
“CATASTROPHE AND THE POWER OF ART”
Although cataclysmic events typically become the stuff of Hollywood blockbusters and cable news, Kondo Kenichi is interested in how contemporary artists learn from, comment on, and even ameliorate the negative effects of such twenty-first-century disasters as 9/11 and the 2008 economic crisis. Crucial to his thesis is the artistic response to Japan’s 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear-plant meltdown, a tripartite calamity that spawned Tsubasa Kato’s The Lighthouses–11.3 Project, 2011, a social sculpture requiring five hundred rope-pulling volunteers to raise a wooden