“ANOMALY” is a gallery jointly launched by Yamamoto Gendai, URANO, and Hashimoto Art Office.
The word “ANOMALY” refers to phenomena or individuals that cannot be explained by orthodox logic or common sense — irregularities, deviations.
The gallery’s inaugural exhibition is “Grand Opening” by Chim↑Pom.
Chim↑Pom is an artist collective made up of six members: Ryuta Ushiro, Yasutaka Hayashi, Ellie, Masataka Okada, Motomu Inaoka, and Toshinori Mizuno.
In “Grand Opening,” they unfold their own distinctive brand of “urban theory.”
Just prior to this show, they created “Building Burger” at “Ningen Restaurant,” an event held in Tokyo’s Kabukicho — a monumental sculpture made by cutting through the floors of a building and stacking them directly onto the ground floor. This enormous work is being transported into ANOMALY.
On top of that, “Michi (The Street)” — first shown at the 2017 Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan — is being physically brought in from Taiwan via a stop in London.
In addition, Chim↑Pom “as individuals” will improvisationally produce works on site during a roughly month-long installation period.
The “urban theory” Chim↑Pom develops here runs counter to Tokyo’s recent city-making, which has moved from the public toward the individual. With a return from the individual to the public in mind, and with an eye to renewal, they declare: “Interesting individuals make an interesting public.”
Related events are also planned during the exhibition. This is definitely one to watch!
Hello, this is Chim↑Pom.
Congratulations on ANOMALY’s grand opening!Grand Opening! That punchline you’re always seeing — an implausibly glamorous headline for a new shop, or a euphoria-drenched press release for a neighborhood redevelopment. Grand opening! Just how much capacity does an “epic opening” actually have? We can’t wait! We really hope that ANOMALY — a commercial gallery that will surely carry Japan on its shoulders — will pursue capacity not toward the “general public” that today’s public spaces, museums, and art festivals treat as their mission, but toward a truly deep humanity.
Opening the doors to bigger crowds isn’t automatically better. Case in point: apparently public parks are being privatized in stages.
“It’s not even a PUBLIC park anymore!”
An artist who raised his voice about this is our friend Osamu Matsuda. A trashy dude from the ghetto with a bad upbringing — and yet, out of nowhere, he decides to have a lovely lunch in the park, packs a homemade bento, and sits on the bench. Talk about biting off more than you can chew. Sure enough, someone reported him for “making the park hard to enter.” Lol
So he flies off the handle, drunk-ranting,
“WHAT IS PUBLIC?!”
But once you hear the setup — a middle-aged guy in pajamas with bedhead in broad daylight, eating a homemade bento in the park lol — you kind of want to side with the officers who had to come out for that. Still, you have to admit Matsuda’s drunken talk has a point. Ueno Park apparently also swapped its street stalls for Starbucks; come to think of it, none of us can tell “public” from “majority” anymore.And frankly, saying this while eyeing Terrada Warehouse, which leads urban development in Tennozu, and ANOMALY, which occupies one of their properties, is more than a little awkward — but at the end of the day, art is birds of a feather. Whether directly connected to Tennozu or not, gentrification that pushes filthy artists like Matsuda out of a neighborhood is one of the biggest issues facing today’s art scene.
And to go further: on the developer side that jacks up land values — i.e. the real-estate operators pushing artist Matsuda out — there are also, ironically, artists involved…! Yes, for instance in this case, that would be Chim↑Pom, headlining ANOMALY’s inaugural show, lol. What a difficult industry this has become.Because let’s face it — even lumped together as “Chim↑Pom,” each of us as individuals is just as hopeless as Matsuda. A two-hour police stop is a normal Tuesday; when the cops stop the Chim↑Pom car, the tools in the trunk get treated as suspicious enough to hint at murder or burglary (true story).
Then again, that’s just what an artist is: a trashy sort who was only ever cut slack out of a vague hope that they might just create some extreme individual range. So it’s honestly worrying to wonder what on earth we’ve been dragged into.For example, in a city where art has now dissolved seamlessly into the streetscape, street artists take commissions to paint developers’ walls, and media artists carry the Hinomaru and public-works projects on their shoulders, somehow feeling responsibility toward the nation itself. And most contemporary artists happily settle into the position of an illustration for a curatorial project or an art fair. And then they get up on the TED stage to talk about their track record as members of society, and the meaning and thesis of art. Come on. Besides, this isn’t the age of anti-theses anymore! And the more you say it, the happier the crowd who wants trash exterminated becomes — everyone wins, which makes zero sense.
Public and individual. Container and person. Firing off project after project while thinking about urban theory, we’ve come full circle to: “You can’t make an interesting public unless the individuals themselves are interesting!” — and somehow started to get all excited by that “individual” nuance. To put it crudely, “Michi (The Street)” we made at KITA-KORE last year is exactly that pattern: because there’s a bar there, someone throws up on it every night, and thanks to that, the street is growing! Nobody’s going to sign onto that geeky private-road aesthetic, I know.
But in spaces that public and private have opened up together, no such joke can slip in — because at the end of the day, they are for “consumers on an epic scale.” In exchange, the homeless, the activists — in other words, every “party involved” — are given eviction notices, one and all; no demos, no scary terrorism, no unmanageable women peeing at the curbside like Ellie.Across a Tokyo where “renewal” has become the default, and drawn as we are by the cries of “grand opening” ringing out from every direction, we would rather try to plot a different kind of grand opening — one that is shittily, sincerely open in a much more “epic” way.
Chim↑Pom
November 2018
Details
Chim↑Pom “Grand Opening”
Venue: ANOMALY
November 22, 2018 (Thu, day before holiday) – January 26, 2019 (Sat)
Tue, Wed, Thu, Sat 11:00–18:00; Fri 11:00–20:00
Closed Sun, Mon, holidays, and December 23, 2018 – January 14, 2019
Opening reception: November 22, 2018 (Thu, day before holiday) 18:00–21:00
