Koki Tanaka: On Collectives, Art & Disasters
by Lilly Wei

Walking into the cluttered Japan Pavilion of the 55th Venice Biennale is like walking
into a makeshift, D.I.Y. loft, workshop or community center. While not mayhem, the installation “Abstract speaking—sharing uncertainty and collective acts” by Koki Tanaka
and curated by Mika Kuraya of Tokyo’s National Museum of Modern Art is decidedly
not minimalist. Instead, the space, roughly columned, partitioned into the semblanceof rooms, feels hospitable, disposable, furnished with a couch, benches, pillows piled
against a corner, countless stacks of cardboard boxes and blocks of wood used as bases
for improvised tables and stands. Among all this, videos, photographs, explanatory
texts and objects are casually, if cannily, dispersed; it is an installation, after all. Someof the materials were already on site, recycled from Japan’s entry in last year’s Venice
Architectural Biennale. Called Architecture. Possible Here?, it presented a housing plan
for a town ravaged by the country’s disastrous 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear
meltdown. Tanaka’s incorporation of the previous installation is a gesture of conservation and collaboration that buttresses his own less direct references to the catastrophe,emphasizing his essential theme of community in the aftermath of extreme calamity. For
New Yorkers, it recalls the compassionate communal endeavors of post 9/11 days andmore recently, the collective efforts after Hurricane Sandy. Tanaka strongly believes thatany current exhibition from Japan is inevitably framed by the “post-quake” trauma andshould address it, although it is not exactly “post,” since much remains alarmingly unresolved.

1Tanaka (born 1975 in Japan, lives in Los Angeles), a multidisciplinary artist, is known
for a practice that explores the ramifications of art into life, a utopian genre with deeproots in the history of modernism, from the Russian Constructivists to today’s burst ofsocially inspired productions. His videos of group tasks he initiates include artists andartisans, such as five pianists playing the piano at the same time, a wonderful sequence;
five potters making one ceramic piece; five poets writing a poem together; and ninehairdressers cutting one person’s hair, usually engaged in a discussion of their collective
enterprise. In a behavioral statement (or unconscious protest), 2013, Tanaka films a large
number of people climbing up and down a fire escape, possibly evacuating the building
or demonstrating the urgent need to save energy. His more open-ended activities he calls“precarious tasks.” One is precarious tasks #0 communal tea drinking, 2012, in which hephotographed a number of people drinking tea together. Tanaka suggested that they
focus on the custom of tea drinking, the various countries from where tea originates,
its Asian, its Japanese roots, its rituals and connections to other cultures, associations
spiraling to eventually arrive at the deeply troubling irradiation and contamination offood, water and land in the wake of the Fukushima debacle. There is also an informal
display of objects featured in the actions that include a vitrine of emergency foods andflashlights, drawings, ceramics, books, poems and so on, every item of equivalent, if unfixed value, the divide between what is art and what is not ambiguous, even moot. Staffers working on their computers have also been co-opted into the installation, as have theviewers wandering in and out, their presence vital and another instance of communal
participation, fluidly merging with the multiple activities being viewed.
At the heart of Tanaka’s quirky, engrossing, multi-layered venture are the relationships
and interactions between participants, the obliquity of his approach immensely appealing, as were the participants. For him, ordinary communal action can be extraordinarily
powerful, something we have all witnessed lately. The lengthy texts and even lengthier
videos require patience but also reward it. Given how unassuming some of the activities
are, they are also surprisingly poetic, the balancing of the banal, the naïve and the subtle
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part of their strength. They are apt responses, inconclusive and therefore more truthful,
to his question: what can art do in the face of devastation?
A neon sign at the entrance to the pavilion that states 9478.57 records the kilometers, itturns out, between the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant and the Japan Pavilion in Venice. Is that near or far? Tanaka, of course, understands that community today is a global
phenomenon, national boundaries are porous, distances relative and constantly shrinking. No one, no nation can isolate disaster, the repercussions will eventually affect us all.

*The review was originally written in English and translated into Japanese for the magazine Bijutsu-techo.
Lilly Wei is a New York-based critic and independent curator.

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