"Absolute reflection on the everyday" is what Isshiki
expects of the images. But this demand can be met in extremely different
ways. Hatakeyama's photographs of the River Series portray reality
while distorting it through an extreme aestheticism. In his Heartbeat
Drawing 24-Hour,
Makoto Sasaki takes a completely different approach: using red ink, he has
transferred his own heartbeats onto paper over a 24-hour period of time.
Approximately one half of the works in the Tokyo collection are currently on
display in offices and corridors. These were put together by Friedhelm
Hütte and Yoshiko Isshiki. Thus, it is primarily photographs that are
hanging on the 16th and 20th floors, stemming in large part from Japanese
artists in the Tokyo collection. Isshiki took care that well-known names
such as
Nobuyoshi Araki,
Toshihiro Yashiro,
Hiroshi Sugimoto, and
Yukio Nakagawa are prominently represented. The 17th floor presents
drawings of sculptures, while the 18th floor is dominated by figurative
painting and the 19th by Minimal and Conceptual Art.
Gerhard Richter: Canary Landscapes II, 1971, Deutsche Bank Collection
While in each of Frankfurt's twin towers individual floors are dedicated to a
single German artist respectively – offering an impression of recent
German art and cultural history from the uppermost to the lowest floor –
in Deutsche Bank in Tokyo, one finds a confrontation between the works of
German and Japanese artists:
Georg Baselitz and
Kishio Suga,
Thomas Schütte and
Yuji Takeoka – wherever he looks, the viewer can discover elements German
and Japanese post-war and contemporary artists have in common or elements
that set them apart: for instance between the Canary Landscapes of
Gerhard Richter, who was born in Dresden in1932, and the images from the
Tomason series of
Genpei Akasegawa, born in 1937.
Akasegawa uses the word "Tomason" to refer to a useless object, a wall
without purpose, a doorknob without a door, a flight of stairs that leads
nowhere. The series was
allegedly named after an American baseball player who came to Japan in the
early nineteen-seventies and went through such a spectacular low in form
that he couldn't hit a single ball.
Tatsuo Miyajima: K.C.C. Y/R-7, 1999, Deutsche Bank Collection
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At the entrance to the trading rooms of Global Markets,
what stands out most is
Tatsuo Miyajima's light object entitled K.C.C. Y/R-7. It was chosen
because it transposes the numbers the traders work with every day into a
new context. "As long as there's electricity, this work will continue to
generate entirely new rows of numbers in random sequences while at the
same time demonstrating the endless character of the number," according to
Isshiki.
Rupprecht Geiger: Colours in the round, Deutsche Bank Collection
A relationship to art of the kind that Deutsche Bank has been maintaining for
decades is an unusual thing in Tokyo. Of the 1,300 employees at the
Deutsche Bank in Tokyo, only very few know the names of the artists and
the works hanging in their offices. But the bank's artistic concept comes
to fore here, as well: art becomes integrated into the everyday, and this
is why it's supposed to reflect on the everyday. It doesn't always unfold
its effect on the surface and immediately, but rather after some time, in
peace and discretion. Yuko Ujita, vice president for communication and
marketing, expresses it. Pointing to a series by
Rupprecht Geiger in the hallway of the 19th floor, whose name she'd never
heard of at first, she says: "without these orange-colored abstract
paintings, the corridor would be too dark and boring." And every time she
passes these paintings, Geiger's powerful color accents give her a little
impulse: "They lead me to creative ideas."
Andre Kunz
lives as a freelance journalist in Tokyo. He writes for the taz and
the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
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