Out of the ruins - installation pieces by Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata

Art in America, July, 1993 by Nancy Princenthal

Tadashi Kawamata's biggest project to date was an extravagantly complex wooden web partially surrounding a derelict Gothic Revival hospital--built in the 19th century to isolate smallpox victims--located at the southernmost end of Roosevelt Island in New York's East River. Like all of Kawamata's work, it was triumph of barely governed chaos. Gently curving walls woven of used planks bolstered with old doors reached out from the hospital ruins to form a maze of souklike arcades. Fragments of improvised roofing rested hap-hazardly on narrow beams as if deposited by nasty weather. Half a dozen small shelters, so casually constructed that their hospitality seemed almost inadvertent, spun out at the margins of the site, along with a few thoughtfully placed rustic benches. Water was all around, and so was rampant vegetation. An English garden as imagined by Mad May, Kawamata's installation was a vision of dissolution so prodigious that it seemed to promise regeneration as well.

Like many site-specific installations and earthworks, the Roosevelt Island Project will remain, for most viewers, an imagined experience. From Sept. 15 to Nov. 1, 1992, after a summer of construction and years of negotiations under the patient stewardship of curator Claudia Gould, it was seen, at a distance, by thousands. Viewpoints included river-facing buildings on the East Side of Manhattan and the FDR Drive, a major thoroughfare. But because of the frailty of the landmark hospital, access to the site was by appointment only, for no more than 20 people at a time. During the six-week run there were roughly 25 scheduled visits. Thus the number of people who saw it at close range is quite small.

Kawamata is altogether comfortable with this state of affairs. Over 10 years ago, he realized a project in an obscure Tokyo apartment rented for just a month, a project that was seen by roughly 20 friends and colleagues. At the same time, he had already begun to move out into the urban landscape, starting with rudimentary cratelike forms installed under a railroad bridge outside Tokyo in 1979. That was the year Kawamata first worked with standard milled lumber, which he initially used mainly indoors, building quasi-architectural structures or space dividers with the neatly carpentered planks. Soon he allowed the increasingly informal structures to penetrate walls, as in Measure Scene, Nagoya, a 1981 gallery installation in that city. By 1984, he was actively challenging institutional as well as physical boundaries, for example in the Ginza Network project, which involved simultaneous installations in three galleries and a jewelry shop in central Tokyo. To Kawamata, this participatory project consisted not just of the prepared installations but of the images each viewer accumulated on the walk from one site to the next.

In 1985, Kawamata was awarded a studio at P.S. 1 in New York, where he put up an irregular, freehand scaffolding in the courtyard of the former school; the U-shape plan of the building and the accretive nature of his work led him to compare the project with the way metal filings adhere to a horseshoe magnet. While in New York that year, he also did an interior-exterior project at the well-known Limelight nightclub, which is housed in a deconsecrated Neo-Gothic church. Since the mid-'80s he has been a nomad, moving from one project site to the next (currently he maintains seldom-used residences in Tokyo and Amiens). His temporary installations of various sizes have appeared in the major contemporary surveys at Sao Paulo and Kassel, and also in Toronto, Houston and Koitrijk, Belgium.

For several years Kawamata stuck with singular purpose to a format that could be applied without wide variation to structures that differ in every aspect, including not just accessibility but also function, historical interest and commercial and cultural status. The Roosevelt Island Project, initially conceived more than five years ago, was a transitional installation, combining elements of that scaffoldlike series with aspects that relate to more recent favela projects, in which Brazilian slum dwellings are the model for ranks of scrapwood shanties.

Here, as always with Kawamata's work, the meaning of the project was inextricably bound up with implications of the site. At the smallpox hospital, these included physical constraints and formal paradigms. A broken masonry shell without roof or floorboards, the hospital is officially a "ruin." It is propped up in some places by cement-block buttresses and in other places by uncannily Kawamata-like struts of weathered wood. Authorities prohibited Kawamata's structure from actually touching the hospital building and required that a rectilinear gridded armature of fire-retardant new wood be built by independent contractors before the artist could begin his work. The extra skin oddly doubled the relationship of his construction to the hospital, which is itself merely a facade.

Other physical aspects of the site to which Kawamata responded include the hospital's isolation, its paradoxically flimsy bulk, its suddenly looming presence when approached along the wooded path from the north and its odd submergence when seen from the landfill promontory that abuts its southern facade (the city has been using this tip of Roosevelt Island as a dumping ground for dirt and broken pavement, and the hospital now appears to sit in a hole because of the new "ground level"). These factors all worked against any coherent sense of scale.