naoshima + teshima | art afar

view from tunnel | go'o shrine [hiroshi sugimoto]

view from below | your first color [pipilotti rist]

last boat off or on | teshima ferry terminal [sanaa]

spaceships one and two | teshima museum [ryue nishizawa]

view from one side of a wall | teshima island

view from corner | afrum, pale blue [james turrell]

view from lounge | honmura archive [ryue nishizawa]

view from one side of a hole | teshima museum [ryue nishizawa]

view from cooridor | chichu museum [tadao ando]

A little over a week before I left Japan, I sallied forth from the Tokyo metropolitan area. My objective? The Teshima Museum, by Ryue Nishizawa, one half of the duo that makes up SANAA. The building is an unapologetic extravagance, holding exactly one artwork, by Rei Naito. It is also comically hard to access; roughly halfway through the six separate legs of the trip from Kyoto to the museum, it occurred to me that this was a rather quixotic excursion, even by my standards (which are exceptionally high, or low, depending on how you look at it). It was a prescient thought; by the time I was back on the train to Tokyo, it was clear that I had been tilting at follies all along.

It was an appropriate capstone to my time in Japan: I came here in large part because of the unusual propensity of well-known Japanese architects to continue creating installations once they have begun to receive building-scale commissions. This contravenes the established practice in much of the US and Europe, in which installation-scale works tend to be seen as a stepping stone to larger and more permanent projects. And I have not been disappointed – everyone that I’ve spoken to, from Jun Aoki to Sou Fujimoto to Kengo Kuma, has had insightful and interesting things to say on the subject of the architectural installation. At the same time, the very ubiquity of the type has given rise to a number of difficult questions about the nature of the “installation” itself, and its role in my research.

one of naoshima's most photographed (and absurd) attractions

Teshima and Naoshima placed these questions, which had been simmering in the background, square in front of my face. A bit of backstory: a corporate oligarch who hails from the shores of Japan’s Inland Sea decided a number of years ago to wield his wealth in a rather extraordinary way, commissioning Tadao Ando to design several showpiece buildings in which a very few, very famous artworks would be placed. As one example, the Chichu: a museum that houses nine masterworks by three artists inside of a building that is itself a masterpiece. Another museum doubles as a hotel – one can, famously, wander the galleries after hours in pajamas or ride a six-seat monorail to a guests-only exhibition space.

The Art House Project represents the extension of these ideas to the residential landscape of the islands at large, in which artists take unoccupied houses in the declining fishing villages on Naoshima and Teshima (and now Inujima ) and transform them full stop into artworks. The installation is the building is the installation. They range in quality from the trite (a big neon-lit simulacrum of the statue of liberty) to the sublime (a collaboration between James Turrell and Tadao Ando), but as a set they seem the apotheosis of the installation as a form.

They were also long way away from what I am seeking in my work. I thought of a conversation from my first few days in Tokyo, with Tom Heneghan, an architect and professor at the Tokyo Fine Arts University. Over the course of our chat, Tom quite affably picked away at the edges of my project, questioning what exactly was in bounds and what was out. I am practiced at defending my interpretation of the word “temporary”, but his focus on another word, “installations”, caught me rather less well prepared.

thoroughly installed: pipilotti rist's multimedia piece "your first color" occupies an abandoned fisherman's hut to striking effect

In a comment that has stuck with me since, he put it to me that “art installations are creating some friction with their site – the architecture ones aren’t”. The artworks I saw on Naoshima and Teshima certainly upheld this observation: they were inextricably tangled with their site in a way that transcended location and took “place” in as a foundational force. Yet they also lacked (and understandably so) much that the “architecture ones” tend to possess: an attention to the material and physical processes by which a volume of space is defined. Moreover, they also tend to forsake (less understandably, to me) a sense of their social or political context – they engage their physical, geographic and sometimes historic sites, but they are often loath to address more human realities.

Realities (of several sorts) were, not coincidentally, at the center of my conversation with Sou Fujimoto the day after I returned from the Inland Sea. Reality, or rather the lack thereof, said Sou, is precisely why the installation doesn’t much interest him as a type. He is more interested in pushing his ideas (which are odd) and his spatial conceits (which are also odd) into direct contact with real life and real people and real goals, and negotiating the conflict and compromises that arise from that meeting.

My research, then, continues to be an area defined by intersecting voids: the absence of site in architectural installations, the absence of architectural or political ideas in art installations, the absence of formal ideas in political and activist interventions. As my time in Japan draws to a close, one of the things I am left with is the instinct that what I am working towards may not be an “installation” at all – that category seems always already filled with other, different things.

Instead, it is a way of working that embraces a physical and temporal scale, and aesthetic awareness, familiar to the installation, but throws these things into contact with quotidian urban realities. That, I think, is what I am after. Whatever it might be called.

nathan john

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