Posted:Jul 1, 2007

“Burgeoning Weeds”, the tatami and my memory of cinema.

Installation art does not have a commercial appeal because, among other reasons, it does not usually take on a permanent or practical enough form for private collectors to display.

Tetsuro Kano’s works, now at the Nico Gallery, give a sense of bridging the commercial and non-commercial. At your request, the artist can plant weeds in the tatami mats in your living-room. His installation comes with, if you are lucky, a hospital IV drip feeder full of water and minerals to sustain the weeds, as well as a delicate, light color drawing depicting, or just inspired by the resulting plant. The tatami mat is just one of the unusual places where Kano has grown weeds for his installations; other spots include the corners of rooms, as is the case in the Nico Gallery, cracks in the floor and other surfaces.

Growing weeds on the tatami mat seems the most symbolic. In Japan, people seem to protect the tatami from contact with shoes almost religiously; if reality does not confirm this enough, the cinema does the job. The film Who is Camus Anyway? includes a scene in which a character breaks into an old lady’s house, brandishing a monstrous knife, to murder her… and yet before entering the traditional tatami room, he first takes off his shoes and sets them very neatly by the entrance. In Nobody Knows, a film in which children are abandoned by their mother, the dirty mats of the apartment they inhabit reflect the precariousness of their situation. The place gets more and more filthy with each day that goes by without their mother. Things are spinning out of control, and yet when a neighborhood kid comes to visit, she is compelled to take her shoes off before walking on the tatamis, which are already sticky from dirty. Doing so, she is not only showing her respect for the house but revealing her ingrained habit of having bare feet when walking tatami.

Tetsuro Kano’s weed-growing is by no means a statement on the tatami’s place in Japanese culture. There is some ecological dimension to it, but due to the work’s minimalism, one can only theorize about it. Perhaps he is suggesting that the parasitic weeds are to be even more cherished than the straw tatami. There is a symbolic strength in those unwelcome plants which are capable of growing and re-growing repeatedly almost anywhere and no amount of cutting will eradicate them. By controlling their growth, Kano makes the weed into an aesthetic object. The tiny gallery Nico seems too big for the bunch of weeds growing from the corner — the object of attention in this exhibition is literally in the spotlight. The exhibit piece resembles some kind of vintage sci-fi film, the last surviving plant or genus in a post nuclear age.

Aneta Glinkowska

Aneta Glinkowska

Born in Poland. She has lived in New York since 1996, where she attended college and graduate school. To escape the routine of science labs in college, she went to the movies daily. Following an MA in Cinema Studies, she roams Tokyo as a writer, visiting art galleries daily and blogging about art events. She's looking for opportunities to write about art and cinema for all types of publications. Contact via email: aneta [at] tokyoartbeat [dot ]com.