Tatzu Nishi.
Markle, Leslie
TATZU NISHI by Leslie Markle Blum & Poe, Los Angeles CA
September 15 * October 27, 2007
For his recent solo show at Blum & Poe, the first in this
country, Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi foregrounds his usual strategy of
recontextualizing familiar urban surroundings--industrial clocks,
government flagpoles, building features, streetlights. Occupying both
interior spaces of this hip, art-smart gallery, Nishi exemplifies his
well-known opposition to the traditional "white cube" by
exploding its boundaries, in this case by bringing the outside inside
and vice versa.
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The clear highlight of the show is Use Your Head (all work 2007) in
the rear gallery, where Nishi clusters five inverted streetlights and
extends them through an ad hoc skylight in the ceiling, ending up some
15 feet above the building. Literally standing the conventional street
standard on its head, the resulting "chandelier" spectacularly
transforms the gallery interior, not only due to the added luminosity,
but also because it opens up the room to a spatial interchange with the
outside. From the vantage point of the street, Use Your Head appears to
be a giant periscope protruding from the top of the building, suggestive
of vast subterranean machinations.
Back inside, in the adjacent room to this transformation of the
commonplace, are four industrial-scale, fully functional wall clocks of
varying sizes, painted, rather too dramatically one might think, in an
animated expressionist style, their combined moving hands simultaneously
keeping real time. Rather similar to his inside/outside "MAM
Project 006" late last year in Tokyo, here Nishi attempts to efface
the usual impersonal face shown by Old Father Time, especially in the
workplace and ever increasingly at home.
Born 1960 in Nagoya, Nishi studied fine art at the Munster Academy
of Arts in the late 1980s and has been based in Germany ever since. Some
of his projects include building a house around part of Claes Oldenburg
and Coosje Van Bruggen's giant Pool Balls (1977) in Munster; Cafe
Moon Rider (2004), which involved converting a freight container into a
functioning cafe and suspending it in midair from a crane to give
patrons a panoramic view of Dublin; and Cheri in the Sky (2006), a
temporary women's boudoir built atop Renzo Piano's glass-clad
Hermes Japon store in the Ginza district of Tokyo, housing a statue of a
cavalryman. One of his current interventions is Hier Entsteht Ein Hotel,
which entails enclosing the iconic dome of Vienna's Secessionsstil
in scaffolding, transforming the interior into an exclusive hotel room.
All of this testifies to Nishi's unique brand of relational
aesthetics, but also betrays its clear reliance on audiences recognizing
the difference between private and public space, basically taking them
by the hand up specially made ladders or stairs.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Of course, the killer punch of Nishi's situationist-style
interventions in a place like Los Angeles is that here the difference
between public and private is not so straightforward or at least only
exists by the bye, so the effect tends to be much more loaded. In lots
of ways, inverting the stark industrial streetlight is an appropriate
symbol for the Blade Runner mythology that now envelops this city in a
kind of decaying, postindustrial smog. But on the other hand, as UCLA architecture professor Richard Weinstein recently pointed out at the
first AIA "Open Space" symposium, maybe public space
doesn't even exist here, just endless urban sprawl, the result, he
says, of developers overvaluing the backyard at the expense of the
piazza.
