Weather makes for an unpredictable artist at Nagano art festival

There are a few things to consider before heading out for some art, but the weather is not usually paramount. The Northern Alps Art Festival, though, is a Fram Kitagawa event — if you can even get there, you better pack an umbrella and bring shoes with some tread.
The festival, which opened Sept. 13, is based out of Omachi, a city of just 25,881 people in Nagano Prefecture. It’s a considerable journey from the closest shinkansen stop, some two or three hours by two trains, but, again, this being a Kitagawa affair, the remoteness, the inconvenience — the way’s the thing.
Located in a town bordered by some of the highest mountains in Japan, the triennale is on its third edition, with new works by 36 artists, nearly half of whom are women (a welcome improvement on the scant female representation at the Oku-Noto Triennale this time last year). Rugged twisting roads lead to installations tucked beside dams and inside shrines and forests. You’d think that Kitagawa, the impresario who oversees the 24-year-old Echigo Tsumari Art Field and the Setouchi Triennale (among other such inconvenient art events), might eventually tire of his ever expanding, publicly funded, site-specific hyper-local revitalization art empire, and that maybe visitors would, too. But this festival has a surprise guest collaborator — namely, weather — working its steady but inconsistent hand, and the experience manages to stay self-regenerating and therefore unpredictable.

One thought-provoking new piece by Yukihisa Isobe is a land work titled “North by North West.” The research-intensive project takes a long view of local ecology and the role humans have played in it. Born in 1935, Isobe began as a painter in the 1950s but broke from making art in the ’60s, during which time he, among other things, worked for the New York City parks department, and later went on to pursue a career in ecology planning.
The space featuring “North by North West” contains a circle 78 meters in diameter intersected by a curved path of green and white windsocks. In 1979, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings completed the rockfill Nanakura Dam, one of three dams along the Takase River. Isobe places a circle of rocks that act as a compass: The flags line up to 22.5 degrees north-northwest, the direction of the wind stream before the dam was built, making visible the effect it’s had on the surrounding environment. A road overlooking the work gives a bird’s-eye view, or perhaps a planner’s, and the work appears like a blueprint of the past. But at the ground level, the flags dance, recalling sports days at grade school, and making the wind something viscerally visual.
Although “Water, Trees, Earth, Sky” is the theme of the event, it’s really a fifth force, wind, that steals the show.
Kaori Miyayama’s “The Roots of Heaven” employs wind as a collaborator, too. Hanga woodblock prints and silk threads on sheer silk organdy panels are hung inside Sunuma Shinmeisha Shrine’s kagura-den, a stage where ritual performances are held. Miyayama, who’s based in Italy, began the series in 2014 inside Camerano’s San Francesco church, while this one is exposed on all sides and ripples with shifts in the wind. When the banners are still, the clouds float serenely, but any breeze turns them to ships marching across a turbulent ocean.
“During my stay here, changing nature has been integrated into the work, capturing the flow of wind and the sky or weather,” she tells the festival press tour. “And in the evenings, moonlight enters from a distance.”
The very photogenic “A Whisper in the Eye of the Storm,” by Canadian artists Caitlind R. C. Brown and Wayne Garrett, is sure to be a crowd pleaser. Around 14,000 recycled lenses of varied prescriptions hang in a curtain that spirals inward, encircling a bench wrapped around a tree. Looking at the installation up close, the viewer’s vision fills with suspended bubbles, warping the sky, forest and lake beyond. More so than with the cloth of Miyayama or Isobe’s works, one has to wonder how the small and intricately arranged pieces would fare under the duress of a typhoon.
An artist who goes by Kotake Man has been gathering people together for “Self Matsuri” in Osaka for 12 years, participatory community events that culminate in a mud festival. For his work “Yamanoue Matsuri,” the artist planned a 35-by-15-meter “ground painting” (that is, a painting made on the ground) broken up into a few large pieces. He and his team sketched a creature that would be drawn in by festival participants using soil then colored in with plaster and pigment, but the creation of the communal work quickly became an act of forecasting. Rain washed the soil away repeatedly, morphing the original figure, and what was finally left behind must have been what the gods approved of, says the artist.
“It felt like the mountain gods were telling us to start over,” he says. “It felt like we were trying to control the painting while nature was controlling us at the same time, and it eventually came together that way.”

The most literal embodiment of weather as art is “A Weather Haecceity Observation Bureau — Omachi,” by Shoji Funakawa. Erected on the lawn outside the Omachi Alpine Museum, the artist created his own observatory whose LED lights respond to changes in weather. Funakawa gives brief spoken word performances related to the atmospheric phenomenon next to his installation.
We often think of “the weather” as a forecast that is given to us by an app or someone on TV. But, of course, there is the other kind of weather, the thing that’s hitting us in the face or banging on the storm door, something that isn’t bound by large-scale patterns or postal codes but rather shifts with the landscape. “The sun, wind, rain, temperature and visibility can fluctuate significantly on any short walk,” writes British author Tristan Gooley in his instructive book, “The Secret World of Weather.” “This is what we have always meant by ‘weather,’ and it is different on two sides of a tree.”
Weather never happens to us exactly the same way twice; the same can be said about art. And in that way they are a perfect pairing.
Put another way, “The meaning of the improvement, of the increase promised by a work of art, depends upon who is looking at it when,” as art critic John Berger once wrote. Berger is talking not about weather but about the ever shifting obstacles facing humankind at a given moment. Today, there’s no doubt that the threat of ecological ruin is at the very top of that list. In its mission, the Northern Alps Art Festival encourages an examination of that natural fragility and humanity’s role in it, while also providing art that is as alive and dynamic as its environs.