TED TALKS THE ART OF STILLNESS DRIVER

TED TALKS THE ART OF STILLNESS DRIVER

For a place where minutes are precisely measured out in even packets with smooth, cutely decorated matte wrapping paper and bundled with string, where a hotel shuttle driver doesnвЂ™t miss a single minute in his daily schedule, itвЂ™s amazing how easily you can lose yourself there for hours, even days. The site is run by FukutakeвЂ™s foundation alongside Benesse Holdings, and has expanded to the neighboring islands of Inujima and Teshima. The result was Benesse Art Site Naoshima, a veritable art spa complete with a hotel-cum-art museum. Fukutake wanted to build a place where people could go to restore their depleted tanks, to change out the dirty residue of cynicism for clear, soaring sublime. He hired a 45-year-old Ando, who works only with steel, concrete, glass and wood, to build his fantasy world, and commissioned site-specific public art from Turrell and the like to be placed all over the island. Fukutake saw Tokyo as a вЂњmonstrous place that sucks people into a cortex of competition and exposes them to a surfeit of stimulation, excitement, tension, and pleasure,вЂќ and so he chose art as a means to his utopian ends. In 1985 a businessman named Soichiro Fukutake called up NaoshimaвЂ™s then mayor, Chikatsugu Miyake, to build a respite from the flashing, whizzing, soul-crushing pace of JapanвЂ™s cities. Every minute is an inconvenience on the way to somewhere cooler - yet willingly we line up, slaves to time, to the precious moments of awesomeness that always seem to be flying away from us, to be stored in the Instagram feeds of other people. To find respite in New York in the summer, you have to cram yourself onto a train going to the Hamptons, or allocate a few extra hours to inching your way along I95 to Cape Cod. Here, the two comparable art destinations are Dia: Beacon and Storm King, paragons of big art you can access after youвЂ™ve finally found a parking spot. In New York City, headquarters of all things queue-able, a place like Teshima could never exist. As if the gods of art are saying, вЂњYouвЂ™re not ready yet,вЂќ youвЂ™re forced to breathe and confront the natural beauty of the island before youвЂ™re allowed entrance. The footpath by the ticket counter leads away, not toward, the museum, taking you behind a wall of trees to a lone bench overlooking the water. As you follow the main road, you come to a bend that dumps you out, with no fanfare whatsoever, in front of a building-sized water droplet, a seed-shaped spaceship from the future with clean, white, natural lines, a haiku embodied. Here you ride past thick groves embracing sculptures like hidden treasure. Here you travel by bicycle, perhaps with a small motor on the back wheel. On Teshima there is no punctilious shuttle bus, and indeed very few cars. Inside, one piece of art, a breath-taking otherworldly installation by Rei Naito that uses water to evoke a meditative trance. On the smaller, rougher hewn Teshima, there is one art museum, by Ryue Nishizawa, the youngest architect to ever win the Pritzker. Naoshima, with a collection of three buildings by Pritzker-Prize winning architect Tadao Ando, houses exquisite site-specific sculptures and paintings from James Turrell, Walter de Maria, Lee Ufan, Claude Monet and Yayoi Kusama. There are three islands in JapanвЂ™s Inland Sea where some of the worldвЂ™s best contemporary art lives quietly nestled between trees. The bus, plain but for the words вЂњBenesse HouseвЂќ printed cheerfully across the side, winds its way up along often rain-slicked esses, past tidy beaches, elegant forests, a pumpkin sculpture the size of a small hut. But no matter the condition of the roads, the layover does not vary from the plan: Arrive 10:57, leave at 11:05 park at 16:52, close doors at 16:55 and so on.

According to the shuttle schedule, the white bus parks for as little as three minutes and as long as twenty-one before beeping, retracting its steps, closing its door, and driving back the way it came.

The wait time at the Chichu Art Museum varies depending on the hour. A lyrical meditation on the quiet place within.

Ted talks the art of stillness