A lot of the restlessness and energy in contemporary art actually stems from a sense of emptiness and frustration that young artists feel as they flail around trying to find their true artistic voice. This certainly seems to have been the case in the career of Kyoji Takubo, a 62-year-old artist, who is now enjoying his first major solo show in Tokyo at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
After entering Tama Art University in 1968, Takubo's artistic odyssey in the 1970s and '80s took him into performance art and anti-art. One of his works from this period was a video of himself drinking bourbon all day. In another he put a bottle of Calpis (a soft drink) on display as a piece of sculpture. Then there were the clothes that he wore, set fire to and extinguished, then displayed as "art." He also once hammered a nail into a wall in front of an audience then left it on display for a week.
Such early derivative forays into artistic expression could perhaps be typified as brattish incontinence, showing more ambition than inspiration.