Post Post Post Modern
The 21st century museum of contemporary art, Kanazawa, is housed in a very impressive building, which alone is worth the entrance fee. Within a large glass circle is a labyrinth of corridors that have glass roofs and they lead to the no-window rooms for exhibits, large and small. The building is really cool and kudos to the architect. No photographs are allowed inside the building.
When I visited, two exhibitions were going on, one of a Japanese contemporary artist I’ve never heard of, the other was called de-sport: the deconstruction and reconstruction of sports through art. Now that alone is a mouth-full. It seemed more interesting than the stuff of someone I’ve never heard of.
Every exhibition room had its own installment and the first room was showing a video on two screens of a woman running around in Greece with a fancy torch thingy that was supposed to resemble an Olympic torch. The other camera showed stuff from the perspective of the torch. Bizarre, boring, and it’s meaning escaped me. I liked the Polish weightlifters trying to lift monuments in Poland much better. They were the main attraction in a room which also had portraits of Japanese sumo wrestler kids, a synchronized swimming team from Russia, a water ball team from Russia and some rugby kids from Australia to offer. The portraits (photographs) were interesting, showing diversity in uniformity, but the Polish weightlifters also had a video, simply showing how they were trying to lift monuments hundreds of kilos heavy, with a silly reporter guy commenting on their efforts (in Polish, with English and Japanese subtitles).
Another video installation showed an event in the US. They had an upside down tank whose chains were running noisily and above one set of chains was a treadmill like from a gym and runners were jogging on that treadmill wearing USA Olympic team shirts. People around the tank gawked and took pics and vids of the action with their iPhones. Hm. Well, at least there was some symbolism going on here and various messages depending on your interpretation. Sports as war, military as a treadmill, the US running over the rest of the world like a tank… many more interpretations possible!
Then there was a bunch of tennis balls in the next room and that was it, their meaning escaped me.
Apart from the awesome Polish weightlifters, the Xijing Olympics of 2008 were a blast. Three artists, one Japanese, one Chinese, one Korean held fake Olympics with nonsense disciplines like bread throwing, massage boxing, brush tickling and so forth. The objects, including stone-old bread, were exhibited, as well as nicely designed posters of the Xijing 2008 Olympics and a video showing the guys in action. Now that was cool. It also conveyed a message, our adoration for faster higher stronger is silly, the commercialization of sports sucks and sports should just be fun. I liked that exhibit the most, together with the Polish weightlifters of course.
Then they had another bizarre thing, two guys playing jazz drums while playing chess in some video installment showing the stuff from various angles. Um… okay? So fxxing what? Neither funny, nor a message anywhere, at least not that I got it. Last but not least there was a redesigned ping pong table with a lotus pond in the middle. There were three ping pong table halfs enabling you to kind of play three dimensional ping pong with balls coming also from the left and right, not only the front. Also here I could get a message, change the rules and sports won’t work anymore, it becomes chaos and are all those rules really necessary? It was neat, but couldn’t live up to the Xijing Olympics or my Polish weightlifters.
There also is a permanent installment in the museum of an optical illusion swimming pool. When you look into the pool from the top, which I did, it looks like a deep pool that is at least three meters deep, but in fact there is only ten or twenty centimeters of water. You can go into the pool from the cellar and look up at the tiny pond from below. I would have liked to go down, but due to corona they limited the number of people in the small pool to five at a time and all “tickets” for the pool for that day were already taken. From above it truly looks like deep water, which is pretty neat.
So, that was my brush with contemporary art, it was worth it for the amazing museum building, for the Xijing Olympics, for the air conditioning on this hot summer day and of course for my Polish weightlifters!
