Word: taniguchi
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...publisher, Ponent Mon, in collaboration with a U.K. outfit named Fanfare, has published five books in the U.S. as part of a line they call nouvelle manga. They mean to start a new genre and the latest two, "Doing Time" by Kazuichi Hanawa and "The Walking Man," by Jiro Taniguchi, are two of the most peculiar comix of the year...
Fanfare/Ponent Mon's two latest releases are by Japanese artists, but couldn't be further from the kind of manga most people get exposed to. Jiro Taniguchi's "The Walking Man" ($17; 155 pages) perfectly embodies the precepts of nouvelle manga, taking the low-key activities of everyday life and depicting them in the highly detailed drawing style more commonly associated with European comix. Each of the book's 18 chapters depicts a nameless salaryman on a different stroll through the city and countryside. The first chapter sets the formula for ones following. The man pops out to take...
...walk in Jiro Taniguchi's "The Walking...
...quiet, low-key activities and cutaways to environmental details, "The Walking Man" evokes the atmosphere of the films of Yasujiro Ozu ("Tokyo Story," "Early Spring," etc.) But the comparison goes no further than the work's mutual tone. Ozu's movies involve rich characters struggling with complex conflicts. Taniguchi's walking man stays a cipher, exhibiting only the barest hint of complexity. The pleasures of "The Walking Man" are principally in the form of Taniguchi's careful compositions, which acheive a contemplative beauty. Like a short walk of the mind, they refresh and provide exercise...
...fact, what Taniguchi has delivered is a building that offers MOMA to the world as the global headquarters of Modern Art Inc. With its long, immaculate planes of charcoal gray granite and milky white glass, his museum emanates taste, restraint, formal intelligence and authority. Those are occasional values of contemporary art as well. Then again, so are effrontery, vulgarity and obfuscation, with occasional detours into buffoonery, kitsch and porn. If it's at the heart of MOMA's mission to continually sort through the muck, it will now do so in a building that says the art world may have...