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Art above the city: located atop a skyscraper, the Mori Art Museum opened with a thematic show of works from East and West, past and present
Art in America, May, 2004 by Barbara Pollack
Like the character Bill Murray plays in the recent film Lost in Translation, the Mori Art Museum, which opened in Tokyo last fall, suffers from a mild case of dislocation. As a privately run contemporary-art venue with international ambitions, it will help herald the accomplishments of such Japanese art stars as Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Takashi Murakami. The museum is also supposed to function as a tourist destination, the jewel in the crown of real-estate developer Minoru Mori's newest project, Roppongi Hills. The upscale multiuse community features condominium apartment buildings, a luxurious Grand Hyatt hotel, the new headquarters of Asahi Television and a shopping complex packed with boutiques of the caliber of Louis Vuitton, Issey Miyake and Baccarat.
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The most prominent structure in Roppongi Hills is the 53-story Mori Tower, designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox. It is one of the tallest buildings in this earthquake-ridden city and houses the Mori Arts Center on the top five floors. In addition to the museum, the center contains a private club with numerous restaurants and meeting rooms, a continuing-education facility and Tokyo City View, an observation deck that provides a 360-degree panorama of the neon-laced metropolis below. Gluckman Mayner Architects designed the steel, glass and sandstone museum, as well as the street-level entry structure, a 98-foot-tall beehive shape covered in glass shingles.
Visitors ride high-speed elevators to reach the 31,820 square feet of exhibition space located on the 52nd and 53rd floors. The galleries themselves are long corridors with windows at the ends. Mori, who calls his pet project "Artelligent City," envisions a scenario where tourists and local residents can mix shopping and sightseeing, entertainment and the viewing of contemporary art, in ways that boost the bottom line of his entire venture. As one of the wealthiest businessmen in Japan, he is blatantly commercial about his goals, stating candidly at the pre-opening press conference that he only became interested in contemporary art when his niece, artist Mariko Mori, mentioned that her work was selling for more, per square inch, than his real estate was worth.
Fortunately, the Mori Art Museum comes equipped with an astute curatorial team, headed by museum director David Elliott, former director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and deputy director Fumio Nanjo, a well-known international curator based in Japan. They immediately recognized that while a museum located in a shopping mall is not unusual in Japan--department store galleries have mounted many important exhibitions--potential viewers from Europe and the U.S. might be put off by this context. Together, they laid out a strategy to place the Mori Art Museum securely on the global art circuit while addressing the underlying reservations of their various audiences.
"What on earth has happiness got to do with art?" asks Elliott in his catalogue essay for the inaugural exhibition, "Happiness: A Survival Guide for Art and Life," which presented a wide range of contemporary art and expanded on the theme by including numerous examples of art through the ages, from modern to ancient. Elliott might really be asking "How can I make you happy?" of the two disparate audiences that the Mori Art Museum hopes to win over. On the one hand, he is addressing the general public, which in Tokyo, as elsewhere, tends to presume that contemporary art will be either too cynical or too serious to provide a pleasurable experience. On the other hand, Elliott is targeting members of the international art world, hundreds of whom flew in for the event.
"Happiness" was a savvy curatorial response to both audiences. Elliott worked with guest curator Pier Luigi Tazzi to assemble over 200 works, ranging from contributions by high-profile contemporaries (among them Tracey Emin, Fred Tomaselli, Louise Bourgeois, Bill Viola and, of course, Takashi Murakami) to a 6th century northern Chinese Bodhisattva and 13th-century Tibetan mandalas. And while much was made at the opening of the fact that Elliott is the first foreign-born director of a museum in Japan, he clearly had invaluable input from Nanjo and the rest of the curatorial staff in fine-tuning the exhibition to the museum's primary audience--Tokyoites.
The exhibition, described by Elliott in his catalogue essay as "a kind of journey through different ideas and times," confronted both Western and Asian notions of happiness. It was loosely organized into four themes--Arcadia, Nirvana, Desire and Harmony--leading viewers through several parallel histories while suggesting a cheerfully idiosyncratic way of looking at art. Here, pleasure, humor and serenity predominated, rather than serving as mere counterpoints to the darker interpretations of life generally provided by 20th-century art movements.
Upon entering the museum atrium, visitors were greeted with "Magnanimous Prayer," a suite of four 32-foot-high digital self portraits by Yasumasa Morimura. The artist is made up in the guise of various Buddhist goddesses, updated with contemporary disco-queen attire. The images--simultaneously kitschy and exotic, sexual and sacred--set the stage for the cultural collisions within the galleries.
