“A Perspective on Contemporary Art: Continuity/Transgression”

The works in “Continuity/Transgression” question their relationship to the museum and its modes of engagement with the outside world. The National Museum of Art in Osaka, built for the 1970 World Exposition and stranded in a park on the city’s outskirts, exemplifies a kind of generic International Style: glass foyer, giant escalator along the facade, concrete everywhere. Julian Opie’s intervention, as decorative as it is barely perceptible, uses the building’s architecture as a point of departure (We swam amongst the fishes, 2002). Opie-style fish are painted in black on the glass double doors of the entrance hall and, superimposed onto the depths of the museum’s vast lobby, visually engage the monumental works of modern art on permanent display. In particular, the decorative nature of a Calder mobile is accentuated by the interaction. Somehow the fish, floating as if in an aquarium, emphasize the museum’s cool modernism and offer it up for scrutiny.

Tadasu Takamine’s God Bless America, 2002, is an animated film that shows an enormous clay head enthroned in the center of a studio where a pair of artists go about their daily lives. Their actions—eating, sleeping, making love—are comically sped up, recalling the antic agitation of silent films. The head’s facial expressions change unceasingly, sometimes of their own accord, other times molded by the artists, who periodically climb on top of it, flattening and squashing it. All the while, the head sings “God Bless America,” imperturbably, in a fragile and high-pitched voice. The image of sculpture and sculptor in the atelier is one of art’s most venerable tropes. But here the image is turned on its head, as the sculpture—a figure at once divine and naive, bewitching and ridiculous—comes alive, only to be desecrated while expressing an obsessive fascination with America.

Translated from French by Emily Speers Mears.