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Five Nights at the Museum
There is such a thing as overdosing on fine art and bold architecture. After a few days of ingesting Rauschenbergs, Stellas, Hockneys and even one exceptional set of Claude Monet’s water lilies, I had redlined. My eyes hurt, my shins were developing splints from hard gallery floors and I clearly needed a break. I pushed a button hailing the private funicular monorail to whisk me up to my room in the hybrid hotel-meets-museum that is Benesse House on the Japanese island of Naoshima. I was starting to agree with some fellow guests I had met at breakfast – a sprightly pair of Dutch seniors – that Japanese starchitect Tadao Ando’s cast-in-place concrete buildings and their slightly alkaline smell had become a bit too Zen. “It reminds me of dikes,” said one. “Or the Maginot Line,” concluded the other. As the monorail car clicked up the mountainside, I gazed out at the glinting Seto Inland Sea, framed by haze-smeared ghosts of the outer islands, the vista a welcome reality check after so much artiness. Despite its name, the sea is not inland at all but rather a portion of the Pacific, sheltering a verdant archipelago that stretches from Osaka’s industrial portside almost to Fukuoka on Kyushu. But it is inland in another more important sense, being central to the minds, hearts and stomachs of the Japanese. Seto-naikai’s sheltered bays are the ur-source of the galaxy of seafood central to Japan’s cuisine; its misty seascapes are the subject of Hokusai’s iconic 19th-century woodblocks; its azalea-decked hills shelter the late Modernist sculptor Isamu Noguchi’s stone workshop; and built more recently around its edges is a string of suspension bridges, including the world’s longest. Thanks to Naoshima, the Inland Sea has become a global – not just Japanese – cultural hub. I had come here to drink in the art for a few days but also to think about the fate of a marriage: that troubled relationship between the exhibition of art and the increasingly boisterous buildings opening all around the world that showcase it. In the aftermath of too many formy, mock-sculptural art museums by Frank Gehry, Will Alsop and Daniel Libeskind, the Bilbao Effect had become bilious for me. Too much of this architecture was a distraction, not a complement to the painting, sculpture, photography and installation art contained within. The ancients called architecture the mother of the arts, but now it was smothering. Naoshima is home to one of the great experiments in contemporary visual culture. The lush, remote island dotted with ancient villages has been transformed into a site for the seamless integration of leading-edge art, the contemporary good life and up-to-the-minute design. You get to wake, eat, relax and sleep with the art. What this means came clear later that night, following a kaiseki dinner saturated with hues and flavours inspired by the surrounding art. I stumbled onto a twentysomething Japanese couple sprawled across the museum floor. They alternately gazed at the army of hundreds of Power Ranger-like figures in Yukinori Yanagi’s Banzai Corner, then got back to heavy petting, oblivious. A few minutes later, I walked through the immense concrete drum at the museum’s core, where the sole light was the flashing neon array of Bruce Nauman’s 100 Live and Die, illuminating a quiet debate by three developers from Tbilisi. I followed up a shiatsu massage the next day by soaking in the art – in both senses – with a dunk in the Jacuzzi, set within a ring of Chinese standing stones at the centre of Cai Guo-Qiang’s Cultural Melting Bath: Project for Naoshima. In the village of Honmura – arrived at on a borrowed bike – I visited the hilltop Go’o Shrine. Here one-half of an 18th-century Shinto shrine was restored, and then a new companion temple in contemporary materials was created by artist Hiroshi Sugimoto. An artwork for veneration in every sense, the contemporary shrine consists of a staircase running from the older shrine’s steps to deep within the soil, the risers formed entirely from in-situ cast glass. These sparkling stairs also suck sunlight downward – step by step – into a mystical underground chamber, which art pilgrims can enter through a slit-like concrete passageway. Gazing up at Go’o’s haloed stair light from a crude dirt floor, I struggled for a critical take. “Architecture gone sublime without the burden of function.” A little wordy. Or this banner: “Young British artists’ Japanese cousins enter zazen satori” – a Buddhist idea which means sudden enlightenment through disciplined meditation. |
