Japanese Art: High-Tech Equilibrium : ‘Against Nature’ is first survey of contemporary works in 10 years

Americans have the feeling that Japan is swiping our car market, annexing our downtown real estate, cornering the market on electronic gadgets and buying up all the luxury trinkets on Rodeo Drive.

We are protectively scornful when a Japanese corporation pays $43 million for a shopworn Van Gogh and nervously amused when the New York Times reports that snooty Fifth Avenue shops put discreet signs in vitrines whispering “Japanese Spoken Here.”

Our politicians like to create the impression that the Japanese miracle is just some sneaky illusion created by unfair trade practices, but secretly the thermometer of our admiration for them just keeps rising. These folks are good. As an island people, their inherent insularity may make them resistant to foreign incursions, but over here it looks like their success is based on producing quality goods efficiently and cheaply. I drive an Acura, watch an NEC TV and listen to a JVC boom box that has two tape decks, two radios and a CD player in a format the size of a breadbox. These mechanisms are all first-rate and, deep down, Americans know that. Japanese competition has caused us to question our own practices in everything from automated production lines to our educational system--another sort of production line.

In short, the Japanese have become dynamic and successful, qualities that make them sexy to Americans. We are now interested in most everything Japanese in case there should be something to learn from it.

The first survey exhibition of contemporary Japanese art in a decade is now on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to Aug. 6. Titled “Against Nature,” it includes the works of 10 artists--or 25 if you count all the members of the collaborative group Dumb Type. All were born after World War II and range in age from 32 to 40. Youngish, but not kids.

The basic lesson to be learned from this exhibition is a general one--namely that art is being promoted these days for reasons that do not necessarily bear on its quality or originality. It tends to be linked to the news and to cultural fashions. Last summer, the new Soviet openness stirred interest in contemporary art from the U.S.S.R. Gallery and museum exhibitions appeared as if by Fax machine and more are in the pipeline. A combination U.S.-Soviet show called “Ten Plus Ten” will appear at SFMMA in September. It will be a surprise if we don’t soon start seeing the latest thing from Poland.

One look at “Against Nature” is enough to inform us that Japan’s success is giving the nation’s psyche a significant identity crisis, a hunch confirmed in catalogue essays by the show’s curators and other contributors. American organizers Thomas Sokolowski and Kathy Halbreich held a round-table discussion with their Japanese counterparts Kazue Kobata, Shinji Kohmoto and Fumio Nanjo. It reveals fascinating matters floating today in the Japanese mind. There are changes in the language with three or four different sets of written letters being used and lots of English phrases--just for effect.

The art of Kaoru Hirabayashi mirrors this concern with language in wooden animal cutouts bearing calligraphic signs and hinged tablets with Oriental writing and Western-style drawings. There are some messages here about a folk culture invaded by a world culture but its concentration on written--as opposed to visual--language makes it the most inscrutable work here.

The curators talk about alternations in character that cause young Japanese girls to go from one mall boutique to another changing their style of dress from Victorian to punk as if they were trying on various personalities.

The work of Shoko Maemoto bears directly on the anecdote. She makes tableaux of Scarlet O’Hara-style ball gowns encrusted in glitter. “Silent Explosion” backs the empty dress with a traditional stylized flame shape. The gown’s front panel oozes forward like a cataract of blood. Its general look will be familiar to anybody who attended Los Angeles group shows when feminist art was getting started in the ‘70s. It wafts forth both faces of traditional Japanese aesthetics--as delicate and eccentric as Lady Murasaki, as decoratively violent as Kurasawa’s “Ran.”

The word “kitsch” turns up repeatedly trying to describe the chaotic melange of sensibility the Japanese must absorb these days. (From the looks of the exhibition, there is a failure to understand the difference between kitsch’s camp stylishness and schlock Expressionism.) The American curators come across as exceptionally naive in their understanding of the Japanese aesthetic but their innocent questions do open onto relevant vistas.

The catalogue deserves a read but much of its content is very hard to stick to the art shown, dramatizing the gap between aesthetic and sociological organizational principles. On evidence, it appears that sociology is called on to rationalize an exhibition when the art therein is just so-so. One of the principle subtexts of the catalogue essay is the suggestion that if a viewer does not like this work, he just does not understand it from the Japanese point of view. This is silly. Art is often appreciated from an initial creative misreading. If the art is eloquent, that is enough. Once the viewer and the art start talking to one another, there is usually some common expressive ground to be reached.

Shinro Ohtake shows a big junky composition of weathered lumber and faded snapshots called “Family Tree.” Fans of California assemblage will recognize it. Its central motif is a scorched wooden cross draped with singed white cloth. An American is bound to see shades of Wallace Berman and a reference to the Ku Klux Klan. There is no reason Ohtake would not know of the sinister organization as he is a cosmopolitan sort who has made books of detritus collected from Berlin to Bangkok. But it seems more likely his work would refer to the atomic holocaust of the Second World War.

In the end, both specific references are too topical. The work speaks of troubled memories of vicious inhumanity wherever it has occurred in our century. Anybody who speaks the visual Esperanto of modern art will surely get the message--and find it a bit too familiar.

Homogenization is the name of the game. Katsura Funakoshi makes carved wooden half-figures of anonymous urban types--a folk-style revival of Japanese 16th Century realist carving. The figures wear Western garb but have Oriental eyes except all are a strange yellow color.

These artists are simply doing what artists everywhere are doing--absorbing the syntax of international modern art and adding their own dialect. The problem of resolving traditional Japanese conformity with ingrained Occidental individualism is an interesting trope and certainly a trauma for the Japanese but it is downright amazing how little difference it makes visually.

Yasimasa Morimura shows salon-painting-size photographic blowups that depict himself impersonating existing artworks. Apparently, they are photographed, altered by painting and re-photographed. In one version, he is in drag as Manet’s “Olympia” complete with blond wig. The precedent for all this is supposed to be the traditional female impersonator of the Noh theater. (Oddly enough, a married couple--Occidentals--did precisely the same project in a class I taught 10 years ago.)

The dilemma for the seasoned viewer is not understanding the work but discovering its distinctiveness. It’s a little like the problem of sensing the difference between the Burger King on the Champs Elysees and the one in Stuttgart. Great subtlety is required.

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Japanese contemporary feels a trifle like French contemporary. Both are absorptive, civilized and highly sensitive. A few years back, PBS ran a series on serious Japanese films and it was surprising how often they recalled French film noir with its tough languor and irrepressible obsession with love. Yusei Ogino’s tableau “The Legend of the Wings” is part Jean Cocteau fairy tale, half Jungian science fiction. Anybody who remembers Godzilla will recognize Noboru Tsubaki’s huge yellow monster mutant, “Fresh Gasoline.” It’s not art but it’s a terrific special effect.

Not surprisingly, the Japanese fascination with electronics is present in the exhibition and provides some of the rationalization for its title. “Against Nature” is supposed to connote a new art rebeling against the stereotypical image of the Japanese as worshipers of nature who make no distinction between art and life.

The truth is that the Japanese aesthetic genius has always mixed equal measures of the natural and the intensely artificial. That balance is what makes Japanese gardens and Japanese prints so agreeable. The mix seems to strike an equilibrium that distills essences--the spiritual in the garden the poetic in the prints. Carried into the present, it has become technologically reversed with the artificial on top--the Zen Garden replaced by the neon Tokyo night. It leads to a fantasy that the natural can be made from the mechanical--hence robotics with its kinky edge.

Tatsuo Miyajima continues the tradition in a big black space with a single vertical zip of neon numerals endlessly counting to 99 and starting over. Called “Monism/Dualism,” it touches the metaphysical but it does not improve on Barnett Newman. It just gives spiritual values the cold glamour of technology.

The collaborative group Dumb Type are real techno freaks. Their performance “Pleasure Life” plays on two videotapes. An installation includes ranks of Lucite records spinning under models of atomic missiles. Florescent doughnuts flash sporadically until they all go up in a white flash symbolizing the nuclear Big One, I guess. It could all be called “Destruction Distraction.”

Watching the video, you finally discover that this is all about young kids searching for love and excitement as usual. There is an unusual degree of idealistic sweetness lurking under all the high-tech gear.

Pity. The show teaches us once again that if you want to make art you have to stick with that. Sociology bogs you down. So does therapy. The best artist here just paints.

Tomiaki Yamamoto makes large abstract paintings said to be roughly based on traditional kimono design. One of the untitled works has louvered doors for arms but it doesn’t matter much.

What does, is the straightness of his concern for making energetic paintings. The artist deals in flurries of circular dollops that could be cherry blossoms or snowflakes but that doesn’t matter either. These works concentrate so hard they make everybody else look like dilettantes. They are as decorative as Momoyama screens and a tasteful as teacups but they are done with such intensity they get beyond themselves.

One work puts a big gold column down the middle and surrounds it with a red field full of giant green snowflakes. It could die of sheer Post-Modern stylishness but the artist keeps surprising us with strange off-the-edge splashes and buttery clogs that have that combination of spontaneity and rightness that drives you crazy trying to figure out how it was done.

This painting is not against anything. It is for then and now, Japanese and not. Art should never be against anything except not being itself.