A SCRAMBLED COSMO
Oct 2019
EILIDH MCKELL ON “COSMO-EGGS”
All photos are author’s own
My inner child was intrigued when I first visited the Japan pavilion. The building is arranged so you would typically walk along the outside of its open plan façade and peek the orange inflatable before reaching the steps to its ground floor. Enticing.
However an issue presented itself immediately on the first floor as I was met with a wall of text before the doorway, shortly followed by more walls of text inside, left and right, blocking the view of whatever was shrieking inside. These walls are so close to the doorway that they obstruct the flow of traffic. Other visitors seemed so excited to get inside that there was virtually no space or time to actually read. Moreover my second visit showed further flaw in this arrangement because there had even been a stack of handouts that I had missed the first time. They show the configuration of the works inside, which some may have found helpful due to the lack of labels, however virtually nobody saw these let alone picked one up.
Along with the neglected hand outs at the beginning, the free catalogues downstairs seem pretty much ignored. I suspect many visitors will dive straight for the inflatable and not attempt to understand the collaborative efforts behind the exhibition.
Like a good art historian, I stood my ground in the traffic and persisted with the reading, although little to none of it seemed to make sense under such pressure to scrutinise quickly and move out the way. What I could grasp along with the title ‘Cosmo-eggs’ was that four different areas of expertise were collaborating for viewers to consider the ecology in which we coexist with non-humans.
More intriguing than the big paragraphs, was the noise. Following the sound, viewers disperse into the room around the round peak of the orange inflatable.
What a glorious beast of a seat. It pokes through the floor like some grotesque mix of a cartoon criminal’s evil lair and a bouncy castle. Attached to tubes leading to the ceiling and reaching various breeds of modified recorders, air is being forced through to make “music” reminiscent of elementary recorder lessons. Better yet, imagine a chorus of hybrid bagpipes being possessed. One recorder is hung lower so one could view it, and has mechanical fingers sporadically pressing the airways. Although after reading some of the myths around the room, (bizarre tales of a woman having sex with a fish, birthing eggs that hatched into Japanese districts?) the sound connotes ideas of some shrieking siren, and hilariously changes pitch when enough people sit on the orange lung.
Seemingly without order, Taro Yasuno’s ‘Zombie Music network’ reminded me of minimalist music, specifically Terry Riley’s ‘In C’. It’s a piece where each orchestra member chooses to repeat every bar of music as many times they wish without direction from a conductor. The overall effect is disjointed and confusing to an audience and It cannot be accurately replicated because of this abundance of free will. The reliance is on each performer to keep the pulse and to instigate the piece’s progress themselves, until everybody comes to a unanimous conclusion in repeating the last bar.
In comparison with ‘Zombie music’, the absence of humans here meant the robotic programme was to run of its own accord, but it is so dissonant to the ears that it gives a clashing effect of both order in its visibly set mechanism, and disorder in the resulting sound.
To an unmusical viewer, it may seem like a horrendous expulsion of air manipulated by a robotic stream, however after viewing the catalogue one can see there is actually structure behind it, there is even a written score, even though it’s made to sound somewhat ‘zombified’.
Screening the orange yolk are four huge black and white projections of boulders that I assumed to be the titular ‘Cosmo-eggs’. Looking closely one can see running water and plants moving in the wind, which was quite effective as collaboration along with the wind instruments.
Hiroyuki Hattori’s curator statement ‘Questioning Ecologies of Co-Existence through Converging Collaborative Resonances and Dissonances’ rectifies the confusion inside the room, although it seems a shame that many will grimace and bear the noise, dive straight for the orange thing which admittedly bears resemblance to an overindulged space hopper, quickly read a few myths and head to the next pavilion. It is exciting at first glance but ought to be explained in a concise and clear way before entering, rather than being bombarded with a huge text that is logistically difficult to pause and read. Without attempting to better explain the collaboration between the works of an artist, composer, anthropologist and architect, the Japan pavilion runs the risk of being just another confusing but quick crowd pleaser.
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