Yokohama Triennale

Sailing Into The Sea of Oblivion

By Kyla McFarlane NOV 2014

Prior to visiting this year’s edition of the Yokohama Triennale, curated by Morimura Yasumasa under the title ART Fahrenheit 451: Sailing into the sea of oblivion, I’d been intrigued to see Michael Landy’s Art Bin, a receptacle for failed artworks. This big metal and glass container, with its dramatic gantry-walk for the art-toss, felt like the perfect work for an exhibition seeking to embrace iconoclasm and reflect upon the dystopic vision of the Ray Bradbury novel referenced in its title.

In reality, Art Bin was actually an underwhelming one-liner, despite its towering scale and prime position in the central entrance hall of the Yokohama Museum of Art. Walking its perimeter, peering inside at the art-trash, I felt no sense of emptiness, or loss, or triumph of failure, or the frisson of radical destruction – just a certain feeling of ennui around the grand contemporary art gesture and its frequent failure to connect.

Perhaps this was Morimura’s point, because as it turned out, the bombastic anti-monumentalism of Art Bin was something of a red herring. ART Fahrenheit 451: Sailing into the sea of oblivion was replete with quiet moments and small gestures unfolding across a series of ‘chapters’, each with their own introductory text revealing a highly idiosyncratic, poetic curatorial vision. In response, I’ve gathered my personal recollections of some of the most enduring, quiet or curious moments.

We Begin With Malevich: After Art Bin, it was somewhat thrilling to enter into Morimura’s opening chapter, which began with a small Suprematist drawing by Kasmir Malevich. These black geometries... Subscribe to read this article in full

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