I stumbled onto this very fun installation on the way to a very serious concert at the Redcat by Yasunao Tone, an electronic musician, art writer and all-around charming fellow. Part of the charm is that although it is supposed to be kind of miniature–extracting 1 feature out of an idealized California house, in the manner of the postwar Case Study houses–it takes 2 attendants to get it going, kind of palanquin-like.
It’s kind of like a lazy-person’s seesaw. Or a 2-lazy-people’s seesaw, really, as you really need another bum on the other hammock to make the weights work. The attendants remove some sandbag weights, and depending on your respective balances, they move them around, to make it roughly balanced. Then you can push-me and pull-you, tho it is a straight up and down motion, not the arc of a seesaw. Still, it made me laugh like crazy and was immensely fun, especially in such a ’serious’ space.
The installation, by the architecture/space firm Atelier Bow-wow, has 2 other components, which are even more silly/wonderful. One is an area that is like a porch w/stadium seating, filled with some barbecues. The other is a large reclining pit, with pillows, from which you watch (a video projection of) a sunset.
The ABW gets its name, I think, because of its interest in “pet architecture,” which is to say, the built equivalent of pocket parks, “charming, small and humorous,” like pets, as one of their books says.
February 10, 2009 at 4:29 am |
Oooh, see-saws and pets! My favourites.
February 22, 2009 at 12:28 am |
I just wrote a Kaisetsu on Okabe Michio’s Crazy Love for the ATG retro now on in New York. Why I don’t know but I was surprised to find Yasunao Tone buried deep in the credits of the film, which is a virtual who’s who of the Shinjuku underground. Though interesting,I never really warmed to his music or ideas, though; he has an album for which he digitized calligraphic drawings and converted them to sound, and is sort of fatalistic noise. Ryoji Ikeda has a much less betabeta twist on the same theme in his newest album “Test Pattern” (a misnomer).
February 22, 2009 at 1:14 am |
That’s the very mod-collage-y film w/improv music that played in Frankfurt, no? I ended up going around a bit with Tone the next day, and Jonathan. He had a lot of interesting things to say about the late 60s scene in general. I hadn’t known he was actually an art writer, till he left for the US in ‘72. The sound was messed up in the output in his show in LA, and he was a bit put out by that, and I regret not hearing what it was “supposed” to be like, if one can say that about improv music…