rapt! blog

Yutaka Sone's “Animal Fountain”

2006-10-25T16:09:00.000+10:00

Yutaka Sone’s Animal Fountain occupies the front half of RMIT Project Space. One of the apparent principles of the work is the desire to confound the natural and the artificial. The work is an installation with a functioning fountain placed in an outdoor setting complete with deckchairs and the kind of waxy fronded plants that look fake even when they are not.

The fountain is a bit rough and ready in the way it has been assembled. Bricks and tiles are plonked here and there and the whole thing is even crowned with a curious lampshade. The animals mentioned in the title, among them small ceramic sculptures of a turtle and platypus, are placed in and around the fountain. They are mildly unattractive, featuring the dated colours and shapes that suggest they were sourced locally from an op shop.

Steam rises from the pool of water in small bursts as if hidden gaseous deposits are bubbling up from underground. I suppose the work is referring to Marcel Duchamp’s seminal readymade, Fountain, and also to Japan’s famous hot springs. I’m unsure whether this reading is overly simplistic or just too obvious, since I’m short on knowledge and experience of Japanese art and culture,

Before practising visual art, Sone trained as an architect and his concern with the cultural meanings that accrue within space governs much of his work. I’ve seen an artwork by Sone once before. Called Double River Island, it was on display in the Japanese Pavilion at the Biennale de Venezia in 2003. This work has features in common with Animal Fountain in that they’re both landscapes, and feature scenes or settings simulating alternative worlds. Yet, in Animal Fountain, it is difficult to determine whether the work is a literal or symbolic representation of space. If it’s the latter then is it pretending to be a fantasy or utopic space of primal elements and creatures from fables, or that of a garden centre retail display? The work is not really a readymade because the objects haven’t been entirely removed from their everyday contexts, but it’s not completely literal either because of the artful placement of the elements within the gallery and the clear intentions that have governed the composition. The installation seems to be able to have it both ways.

RMIT Project Space features a full-length window onto Cardigan Street and right next door are window displays for the TAFE creative merchandising course. When a visitor approaches from the street, on the left they encounter a gallery that looks like a retail space, despite intentions to the contrary, and to the right the shop-front for an educational course pretending to be retail windows for fashion and other sorts of merchandise.

Yutaka Sone may have only had a brief opportunity to familiarise himself with the gallery space during the installation period, yet his work cleverly exploits the ambiguity of the gallery’s front window and its situation. If Sone’s is a fantasy space then it’s the fictional world of a Bunnings in-store garden display, but if it’s a real space then it’s one you could only find in an art gallery.

Posted by Christine Morrow
Photos: Christian Capurro

Giving back: Rei Naito’s reconnaissance of Birrarung

2006-10-21T20:08:00.000+10:00

Last Friday afternoon, 13 October, over 40 intrepid Rapt! supporters left the haze of the CBD behind and ventured out to the clearer skies of Birrarung in Eltham to join in a performance led by resident artist Rei Naito. Most had made the journey by bus, some carpooled from various points, while locals simply walked.

We walked reverently through an empty 70s mud-brick house, vacant except for the deliberate interruptions placed by Naito. Lengths of string hung freely from the ceiling, window frames and timber beams, beckoning visitors to blow on them. Paper circles contained messages like, ‘No need to be anything… come’. These were stacked on the floor waiting to be picked up, while a collection of small clay pots bound with string hugged the perimeter of each room.

A select number of visitors were requested to collect one of these pots or ‘boats’. As small clay offerings, the vessels were about to be returned to their birthplace. As each participant held the pot gently in the palm of their hand, they were lead down to the edge of the Yarra River by Naito. A short walk soon found the visitors clambering down riverbanks to the edge of the water, where they would conclude and celebrate Naito’s residency. Once all had made it to the river and with no formal ceremony or announcement, participants gently began to place their unfired clay pots into the water. Some sank immediately, as their centres filled with water, while others floated away in silence, and slowly disintegrated as they ebbed and flowed with the rhythms of the river. All that remained was a trail of clay fragments that were eventually reclaimed into the clay riverbed of the Yarra.

Just as the clay dissipated so too did the tranquil participants, who headed back to toward grey city skies; and accordingly this series of serene interventions by Rei Naito came to a gentle close.

Rei Naito’s work continues at Birrarung until 29 October 2006. Birrarung is in the Nillumbik Shire Is at 195 Laughing Waters Road, Eltham, Victoria
Posted by Sarah Bond
Photos: Christian Capurro

Kyota Takahashi’s Public Projection

2006-10-18T15:28:00.000+10:00

On Thursday and Friday evening last week, Kyota Takahashi presented a live public projection on the tower of the former Melbourne Power Station at Lonsdale and Spencer Streets, Melbourne. Anyone who has seen Takahashi’s work at Spacement will have observed that he manipulates images in conjunction with the projection (and mirrors) to create distorted perspectives. As a video sequence, the piece at Spacement renders a human shadow in motion, whereas the projections on the tower were more inert, being a series slides rather than rolling footage. This slowness lent itself to the form of the tower, as an object of striking stature; anything faster would have spun out the locals. Once again Takahashi’s light-work reduced complex imagery into powerful silhouettes that, in the live projection, took the form of biomorphic abstraction.

Lieko Shiga’s Golden Mirage

2006-10-17T15:27:00.000+10:00

If you’ve ever spun a tale around a complete stranger you’ll appreciate what happens when you meet with Lieko Shiga’s images. Compelling stories extend from the works and writhe though your imagination like tentacles of a deep-sea creature: a woman nestles into an old couch, oddly comfortable with the spectre of a mammoth sheep’s skull. A family poses behind an open fire, which seems to be burning in another time. Phosphorus rain as radiance, skeins of glowing embers, pigments smearing, tearing and plummeting into darkness. How can these be photographs? Their flesh gives a clue to their true nature: they’re analogue works, created though multiple exposures of images on paper in the printing stage of darkroom processing.

As a mechanical process, photography is mostly thought to be in the realm of the rational. Yet photos also capture information imperceptible to the human eye and the effects, consequently, are believed to pertain to the supernatural. Apart from accidents of light and chemistry, many of these impressions are old tricks of photography, developed in pursuit of 19th-century obsessions with ghosts and the fancy that the otherworldly or phantasms might be captured in photos. Ectoplasm photography became such a craze during this period that a whole genre of photography emerged, explored in the historical exhibition, The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, held at the Metropolitan Museum, New York in 2005. A lot of these shots are feebly staged and appear ridiculous but offer a fiction that, in their time, was surely embraced with a little irony. Shiga’s photos, however, are utterly faithful, having none of the histrionics of the 19th-century stagings; in her images the people and their stories are real.

Lieko Shiga was the very first artist we met on our study tour of Japan in September 2005 and even at the end of twelve overwhelming days of gallery visits the Australian group remained enamoured with her uncanny images. The Golden Mirage is the outcome of her five-week residency in Brisbane, and is a languid arrangement of photographs at Seventh Galllery in Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, in which the humidity of Brisbane’s gelatinous air is suspended in glossy prints. To be on the outside looking in can be an unpleasant experience and yet Shiga’s series of photographs embrace the strangeness and irresistibility of chance encounters with strangers.

Posted by Lily Hibberd
Thanks to Kyla McFarlane for the reference to the The Perfect Medium.

Rapt! launch at LOOP bar Melbourne

2006-10-13T13:29:00.000+10:00

Every shindig has its unravelling and so on a freakily hot spring night in Melbourne the Rapt! launch was unwrapped on Thursday night, with party-goers at LOOP crammed into the steamy little space. Composure was maintained for the duration of the event, with the formal launch of the program made by Mr Yoshiyuki Ueno, Director of The Japan Foundation, Sydney, pictured below.

Simon Maidment made a fantastic yet apt remark as MC, describing Rapt! as: “The biggest collaborative project ever undertaken between Japan and Australia”. Other important visitors from Japan shown here (from left to right) are members of the Rapt! curatorial advisory team, Taro Igarashi (Architectural Historian, Tohoku University), Kyoji Maeda (Art Critic with Yomiuri Shimbun) with Max Delany (Director of Monash University Museum of Art).

Photos: fabulous Christian Capurro

"Dr Toilet’s Rapt-up clinic" at Kings ARI

2006-10-11T17:41:00.000+10:00

I wear my sunglasses at night
So I can, so I can
Watch you weave
Then breathe your story lines
And I wear my sunglasses at night
So I can, so I can
Keep track of the visions in my eyes
Corey Hart (1983)

Let one-hit-wonder Corey Hart’s tune Sunglasses at Night set the mood for an encounter with Naohiro Ukawa’s Dr Toilet’s Rapt-up clinic, an artwork comprised of a block of toilets, surveillance cameras, one-way mirrors, disco lights and sunglasses. Walking into the main gallery of Kings ARI, visitors will immediately note a large architectonic installation, a five-cubicle toilet panopticon. Each cubicle has headphones and a pair of sunglasses. Accessorising endows participants with audio and visual sensory effects: psychotropic video and a combination of ‘noise’ or sound art and live internet streaming of ten Japanese television channels (mirroring Ukawa-san's server computer in Tokyo), of which Ukawa has said that staff can change channels whenever they feel like it. Exposure to these audio-visual elements elicits a deep brain massage, escorting spectators into a state of total relaxation, not dissimilar to the initial stages of sleep, which is a scary thing to do while on the toilet.

The adjacent gallery contains another component of the installation, with four video projections presenting surveillance footage of the panopticon toilet. This space is clearly meant to be a ‘viewing room’, in which voyeurism is promoted. It was funny to see VIPs on the opening night hovering in the surveillance room to avoid entering the panopticon toilet. For those heeding the call of nature, the King’s functioning public toilet exposed them to the third part of Dr Toilet's Rapt-up clinic, where Ukawa set up a closed-circuit television with more live footage, providing lavatory users an even weirder perspective on the uncomfortable inhabitants of the panopticon toilet.

Ukawa’s work presents a number of slippages between public and the private spheres. But how does Dr Toilet’s Rapt-up clinic respond to the theme of the Rapt! project? The project title, ‘rapt’, refers to techno-culture and notions of immersion and absorption. In the Rapt! catalogue, the project’s curators postulate that immersive and sensory-based experiences are symptomatic of contemporary Japanese youth culture. This symptom might be problematic, the curators argue, because, “young people are enjoying a mass-consumption lifestyle, but at the same time, [are] becoming absorbed in their own world without any relation to the society around them”. Such lifestyles can potentially lead to apathy; however that is just one aspect of techno-culture. As the Rapt! curators also note, “it is possible for artists, while ‘immersing’ themselves in something, to arrive at positive results by leaping into an imaginative realm that is divorced from existing value systems”. That is, immersion in technology can promote transcendence from the everyday and subsequently allow for a more poetic and creative state of being.

In Dr Toilet’s Rapt-up clinic, Ukawa traces the fine line between vacuous and expanding psychological states that can be experienced by participating in technology and popular culture. Through its advancement of direct sensory experience, and also, its humorous and carnivalesque endorsement of toilet-voyeurism, Dr Toilet's Rapt-up clinic successfully unravels the program’s themes.

Posted by Veronica Tello
Photos: Warren Fithie

Tadasu Takamine at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces

2006-10-03T15:21:00.000+10:00

Not many artists choose to install their exhibition during the course of the opening, let alone as the culmination of a road trip from Darwin. When invited to participate in the Rapt! program Tadasu Takamine chose to enact his work as a direct exchange with Australia. Travelling across the northwest of the country, Takamine went along the Tannami Track to Alice Springs, to Lake Eyre, and finally to Melbourne along with 24HRArt Director Steve Eland and art critic Ashley Crawford. On the surface this could seem touristic, yet Takamine’s lineage as an artist reveals a deeper engagement with culture, probing and questioning the relationship between individuals within and beyond greater paradigms such as race, language and nationality. Besides, how many Aussies have ever bothered to make this journey?

It’s an awkward proposition for Australians: who has permission to make observations, or even join a conversation on the relationships (fraught as they are) between indigenous and settler populations. Sometimes it’s easier for an outsider to make comment, the ease of this position being ameliorated by the author’s lack of immediate responsibility – not that this relieves the burden. The Songlines is by British novelist and travel writer Bruce Chatwin. A work of fiction and non-fiction, the book is presented as a travelogue in which Chatwin proposes that language begins in song and the aboriginal dreamtime sings itself into existence. It’s a disarming book because simultaneously embraces and short-circuits colonial views of Australia. In the end we’re all hypocrites.

As a Japanese artist Takamine’s political position is entirely different of course, but like Chatwin he is not content to make mere observations. Takamine’s works are always challenging, drawing on disparate cultural references and allowing them to interact in uncomfortable and questionable ways that are at once delightfully open. His work for the 2005 Yokohama International Triennale of Contemporary Art, Japan, Kagoshima Esperanto, spoke in a very direct way about loss, or the personal and collective passing of things in the world (due to annihilation, expiry or irrelevance). Here, once again, Takamine was installing his work during the opening. I attended the preview as a member of the Rapt! curatorial team and in a review for un Magazine issue 6 wrote: “The floor was covered in damp soil, clumped into forms like burial mounds and littered with found objects, such as prams, sex toys and other detritus that Takamine had picked up in the surrounding streets. A sequence of events unfolded in the space: lights illuminated the small moving objects and scrolls of text projected and unfurled over the walls in two languages. The first was Kagoshima, the vanishing dialect of his hometown. The second Esperanto, an international language constructed with the intention of fostering common understanding throughout the world but now used as a reference to vain hope.” All the elements mingled in an unintegrated manner, which instigated an overwhelming desire in viewers to make sense of the mess.

In manufacturing a similar environment at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Takamine is asking us to view his personal experience of Australia as inseparable from the problem of relationships between foreigners and originators. If you visit the gallery you may be disappointed to see only one video, a few photographs and ceramic works constructed en-route, but this is merely evidence so you’ll get a lot more out of the exhibition if you investigate beyond the surface.
Posted by Lily Hibberd. Photos: Christian Capurro

Lieko Shiga at the IMA Brisbane

2006-09-19T15:50:00.000+10:00

Last Tuesday the 12th of September I went to visit Lieko Shiga in her studio residence at the Institute of Modern Art and came away feeling excited. Shiga’s project is ambitious, spontaneous and unpredictable. Her short stay in Brisbane involves a hectic daily schedule, meeting members of the general public at sites around the city to shoot a series of photographs, many of which rely on installed elements and props. Shiga’s project facilitates community involvement with ‘culture’ and ‘environment’, at a time when such interactions are on the checklist of many cultural agencies. Yet Shiga interacts in a particularly meaningful and light-handed way, asking a series of survey questions based on personal imaginings, dreams and psycho-spiritual reflections on location, to which the photos then respond. For instance, Shiga invites participants to describe the places in Brisbane they feel are “brightest” or “darkest”. She also asks them, “Have you ever had a dream in which you are flying?” The accompanying photos are surreal, funny, jarring; there’s something so deeply personal and poignant about each one that they send shivers down the spine. It’s fascinating to learn that Shiga combines the information obtained through the individual surveys with ideas of her own. In a way they’re collective responses, which recognise that interactions with the world are mediated in numerous ways. I found Shiga’s methodology a profound way of engaging with the public and would be interested to hear from the participants about how they have been affected by their involvement, given the amount of government funding often dedicated to this kind of interaction. Lieko Shiga will be showing her work at Seventh Gallery in Fitzroy from 10 October 2006
Posted by Holly Arden, Brisbane. Image: Lieko Shiga To Heaven, 2006

Atelier Bow-Wow's manga pod

2006-09-19T15:46:00.000+10:00

Object Gallery's window has never looked this good. The pod is tailor-made for the space and fits snugly into the unusually shaped window area. Visible from the street 24-hours a day, it looks amazing at night when the lighting makes it glow. Hondarake bookstore in Sydney has sponsored the project, lending the 700 manga jounals installed in the structure.

Yuken Teruya "re:order" at Object Gallery, Sydney

2006-09-19T15:41:00.000+10:00

Yuken Teruya’s show is remarkable – it includes three Notice Forest paper bag works, a 'You-I You-I bingata', and two beautiful brush-box twig works that sit on the floor of the space – that spell out the words, “Sit down and rest” and “Cut down my trunk and make a boat so you can sail away”, both from the children’s book “The Giving Tree”.

MUMA Rapt! artists’ talks

2006-09-14T18:03:00.000+10:00

Recent gallery talks at Monash University Museum of Art featured the visiting artists Tomoaki ISHIHARA, Nobuya HOKI and Yuki KIMURA, with the assistance of art student/translator Utako Shindo.

ISHIHARA-san gave a thoughtful account of his work which explores the notion of seeing and being seen, beginning with three ‘self portrait’ electron microscope photographs. The images of a scab, pubic hair and semen are enlarged to approximately three metres square, and at this scale they resemble sublime landscapes. At the centre of the room a glass sphere is suspended between the ceiling and floor. Its contents have been completely removed to create a vacuum and ISHIHARA explained that his intention was to create a space devoid of art rhetoric, meaning and substance.

In the second space, three golden panels with Braille text surround a beautiful circular piece of resin, also featuring Braille inscribed on its surface. Titled ‘Blind Love’, each of the gold leaf works bears a love letter written in Braille that remains a mystery to the viewer. ISHIHARA-san explained that by denying access to the personal meaning of the works, he was actively seeking the viewer’s response and interpretation, thereby making the works more universally relevant and meaningful.

The audience followed Nobuya HOKI into gallery two to view his delicate and linear paintings and drawings. Working with a ‘secret pen’ on the ultra flat surfaces of gesso and aluminium, HOKI-san spoke about how he intended the meandering lines in his paintings to be explorations of multiple pictorial spaces. His beautiful and sometimes quirky images contain illusions of depth in the detailed landscapes, as well as abstract calligraphic lines which flatten the picture plane. The pieces in the exhibition date from 2001 through to a suite of drawings that were completed this year, and HOKI has continually investigated the relationship between background and foreground in his work, with a recent development in this enquiry being the introduction of bright colour combinations. While HOKI refutes any conscious influence of Manga or animé on his practice, several Manga-style figures appear in the recent works.

Yuki KIMURA was the final artist to speak to the group and she provided an extended insight into her installation, ‘ghosts in tourism’, complementing the lecture she gave on the work at Monash Caulfield. The audience crowded into the darkened space of gallery three and learnt of how a cave found during a road trip along the south coast of Victoria was an inspiration for the work. For further description, please see previous posting about her lecture. The floor talks were a fascinating insight into three very different practices, very kindly translated by Victorian College of the Arts student, Utako Shindo.

Posted by Kirrily Hammond

Rapt! exhibition opening at CCP

2006-09-10T21:44:00.000+10:00

On Thursday evening the first Melbourne exhibition opened at The Centre for Contemporary Photography, Fitzroy. Three artists are displayed in gallery four; Hirofumi KATAYAMA, Asako NARAHASHI, Kazuna TAGAUCHI, while Tomoko KONOIKE occupies the intimate space of gallery three and the night-time projection screen onto George Street. Gallery four is a large, evenly proportioned space and this provides the works with an appropriate viewing structure, in which the works are read as dual relations, in an apt elaboration on the Rapt! theme. In a vertiginous and entirely physical encounter with the sea, Narahashi’s photographs are taken through the artist’s literal immersion in her subject. These images run along the northern wall, while Katayama’s precisely rendered vector drawings on the south side are a counterpoint, in their Cartesian containment. Tagauchi’s work is worth inspecting first-hand, because as photographs they are elusive, being in fact documents of highly detailed paintings with the compiled images floating stagily on black yet indeterminate ground.

The animations and installations of Konoike are easy to adore, as we are taken on the adventures of her bizarre creature-people, such as the faceless “Mimio”. Eschewing the straight-on-the-wall video display, Konoike has thrown the projection onto the floor in pond-like form framed by sticks; activating an entrancing illusion, as is often the case with magical realism. It could be a gimmick, but on the way in to CCP a pair of legs dangle over the edge of the building. Anyone who stays long enough will locate the corresponding owner in Konoike’s animation in gallery four.

The evening was venerated by the Japan Foundation’s Mr Takatori, who spoke about the intentions and concept of the program, along with Naomi Cass, Director of CCP, and her stirring address in which exercises for viewing were collectively enacted.

Yuki KIMURA speaks at Monash University

2006-09-09T11:47:00.000+10:00

The next cab off the rank for the Rapt! extravaganza is Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) Clayton, where an exhibition featuring the work of Yuki KIMURA is opening this week. As part of the regular Wednesday lunchtime forums at Monash University Caulfield, KIMURA-san presented a fascinating lecture about her practice. KIMURA introduced the audience to earlier work, and then spoke about her six-week residency at Caulfield. Her intention for the residency has been to make new work for the exhibition at MUMA, drawing inspiration from Australian surroundings. Almost immediately after their arrival, KIMURA and her assistant embarked on a road trip to the Great Ocean Road. Explorations in caves and along the beaches provided a collection of curiously shaped rocks and footage of rolling waves, all of which eventually found its way into KIMURA’s installation at MUMA. Making use of the ceramics department at Caulfield, KIMURA replicated the rocks in white clay, creating an array of delicate forms. These have been placed on the gallery floor in a careful arrangement, reminiscent of an archaeological site. Found images sourced from country opportunity shops are threaded with cascading white cotton, creating intriguing and beautiful images placed on the surrounding gallery walls. To fully appreciate the intricacy of the installation you will need to make your way out to MUMA, and while you’re there you’ll also have the chance to see the remarkable work of Tomoaki ISHIHARA and Nobuya HOKI.
Posted by Kirrily Hammond

Social gathering at Rapt! Laboratory for Social Space Melbourne

2006-08-31T09:07:00.000+10:00

On Monday night Atelier Bow-Wow celebrated the completion of their four-day residency and workshop project in the City Square with raised plastic cups and replicant Japanese snacks. Chatting to Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo Kaijima it was intriguing to learn that their intention, through a handful of RMIT student research projects, was to examine social spaces in Melbourne. Yet, it was a bit absurd that the experimental hothouse was installed on a locally contentious public site, the City Square being an infamous example of a lack of reference to workable models of social interaction in public space.

Shihoko Iida arrives in Melbourne

2006-08-27T16:37:00.000+10:00

At 6pm tonight in the Laboratory for Social Space at the City Square, Shihoko Iida, one of the Rapt! curatorial team and Curator at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery will speak about the Rapt! project. There will also be a series of presentations and an informal closing celebration in the tent at the City Square on Monday 28 August from 6pm onwards.

Image: Rapt! curators Shihoko Iida and Fumihiko Sumitomo standing in a Janet Lawrence piece at Echigo-Tsumari, Japan 2005

Rapt! launches at the City Square

2006-08-27T00:18:00.000+10:00

Since late Thursday afternoon, Atelier Bow-Wow's plastic construction in Melbourne's City Square has capturing passers-by, as new ideas might in a thought bubble. Atelier Bow-Wow is an architectural group, led by Yoshiharu Tsukamoto and Momoyo, and along with the architect Taira Nishizawa they have opened up the space as a laboratory for social space, with architectural studios (as demonstrated by the conceptual development washing line) plus free symposiums and films.

Welcome to rapt!

2006-07-30T13:28:00.000+10:00

Rapt! 20 contemporary artists from Japan is an ambitious program of exhibitions, residencies and public events showcasing contemporary Japanese art in Australia. Developed by the Japan Foundation in the Australia-Japan Year of Exchange, it is based on cross-cultural research and discussions by Japanese curators, Shihoko Iida, Fumihiko Sumitomo and Yukihiro Hirayoshi, and an Australian curatorial advisory group led by Philip Brophy, Max Delany, Stuart Koop and Kathryn Hunyor. Rapt! is remarkable in its scope and commitment, becoming the largest collaborative arts project ever undertaken in Australia, involving twenty organisations developing different facets of the one project.