DRINK SAKE ALONE

As I sit down to write this review I'm drinking a Pacifico beer, the staple of San Francisco artist Tom Marioni, which brings to mind his artwork "The Act of Drinking beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art." Thirty five years later, the japanese artist Makoto Aida is visiting San Francisco with the exhibition Drink Sake Alone. Social alienation aside, Aida's work in the gallery is not far from the sense of humor floated by the early California Conceptualists like Baldessari and Marioni. Yet Aida is a much wittier incarnation, focused on global concerns and political satire.

Aida's work is scattered about Lisa Dent's beautiful fourth floor gallery space across the street from the new Museum of African Diaspora. On the day I visited the gallery MoAD was having its grand opening which involved the sharp staccato of what might have been the drum section of a local high-school marching band. The noise was distracting at first as my wife Helena and I walked into the gallery, but it didn't take long to get drawn into the 14 works on view and leave the rest of the world behind.

Image Courtesy Lisa Dent Gallery

The bulk of the exhibition is comprised of a hand full of monitors surrounded by detritus, performance props, and the odd seating option (which hover in the ambiguous space between sculpture and furniture). I see this collection of 8 or so works in semi-installation format as cumulative. In other words, I read them not as individual objects but as signifiers that build sentences and culminate in a sort of story line. The feeling underlying the story alternates between irreverent and charming. Works like "Attemped Suicide Machine Version 3 ...and 4" (2001/2002) sit a few steps away from "The Video from a Man calling himself Bin Laden staying in Japan" (2005). In combination they remind me of a fact I picked up recently: more people die each year from suicide than in all the world's armed conflicts. It's not that you should read this from the works, but I offer it as a way to suggest that Aida is calling up global concerns here. Concerns like the specters of war, the surface glance of tourism, and a shared sense of international anxiety. And he wraps it all up with a kind of humor that makes it easier to think. Or at least more inviting.

There are also several bonus tracks surrounding the core of the exhibition. The first three are a ramshackle video kiosk in a closet, a sculpted bonsai (made in collaboration with Aida's former student Ai Kato), and a large painting that has a striking rapport with the Berkeley based artist Manuel Ocampo. Like most bonus tracks, some of these seem a bit unresolved in relation to the rest of the show, yet they offer some of the most compelling moments. The one exception is the large painting "Copyright?" (2005) which is set as the sight-line from the entrance to the gallery. Some of Aida's earlier sexually explicit endeavors are impressively seductive / sickening (each being of equal weight) which causes a kind of self conscious tension. This one carries all the juvenilia of Rat Fink meets MAD magazine. It could be that Aida's interest in addressing a domestic audience led him to appropriate local styles and attack an american icons, but I think Ocampo's oeuvre far outshines this effort.

Image Courtesy Lisa Dent Gallery

Helena's favorite piece in the show (also a bonus track) might be making fun of the historically liberal sensibilities of San Francisco. It's a white painted box on casters with a leash that ends in a waist sized belt - so that you can drag the whole thing behind you. Running alongside the leash is a microphone with a trigger button. Yell your activist chant into the mic and the box behind produces the sound of a crowd of people (with your voice) yelling the chant. The box is topped by a group of clumsy potato sack dolls with picket signs - all painted the same white as the box below. The nearby video documentation is a wonderful and strange conflation of classic activist footage and documentation of the artist and his wife walking through an art fair environment yelling chants to the echoing crowd in tow.

The last two works in the exhibition are actually made by six of Aida's students who collectively call themselves "Chim | Pom." (The line in the middle should be a arrow pointing upward). As it describes in the helpful gallery sheet written by Aida, the video by Chim Pom is something like MTV's "Jackass." We know Jackass for its bong-toking head-bashing stuntsmanship, which is here in spirit but there's someting very different, much more uncanny and disturbing, about a beautiful japanese girl dressed up for a night of dancing, sucking down pink liquid (ostensibly some kind of Ipecac formula) to the sounds of Japanese chugging chants. She pauses, looks up, flashes a peace sign and proceeds to vomit and then chug again. The rest of the Chim Pom work on the DVD (which you can buy for $20) is a collection of awkward disasters. There's something interesting there but as my friend Lucas said after we watched it in his living room. . .it's a little spastic.

Drink SAKE Alone is strange and at times uncomfortable, and it's probably the most interesting show I've ever seen at a commercial gallery in San Francisco. I want to thank Lisa Dent and her gallery director for their willingness to take on such a weird show. It's risky endeavors like this that make the alternative spaces in SF seem dull, despite their supposed freedom from market pressures.

http://www.lisadent.com