Yokohama's Magic touch

Striking the right balance between accessibility and seriousness, 'Our Magic Hour' in Yokohama draws crowds to innovative contemporary art, writes AIDAN DUNNE

THE WORLD of contemporary art fairs, biennials and triennials has become crowded in the last few decades, and most newcomers have struggled to make their mark. Dublin Contemporary debuts in this challenging environment. Japan’s Yokohama Triennale kicked off in 2001 and has had its own problems along the way to its current, fourth installment, Our Magic Hour.

Eriko Osaka, the exhibition’s director general, is also director of its main venue, the capacious Yokohama Museum of Art. Outlining some of the difficulties she and her team faced, she says, “Our press conference to announce the programme was scheduled for March 11th, the day of the earthquake and the tsunami. We had no option but to cancel.” They were already under pressure. The triennale had been revamped as a municipal endeavour on the part of Yokohama rather than, as previously, being organised by the Japan Foundation, although they still support it.

“We only put our team, with artistic director Akiko Miki, together last October, so we had less than a year to make the exhibition.” Yokohama is Japan’s second city, she says, not its capital. “But we are very close to Tokyo, and Yokohama has always been a cosmopolitan city. Also, the museum is located in the centre of an event and tourist area. It is true that contemporary art is not a popular show. We still struggle to sell tickets.”

However, assistant curator Yuko Katada mentions in passing that up to 300 people were queuing for tickets each morning at opening time, which sounds fairly healthy, and there is a steady stream of visitors moving through the exhibition, with some notable concentrations of crowds.

One of the attractions is a video by the young Dublin-based French artist, Aurélien Froment, Théâtre de Poche, in which a magician conjures up a dazzling array of iconic images of tourist destinations and well-known films and paintings. It's a simple idea but gripping nonetheless, and it attracts packed audiences. Equally, Mircea Cantor's video, Tracking Happiness,in which a circle of white-clad women perpetually sweep away traces of the footprints ahead of them, exercises a strange fascination despite, or perhaps because of, its cyclical, endless nature. Both works are allegorically rich, but also completely accessible.

The Japanese audience respond readily to the relatively abstruse performance work Five Points Make a Man by the late James Lee Byars, with its slow, ritualistic rhythm. It could be because of their experience of traditional Japanese theatre, but the space is packed.

At the exhibition's other big venue, the NYK Waterfront Warehouse, one of Rivane Neunschwander's exhibits allows visitors to generate their own messages by rearranging cards inscribed with letters of the alphabet, and they really love it. In terms of hypnotic interest, though, Christian Marclay's renowned film The Clockwins hands down. Since it was first screened last year, in New York, it's wowed audiences, and with good reason, even though it would take 24 hours to sit through it from beginning to end. Marclay harvested clips from countless feature films in which clock or watch faces feature and constructed a minute-by-minute 24-hour compilation.

One of the mysteries about the work is that, although it should logically disintegrate into a series of disconnected fragments, it exercises a growing, cumulative fascination. It’s screened in a cinema-like darkened space, lined with comfortable sofas, and people have been known to revisit it to catch up on sections that they miss. It shows, for one thing, how quickly we can enter into a fictional, narrative world, and constantly readjust our expectations. If you get any opportunity to watch it, grab it.

Mindful of the nature of the potential audience, the organisers were keen to provide a user-friendly experience. The Yokohama Museum happens to possess a strong collection of European surrealist art, including outstanding works by Max Ernst, René Magritte, Meret Oppenheim and Paul Delvaux. They are on view with other, derivative and much less satisfactory tries at surrealism, but one recent excursion into the area, by Belgian artist Michaël Borremans, comes off incredibly well. He effortlessly perpetuates the spirit of surrealism without merely copying or pastiching it.

The photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, famous in Japan, has a room to himself. His Photographs of a Seventy Year Oldare, perhaps appropriately, of sunsets. Death and memory are persistent themes for him, and two sequences record respectively the life of his much loved cat and the first anniversary of her death.

Several of Damien Hirst’s butterfly paintings, another meditation on mortality, attract some curiosity but nothing like the crowds at other exhibits. Their stained-glass-like quality complements their immediate neighbour: Massimo Bartolini’s arrangement of scaffolding, which doubles as organ pipes through which music flows into the room.

Yoko Ono's installation, cheekily, consists of a glass labyrinth with a telephone at its centre. The lure is that, if you make your way to the centre, the artist, currently at home in New York, might ring. No one was waiting too long for that call. Ono is also showing an extensive installation at the Hiroshima City Museum of Art, The Road of Hope, a response to the city's past catastrophe, which also incorporates references to Japan's recent tsunami. Her installation, besides incorporating doors to a better future, includes domestic debris recovered from buildings demolished by the earthquake and the tsunami.

Unlike Ono, or even Araki, Hiroshi Sugimoto couldn’t be regarded as a populist artist, but there are permanent queues for his walk-through installation, featuring not only the beautiful black-and-white photographs for which he is best known but a series of intriguing, Zen-like stories that pose questions about the nature of perception and reality.

Some time ago, the Californian artist Peter Coffin set out to explore the theory that growing plants respond to music, and the latest instance of his investigation takes place in Yokohama, where, in an improvised performance, he plays loud electronic music to a greenhouse full of plants. Challenging stuff, particularly as it goes on for more than an hour and a half, but again the venue was packed way beyond capacity, and everyone seemed engrossed.

Our Magic Hour is relatively compact for an international blockbuster show, and that’s no harm. It scores on quality, and Miki’s selection of works strikes the right balance between accessibility and what might be termed high seriousness.

Our Magic Hour: Yokohama Triennale 2011 is at the Yokohama Museum of Art and the NYK Waterfront Warehouse until November 6th