Karal Ann Marling I've scoured my memory trying to recall an important or even interesting exhibition I've attended in the ten years since American Artwas founded. And in the end, I'm forced to conclude that there wasn't one: the last show that made me swoon for the sheer wonderfulness of it all was Tokyo: Form and Spirit, held at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1986, a year before the decade in question began. If I were to go back now and thumb through the catalogue, my recollections of the event would be more accurate, but I'm afraid they'd be less vivid. And I relish the memory of its full-bore assault on the senses-color and motion everywhere. TV monitors. A succession of unpredictable spaces swelling and constricting at will inside the staid and static walls of the museum. Video games, pachinko balls, and Hiroshige prints-a clash of the old and the newer-than-new. An environmental experience that was as rich and challenging as the Ginza at rush hour. Think of a terrific Web page, circa 1997, but one created in un-virtual reality or anti-cyberspace, so the pop-up buttons produced scenes that actually zoomed out of the monitor right into the room and yelled at you. That's the Ginza-the essence, in this 1986 show, of Tokyo's form and spirit. Or so I discovered in 1991, when I went to Japan (and reported on the trip in the spring 1992 issue of American Art). Art often sets me to globe-trotting. A glimpse of a Caravaggio in the Vatican pavilion at the 1984 New Orleans World's Fair put me on a plane to Vienna to see more. Tokyo: Form and Spirit had the same effect. During the endless flight across the expanse of the Pacific, I got to thinking about the complicated interrelationships between time and place-Minneapolis here and Tokyo there, separated by hours and minutes for which the ocean provides little more than a scenic background. I thought about the unfolding of place over time, how the sacred and the profane, the artistic and the quotidian, manage to coexist in the very same sites. The show also made me (the least introspective of persons) acutely aware of what I need in the way of style and content in my own world, of what I'm inclined to look at and pay attention to and what I'm inclined to ignore. After Tokyo: Form and Spirit, I began to demand complexity, more contradiction and profusion than Robert Venturi ever dreamed of-color, light, noise, similar things lined up in threes and fours and dozens, unique pieces alongside ubiquitous ones, things that wiggle and slither and shake. That pretty well describes my living room in its latest incarnation, or the American mall. In museums now, I often feel strangled, starved of stimulus. They seem airless, dead, and far too reverential. Overdetermined. Now, I go to the gift shops first or to the gift shops instead.
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Jan 1, 1999
M Sanati + 1
Open Access