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KNOW	CRITIQUE FROM ABROAD

Travel Diary

FYA asked New York based painter and critic Joe Fyfe to share an excerpt of his ongoing travel diary.

I am not traveling much these days, but I am getting on planes and going places. My friend S. asks me to accompany her to Tokyo and I get on yet another plane. Tokyo, I am warned, is stiflingly hot and humid in the summer. We are ensconced in a friend’s second apartment in the Aoyoma district, near Roppongi, the old expat area that was honky-tonk when American Forces were a larger presence. Aoyoma is at the edge of the high fashion shopping area. The most notable section has a long street, Omotesando, divided by trees and chock a block with high commerce fashion names like Ralph Lauren. It’s sort of like the Champs-Elysées. The apartment is right off Kotto-Dori a street that used to be full of antiques dealers. There aren’t many left. A few large private houses, lot of medium height apartment buildings. Closer by are the more exclusive designers, Prada, in a Herzog-Meuron building, Commes des Garcon, Yamamoto.

I had been in Japan briefly once before, a few days in Tokyo and three in Kyoto, where I rode around through the hills on a bicycle and visited the temples. I wasn’t that interested in Tokyo per se, but I was not going to miss a chance to spend time there. I brought work to do: writing that needed to be done and drawings to work on. S. took care of her business and we did things together and at other times I was on my own. My idea of Japan was that it was all in the details, accumulating all the little impressions would be interesting.

The first thing that I became aware of is that Tokyo is a sexed-up place—at least in the neighborhoods where I was spending time. In the evenings brought businessmen out with their girlfriends—identifiable with a certain desirable girlfriend demeanor and dress—and then in the daytime there was a young woman fashion parade going on in the boutiques and thereabouts. There was a general flirtatious energy on the streets in the neighborhood, not directed towards me, but in a general way. One could seemingly occupy the sign of the coquette with impunity, but then there is a molestation problem on the Metros, so extreme that there are cars reserved for women only during rush hour. These aspects, clear divisions between men and women—the malls were full of conservatively well-dressed haute-bourgeois women having lunch with same; the men, if around were all dressed in black and in groups concentrating completely on business or on women and diversion—it gave a strange hint of what 19th century Paris might have been like.

I was particularly conscious of the earth in Tokyo. The traditional aesthetic rooted in nature contrasted completely with the "Empire of Signs." Clay and porcelain pottery is in wide distribution on all levels from the most treasured and rare to the mass-produced and commonly used. Several stores in my neighborhood sold antique pottery, and one, obscurely tucked in next to a 7-Eleven and near the Metro had people stopping in to browse through their contemporary handmade pots, plates, vases and cups. I became more and more interested in this particular shop as my time there progressed. Several museum exhibitions happened to be of artists who were favorites or in whom I had a renewed interest. All were united in their relation to the earth. At the Corot show at the National Museum of Western Art, for example, one is perhaps more aware, here, of his terrestrial aspects—sleepy models in half-shaded interiors (some holding jars), tan-colored Italian hills—and especially, in his later Barbizon landscapes, their commonality with Japanese screens of poetically misty landscapes.

At The Idemitsu Museum of Art, (the name comes from an energy magnate, Idemitsu is the brand name of many gas stations) is "Hommage à Georges Rouault" an extensive survey of drawings, paintings and prints. Where Corot is sober, Rouault is serious—grave, even. At the same time he takes great liberties with oil paint, which appears in his work as sacred, colored humus used to make his mostly sacred images. The show also demonstrates a large influence on the work of Howard Hodgkin, something I had suspected: Rouault’s slow buildup of paint followed by his boldly bright brushstrokes that curve through the picture, as well as another penchant for last minute-multicolored stripes imposed over countless previous painting decisions. In an extensive series of works on Christ’s passion, Rouault utilizes an internal painted frame throughout. Elsewhere, he paints the wooden fame surrounding the portrait. In a late portrait from '56, "Pierrot" he paints on a wooden tondo.

Most remarkable was the first retrospective exhibition of a particular aboriginal artist outside of Australia, Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s paintings at Tokyo’s latest art museum, The National Art Center. I reviewed it for ArtCritical.com and it can be found here.The museum, designed by Kisho Kuragawa was, like most contemporary museums striving to be an event, a go-to destination. I did not respond to the building at first as other than spectacle. It had a large waving glass façade. The interior featured cast concrete inverted cones with restaurants on their flat tops, but the place grew on me slowly as I revisited the Kngwarreye exhibition. The space enveloped the visitor in its hugeness, then one could duck off into galleries and the theater of the building disappeared.

Of equal interest was a show at the Tokyo National Museum: Korean Tea Bowls from the Joseon Dynasty, mass produced in the 15th –16th century but very wabi style and funky, they caught on in Japan because they were rustic and natural. All of the work mentioned—Emily, Corot, Rouault—shared that quality of being humble, philosophical and in touch with nature.

Another day I went to Shiedome Center, part of a real estate project, of which there are many in Tokyo, which revises a section of the city. I saw Melissa Myer’s murals, painterly abstractions influenced by Ukiyo-e, installed in a large lobby. On my last trip they were still in crates. Another day I made the rounds to all the designers on Omotesando. Yamamoto still is the most interesting: best textures and colors and his seductive obscurity is intact.

There was a trip to the mountains to a traditional hotel with sulfur baths and a cuisine derived from the higher echelons of Kyoto centuries ago, and a very speedy train to get there. Japan is overbuilt, crowded and quiet. There is not a high degree of sociability on the trains and speaking on cell phones is strictly forbidden. Returning to Tokyo, I liked walking through the back streets behind the larger thoroughfares, and spending time looking at how the houses were assembled, individually and as they met one another in progression. Though the formal architecture, in the form of individual buildings was impressive, although any wide view of the city wasn’t.

The level of food preparation, as well as freshness and the immaculateness of the preparation environment left me rather soured upon my return to the U.S. I gained weight from eating so much and so well, all kinds of Korean and Japanese food. And then there were the bakeries, particularly The Berry Café, a place that had originated in Florence that sold fresh fruit pies with combinations of fresh figs and berries or several kinds of grapefruit, for example, and with bases of Fromage Blanche or custard. Another favorite place was a small restaurant that only served tempura. The owner was a very self-possessed man in crisp, blindingly clean, chef’s whites. He stood behind where we sat at the counter and served up feather light pieces of tempura piece by piece. There was a large (about the size of a small boulder) chunk of something salmon colored behind him and we asked, surprised, if it might be a side of tuna. No, he said, it was salt. This same ground pink salt was all I used on my tempura and it was delightful. S. asked him about the bowl he stirred his batter in and he said he could not find a bowl that was high enough to stir his batter in properly, so he took a ceramics class and made his own.

Another night we saw two Noh plays. I did not know what was going on but the costumes and movements were enough to keep me involved. I kept returning to the odd pottery store to look at the ceramic ware. First I bought a brown cup with some speckles on it. I liked the way it was innocuous but somehow special, like those boring Corot paintings that have their own secrets. Then I bought a strange, funky plate. I later also purchased a vase that had remained in my thoughts for days. Both were by Uno Ninmatsu, who was from Kyoto and taught Isamu Noguchi the craft of pottery. These ceramics, I felt, were the beginnings of something I was trying to figure out but wasn’t exactly sure what it was yet. It made the purchasing of them thrilling. This may be the stimulus behind buying all works of art, or perhaps should be.

Joe Fyfe currently resides in Brooklyn. He has had solo shows of his paintings at James Graham & Sons (upcoming March '’09) and his drawings at Cynthia Broan in New York City, at Galerie Pitch in Paris and in Ho Chi Minh City and in Hanoi, Vietnam. He has received a Bessie Award for stage design (’'86) and grants from The Guggenheim Foundation, Pollock-Krasner and Gottlieb Foundations (2: ‘03 & ‘08) and recently spent six months as a Fulbright research fellow in Vietnam and Cambodia (‘06-’'07) and the summer ('’07) as artist in residence at Sitterwerk Zentrum für Kunst und Kulturwirtschaf in St. Gallen, Switzerland. He writes for Art in America & Artnet. He is also a contributing editor at ArtCritical.com & Bomb magazine.