Beautiful Cities in Dreams

Watari-Um serves up a photographic exploration of the city

Man Ray, City, 1931 photos courtesy of the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art

The Watari-Um in Aoyama straddles an unusual position in the Tokyo art world. At once a professional museum in an exclusive neighborhood with an impressive collection of two- and three-dimensional works, it also maintains the feel of being an active member of the community and an open-minded center for arts education. Moving through the museum’s three floors of galleries seems less like a tour of a professional institution than it does the house of a private collector. The result is an unusually cozy backdrop for well-sized exhibitions with neither too few nor too many images.

“Beautiful Cities in Dreams” is mainly a convenient dressing for a portion of the museum’s photography collection, as well as a vehicle for sliding in a few other works and sculptures. The primary focus of the exhibition is clearly set on works by big-name draws like Andy Warhol, Robert Mapplethorpe and Diane Arbus, among several others. Each is represented with a spread of eight to ten images that minimally cover a few highlights of their careers.

For Warhol it’s a standard bill of photographs from the New York scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s. And a frolicking series of works from sunny beaches represent Arbus. Each of her images is filled with unknown but thoroughly enlivened personalities, typified by the compelling grimace contorting across Puerto Rican Woman with a Beauty Mark (1965).

Robert Frank, Teardrops, New Jersey, 1955-6

There are no examples, however, of the cool sexuality and notorious eroticism for which Mapplethorpe is known. The works here have far tamer images of saturated flowers curved and bent with ikebana-like calculation. Brimming with intense color and form, these images radiate a more benign yet nonetheless potent sensuality and are compelling images in their own right.
Beyond these well-known image-makers, a small sampling of works by the poet Allen Ginsberg offers an unexpected but welcome addition to the show. Along with a number of candid snapshots portraying artist and writer friends, two journalized sketches, June 12, 1960 and August 1961, offer thoughtful moments of insight into the iconic Beat’s process. Each of these gestural glimpses is accompanied by a short poem that echoes the of-the-moment nature of the drawings and elucidates more about the depicted scene.

Rene Magritte, The Recompensed Virtue, 1934

In addition to all the photographs, a few scattered sculptures and video works extend the exhibition away from the walls and out into the gallery space. The most interesting of these are the dueling video screens contrasting street-art legends Keith Haring and Barry McGee. Each video focuses on the two artists’ similar processes, and follows them out into the world as they spray and scribble their works across subway stations and abandoned buildings.

It isn’t always easy to follow the loose connections made among the artists in “Beautiful Cities in Dreams,” and for the most part one doesn’t have to. The exhibition is a chance to air out a superb collection of photographs that contain several memorable images and are from such eminent identities that they speak for themselves. The joy of “Beautiful Cities” is being in a welcoming Tokyo art spot and dreaming an afternoon away amid a selection of absorbing imagery from some of the world’s most celebrated artists.

The Watari-um Museum of Contemporary Art, until June 4. See exhibition listings (Harajuku/Aoyama) for details.

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