Which Is The More Surreal?

Last week, I felt like I should do something cultural and/or educational and/or intellectual, so I went to the Dali exhibit in Ueno Park. I didn’t know much about Dali – except for the bent clocks that feature in his paintings, and that he had a wicked moustache – but he’s Japan’s favourite Western artist, as I’ve been told by a lot of the students. Belatedly celebrating a ‘Retrospective Centennial – 1904-1989’, it’s big news in Japan to have so many works accessible to the public.

The exhibition was great; with over 60 different paintings. Ignorantly, I didn’t realise how broad his style was, from the surreal to naturalistic portraits. Nonetheless, the best thing was the titles given to the works; each one better than the next. For example, “Premature Ossification of a Railway Station”, “Partial Hallucination. Six apparitions of Lenin on a Grand Piano”, “The Meeting of the Illusion and the Arrested Moment - Fried Eggs Presented in a Spoon”, Average Atmospherocepalic Bureaucrat in the Act of Milking a Cranial Harp”.
My favourite is simply titled,"Eggs on the Plate Without the Plate”.

Here are some of my favourite paintings:




Respectively:
Soft Self-portrait with Grilled Bacon (1941)
The Persistence of Memory (1931)
The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory (1954)
Fiesta in Figueres (1914-16)
The Basket of Bread (1926)
The Ram (1928)

And my number one:

Geopolitical Child Watching the Birth of the New Man (1943)

After the museum, Julian* and I walked to Asakusa; passing this rather novel building.

We had a look at the temple and then went to the top of the Asahi building (next to that huge golden flame) and had a beer. The view was pretty cool.

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The next day I went to the area around Tokyo Station – Marunouchi – to see… Cow Parade!! For those of you who don’t know, Cow Parade is a beautifully pointless event that takes place in different cities across the globe and counters all the misery in the world; the last time I saw it was in Prague, and Dan saw it in Manchester. Simply put, 50ish plastic cows line the streets in one area of a famous city, each painted by different artists. For no real purpose. But it’s great:






This is my second favourite cow. I’m not sure what the red on top is, but the skin is so cool:



And my favourite:

If it doesn’t look amazing, it makes up for it by its name: すしうし. In Japanese, “ushi” means “cow”. The title: “sushi ushi”.

*A NOVA teacher. British by name, exceedingly ‘British’ by nature.