If you're planning to visit the Shinro Ohtake retrospective now on at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, be sure to wear comfortable shoes. With over 2,000 works spread over the entire extent of the museum--one of Tokyo's biggest--you'll be on your feet for a long time if you try to take in every aspect of this blockbuster show.
Titled Zen-kei--meaning "full view"--the exhibition aims to give a comprehensive look at one of Japan's most prolific artists.
Comprising painting, sculpture, video, collage, found objects, scrapbooks and even musical works, the first impression is of a diverse talent. But even this isn't really the full view, for Ohtake estimates that his total output numbers over 20,000 works, most of which have never been shown.
The exhibition also marks the first time the whole of MOT has been given over to a single Japanese artist.
If that sounds like a signal honor, then the artist himself feels that the recognition is long overdue.
Ohtake burst on the Japanese art scene in the 1980s, when he was hailed as one of Japan's leading exponents of the "New Painting" movement. But the art world's attention soon shifted, something Ohtake says is partly explained by his decision to move to the small city of Uwajima, Ehime Prefecture, in Shikoku.
"Usually, modern art is basically in and about the city, and they always ignore the regions and the countryside," says a slightly peevish Ohtake in an interview with The Daily Yomiuri.
Fashions come full circle, however, and it seems that he is officially back in the spotlight. So what does Zen-kei have to tell us about the second coming of Shinro Ohtake?
Among the most engaging elements of the show is hinted at in the dates given in its subtitle: Retrospective 1955-2006. Since Ohtake was born in 1955, that date range suggests we're going to be treated to some very early works indeed. Actually, there aren't any pieces from his toddling days, but the exhibition is notable for the artists's willingness--determination, in fact--to include pieces produced when he was a child.
Some of the earliest examples, such as doodles of anime character Astro Boy from 1962-63 look like something any 7 or 8 year old might produce--or, at least, any precocious one with a cartoonist's flair for line and form.
But it wasn't long before the young Ohtake was grappling with more adult elements. With its artful composition and comic-book images of fighter planes, Black Shidenkai (1964) suggests he had seen Roy Lichtenstein's Whaam!
, which was produced a year earlier.
By 1973, then in his late teens, Ohtake was producing drawings adapted from photos by Diane Arbus. The technique is adult by this stage, and there are hints of a move away from representation toward abstraction.
But these are still the works of an artist looking for a voice to call his own, so why include the unfinished article in such a show?
"My first exhibition was held when I was 26 or 27. My work was often talked about from that point on, but I always wanted to show what came before that and what led up to that point," Ohtake says.
"In modern art exhibitions works before the artist established his concept or style are considered unimportant and excluded--which I just don't understand. What I want to see in an exhibition is what kind of creative drive a person who wanted to create something had when they were small," he adds.
The question of Ohtake's "voice" remains a difficult one as the viewer moves into the main body of the show, dealing with his adult works.
Not because of a lack of originality, but because of a surfeit. The artist has produced such a variety of work that it's hard to describe or categorize him in any simple way--a difficulty that may be the real reason for his critical neglect.
In the early to mid 1980s you could certainly have called him a painter.
These were the boom years of New Painting, when there was a reaction against the long dominance of abstraction and a new interest in some of the more traditional elements of the art.
Ohtake disputes whether some of his best known works from around this time were really part of the movement, but others certainly saw it that way. Mr.
Peanut (1978-81) features a Warhol-like fusion of portraiture and commercial imagery. Tokyo-Puerto Rico (1986) is almost traditional landscape painting, but dark, grimy and redolent of the industrial age. The fractionating columns of an oil refinery replace the bell towers of a 19th century cityscape, and it's ambiguous whether this vision is served up as a celebration or a warning.
The movement won Ohtake a lot of acclaim from critics who were looking for its Japanese manifestation. The artist is grateful for that, but says the attention wasn't always wholly positive.
"They called it New Painting, but it was really a discriminatory term.
They used it to describe a subculture, and didn't really recognize it as true art. That's how I felt, but I can't deny that the movement helped me," Ohtake says.
In any case, the artist was about to enter a period of diverse new creativity, and later works mark a decisive break from New Painting.
Among the most striking on show here are some of his huge kinetic sculptures. Indeed, viewers are welcomed to the show by Zeroscape (1991-99)--a visual and aural spectacle that stands in MOT's entrance lobby.
A two-story high totem pole crafted from wood, steel and assorted junk, Zeroscape rotates slowly to the accompaniment of Hawaiian-sounding music.
Periodically it emits a discordant screech, as an attached electric guitar is strummed by a mechanical hand.
Mysterious and captivating, it reminded many original critics of kinetic works by Swiss artist and entertainer Jean Tinguely (1925-91). In a recent essay on Ohtake, art critic Noi Sawaragi says "they couldn't have been more wrong" in seeing these parallels.
But it still seems like a fair comparison to me.
Perhaps the best way to see such works, however, is as part of Ohtake's fascination with combining sound and vision.
During the 1970s, the young artist spent some years in London, where he was fascinated by the experimental music scene.
More than two decades later, the spirit of those days is alive and well in works by Ohtake such as the two shacks of Dub-Hei and New Chanel (1999).
In the larger of the two ramshackle structures is an automated band with three guitars and a drum kit. Covering the walls are posters, adverts and a mass of other unidentifiable scraps of paper, the whole scene bringing to mind a basement punk club, sometime in the late 1970s.
What makes it more than mere sculpture, however, is the adjoining shack, which is actually Ohtake's control room. At the time of my visit he is in situ, orchestrating a cacophonous, atonal performance from the instruments in the main shack.
A musical sculpture?
Experimental music with sculptural overtones? Actually, Ohtake has another term for it: painting.
"I strongly feel that 3D art and sound are extensions of painting.
The basic thing is the paper and pencil, and I come back to the basics in the end. I strongly feel I'm a painter," he says, explaining that he sees no distinction between the different media he employs.
Of all the works featured in this show, the most authentically and uniquely Ohtake are perhaps his voluminous scrapbooks--works that also date back to his time in London.
"At that time I didn't know what I was supposed to do, and I was struggling to find my own originality. I felt pressured in that sense, but when I saw some matchbox labels at a flea market I felt a sense of rediscovery," Ohtake recalls of the first items that he put in a scrapbook.
He hasn't stopped making them since, with the total collection now topping 12,500 pages.
At MOT they fill cabinet after cabinet, forming a sprawling, kaleidoscopic library.
There's an almost archaeological quality to these works, which seem like a core sample through the layers of Ohtake's own history. But the artist says there's no compulsion to record in all this--merely an unstoppable need to create: "When I make the scrapbooks there are no rules, and this is a kind of experimental breaking of the taboos.
..I try to do the opposite of what I normally do, like using colors that I don't usually like, so this is not quite like a diary or a recording.
"
Diary or not, it seems that the artist is once again at a point in his life that will be worth recording. After a long period toiling in the wilderness, Ohtake clearly feels he's due some more time in the limelight. Serious and quietly intense in person, he makes no bones about seeing Zen-kei as a just reward.
"When I was in my 20s, people paid attention to me but I never felt that I was fully understood," he says. "This is the first time I've ever felt that I've been able to do what I really wanted. In a way, I feel that this is my first exhibition.
"
Until Dec. 24, open daily 10 a.m.
-6 p.m. Closed Mondays.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, a nine-minute walk from Kiyosumi-Shirakawa Station on the Hanzomon subway line, or 14 minutes from Kiyosumi-Shirakawa Station on the Oedo subway line.
Admission: 1,400 yen for adults; 1,100 yen for students; or 700 yen for middle- and high-school students, or seniors aged 65 and over.
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