ART REVIEW : AN ERSATZ AESTHETIC IN ‘TOKYO: FORM AND SPIRIT’

Everybody has seen the little wooden Japanese doll whose head unscrews to reveal an identical smaller doll inside. Its head also unscrews on a yet smaller one. The process drags on until you have a whole row of look-alike dolls of diminishing size.

One is set musing on this by a new exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Temporary Contemporary galleries. Called “Tokyo: Form and Spirit,” it attempts to compress the sensibility of a vast and venerable metropolis into a few galleries inside a warehouse building inside a community called Little Tokyo.

Putting Big Tokyo inside Little Tokyo was bound to require a little huffing and puffing, but even at that, one failed to anticipate just exactly how awkward the result might be. After all, this exercise was organized by the respected Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and involved talented Japanese designers and architects, including Irata Isozaki, who did such good work on MOCA’s permanent quarters set to open on Bunker Hill later this year.

The whole sushi is accompanied by a glossy book-catalogue loaded with illuminating and exceptionally frank essays on various aspects of Tokyo life--everything from “Walking in Tokyo” by Donald Ritchie to the excellent “Work As a Form of Beauty” by Ian Buruma. Nicely illustrated, it is probably required reading for anyone attracted to Japanese art, architecture and culture.

The exhibition is something else. Its melange of costumes, artworks, artifacts, toys and what-not range from a beautifully inlaid old sedan chair to a risible screen by Masami Teraoka but fail in themselves to add up either to an art exhibition or an evocation of modern Tokyo or its historic incarnation as Edo.

To make up for this obvious gap, the show attempts to organize itself around a series of environmental set pieces paralleling themes in the book. “Walking,” for example, designed by Isozaki and Tadanori Yokoo, is a corridor-like gallery lined with collage paintings representing various historical epochs in Tokyo. These are set behind architectural frames presumably intended to suggest storefronts. It doesn’t work as a street set and it doesn’t work as art because the images are excessively illustrative.

What is really so distressing about “Tokyo” is that its obviously benign intentions serve only to caricature the worst cliches about the Japanese aesthetic. The whole rests uneasily in the recycled-warehouse space of the TC. Everything looks flimsy in an installation design that works like a series of compromises.

In the “Living” section, a model teahouse looks tacky instead of delicate. A modern variation on a traditional interior has all the charm of the lair of the evil Ming the Magnificent in “Flash Gordon.”

To call forth the muse of “Working,” Hiroshi Hara made an environment of clear panes. Etched with outlines both human and machine-like, they light up and seem to fuse man into a computerized robot. The work evokes stereotypes of a sensibility in love with masochistic elaboration and complexity and a love of artifice so profound it actually prefers robotry to reality.

In this exhibition the idea of metaphysical meditation is joined to high tech in an environment called “Reflections” by Toyo Ito and Kohei Sugiura. You walk into a dark room and for a second it’s like crossing a footbridge over a koi pond on a moonlit night. But only for a second. Then comes the reality of stale air and the knowledge that this is all done with lights, mirror and undulating material. It has all the charm of a set on a TV variety show.

The only way to evoke something is with art. Done with design, as in the assemblage pillars concocted by Fumihiko Maki and Kiyashi Awazu, the results are both cold and incomprehensible.

This is not to say you can’t brew up an ersatz aesthetic with technical wizardry. In the “Performance” section, Isozaki worked with Eiko Ishioka to make a glass-topped stage filled with tilted television sets in the manner of Nam June Paik. The sets simultaneously broadcast seal-slick Japanese TV commercials brimming with clever animation and gorgeous graphics. Museum visitors are mesmerized and at last we have a real taste of the poetry of nighttime cities, bewitching and predatory.