickening, skull-crunching hum, suggesting that technology, as it comes to redefine our very sense of space and time, is far from gentle or neutral.

Where Ikeda hinted at the future of the work at the Mori, Waiting for Video, at the National Museum of Modern Art, revealed its precedents. This is the kind of show major museums in the West should be mounting, a survey of video from the 1960s to the present with multiple examples of early pieces by a who's who of greats – John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, Robert Smithson, Valie Export, Lynda Benglis and Joan Jonas – to experimental work from the 1970s by Hitoshi Nomura and Saburo Muraoka, Tatsuo Kawaguchi and Keiji Uematsu. Arranged by themes like Mirror and Reflection and The Dematerialization of Art, the show functions as a primer for the kind of critical and investigative thinking that underlies the plethora of contemporary work challenging the function of the media and probing the relativism of personal experience.

I'd never seen Martha Rosler's Semiotics of the Kitchen or Baldessari's tongue-in-cheek I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, but as someone who is constantly amazed at how much innovative work was made in Japan in the 1950s and 60s, and how little known it is even in its home country, I was most taken by the work of Hitoshi Nomura. In Turning the Arm with a Movie Camera: Person, Landscape (1972), he stands in a public park and swings his camera in various circles. The dizzying images of sky and trees he captures follow footage of him hefting the camera. This is similar to something Steve McQueen did years later. In Jun. 1972 – Oct. 1973 or The Brownian Motion of Eyesight, still images of quotidian scenes click by at four images a minute. It's a spare and formally beautiful, if symbolic, chronicle of how dull life and how random individual visual experience can be. It also cuts through the theatre and effects that seem to rule so much of Japanese public life to reveal the personal and individual behind it.