Conversation With Art, On Art

Bauhaus to Contemporary Art: From the DaimlerChrysler Art Collection

Sylvie Fleury, Installation View, five-piece video work, 2000 Photos Courtesy of DaimlerChrysler Art Collection

The typical corporate art collection tends to be a stiff and underwhelming spread of uninspiring works loosely connected to the patron’s industry and punctuated by the occasional lesser work of a well-known artist. Likewise, exhibitions of such collections are apt to follow such humdrum conventions with suitably bland and unremarkable presentations.

In “Conversation With Art, On Art,” Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery brings the impressive collection of perennial art supporter DaimlerChrysler to Tokyo. And while this exhibition may not be the
most head-turning or window-steaming event of the new year, it is a surprisingly engaging tour through a varied field of noteworthy modern and contemporary works.

The unorthodox format of the exhibition comes in no small part thanks to the curatorial leadership of the head of DaimlerChrysler’s art department, Dr. Renate Wiehager. Rather than simply offering a back-patting display of the company’s substantial philanthropic efforts, Wiehager and her team use the exhibition as an open-ended opportunity to inform and stimulate an expansive dialog with the average museumgoer about the occasionally elusive aims and ideas inherent to the contemporary art world.

Much of this initiative begins through dismissing the standard arrow-plotted path through an exhibition and substituting a small but thick workbook of activities meant to lead the viewer out of a passive position and into an interactive entanglement with the exhibit as a whole.
This workbook compels viewers to approach “Conversations with Art” in ways many Tokyoites are most certainly unaccustomed to. At times the offered tasks are as straightforward as to write or draw what you see in a work, as for acclaimed color theorist Josef Albers’ color field painting Homage to the Square between two scarlets (1962). Or it provides a task like moving several blue stickers around a page in response to the minimal wall work Blue Blocks (1993) by Franz Erhard Walter.

Charlotte Posenenske, Eight Reliefs, series C, 1967

Yet the workbook doesn’t shy away from the loftier ideas of contemporary art either, as when it asks of David Hockney’s meager 1982 photo collage The Steering Wheel #3, “What does Hockney mean when he says, ‘The collages always deal with seeing or watching other people seeing.’” Most importantly, the workbook asks viewers not to file along from piece to piece, but to proactively move through the exhibition and seek out individual works in a manner that pushes viewers out of a traditional linear approach.

The overall result of such curatorial engineering is inevitably a mixed bag considering the multiple directions and erudite intentions of much contemporary art, as well as the fast-paced schedules of museum-going crowds. But ultimately, the workbook proves an unconventional and pleasantly playful rebuke to Tokyo’s often all-too-stuffy museum atmospheres. With its varying tasks and thoughtful questions, the book guides but never demands, allowing visitors ample freedom to explore and enjoy the numerous pieces crowding the gallery.

Thankfully, too, a few significant works are left out of the workbook, leaving visitors to approach them on their own terms. Among these are the awkward dramas of video works like Kirsten Mosher’s Carmen 1-4 (1996) and Berni Searle’s Snow White (2001). Their stilted panache and introspective pauses round out this unexpectedly playful exhibition of a corporate collection with appropriate touches of humor and thoughtfulness.

Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Until March 26. See exhibition listings (Shinjuku) for details.

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