"Thomas Ruff" @ National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (MOMAT)

I was quite taken with Thomas Ruff's work, helped, I think, by their monumentality - many are somewhere in the vicinity of 1 to 2 metres along either or both dimensions.

The earlyish-career portraits - an example of the 'typology' approach that he uses at times - are a highlight, the size of the seemingly objectively shot passport-style photos of people's faces imbuing them with real interest.

Also noteworthy were his portraits of a different kind - shots of Mies van der Rohe buildings, which capture some essential simplicity. A few digitally manipulated photograms with glassy, eye-catching effect. And three different series created by (again) manipulating existing sources taking space as their subjects ("Stars", "cassini" and "ma.r.s").

Non-Ruff pieces from elsewhere in the museum that grabbed me included Tai Kambara's "Notes of a Pessimist" paintings (1923), the surrealist "Landscape with an Eye" (Ai-Mitsu, 1938), Tatsuoki Nambata's "Generation" (1959), two earlyish ones by Yayoi Kusama (this trip has brought home to me that despite the ease with which she can be identified and pigeonholed, Kusama's work has genuine charge) and three on the theme of moonlight: Shinsen Tokuoka's "Moonlight" (1950), Komei Kondo's "Moon Flower" (1964") and Tatsuo Takayama's "Heaven" (1964).

China Mieville - This Census-Taker

In
Keying, No Obstacle Withstands.

What an elegantly gap-filled, worryingly incomplete and unsettling novella this is. I can't help find its absences and silences frustrating, beholden as I am to the usual desires for narrative and resolution, but that only adds to the power of This Census-Taker - like a missing or painful tooth, you can't help constantly probing at it, to still be met by the same lack each time.

The Hope Is So:
Count Entire Nation, Subsume Under Sets. -
Take Accounts. Keep Estimates. Realize 
Interests. So
Reach Our Government's Ultimate Ends.

The East

It's hard to know how good an actor Brit Marling is - indeed, whether she's even good at all. In both this one and the other that I've seen her in, the excellent I Origins, she has an opacity to her - a mysterious kind of internal stillness - and I can't tell whether that's a function of the characters she played (it would make sense for the undercover operative infiltrating a radical eco-activist collective that she plays in The East) or rather something that she carries with her into all of her performances. Anyway, it makes her an oddly compelling figure at the centre of this one - compelling in its very lack of expressiveness - and helps to keep the film interesting, together with the inherent tensions relating to whether/when she will be outed and whether each of the titular East's actions against mega-corporations will come off. Also good: Alexander Skarsgard, Ellen Page (of course), Patricia Clarkson.

Garbage - Strange Little Birds

Surprisingly good given this late stage in Garbage's career; I remember way back when Version 2.0 came out (that would have been 1998), I already felt like it was overproduced and lacking that jagged dark-lightness that made Garbage so defining. Despite song names like "Night Drive Loneliness" and "Even Though Our Love Is Doomed" - and lyrics to match - it's textured enough while retaining that fuzzily sweet angst that made them such a treat (and one of my favourite bands) in their pomp.

"Hiroshi Sugimoto - Lost Human Genetic Archive" @ Tokyo Photographic Art Museum

Another reminder of how great and enriching contemporary art can be. There's something of the wunderkammer to Sugimoto's design for the main work here, the "Lost Human Genetic Archive" itself - a succession of dimly-lit rooms divided by standing corrugated iron partitions, in which the artist imagines a series of scenarios in which the world could end, and gives voice to them through a singular last survivor and an installed jumble of objects and art pieces, sometimes only one or two, for others with far more, mixing types and periods. There are times when it is a bit rough edged, the ideology a bit too self-evident and simplistic, undergraduate even - but the forcefulness of the whole prevails nonetheless. An example, to illustrate:

* * *

26  The fetishist

Today the world died. Or maybe yesterday. Back in the Neolithic Age, people found magical things to worship in the natural world. Eventually we came to fashion sacred objects with our own hands. This stone rod is an idol, a phallic symbol thought to have figured in fertility rites. Even later advancements in civilisation did not change humans so very much. In modern society, we still worshipped latter-day idols and brand-name luxury goods. We discriminated against people by the cars they drove and the clothes they wore. Though, of course, fake items were rife. But as copying techniques became ultrarefined, the fakes surpassed even the originals. Fetishism lost its magic; people lost their objects of faith. When the market for brand-name goods collapsed, the global economy contracted, swallowed down into a Great Depression. The ancient gods who banned idolatry were right: A world that believes in nothing is a dead world.

Stone Rod
Jomon period (10000-400 BC)
117 cm

Hospital Gurney
1950s
56 x 214 x 39cm

YSL Pattern Fabric

* * *

Also: "Abandoned Theatre", a series of photos of just that, each lit at its centre by a shining white screen which is the result of the exposure of the film for the entire duration of a particular film. And "Sea of Buddha", which are striking large-format images of the statues in Kyoto's Rengeo-in Temple, together with a small glass pagoda constructed by Sugimoto himself.

Justin Cronin - City of Mirrors

A good ending. Neither The Twelve nor this one has captured the unnerving electricity of Cronin's first cast, The Passage (part of which was that I had no idea where it was really going at any stage), but they pretty much sustain the story and it never feels like he's cheating. The integrity of the vampires, the human antagonists, and those somewhere in between - that is, the logic of the world set up here - holds throughout, and so does the interest in what will happen next.

"Kishin Shinoyama - La Maison de rendez-vous" / Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo

More nudes! These were interesting, and left me wrestling with a few different responses - which I think is a good sign.

On the one hand, the female models are very conventionally very attractive - uniformly slim, pale skinned, large breasted, big eyed etc - and definitely sexualised (in nearly all of the photos, they're completely naked apart from being in stilettos - and make up, if that counts). There are ten of them and they're the vast majority of the show - there's only one male subject, who appears only in I think seven or eight photos in a discrete room. Which is a bit 'hmm'-inducing.

On the other hand, the concept of the show is that they're all photographed in and around the gallery itself (in some cases slightly furnished), and that works extremely well, with Shinoyama taking full advantage of the interesting spaces within and outside the building (a 1930s western modernist style building) and its permanent installations.

So in the end I liked it more than I found it 'problematic' - I liked its spirit.

The gallery itself is also an attraction, including in the way that it and this particular exhibition are integrated. Sculptures arranged in the gardens outside, and a handful of pieces integrated into various nooks of the three-floor building, including one by Yoshihiro Suda, who I only came across for the first time just last week, "This water unfit for drinking" (2001) - two of his wooden flowers 'growing' in an alcove of exposed pipes, peeled-away tiling and general disrepair.

Very good.

"The Universe and Art: Princess Kaguya, Leonardo da Vinci, teamLab" @ Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

This reminded me of how nourishing contemporary art can be.

The exhibition is organised into four sections: "How Have Humans through the Ages Viewed the Universe?" (including mandalas a-plenty, books and instruments of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and other art including Laurent Grasso's intriguing "Studies into the Past"), "The Universe as Space-Time", "A New View of Life - Do Aliens Exist?" and "Space Travel and the Future of Humanity", and the "Space-Time" section, given over to contemporary work, was really something - I wonder if the subject (what we used to call 'outer space') works particularly well with the conceptual apparatus of contemporary art?

Anyhow, there is Andreas Gursky's "Kamiokande" (2007), which I've seen before and I don't think impressed me that much then but certainly did this time round (underground neutrino observatory - as it happens, in Japan), Bjorn Dahlem's "Black Hole (M-Spheres)" (2016), a sculptural reinterpretation of the Milky Way, Trevor Paglen's breathtaking photos, especially "They Watch the Moon" (2010) and "Keyhole 12-3 (Improved Crystal): Optical Reconnaisance Satellite near Scorpio (USA 129)" (2007), Jia Aili's "Hermit from the Planet Dust" (2015-16) which invokes a whole lot of art movements but none so much as simply 'sci fi', and best of all, Conrad Shawcross's "Timepiece" (2013), which was utterly hypnotic and achieved its aim of referencing "a sublime form of astronomical time, as experienced in sundials and interactions with the Sun" - a suspended set of metal arms, three bulbs, one in constant rotation (orbit) and a single metal spike on the ground, shadows thrown through the movement.

And then at the very end, in the "Space Travel" closer, a participatory video and music installation by a collective called teamLab - "Crows are Chased and the Chasing Crows are Destined to be Chased as Well, Blossoming on Collision - Light in Space". A dark room in which the neon images of crows, flowers and other visuals stream across the four walls and the floor of the room to music, taking their central point from the centre of where the viewers of the work are gathered in the room itself. Also sublime and immersive as the lights swooped round and about and up and down were all swirled together.

It also occurs to me that maybe I was primed a bit by having gone to the 52nd floor city view observatory (which had created a very meditative mood as the night lights of Tokyo glittered below in panorama in the darkened quiet of the circular passage beside the windows) and then the open air sky deck above it immediately before seeing the exhibition.

"Dali" @ National Art Centre, Tokyo

A substantial retrospective covering his entire career, drawing from the collections of the Reina Sofia,  the Fundacio Gala Salvador Dali Museum in Figueres (Dali's birthplace) and the Salvador Dali Museum in St Petersburg, Florida, USA.

Very early works (1918-21) then a period of hopping through a series of modern art styles starting with cubism throughout the twenties, during which - interestingly - it's the ones which take the human body as their subject which most clearly prefigure his later style ("Nude" 1924, "Nude in the Water" 1924, "Girl with Curls" 1926).

Then his most familiar surrealist period of the 30s, which is well represented but not overly so, and I felt the force of these a bit anew - those yellows and blues gleaming vividly through his dreamscapes: "Invisible Sleeper, Horse, and Lion" (1930), "The Shades of Night Descending" (1931), "The Invisible Man" (1932), "Enigmatic Elements in a Landscape" (1934), the glowingly limpid "Surrealist Composition with Invisible Figures" (1936),  and the out and out nightmare of "Palladio's Corridor of Thalia" (1938) which is an early appearance of the girl with the skipping rope who is his motif in those wonderful illustrations for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (also on display here, along with a lot of other drawings).

Paintings, drawings, etc through the remaining decades of his life, including some unexpected, wonderful jewellery in gold with inlaid gems.

An aside: it is unfathomable that it was seven years ago that the NGV had its major Dali exhibition. It seems so recent! 

Garth Risk Hallberg - City on Fire

Its ambition is clear, not least in its sheer length - I read it on kindle but it's close to 1000 pages in physical form - but also in the number of characters, their intersecting stories, and the back and forth through time within the umbrella goal of evoking NYC in the late 70s. For me, it was ... fine. Well written, well put together, enough of a through-narrative (organised around the mystery of Sam's shooting and with the city's July 1977 blackout as its climax) to hold the interest, characters who weren't jarring (but who never quite lived and breathed either) and some decent imagery and themery. But nothing revelatory either - even in the lower-bar sense of that word.

"Ren Hang: Tokyo" @ matchbaco, Tokyo

Photos of (unglamorous, or not conventionally so anyway) naked people arranged in various external Tokyo locations - friends of the (Chinese) photographer. A handful of them had the glimmer of something.

Everest

A fairly convincing Hollywood version of 'like being there'.

"Masterpieces from the Centre Pompidou: Timeline 1906-1977" & "Dialogue with Trees" @ Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum

The "Pompidou" exhibition is one piece from each year from 1906 (selected as the year that the Fauves burst into public view - I guess the first major movement in modern art of the 20th century) to 1977 (the year that the Pompidou itself was established). It was super crowded so I engaged with the exhibition mostly on the level of paying attention to the curatorial decisions that have been made to select these representative-but-not pieces (one of the exhibition notes makes the point that the chronological ordering evades the temptation to tell a story through 'isms') while trying to be open to any individual pieces that might jump out at me.

The ones that I took particular note of: Frantisek Kupka - "Vertical Planes I" (1912); Alberto Magnelli - "Lyrical Explosion No 8" (1918); Robert Delaunay - "The Eiffel Tower" (1926 - these are striking whenever one comes across them in their boldness); Seraphine Louis - "Tree of Paradise" (1929); Pierre Bonnard - "Nude by the Bath Tub" (1931 ... and Bonnard has made me pay attention a few times now I think); Otto Freundlich - "My Sky is Red" (1933); Pablo Gargallo - "The Prophet" (1933-36); Kandinsky - "Thirty" (1937 - an exercise almost in monochrome, black on very pale blue: "The 'content' of painting is painting"); Edith Piaf's "La vie en rose" in lieu of a work from 1945 given the significance of the year in the world's history (a song which has picked up some proper emotional associations for me in the past few years); Henry Valensi - "Symphony in Pink" (1946 - musical painting); Matisse - "Large Red Interior" (1948); Nicolas de Stael - "Composition" (1949); Giacometti - "Woman of Venice V" (1956 - pulled me up and made me reflect again on the poignancy of his figures); Simon Hantai - "Memory of the Future" (1957); Victor Vasarely - "Arny (Shadow)" (1967-68). As the length of that list probably makes clear, it was a very good exhibition despite the crowds.

And the "Dialogue" one collects work from five contemporary Japanese artists all of whom work in wood. Best were Yoshimasa Tsuchiya's warmly glowing animals (the mythical and larger scale ones especially memorable) with their crystal eyes and Yoshihiro Suda's extremely realistic plant sculptures, installed in unlikely spots around the gallery space so as to appear to be growing from walls, spaces and so on.

Suicide Squad

I guess low expectations are the key with these superhero movies because I enjoyed this one, even though I could feel a part of my mind keeping track of all the ways in which it was sub-par. Pity it wasn't better though - I remember seeing that "Bohemian Rhapsody"-tracked trailer and thinking it might be something amazing ... but instead it comes across as a merely functional and rather bland version of its attempt at a 'worst of the worst' type subversion of the genre. Margot Robbie is memorable though, for reasons both good and bad.

"Anish Kapoor" @ SCAI The Bathhouse, Tokyo

A small exhibition in this private gallery that evidently represents Kapoor here, all exploring his notion of the void. 

Jurassic World

Chris Pratt is pretty good at these roles. Those dinosaurs aren't bad either. But Jurassic World is neither fun enough nor exciting enough to really get past the ridiculousness.

Crimson Peak

Hugely melodramatic. Is that it? Crimson Peak looks the part, but doesn't have the emotional and allusive layers that del Toro normally provides. Something of a disappointment.

Lucy

Scarlett Johansson as a Luc Besson action heroine - of course it's watchable, even though it's also very slight. Her depthlessness, as usual, enhances her performance. Also, I thought the Korean bad guy had something of the air of a world-weary Gary Oldman (not least in Besson's magnificent Leon).

Peadar O'Guilin - The Call

YA dystopia with a twist! The premise is neat and the interspersed chapters from the perspectives of the children as they are 'called' from this magically walled-off alternate Ireland to be hunted by the sidhe in their own land work, as does the polio-impaired main character Nessa and what this means for her chances of survival. A proper page turner.

Scott Lynch - The Lies of Locke Lamora

Renaissance-ish Venice inspired fantasy. Quite fun and a bit of dirt under its fingernails too.