MoMA and Guggenheim Go Head-to-Head in Tokyo
By C.B.Liddell
Since the opening of the Mori Art Museum (MAM) last year, the artistic temperature has started heating up here in Tokyo. Installed on the 52nd and 53rd floors of the brand new Roppongi Hills Mori Tower, MAM is now the place to see and be seen for the city’s self-conscious art lovers.
Not long ago the trendy hot spot was the Bunkamura, located in Tokyo’s bustling youth center of Shibuya. The rivalry between these two premier private art venues was recently highlighted by their main exhibitions of the year, both of which featured modern art from major New York collections.
MAM got its punch with "Modern Means," an exhibition devised by David Elliot, its British-born director. The show featured a massive 252 items borrowed from MoMA, a gesture made possible by the donor museum being closed for renovation and rebuilding work (supervised, ironically, by Tokyo-born architect Yoshio Taniguchi).
While this exhibition was still running (it closed August 1), the Bunkamura retorted with "Treasures from the Guggenheim," curated by Guggenheim’s Lisa Dennison with the assistance of Bunkamura curator Masao Miyazawa, and scheduled to run through October 11.
Although this second show only featured a third of the items at MAM, both shows proved varied and attractive. At MAM, the large pile of candies by Felix Gonzalez-Torres stacked up in a corner – with an offer to take one – energized visitors, who were also amazed by Tom Wesselmann’s giant "Smoker, 1 (Mouth 12)" (1967), showing a man-sized cigarette dangling from a heavily lipsticked mouth. The Bunkamura delighted audiences with the accessible stylization of Picasso’s "Woman With Yellow Hair" (1931), the vibrant colors and vibrating forms of Jan Dubuffet’s "Propitious Moment" (1962), and the stunning photo-realism of Richard Estes’ picture of the Guggenheim’s famous rotunda.
Visitors to both exhibitions were struck by how many artists she shows had in common — Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky, de Chirico, Ernst, Pollock, Lichtenstein, and Warhol, to name a few. Asked about this obvious overlap, Elliot seems in denial: "The only overlap is that both shows are drawn from the collections of New York museums," he refutes, "otherwise they have no similarity other than a few overlapping names."
Miyazawa, however, is unfazed by the accusation of treading on the toes of his rival.
"There are no big differences between the two exhibitions, except for the number of art works," he admits. "But I think their exhibition is a bit more manifest and more oriented to contemporary art."
Although the material is similar, the cloth is cut in radically different ways, revealing sharp museological differences between East and West. By appointing a foreign-born director, MAM is clearly setting out its stall as the innovator on the Tokyo art scene. With "Modern Means" the intention is followed through with the material organized not in the typical, chronological walk-through loved by Japanese curators, but according to several non-chronological themes – "Primal, Reductive, Commonplace, and Mutable" – that reflect the postmodern notion of history and culture as a kind of matrix in which many different links can be made across time and space.
For example, the clanging, radiant fauvist hues of Derain’s "Bathers" (1907) and the brusque, brutal, almost misogynistic strokes of Willem de Kooning’s "Woman II" (1952) can both be cast as primitive, while the masterly Cubism of Juan Gris’s "Still Life" (1911) and the characteristic black lines and color fill of Piet Mondrian’s "Trafalgar Square" (1939-43) are clearly products of the reductive.
Encouraging people to make connections between different artists, movements, times, and places is more in keeping with Western museological thought, expressing a postmodernist deconstruction of the heroic modernist storyline of art as a succession of ever progressive developments, each one inevitably leading to the next.
However, while this approach may be increasingly favored in the West, the hushed reverence with which Japanese audiences approach modern art suggests they still retain faith in its great progressive narrative. It is perhaps for this reason that the Bunkamura keeps to the typical chronological walk-through of Japanese museums. "The Guggenheim actually wanted us to have separate, unconnected rooms," Bunkamura observes. "But Japanese audiences are more passive so we suggested a route system would work better."
The chronological, single route approach is even signposted in the exhibition’s subtitle, "From Renoir to Warhol." Accordingly, we are greeted at the entrance by the French Impressionist’s "Woman with Parrot" (1871), a picture of an overdressed lady in an overfurnished interior – not the ideal subject matter for an impressionist. This creates an image of stuffy Victorian conservatism that the rest of the exhibition quickly strips away, as we soon encounter the lurid colors of Frantisek Kupka’s large confident nude, "Planes by Colors, Large Nude" (1909-10) and the Dadaist excess of an early Max Ernst, "City with Animals" (1919).
Although the chronological framework makes the exhibition a little predictable, it also helps visitors to detect one of the central rhythms of 20th century art, the constant fluctuations between the abstract and figurative, which can be observed as we traverse from the abstraction of Kandinsky, Miro, and Motherwell to the figurative art of Magritte, Leger, and Warhol. The celestial harmonies solicited by Kandinsky’s "Several Circles" (1926) are countered by the unstated menace created by the mysterious yet precisely painted orbs hovering over the countryside in Magritte’s "The Voice of Space" (1931), an emblem of alien invasion that has an additional resonance in a city that is forever subject to outside trends.
Indeed, the main thing to stand out from these two exhibitions is the degree to which this vast Asiatic city is culturally dependent on the West when it comes to modern art. New York and other Western cities have infinitely richer collections. This constantly places Tokyo in the inferior position of borrower, with its museums becoming surrogates of major overseas collections and subject to curatorial trends and dictates from abroad. This is tantamount to a kind of artistic colonialism.
"Japan has always taken what it has needed from other cultures and then transformed it into something else," he replies optimistically. "But I agree that there are what appear to be colonial ambitions on the part of some quasi-global museums. In Japan, where there have been many such exhibitions, the foreign museum is almost reduced to the level of a brand name – a guarantee of quality – but also a commodity that happens to have a collection of art. They have been paid handsomely to adopt this role and that is no doubt why they have done so."
Elliot hopes that by encouraging Japanese audiences to question the traditional values behind modern art, they will escape from their conservative reliance on Western ‘art brands.’ The success of "Modern Means" and "Treasures from the Guggenheim" suggests the trend is moving in the opposite direction.
