TADANORI YOKOO: NO MORE FORKS IN THE ROAD?

A Dark Night's Double Darkness (2001)

Japanese artists, as they age, often benefit from the ‘Hokusai Effect.’ This is the notion, based on a famous quote from the great ukiyo-e painter, that they only attain real greatness well beyond the normal retirement age for other professions.

“Nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention,” the quote runs, ending with the ambition that, “at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive.” The sad truth, however, is that most artists achieve their best work well short of their 140th birthday. In fact, their later work is often characterized by a loss of energy and inventiveness and a lazy reliance on the successful formulas of the past.

Now 72, Tadanori Yokoo is at the stage of his career where he is benefiting from the ‘Hokusai Effect.’ As one of Japan’s most famous and prolific artists, there is a collective interest among sections of the art world in believing that his already substantial career has yet to peak, and in perpetuating his considerable international reputation.

Reminiscence of Love (1994)

The recently opened exhibition at the Setagaya Art Museum, “Tadanori Yokoo: Be Adventurous!” looks back over his lengthy career, and pulls out all the stops to reinforce positive, open-ended perceptions. Rather than honestly admitting to be a retrospective, and focusing on the nitty-gritty of analyzing a lengthy career that has now largely run its course, the exhibition attempts to recast his works as part of an exciting, long running, and unfinished narrative.

While this may sound like a great idea on paper or in curatorial discussions, the conceit simply doesn’t work in practice. While Yokoo’s work abounds in continuities, connections, and repetitions none of these are of a narrative nature, certainly not in the Aristotelian sense of an organic story. Instead, the picture that emerges is the mundanely familiar one of a successful artist who has successfully navigated the winds of artistic fashion, through periods of intense production, interspersed with breaks and changes of direction.

The Wonders of Life on Earth (1965)

The exhibition includes plenty of examples his 1960s graphic design work and even a room full of superfluous parodies of the already amusing paintings of Henri Rousseau. But the bulk of the exhibition is made up of large, often crudely painted canvases, populated with surrealistic mish-mashes of pop culture images.

Many of these look like the work of somebody who has taken books of Freudian dream interpretation a little too literally. A clear example is “Reminiscence of Love” (1994), where the sexual curiosity, confusion, and development of three young boys is crudely sign-posted by dildos of varying sizes, a dog’s anus vividly highlighted in pink, and a giant orifice in the sky. The three young boys are also used as a kind of framing device, positioned so as to look into the painting along with the viewer, a device which is reused in other works.

Although one of his less inspired works, this painting nevertheless reveals what has been Yokoo’s main talent over most of his career – his ability to create ‘sticky,’ eye-catching canvases that force you to look at them, even when the experience is not aesthetically pleasing.

Theatre of Memories (2007)

Where he does try to be more aesthetically pleasing, such as in the lush painting “Kinosaki Fantasy” (2006) – the work alternatively suffers by losing much of its ‘stickiness.’ Elsewhere, his art veers off into Monty Python territory, eliciting chuckles and groans from visual and literal puns.

This is a large exhibition with hundreds of works of all kinds. One effect of such curatorial ambition is to raise the ultimate questions about an artist, such as how relevant, profound, important, and great he really is.

Apotheosists might call attention to the psychological depth of his works, with the frequent use of personally significant symbolism. However, in addition to having a dated Freudian feel to it, much of this is of a willfully obtuse nature. “Theatre of Memories” (2007), for example, juxtaposes the nationalist writer Yukio Mishima with Millet’s “The Sower,” the Aurora Borealis, a bath full of naked women, and an ambulance apparently driven by Picasso!

Kinosaki Fantasy (2006)

His best works remain the subtler Y-Junction paintings, like “Intersection of T and R” (2002), which show normal Japanese buildings positioned in forks in the road, usually with expressionist and surrealist touches. By presenting a choice of paths, such works resonate philosophically with existentialist notions of free will; that is, until you realize that, in most of these paintings, one road is clearly more inviting than the other. In “Intersection of T and R,” for example, most of us are likely to mentally take the path going downhill rather than the one next to the shrieking steam train – which rather endorses a deterministic view of human volition.

While the exhibition reveals artistic shortcomings, it also shows Yokoo’s unbounded populist flare. Why else would he have painted several pedantic works that merely refer to popular Japanese hot spas? His frequent use of visual quotations from famous art history is further proof that he knows where his audience’s buttons lie. While often lacking a clear artistic purpose, such elements provide moderately artistically literate viewers with the opportunity to suitably impress each other by identifying them. These aspects, set alongside his frequent visual quoting of pop culture, his forays into sexuality and sentimentality, and his ability to tart up his canvases just enough to look good in the complimentary light provided by a compliant art scene, show that Yokoo, too, has faced that metaphorical fork in the road. But, rather than ‘being adventurous,’ he has more often taken the path of least resistance.

C.B.Liddell
Japan Times
23rd of April, 2008