The Guy Upstairs At lunch, they kept telling me to go check out the guy upstairs. So. There's this guy from Chimpon (Chimpon is a group of artists that sort of studied under Makoto Aida and have the same "slacker dark humor"). The group pronounced "The only thing humans, rats and crows have in common is garbage," and that one man from the group would live in a tiny room (maybe more like a very big box?) for the duration of the exhibition with a dead crow and rat in the same room (two of their other works: an installation of rats painted like Pikachu in a mini model of Shibuya, stomping about like Godzilla's nemeses, and a conceptual piece where they used a fake crow and crow noises to call together a huge flock which they had circle around 109 in Shibuya). The guy would do prankish things in the room like (when I was there) pop his zits by using the glass as a mirror. Or he might pray to the garbage can in the room (which was his toilet? I don't know the mechanics behind all this). Apparently, he also ate a large part of the crow. I was warned that it would smell.
It was as fun as I had hoped.
[The Japan Times Article]

Labels: art

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