Tachikawa Public Art Walk: A Guide to the 109 Works of Faret Tachikawa

Faret Tachikawa: 109 artworks by 92 artists from 36 countries outside Tachikawa Station. How to walk them, and why its bollards and air vents had to be art.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

At the North Exit of Tachikawa Station you can sit on a Niki de Saint Phalle. For free, and there is no closing time.

Surprisingly few people know this. Ask what there is in front of Tachikawa (立川) Station and not many can answer straight away. People from central Tokyo will say it is a place to change trains, and even locals might only say it has a lot of big shops.

Leave the North Exit and step onto the elevated pedestrian deck. There is a hotel, a department store, a cinema, a library, office buildings. It is the station-front scenery of any city. Walk briskly past and that is the end of it.

But slow down a little and strange things start to catch your eye. Something shaped like a person stands at the edge of the pavement. There is a lump far too elaborate to be a mere bollard. The ventilation vent beside a building is, by any reckoning, shaped like a sculpture.

This corner is called Faret Tachikawa, and its collection is called Faret Tachikawa Art: 109 works by 92 artists from 36 countries and regions, placed around the streets. They do not hang on the walls of a museum. Every day they stop cars, give people somewhere to sit and change the air underground. The works are doing the town’s chores.

A bollard could be a post. A vent could be a box. So why did this town have to make each and every one of them into art? And one of them, they say, is the last work an artist finished from his sickbed. Carrying those questions, I start to walk between the buildings.

Before the Highlights: How a District of 109 Artworks Was Born

The official Faret Tachikawa website records that the district was born on 13 October 1994, on former US base land at the north exit of Tachikawa Station.

Tachikawa’s airfield received an Army air unit in 1922, and in 1929 Japan’s first scheduled private passenger service began between Tachikawa and Osaka. After the war it became a US base, and according to the city’s chronology it was fully returned in 1977. In the same year Tokyo Metropolis and the cities of Tachikawa and Akishima drew up a plan for using the base land. The land became Showa Kinen Park, a wide-area disaster-response base, and new town districts. One of those districts is Faret Tachikawa.

According to the records of Art Front Gallery, which took charge of the art, in 1992 the Housing and Urban Development Corporation of the day held a competition for art proposals among five invited companies, and Art Front was chosen. The city chronology’s entry for 1994 reads “Faret Tachikawa opens.” It is a district of about 5.9 hectares with 11 buildings: a hotel, a department store, a cinema, a library, office buildings and more.

The northern section of the Tama Monorail opened in 1998. When Faret Tachikawa opened, today’s Tachikawa-Kita monorail station did not yet exist. The works were standing in the town before the monorail began to run.

The origin of the name is on the official site too. They took the Italian word “fare,” meaning to make, to create, to produce, and added “T,” the initial of Tachikawa, to make “FARET.” Tachikawa has hitched a ride on the end of an Italian word, quite shamelessly, for the price of one letter.

Until 1977 (Showa 52), this was land on the other side of a wire fence. In 1971 a partial return was agreed, and in 1977 came the full return. What you saw from the station’s north side in those days was the base beyond the fence. What you see in the same place today is people carrying department-store bags, and the bollards at their feet. From a base town to a town that makes things: you can read that intention in the name. But if a symbol of a “town that creates” was what they wanted, a fountain or a monument would have done. Why place more than a hundred works of contemporary art, and in the form of bollards and vents at that? There is one person who holds the key.

Fram Kitagawa Saw the Town as a Forest

The art director of this district was Fram Kitagawa. According to the official site, he saw the town as a forest, and set out three concepts: “a town that reflects the world,” “turning function into fiction,” and “a town of surprise and discovery.” (The Japanese plays on the near-rhyme of the two English loanwords, “function” and “fiction.”)

The forest image makes sense once you walk it. Someone walking in a forest can walk among the trees without knowing the name of each one. You notice something at your feet, stop, and walk on. Here too, the works are not gathered in one place. They are scattered between buildings, among the shrubbery, on the walls of the deck, at the edges of the pavement. Passers-by walk past works without knowing it, and now and then realise that something is a work.

“A town that reflects the world” has evidence behind it too. Look at the city’s list of works and the range of the artists’ nationalities is startling. Japan, the United States, France, Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy, and also Thailand, Senegal, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Haiti, Lebanon, Iran, Uruguay, the Philippines and Lithuania. Tachikawa City introduces Faret Tachikawa Art as a collection of contemporary art by the world’s top artists of the end of the 20th century.

And it can be seen freely, at no charge. No admission ticket, no closing time. Land that was fenced in by the base’s wire became a museum open to everyone. Land where entry was forbidden became land where entry is free. That reversal is the most interesting thing about Tachikawa.

So what, concretely, did the second of the three concepts, “turning function into fiction,” mean? The answer was in the brackets of the list of works.

Why Air Vents and Bollards Became Art

In Tachikawa City’s list of works, beside each title and artist, the function the work performs is noted in brackets. Read them in order and you begin to see what a town is actually made of.

There are ventilation vents. There are entrances to utility tunnels. There are covers for sprinkler valves. There are covers for fire-brigade standpipe connections. There are entrances for machinery deliveries. There is a gate to a rubbish collection point. There is a sign for an emergency staircase. There is a neon sign for a bicycle park. There are street lamps, benches, and bollards. Above all, there are a lot of bollards. The second half of the list is little more than a row of bollards. Celebrated artists from around the world have all lined up in front of Tachikawa Station to stop cars.

Richard Wilson made an entrance and an exhaust vent for a utility tunnel; Tadashi Kawamata also did a utility tunnel entrance and a vent. Charles Worthen’s “Water Jar” is a sprinkler-valve cover, and judging from the list there are four of them in the district. Marina Abramović’s “Black Dragon, for Family” is a machinery entrance, and Robert Rauschenberg’s “Bicycloid VI” is the neon sign of a bicycle park. Felix Gonzalez-Torres did the emergency staircase sign, and Takamasa Kuniyasu’s “Stack in Frame” serves as the gate of the rubbish collection point. I know of no other town where even the rubbish point and the fire-escape sign carry the names of world-famous artists.

Pick out the titles of the vents and another landscape appears. Susumu Shingu’s vent is “Visitor.” Shintaro Tanaka’s vent is “A Place Where the Wind Blows.” Kyotaro Hakamata’s vent is “17 Years Old.” A vent with an age. Thirty-two years after the district opened, “17 Years Old” is now a 49-year-old vent. Kenjiro Okazaki’s vent bears a long name that recalls Greek myth: “Mount Ida (The Boy Paris Is Still Tending Sheep).”

No two bollards are the same, either. Nobuo Sekine’s “Bollards of Dialogue”; Kishiko Fujiwara’s “The Hare and the Tortoise”; Hossein Valamanesh’s “You Just Sit Here, and I’ll Keep Watch for You.” Valamanesh’s title is a little long for a bollard. By the time a driver has finished reading it, the car has long since stopped.

Vito Acconci’s work is both bollards and benches. According to the official commentary, Acconci made a work here in which the pavement itself becomes a car. That, the commentary goes on, also raises a question about car society. A device for stopping cars borrows the shape of a car to put a question to cars. This is what “function into fiction” means: doing its job while doubting the job itself.

Faret Tachikawa by the Numbers

• 109 — the number of works. Some of them you have sat on without knowing, or parked beside without knowing.
• 92 and 36 — the number of artists, and of countries and regions. The pavement in front of the station is a small international conference.
• 11 buildings, about 5.9 hectares — the size of the district. Seeing all the works tires your neck more than you expect.
• 4 — the number of Charles Worthen’s “Water Jars.” Meeting the same work several times does not mean you are lost. Probably.
• 144 — the number of numerals Tatsuo Miyajima’s “Luna” is counting at once. Try to follow them all with your eyes and your eyes will give up before your neck does.
• More than 20,000 — the number of people guided by the citizens’ volunteer group, the Faret Club.

So what did the famous artists leave in this town? Some of their works you can sit on, and some you cannot.

The Niki You Can Sit On, and the Armchair You Can’t

Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Conversation” is a bench. According to the official site, it is made of fibre-reinforced plastic. Niki was born in Paris in 1930, grew up in New York and died in San Diego in 2002. From around 1965 she began making the brightly coloured female figures called “Nanas,” and she created the Tarot Garden, a sculpture garden in Tuscany, Italy. In 2000 she received the Praemium Imperiale in sculpture.

That artist’s bench is in front of the station, and anyone can sit on it. A work that in a museum would carry a “Please do not touch” sign has, here, the job of being sat on. Most of the people sitting on it don’t know it is a Niki. They kill time waiting for the lights to change, on top of a Niki, without knowing.

Patrick Villiers’s “Human Armchair,” on the other hand, though it calls itself a chair, is an iron object placed in a shrubbery, more than two metres tall. According to the official site, it grew from the idea of a throne on which one person lords it over others: a symbol of power. The chair you can’t sit on says far more than the one you can.

Claes Oldenburg’s “Lipstick” is, in the official site’s words, a lipstick made simply of painted metal plate, and in that simplicity it symbolises 20th-century urban civilisation. Oldenburg was a pop artist who remade familiar everyday objects on a gigantic scale; in Japan his giant saw outside Tokyo Big Sight is well known. Here is an artist who made a saw on the shore of Tokyo Bay and a lipstick in front of Tachikawa Station.

The terrace of the department store’s open café is a work by Jean-Pierre Raynaud. The official site describes the whole terrace as a mineral garden made of red flowerpots and natural stone. Raynaud, who graduated from the horticultural school at Versailles, is known for the story that he filled flowerpots with cement and sealed them. Pots meant for growing plants make a garden with no plants. In the shrubbery there is also “Mountain,” an iron work by Anish Kapoor, winner of the Turner Prize in 1991.

And there is a wall. A wall sculpture by Donald Judd.

Here I must tell the story of the “last work” I mentioned at the start. According to the official site, Judd worked on the Tachikawa piece from his sickbed. The building’s conditions changed, the wall he had first had in mind could no longer be used, and a new wall even had to be prepared. Then, in February 1994, Judd died. The Tachikawa piece became his last work.

Faret Tachikawa opened in October of that same year. The artist who helped define Minimalism never saw the birth of the town where his last work would stand. The seven pieces, made of Corten steel and iron, were handed straight over to a town whose artist was already gone.

But the fun of Faret Tachikawa does not end with names from the textbooks. Read the commentaries on works by artists you have never heard of, and stranger stories emerge.

Marilyn on the Exhaust Vent, Dragonflies Around the Trees

“The Last Shopping,” by the Singaporean artist Tang Da Wu, is an exhaust vent. According to the official commentary, it is made of fibre-reinforced plastic and stainless steel. On it is a figure of Marilyn Monroe, her skirt blown up. Frying pans hang on the wall, seven bottles stand in a row — soy sauce, olives, vinegar and more — and dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves hang down. Above an exhaust vent, Marilyn holds down her skirt. I felt I had seen this scene somewhere, and then remembered: the film, the subway grating. That said, this is my own association; the commentary does not go that far.

The original plan was to make it in copper, the commentary says, but restrictions meant it was made in fibreglass. Tang Da Wu was born in 1943, when Singapore was under Japanese occupation. He is described as an artist who has expressed society’s contradictions and the violence hidden in them through everyday objects. In 1999 he received the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize, and in 2007 he represented Singapore at the Venice Biennale. A work by an artist born under the occupation stands on an exhaust vent in a former base town. The commentary says nothing about that pairing. In the space where it says nothing, the work stands silently.

Even the tree grates that cover the roots of the street trees are art: Nobuho Nagasawa’s “Message of the Dragonplane.” Seven cast-iron discs about 1.23 metres across are lined up, according to the map, along Midorikawa-dori near the station. The title’s origin is on the official site: dragonfly plus aeroplane, “Dragonplane.” The artist lived in this area as a small child, and laid her memory of dragonflies over the history of Tachikawa’s airfield and the US base. She engraved in iron forms in which aeroplanes and dragonflies turn into each other. On the iron lids at your feet, dragonflies become aeroplanes and aeroplanes turn back into dragonflies. In the artist’s childhood memory there were dragonflies in the sky here, and there was an airfield. Now both are held in iron discs, and commuters’ shoes hurry over them toward the station.

Tatsuji Ushijima’s “Classic Communication Device: Speaking Tube” is an object of six stainless-steel pipes 1.8 metres tall. The commentary says Ushijima has found joy in making useless machines. The work asks what colour the sound of the wind is. Yukio Fujimoto’s “Ear Chair” is a stainless-steel bench; press your ears to the pipes, six centimetres across, and you hear the sound of the air around you, given a peculiar hum by the pipes’ resonance. It grew from the idea that a town is not made only of what you can see. Fujimoto represented Japan at the Japan Pavilion of the 2001 Venice Biennale. In front of the station, you press your ears to the bench of a Venice Biennale representative. If an acquaintance sees you, the explanation will take at least five minutes. That too, presumably, is part of the work.

Ushio Shinohara’s “Centaur Motorcycle” is a car-park sign: a bronze frog riding a motorbike. The commentary calls it the god of motorcycles. Shinohara was born in Tokyo in 1932, was known in the 1960s for his “boxing paintings,” and has lived in New York since 1969. In 2013 “Cutie and the Boxer,” a documentary following the couple’s daily life, won the directing award at the Sundance Film Festival. The commentary introduces him as an artist who has lived on sheer fighting spirit and worked on sheer fighting spirit. At the car-park entrance, a frog full of fighting spirit welcomes the cars.

Joseph Kosuth’s “Incantation, for Noema” is the wall of a vehicle ramp. According to a 2019 article in the art magazine Bijutsu Techo, texts by Michiko Ishimure and James Joyce are carved along 42 metres of wall. Along a passage for cars run the words of the writer who wrote about Minamata and the writer who wrote about Dublin. Marina Abramović’s “Black Dragon, for Family” is a machinery entrance, but according to the same article the artist explains that she designed it as a “place of rest,” not just to be looked at but for pressing your body against.

The strange stories never run out. On the next page we meet a ventilation tower that takes on time itself: a patient tower with numerals that advance only once an hour.