Day 4: What is Contemporary Art?

Although I said yesterday I would try to decide what to do ahead of time, I accidentally fell asleep earlier than expected and woke up at 7 AM with all of the lights on and my contacts still in. Somehow after taking out my contacts, I did actually manage to go back to sleep until my alarm went off at 11:40, but I still didn't have a plan.

I have a decent number of things planned to do, but as pins on the map the list just isn't dense enough to make a clear day out of any one area. So today, I basically took the first thing I had on the list, Kiyosumi Garden and then planned around that. Since it's not exceedingly far from where I was staying, I basically decided to walk to it and find stuff along the way and near it to create a day plan.

The first place along my route - ok you caught me, not literally the first place, just the first place I actually took pictures of, my life isn't so exciting that I would share the whole thing online.

Anyway, the first place along my route was Hamachō Park. Google Maps had told me that it was "As Busy As It Gets" so I was worried I would be elbowing people out of the way for a glimpse of such a nice park but it turned out there was only a few people here or there, so I guess either Google was wrong or there's not usually anyone here. That's a little surprising since it seemed pretty nice overall, if not terribly big.

One interesting thing was that the park was one of the places that was used for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Torch Relay

Another interesting thing was that there was construction nearby, and that the construction company had provided a sound level meter to show how much noise they were making!

A random website I checked said that an electric toothbrush is 60db for reference

I guess if you want to complain about the noise they're making or something, they will look up the historical data to prove you wrong. I'm not a soundologist so I can't tell you the difference between the top and bottom readings. The kanji seems to indicate that the top is for "noise" and the bottom is for "vibration" but I don't know enough about the situation. Either way, I thought it was pretty nifty.

I was about to head across the Sumida River while walking to Kiyosumi Garden when I noticed something in the distance. I could see Skytree from over 2 miles away, towering over the many much closer buildings.

But if I could see Skytree, Skytree could see me... \(˚☐˚”)/

Photo I took last year when I visited Skytree. Yes, I was concerned when I saw the giant red arrow descending from the sky.

If someone had been looking for me at that exact time, they could have spotted me. At least with a nice telescope or pair of binoculars. Or maybe one of those big camera setups.

Kiyosumi Garden was nice when I got to it. The entrance fee was only ¥150, which is roughly 1 USD these days, so it was pretty cheap. The garden itself was pretty nice and there were some koi in the central pond and some other cool stuff to see.

I spent roughly 30 minutes taking a leisurely stroll around so it wasn't huge compared to some of the other parks in Tokyo, but it wasn't bad. One thing though was immersion breaking.

You mean to tell me this isn't a totally naturally-occurring pond?? WHAT?? I'm just kidding, I'm not personally the kind of person that cares about that kind of thing, but I can imagine someone out there in this big, wide world is.

My final planned stop was the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. I am not really someone who can understand art all that well so I didn't expect to be there very long but I opted to pay for the all-inclusive ticket so I could get access to the main gallery plus the two temporary exhibitions, the Takahashi Ryutaro Collection and the Yoshiaki Kaihatsu: ART IS LIVE exhibit. I wasn't familiar with either at all, but figured I had nothing else to do anyway.

There were some areas where photography wasn't allowed and I didn't 'get' some of the work, but I'll add some photos below of some ones I thought were cool or interesting before opining further.

Pretty cool to use an ant farm as a medium

This thing was also pretty noisy if you can believe it

This one had positions that started blank, counted from 1 to 9 and then started over again. Each position changed at different rates. I kept wondering if there had ever been a luckily person that had seen all of the digits turned off simultaneously

This one was like 20 feet tall and reminded me of Death Stranding or something

All in all, I thought the main collection and the Takahashi Ryutaro exhibits were cool but not all of it was stuff that resonated with me. I think I spent like 2 hrs on both in total and towards the end, I definitely felt myself getting worn down. I wonder if curators know this and arrange the art specifically to combat that somehow?

I went to the Yoshiaki Kaihatsu: ART IS LIVE exhibit last, and I'm glad I did. It really rejuvenated me. It was actually a more interactive exhibit. I wasn't sure if I would like that at all but it ended up being pretty cool. When you first entered, you got a 'mission bag' with a few items and a 'secret mission' that were supoosed to say as you walked around the exhibit. My secret mission was written both in Japanese and English:"「そういうことか」と言ってみる" - Say "So that's how it is". I assume that the goal would be for others to catch on and say something about it, so I thought it would be funny if I said the Japanese phrase because that might give me away more easily. I mostly ended up forgetting to do it though, and there weren't that many people there for me to look out for doing something similar.

In addition to 'normal' art like sculptures of a giraffe made out of stryrofoam, there were the interactive exhibits. One called for museum-goers to throw a piece of stryofoam found in the mission bag to create a sort of living sculpture. Although to me, it just seemed to be a pile of garbage.

I guess the art is in the process though (or something) since the instructions said to choose your favorite kind of throw, that it might be fun to throw with eyess closed, and to "Please enjoy the action while listening to the sound of foam."

Another one of the interactive exhibits was to send a postcard to your future self, and that it will be delivered in a year. I don't know if they will actually deliver to the US, but that would be cool.

The final one that I interacted with (there were more) was to place a sticker onto a canvas. Although it's a simple task, I thought it was interesting that some stickers grouped in tall piles that allow other stickers to freely sway in the air, unbound by adhesive against canvas. Sorry I didn't get a good shot of that, I'll leave imagining that as an exercise to the reader.

All-in-all I thought that the trip to the art museum was fruitful even if I didn't understand it all.