Naoshima: Paradise on Earth?

For this post, I am allowing myself to stray from our beloved photographic shores, but I assure you that it will be worth it. Last Friday I attended a conference at the Palais de Tokyo given for the opening of the exhibition on the Benesse Art Site Naoshima project. This was a pretty star-studded affair: super-architects Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA, Hiroshi Sambuichi, Patrick Bouchain (I was half-expecting Tadao Ando to appear from a hole in the stage), with a guest appearance by Christian Boltanski.

Benesse Art Site Naoshima is a fantastically crazy project that was begun by Tetsuhiko Fukutake, the CEO of a publishing company, in 1989 as part of a promise to develop the island of Naoshima. The project is now run by his son, Soichiro Fukutake, who shares his father's eccentric vision of how to conduct business. Benesse (derived from the latin to live better) is Fukutake's modest attempt to "create a new independent country inside of Japan" which could be considered to be "heaven on Earth". This is a man who clearly spends very little time thinking inside of boxes.

The project began with a series of architectural commissions by Tadao Ando on the island of Naoshima, including Benesse House and the Chichu Art Museum, and has now been extended to the neighbouring islands of Teshima, Megijima, Inujima, Ogijima and Shodoshima, and to other architects. Fukutake might sound like a megalomaniac who can't get enough expensive toys to play with, but seeing these projects outlined it is clear that Benesse is much more than that. At the center of the project is a desire to rethink the relationship between art and architecture and to experiment with new possibilities in this field. Fukutake also believes that "culture is superior to the economy" and that the latter should therefore serve the former (6% of his business's capital goes to the Benesse Foundation). There is a genuine attempt to involve the inhabitants in the developments of these projects and to give them the right to veto anything they don't like. The project is helping to redevelop the area, to give the aging population of the region more and better opportunities to earn a living and is even succeeding in attracting the younger generation from Tokyo to settle there. Christian Boltanski, who is preparing a museum of heartbeats as his contribution to the project, described Benesse as a utopic project, "in the important and rare sense of the term."

The only dampener on what was truly an inspirational few hours, was that the exhibition includes a number of Naoya Hatakeyama's fantastic prints, notably of the Chichu Art Museum, and nobody bothered to tell us (or him!) about it.

I would recommend going to the exhibition (although I have never really been blown away by architectural scale models), but, if you can, skip that step and just book your tickets to Naoshima right away. Next summer the first edition of the Setouchi Art Festival will be held on Naoshima and the neighbouring islands... sounds like a pretty good opportunity to me.

Akira Rachi and Hirofumi Katayama

It seems to be Taro Nasu Gallery week on eyecurious this week. Following on from the seemingly excellent Ryuji Miyamoto show, they are now going to be showing work by Akira Rachi and Hirofumi Katayama. This show could be called 'In Between' as both of these two young photographers focus on interstitial spaces. Katayama seeks to find geometric perfection in the city's places of transit that are mostly overlooked: lobbies, entrances, stairways. Rachi's photographs deal with a different kind of space: the space between objects, as if he is trying to capture the physical forces of attraction and repulsion at play.

Michael Wolf: Paris Street View

"Finally the journey leads to the city of Tamara. You penetrate it along streets thick with signboards jutting from the walls. The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things: pincers point out the tooth-drawer's house; a tankard, the tavern. (...) If a building has no signboard or figure, its very form and the position it occupies in the city's order suffice to indicate its function: the palace, the prison, the mint, the Pythagorean school, the brothel. Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe that you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts.

However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it. Outside, the land stretches, empty, to the horizon; the sky opens, with speeding clouds. In the shape that chance and wind give the clouds, you are already intent on recognizing figures: a sailing ship, a hand, an elephant..."  Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Michael Wolf recently sent me some images from his current work on Paris, made using Google's Street View technology.  For a photographer whose previous series were done on a large format camera, with extraordinarily detailed results, these super-pixellated street shots came as a bit of a surprise at first. But it didn't take long for them to make sense to me: Wolf is not so much a photographer of architecture as of the city in all its forms and I see these images as a logical progression from his architectural work. To his studies of density, privacy and voyeurism, he is adding the idea of representation and symbolism.

As I have written before, I think Paris may now be one of the hardest cities to photograph as it has changed so little over the last century and, through the work of Atget, Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau or Ronis, has become part of an almost universally recognisable photographic iconography. How can you take pictures in this city without just repeating clichés or, conversely, trying to run away from its overwhelming photographic past?

Wolf's Street View work brings an interesting answer to this question. By making use of Google's pixellation, superimposed lines, arrows and geometric shapes, he forces Paris's Haussmanian architecture into the present day. Just like in Italo Calvino's imaginary Tamara, Paris is a city where everything is invested with some symbolic reference to the past and by adding a layer of contemporary symbols to the city's old ones Wolf is suggesting a new way of reading the city.

Since Street View has been launched, a number of people have started combing through this tool (check out Jon Rafman's piece for an example) to find the strange moments that Google's cameras end up catching on their way around the world. Wolf's approach is different. He is not only searching for specific moments, but also for photographs within them by "trying various crops/styles (Frank, Doisneau, Ruscha)". These are "photographs of photographs" that recognise the weight of their heritage. And in a city where almost everything has been photographed, this strikes me as a pretty interesting way to go.

The full series is available on Wolf's website.

Ryuji Miyamoto: the grass, the bugs

Ryuji Miyamoto has just had an exhibition of new work at Taro Nasu Gallery in Tokyo's equivalent of the meat-packing district, Higashi-kanda. These new photograms are quite a departure from his earlier work on the destruction of architecture. Miyamoto had already begun experimenting with photographic techniques for his previous series Pinhole, for which he built his own camera obscura. I have written about these pieces before, and now that I have seen more of the work I find the series to be even more strangely beguiling. They are beautiful, but invested with a sense of foreboding... images documenting the beginnings of a mass extinction. For those, like me, who missed the exhibition, Taro Nasu will be bringing some of these photograms to Paris Photo next month.

Agan Harahap

On a lighter note... Agan Harahap's ongoing Super Hero project involves dropping super heros (Darth Vader also pops up quite a lot) into photographs of important historical moments of the twentieth century.