TOKYO JOURNAL - ART CITYSCOPE

HOMEPAGE	CITYSCOPE	CONTENTS
HOT, HOT ART by Cheryl Chow

Jack Maclean has brought his brand of terror to Tokyo's art world.

It's 4am in the Ginza and a few streets down from Matsuya Department Store, the big neon switch has been pulled for the night. Inside Dunkin' Donuts, the only place open at this time, groups of stop-outs sit in clusters, peering through the glass. Suddenly, he appears: a man with slicked-back hair, dressed all in black, striding down the street carrying what appear to be plastic garbage bags. He stops at the curb, right up against the traffic lights, and drags out the contents: three huddled, humanoid figures in semi-fetal postures, hands covering faces as if in terror. The man in black whips out a cigarette lighter, and the figures flicker into flames. An eerie spectacle, evoking disturbing images: fire bombs, Napalm, self-immolations.

We have just witnessed an "exhibit" by the self-styled "art terrorist" Jack Maclean. The effigies, life-size sculptures of aluminum and wire, are his own creations. The materials were chosen for their low cost and for the way, as Maclean explains with obvious relish, that aluminum "crinkles in the heat like human skin." The idea originates in his life-long fascination with fire. "Fire mesmerizes people," says Jack Maclean.

The "burnings"--this is the third since his debut on Valentine's Day in Omotesando--are planned and executed by Maclean and a collaborator (a fellow member of the mysterious "Faculty of Transient Identity") who films each performance with a Super-8 camera. They are held in the dark for visual effect--and also to escape the eyes of the Tokyo policemen. What Maclean is doing is, of course, strictly illegal, and at the height of Aum-mania, the risks are considerable. Maclean speaks little Japanese. But in the run up to the burnings he memorized the single phrase Utanaide kudasai! ("Don't shoot!") to shout at overexcited police.

"But it's art," he says cheerfully. "What can I do?"
"Plenty of people," he acknowledges, "would say it's just rubbish, and there are justifications for that point of view." But Maclean thinks of his burnings as three-dimensional works far more engaging than most of what passes for contemporary art. "How can you say that what I do is less a work of art than potted plants lying around on the floor of a gallery?"

This is in reference to an exhibition Maclean came across in Berlin's Daad Gallery, an installation by the British artist Damien Hirst and a symbol to Maclean of all that is wrong with today's art market. What counts is not technique or creativity, he insists, but an artist's name. Hype is built up around a few individuals to pump up the value of their work.

Maclean is a soft-spoken Glaswegian, much younger looking than his 33 years: an incongruous terrorist, even in the name of art. He began his career as a guerrilla in 1989, fed up with flogging his paintings around London galleries. `"If they won't give me space,' I thought, `I'll steal it.'" And so he did, by surreptitiously installing "microsculptures"--tiny foil figures set in resin--in 13 major art galleries in a dozen cities. Returning to London from his 22-day world tour, he sent to each gallery a fax that read: "Jack Maclean is now exhibiting a microsculpture in Violation of your Art Space." His installations can be found trespassing in such places as the Saatchi Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Pompadour Centre in Paris. There's even one in the Spiral Building in Omotesando. (Hint: go to the top of the stairs.)

Without any financial backing, Maclean had to fund the entire tour himself. Now he's in Tokyo, saving up money as an English teacher so that come October he can light up his sculptures in eight more cities, including Helsinki, Berlin, and New York. He will orchestrate another burning in Tokyo too, but unlike the last there will be no hand-drawn invitations. He'll just invite passers-by on the spur of the moment. "It'll be a new way of making friends," he smiles.

The "exhibits" have become his mission. He finds them so satisfying, he says, that he no longer feels the need to have his work exhibited--although he admits that he wouldn't mind being famous so that he could fund his various art ideas. He even hints that he has a new act of terrorism in mind, although just what that might be he is not prepared to say. The terrorist's greatest weapon, after all, is the element of surprise.