YANOBE KENJI 1969-2005
04 MEGALOMANIA [2003]
【Chapter 04】2003 MEGALOMANIA
It was decided to hold Yanobe’s solo exhibition at the National Museum of Art, Osaka rn 2003, the year before it was to move and its old building demolished. Yanobe began work on the project to transplant the future city of delusion, “The MEGALOMANIA City”, and exhibit the works he had created from an imagination inspired by the Osaka Expo, formerly a vast city of the future. Yanobe gave the project the title MEGALOMANIA. He produced a short film to offer a preview of the exhibition before it started and broadcast it over the Internet.
This collection of works marked a return to his creative origins. Among them was Atom Suit, back from its pilgrimage to “The Ruins of the Future”. At the same time, Yanobe embarked on another project involving the two symbols of the Osaka Expo —the Expo Tower and the Tower of the Sun. Having traveled through time once again to “The Ruins of the Future”, Yanobe began to complete his own world of delusion in the form of one vast epic that occupied the entire museum.
MEGALOMANIA
Yanobe began creating one more monument to “The Ruins of the Future” from the former site of the Osaka Expo. This was to perfect the meaning of the existence of Standa, his monument to rebirth that arose from “The Ruins of the Future” at Chernobyl. At that time, he recalled Deme, the giant robot that was discarded in the festival square. Yanobe had been able only to glimpse the robot through the fence at the site when the Expo was demolished, and he remarked that he “spread the wings of delusion”. The functional details, including the driver’s seat, the wheels, the entrance, and the arms, appeared before Yanobe’s eyes and seemed so real it was as if they would start to move at any second. Deme had a great impact on him, because it was his starting point for creating works of art that could actually function and be operated.
“Bringing about the second appearance of the robot I saw 30 years ago at “The Ruins of the Future””, explained Yanobe, “might enable time travel to be experienced again.” Applying his imagination to the motif of Deme, Yanobe created Viva Riva Project: New Deme, a mechanical monster rising at “The Ruins of the Future”. He unveiled New Deme with Standa at “Expose 2002 -Far Beyond Dreams” (2002-2003, Kirin Plaza Osaka / Yokohama Red Brick Warehouse) with Arata Isozak:i, Deme’s designer. Yanobe then embarked on a new journey to decode the site of the Osaka Expo that had nurtured his imagination during his youth as a way to discover the source of his creativity.
It was decided to hold Yanobe’s solo exhibition at the National Museum of Art, Osaka in 2003. For Yanobe, this was holy ground and the source of his creativity. It was the perfect opportunity to create a link to the world of delusion that he had built. He gave the exhibit the title of “MEGAWMANIA”.
The former building the National Museum of Art, Osaka opened in 1977 using the Expo Museum of Fine Arts erected during the Osaka Expo. It was one of the few museums at the time that would exhibit contemporary art. It was decided to tear the building down in September 2004, after the museum moved to Nakanoshima earlier that year. In a strange twist of fate, MEGAWMANIA was the last solo exhibition held at the museum on the former Expo site.
Establishing his own worldview, Yanobe’s exaggerated delusion was not limited to merely creating a work of art. After visiting Chernobyl, Yanobe’s world of delusion portrayed a character as a work of art. It was recreated as if several smaller stories were layered together closely interwoven with the real world. The narrative was linked together as one large story. He planned MEGAWMANIA as a person who typified the age of “Delusion”, creating an exhibit that used the entire former site of the Osaka Expo to enable visitors to experience time travel in one immense journey.
The scenario of this vast story involved transplanting Yanobe’s future city of delusion “The MEGALOMANIA City” to “The Ruins of the Future” at the site of the former Osaka Expo. The Expo site featured large pavilions that were arranged based on the plan of the city of the future envisioned for the 21st century. It was an experimental site for planning the construction of the MEGALOMANIA City. The young Yanobe had stood on the large open space where the city of the future had been, and he began to imagine the MEGALOMANIA City in his mind. Now, some 20 years later, Yanobe began to actually create that city. His creations functioned as the daily necessities of life, including clothes, trains, cars, shelters, and homes. It was because they had been created as individual elements comprising that city.
As the Osaka Expo lost the buildings of the future one by one, Yanobe tried to recreate the illusion of the Expo with his own integrated worldview. For the artist, that was by no means a recreation of the Expo, but an idea meant to discover something by bringing the world of delusion he created into conflict with the site of the former Expo and being born again.
His works of art had returned to the most appropriate site—the starting point of his own creations. Among these works was Atom Suit, which Yanobe already should have sloughed off. Though the artist had made a pilgrimage to “The Ruins of the Future” in the real world, he resolved to don Atom Suit one more time. His objective was to completely end his own world of delusion and come face to face with “Reality” in the form of the former Expo site. He also brought into conflict the two symbols of the Expo —the Expo Tower and the Tower of the Sun.
TOWER OF LIFE
In 2002, the year New Deme was created, Yanobe got the chance to climb the Expo Tower, which was about to be dismantled because it had become decrepit. This symbol of the Osaka Expo was an observation tower built on the highest point of land at the Expo, a hill at the extreme southern end of the site. A cabin had been suspended from the tower 100 meters above the ground, just as if it were a piece of fruit on a tree. This was done to create the image of a dwelling in the future.
After 1990, when its role as an observation tower had ended, the cabin hung suspended above the ground and overlooked the former Expo site. No one entered the tower. For Yanobe, the Expo Tower was one of the many places where he could experience once again his younger days spent exploring the site where all the buildings had been torn down.
Suspended in the air above “The Ruins of the Future”, Yanobe saw spread out before him a scene of mystery in which “Reality” seemed to summon “Delusion”. Moss and ferns had grown to cover the whole interior of the cabin, itself now a ruin. It was filled with new life, symbolizing a “Revival” for Yanobe. He physically sensed a reversion to a time of returning to the primordial, as if life had begun to inhabit the earth. He felt as if he was travelling in time once again. Yanobe took some plants that had sprouted in the world of the future and brought them back for transplanting in the earth.
The work to dismantle the tower began after that. Yanobe donned Atom Suit and looked up at the tower of the future, of which only fragments remained. Then the cabin was lowered to the ground in front of Yanobe for the first time. It was as if the adults who had given dreams and hope to so many people by building the city of the future had begun to once move again as the people who would create the new future received their energy. As Yanobe watched the cabin that floated above his head being slowly lowered to the ground, he thought, “The falling future, the fallen future.” When the cabin reached the ground, Yanobe reports he saw an illusion that “The Ripe Fruit of the Future” had fallen to the earth and that a new sprout had emerged.
The positive thoughts he had toward “The Ruins of the Future” he discovered during his childhood had, with the passage of 30 years, brought forth an image directly connected within himself. As the vision of MEGALOMANIA gradually took shape, he envisioned a newly revived tower of the future that would link heaven and earth in the same way as Jacob’s Ladder or the Tower of Babel. Yanobe picked up pieces of the “The Fruit of the Future” that had fallen and used them to create Tower of Life. He placed the plants he had brought back from the Expo Tower cabin in the center of the tower interior on an elevator created in the image of an elevator to space. Yanobe placed Tower of Life in the center of the exhibition site as a symbol of rebirth, as if to become the catalyst for building a new tower to an even greater height using the energy created by people. He presented this concept using models and diagrams.
The MEGALOMANIA City was transplanted to the art museum in August 2003, radiating outward from Tower of Life at the center. Tanking Machine was placed at the entrance to Yanobe’s world of delusion on the site. A cluster of works based on the subject of “Survival” was arrayed in a series. The “Revival” monument was connected to these. It emitted a white light at the site as if the energy of creation intrinsic to “The Ruins of the Future” had been ignited. Mini Atom Suit stood at the base, placed in a pose that made it seem as if it were playing. It was created for Yanobe’s own three-year-old child and for Bakudan, whom he had met at Chernobyl. Light boxes from the Atom Suit Project, with illustrations from his two trips to “The Ruins of the Future”, surrounded part of the exhibition space. Queen Mamma, a shop designed in collaboration with Issey Miyake, was operated here for the final time. The MEGALOMANIA City multiplied as if it would spread throughout the entire museum unconstrained by a single site.
Atom Car was driven throughout the museum on weekends during the exhibit. A rest area was created in the museum’s inner courtyard by a caf6 that was the remodeled Bunker Bunker. Finally, a commemorative marble monument was placed at the museum entrance to declare that the MEGALOMANIA City created from “The Ruins of the Future” had become a reality and had appeared there. After a journey lasting 33 years in the conception and 13 years in the creation, Yanobe had returned to his point of origin. The marble was placed on the rails of the Survival System Train as if to suggest that Atom Suit and other works had returned home.
Yanobe also used video to bring his vision of the world of delusion inside his brain to greater numbers of people. One film screened on the program was The Tower of Sun Hijacking Project, showing all these changes in a video.
THE TOWER OF SUN HIJACKING PROJECT
Yanobe announced The Tower of the Sun Hijacking Project in a lecture at the Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum (2001, during a series of lectures titled “Talking about Taro Okamoto”). He implemented this project in tandem with MEGALOMANIA by directly tackling the Tower of the Sun, another symbol of the Osaka Expo.
Yanobe had the opportunity to enter the Tower of the Sun in 2000 while a journalist conducted research for a magazine. The group also included the art critic Noi Sawaragi and the cultural anthropologist Masanori Oda. They went to see the Tree of Life, an exhibit installed there to show the evolutionary process of living creatures.
Visitors to the Osaka Expo climbed through the past and present to see the immense, 50-meter Tree of Life. They were led from there to the world of the future, an aerial display connected to the Tree of Life on the right by a large roof. After 30 years, the Tree of Life had been removed of most exhibits. The interior structure had been removed from the remaining exhibits, creating a desolate appearance. The scene was precisely that of “The Ruins of the Future”. The entrance to the World of the Future at the right was covered with concrete as if to suggest that the future of humankind was blocked off.
When a feeling of gloom began to penetrate them, Yanobe and the others recalled there had been a person who saw the outside from a different entrance. That was the so-called Eyeball Man, who had staged a 159-hour hunger strike during the Expo, who holed up inside the eyeball on the gold face of the tower to bring the Expo to a halt. They looked for the passageway to the upper section of the tower as if to follow in his footsteps. They passed through the skylight of the electrical service compartment and discovered a ladder leading upward. Fearful of the bad footing in the darkness, they decided against climbing the rest of the way to the eyeball.
For some time after that, the world was gripped by the anxiety of economic downturn and war after the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001.
With the reality that a future of progress and harmony for humankind was still far away, Yanobe began to be seized by the illusion that the claustrophobic feeling he sensed in the Tower of the Sun symbolized the world today. On his own, he gradually began to investigate the Eyeball Man, one of the few people who discovered a different entrance to the future. The Eyeball Man was an important presence for Yanobe as a man of the future who had glimpsed the sky of the future from a vantage point ahead of the rest of humankind.
An examination of the media coverage at the time, however, showed that the Eyeball Man was treated as merely a publicity seeker or a troublemaker. Yanobe had the gnawing sense that this obscured the truth, so he decided to meet the man and talk to him. In mid-February, Yanobe disembarked from an airplane at the Sapporo airport, surrounded by deep snow. At just that time, the American army was preparing to invade Iraq. The amateur detective lacked clues, knowing only the man’s real name and that he was from Hokkaido. In what seemed like a miracle, however, Yanobe met the man in a Hokkaido town. He explained who he was and the motivation behind his search. The man gradually opened up to him and told him what had happened.
A search warrant had been placed on him for an incident in which the Hokkaido and Japanese national flags had been taken down, dragged along the ground, and burnt. The man fled with his companions to Osaka. A member of a group calling itself the Citizens’ Coalition for Peace in Vietnam Now, the man also participated in the meetings of another dissident group opposed to the Osaka Expo. His associates only argued among themselves without taking any action. The man declared that hijacking the Tower of the Sun, the symbol of the Osaka Expo, was a more effective and direct action against authority. He put his plan in action and holed up in the eyeball of the Tower of the Sun. He had with him copies of the Manyoshu and Hakagure.
His actions were not taken for some ill-defined reason, but were based on his firm anti-establishment beliefs, which he was prepared to die for. Even when Yanobe met him, he still believed that radicalism could change the world, and he made several extreme statements about contemporary society. Yanobe said he deeply admired the man for his power of expression as demonstrated by his ability to act on behalf of his objectives and achieve them. The man who had seen the future 33 years before was brimming with the strength to fight reality.
Listening to the man’s story, which was intertwined with the background stories of the times, including the Vietnam War, anti-war protests, the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty, and anti-establishment activity, forced Yanobe to consider several key expressions that were symbols of the current age. He was convinced that this age, which seemed to be overhung by a dark, eerie cloud, was exactly like the interior of the Tower of the Sun, in which the entrance to the future had been cemented over. “That’s just the reason I wanted to see the potential for a breakthrough to the future, just as the Eyeball Man, who had traveled through time by climbing through the period of the evolution of life, saw the sky of the future open before him. What indeed could be seen now through that giant eye?”
That’s why Yanobe crawled into the belly of the Tower of the Sun and climbed into the eyeball of that golden face.
“There are symbols that connect all the things I have done, the works I have created, and the people I’ve met from the days of the Expo until now.” For Yanobe, producing works based on the theme of the Expo was indeed the opportunity to become aware once again of the Expo as his point of origin and that which spurred him to create those works. It was an attempt to reconfigure himself. Yanobe revealed everything that was inside of him to reset himself by creating something new again at the site where he had discovered the seed of his creativity as a child in “The Ruins of the Future”.
The National Museum of Art, Osaka began its last summer at the site of the former Osaka Expo with MEGALOMANIA. The MEGALOMANIA City was not just for art lovers many visitors and children flocked to the site. With the museum attendants, security guards, and employees who witnessed these scenes at close range, they experienced Yanobe’s weltanschauung that had taken concrete form at the museum.
The MEGALOMANIA City depicted by Yanobe gradually neared completion and blended with its location as it brought together the people who visited the site. Yanobe also sowed the seeds of delusion among the next generation of children as to connect his integrated worldview with a new future. During the exhibit, Yanobe conducted a workshop for children called “The Pavilion Revival Project”. The many pavilions that the children worked together to build were displayed in a room of the museum as the leading edge of the MEGALOMANIA City. He also formed “an Expeditionary Party to the Ruins of the Future” that explored the vast former Expo site. He once again experienced time travel with the children while circling the Expo pavilions’ commemorative monument.
This was the temporary end to MEGALOMANIA as an exhibit. The visitors who experienced the future city of delusion, however, were able to experience vicariously Yanobe’s world of delusion again as the immense means for recreating the Osaka Expo site that lay before them in the instant they stepped outside the museum. They were able to spread their own wings of delusion, stimulated by the physical sensation of this experience and the seed of delusion they received. What sort of new creations would arise at this site from that which Yanobe left behind. The MEGALOMANIA project gave a premonition of the beginnings of something new, as if in a dream.
Yanobe had come face to face with the two symbols of the Osaka Expo and opened a new entrance to the future. He forced open the door to the hope and potential for a secure linkage to the future through the hands of people. The important experience of “Time Travel to the Ruins of the Future” had been digested by Yanobe, and later be connected to works of art as new expressions.
MEGALOMANIA was over, and Yanobe himself returned Tower of Life to the Expo Tower square, the place where “The Fruit of the Future” had fallen. It was his gift to the site of the Osaka Expo, which had given him the potential for creation. He did this to make real the illusion that the beginning of the new future had begun.
Yanobe claims that Atom Suit played its final role in the instant that the Tower of the Sun and the eyeball in the golden face were combined. Atom Suit was created to detect dangerous states characteristic of the age with the first stirrings of disquiet at the end of the century. The current age, however, is an unstable time in which humankind still needs Atom Suit. Yanobe has declared that he won’t wear Atom Suit as a form of expression any more.
Yanobe’s vast story of delusion continues. Atom Suit contained a part of the Expo Tower and clashed with the Tower of the Sun. That caused nuclear fusion to occur, and Atom Suit disappeared. It left the entrance to the future at the end of the evolution of life.
The National Museum of Art, Osaka, which had completed its role at the former site of the Osaka Expo, was torn down in the beginning of 2005. This destroyed Yanobe’s great delusion. Having lost all of “The Ruins of the Future”, he lingered again alone at that land of the future as if waiting for the instant when the God of Creativity would descend.
