Ryuichi Sakamoto - seeing sound, hearing time
2024.12.21 - 2025.3.30 at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
INTRODUCTION
Ryuichi Sakamoto is, internationally, one of Japan’s best known musicians, probably second only to Yoko Ono. His experimental electronic music in the late 1970s and work in Yellow Magic Orchestra established Japan as a leader in the genre of music. His song “Tong Poo” was especially popular internationally, and 21 albums in his career established him as a multi-talented creator. He died in 2023. The show at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo is a collaboration with a handful of other artists and serves somewhat as a culmination of his life’s work.
The show sprawls over a large area with each room focusing on a particular immersive work. Most of the works utilize all of: sound, video, lighting, and kinetics. The above room featured an automated water drop machine that drops drips in conjunction with a high-pitched soundtrack into a mirror-style flat pond. I suppose as the show title suggests, it’s a way of “seeing sound”, however clearly this is just an amalgam of what sound might feel like. If you actually wanted to see the direct effects of sound you could use speakers to effect the water directly. Perhaps it has a more direct link to notation or something but the sound and drops were very sporadic so most people seemed to be bored and walked out before anything happened. It was an odd experience to look at the faces of others questioning what was supposed to be happening. Given the huge number of visitors, most seemed to quickly want to leave each room. I was the same.
This installation was one of two that used a real player piano and the sound was lovely. It’s still immediately true that no speaker can recreate the full dimension of a real instrument in a real space. Unfortunately as with the mirror pool in the previous room, the sound and the lighting seemed at best atmospheric and it was hard to glean any kind of meaning from it. Another dark black pool of water served as the base for the piano. Absent a text to describe some sort of meaning, there wasn’t much beyond aesthetics to appreciate. Is it just that music is literally the link between heaven and earth??
I’ll start by saying that there was a darkened room to your left when entering the gallery with a large poster-style collage on the wall. I didn’t like it because it reminded me of an exhibition ante-room where everyone takes a selfie in front of a poster of a major work of the show. There was also a sculptural installation in this room with tubes of blood and various body-related shapes which seemed overtly literal and rudimentary at the same time. I suppose this room was supposed to introduce the show by saying - “here comes some grotesque body art for you.” Maybe it was something else. There was also a vaguely African/Colonial sense to everything as well. Was it autobiographical? Commentary? I don’t know. It didn’t resonate on any deep level with me.
On the other side of this room, connected by a horizontal slit in the wall was a quite cohesive room featuring more painterly collages on the walls with a central sculpture area. While these pieces had ostensibly the same topic and form as the first room, I felt they worked much better. They were less literal. I felt I could become part of the shapes and their energy vibrated in a meaningful way. I especially liked the tiny painting on the tile platform in the above photo. Specifically I liked the feeling that the artist himself must have placed it in that position. There was an intersection of viewer and artist in it.
Down a long corridor, an interesting digital snow-scene awaited. The sound was mostly noise and coincided with the reticulation of the video. The mirrored floor acted like the mirror pools in the previous rooms. The mood of the room was calming and immersive with a strange camaraderie you might find when climbing a mountain and reaching the top with 30 other people. Again, I didn’t feel any particular deep meaning beyond superficial aesthetics. We’ve seen this type of thing in countless movies and AI images.
By the time I got to the next room, the crowded environment and the near pitch-black environments began to seriously wear on me. Of course everyone was taking photos constantly and it began to feel like an amusement park with the main goal to get as many people funnelled through per hour as possible. This room in particular seemed to be a “Matrix”-like reverse installation where the people are incited to take videos and are actually the content of the art piece. I wondered what difference there would be if I was alone in the exhibit. I think clearly it would have been far superior. There was simply no time or space to settle into a contemplative mood with so many people wandering around bumping into each other and taking photos.
The next room was by far the highlight of the show, and in my opinion, the other room that had a weight and gravitas.
Using a fairly primitive projector and mirror technique with a real Yamaha player piano, there was a life-size video of Sakamoto projected so as to think he was sitting at the real piano. A stream of notes also was visualized above him as if meteors were heading towards the sun or perhaps heaven. Firstly, other than pure noise or random sounds, there was a musical value to this piece. As with the prior player piano room, the gorgeous and enveloping sound of the piano begged your attention, and the effective angle and setup of the projector captivated with an engrossing illusion. I could effectively imagine being at an intimate concert with Ryuichi Sakamoto. Given his primary legacy as a performer, I thought this was the most fitting artwork. Especially because he recently died it serves as an appropriate eulogy.
Outside there was a “cloud” installation. It was completely lacklustre.
Off the gift shop there was another outdoor installation. It was largely annoying and even the children seemed bored and content to ignore it. I’ve seen many many similar exhibitions over the decades and most were better.
CONCLUSION
This show seems to be much a part of the current “immersive experience” popularized by the traveling Van Gogh show. I think these shows are about as far away from Art as you can get. Basically they seem like a ploy by desperate real estate owners to make profitable use of huge empty warehouses using kitschy video projections to fleece tourists and ultra-conservative locals. Sadly, these type of shows are quite popular and make a lot of money and their influence in traditional gallery spaces is growing every year. Combine that with the unending trend to social media “content creating” and most large museum or gallery shows are now to some degree specifically designed to maximize the ease of taking smartphone photos. As such these are somewhat antithetical to the idea that you go to see art to gain an experience from the artwork. In these environments, you go to gain an experience of the show design more than the art itself.
I think in most the rooms of this show, with the exception of the concert projection, this was unfortunately true. There was almost no artistic value in any of it. I think there could have been more potential if there were far fewer people, but in my time slot there were at least 1000 people walking around concurrently through all the rooms. It was impossible to see any aspect of any room without having a person in your line of sight. Meditating on the meaning was impossible.
PRICE
2400JPY
AVAILABILITY
2024.12.21 - 2025.3.30 at Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
THE RATING
3/10 Absolute
5/10 Relative
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