Volume 04, Number 07
Diversions
By Owen Schaefer
Colbert Exhibition all Ashes and Show
There was a telling moment as I sat with a group of a dozen strangers, watching one of Gregory Colbert's sepia-toned films which make up a part of his globe-trotting exhibition "Ashes and Snow." While the atmospheric soundtrack played, and apes frolicked with sleepy-eyed human women in majestic slow motion, one or two members of the audience began to giggle. It was infectious, and soon almost everyone was quietly sniggering, or outright laughing.
But this is not comedy. In fact, what Colbert's work most suffers from is an almost painful earnestness. The Canadian artist presents us with a collection of three films and fifty admittedly striking photographs of humans and animals in poses you could never imagine possible: a young African woman leans sleepily against the flank of cheetah, three adolescent Buddhist monks kneel before the power of an elephant, and a young girl sits as if in meditation as an enormous bird perches atop her head. There is no denying that Colbert is an excellent photographer, but the show works so hard to establish the grandeur of these works that it inevitably backfires.
Traveling with their own temple-like exhibition space, the photos have been blown up to gargantuan proportions and hung like tapestries between high pillars.
Nearly every scene features an Asian or African face wearing a beatified expression, and the effect quickly becomes unsettling. After the 25th photo of a child with eyes closed in reverence, it becomes difficult to escape the overwhelming sense of torpor in these images. Veneration begins to look more like languor. One quickly realizes that, at best, this is an exercise in pretty-but-vacant photography, and at worst, it is the glorification of a colonial exoticism—peopled with ethnic stereotypes and repackaged as new-age eco-spiritualism.
The audience's bottled-up giggles that broke free during that screening? Surely that was only an echo of the laughter in between takes from the people actually involved. If only Colbert had captured some moments of genuine awe and joy instead.
Ashes and Snow (to Jun. 24) The Nomadic Museum,
Odaiba. Tokyo Teleport Station (JR). ¥1,900. 11am−7pm
Mon.−Thu., 10am−10pm Fri.−Sun, tel. 03-3498-9999.
http://pia.jp/t
Email: contactmuseum@ashesandsnow.com
Hope that Spring's Eternal
When Western artists tackle Asian styles, I am always prepared to wince. There are those who choose to imitate, and those who choose to borrow, in both cases usually to lend some form of the exotic to their work.
Then there is Adam Booth.
Booth is a young British artist currently living in Japan, and pursuing his doctorate in Fine Arts. Working almost exclusively in colored inks and dyes on silk and paper, Booth's paintings have the appearance of being highly orthodox Buddhist works, while crossing seamlessly into the contemporary. The traditional gods and Bodhisattvas of Japanese and Chinese tradition become anthropomorphic white elephants, and suspicious-looking birds peer at falling or hanging peaches. There is no sense of satire here, only a focused discipline and a love of the material from which he is drawing. The works center around concepts of attainment—in both a worldly and enlightened sense, and possess an accomplished air of tension and balance.
Eternal Spring will grace the wooden halls and rafters of Asakusa's Gallery éf, the 1868 warehouse that survived both the great Kanto quake and the bombing of Tokyo, and was eventually transformed into one of the city's most quirky art galleries. And this particular exhibition features paintings that explore the idea of spring as a kind of utopia, and whether the attainment of an eternal spring is fleeting or within our grasp.
Adam Booth: Eternal Spring
(to Apr. 15) Gallery éf. Asakusa
Metro Station. Free. 11am−7pm
Closed Tue. Tel. 03-3841-0442.
www.gallery-ef.com