Jun Aoki and Richard Tuttle’s “Almost Sky”

Sheets of colored tissue are arranged in a line running down the wall, a blocky cascade of soft blues and reds, several overlapping to make a faint bruise color. While a few of these muted paper rainbows line the corners of each area of the maze of hallways and cavernous rooms in the Opera City galleries, this one sits just above a squat, floor-level lightwell, daylight streaming out in an indirect rectangle to complete the piece, so that the room seems to float. It’s one of the quietly playful highlights of “Almost Sky,” a collaborative exhibition of not-quite institutional critique by Post-postmodernist architect Jun Aoki and Postminimalist sculptor Richard Tuttle, attempting to retune the building with a series of untitled, unattributed spatial interventions.

While the galleries are mostly empty, Aoki and Tuttle’s other incursions are not so slight or subtle. A set of meter-wide metal baskets are suspended high up near the ceilings, each with a tangle of dead tree branches stuck inside, the occasional twig sticking out like a jaunty, burnt-out feather. Circles of dry pine needles dust the floor beneath them, crossing the sterile, cleaning-product smell of the galleries with an occasional whiff of forest floor. White columns dominate each massive room, huddled in groups of two or three, reaching up several meters before topping out with spiraled stacks of what look like wooden pallets. The columns are made of, or at least encircled in, large sheets of paper, which gives the impression of classical-style columns made in a budget crafts class. Occasional lighting fixtures that run in strips up the wall and benches along the walls further this impression. They are evidently made from long, thin bits of reused wooden sheeting that have at one point been painted white, dotted with erratic patterns of drill holes from previous lives.

The Opera City galleries—like similar exhibition spaces in multiplex behemoths in London, New York, Sydney, and Singapore that host art exhibitions alongside concert and theater spaces—are sturdy, functional rooms ensconced in the belly of the arts complex, weighted with seriousness and feeling seemingly immobile. I had all but given up on Tuttle after his disastrous run in London in 2014, with simultaneous showings at Whitechapel and Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall that felt both tone-deaf and overdone, a mix of newer and older works burdened with Tuttle’s attempts at poetry. His improvisatory, intuitive scavenging, and material remnants of small gestures, often butts up against the repetitions and demands of the large institutions and retrospective surveys that he now mainly moves within, as if struggling against the formality that entraps the work.

This collaboration with Aoki seems to enact that struggle, but also brings out what works best for both of them—paucity with the occasional jumble, small readjustments that lead to larger consequences. In another of the large galleries, they’ve suspended a white cloth across the room to create a low ceiling, its squat horizon paradoxically giving a sense of outdoor airiness. Their interventions into the building also include a few token gestures of institutional reframing: the gallery bookshop has been moved from a room in a hallway outside to a passage inside the show, while a set of Nomata Minoru paintings of fantastical buildings from the 1980s and ’90s—ordinarily shown in an upstairs room and part of the Opera City collection—have been moved to a downstairs gallery. I wonder who such flimsy reshufflings are for. It is easy to imagine disgruntled regulars wandering the halls, lost.

In the former “bookshop” space, the division of work is clear: a set of smaller wall-based works by Tuttle encircle several rickety wooden columns devised by Aoki. Tuttle’s 三 3 (2024) is an assemblage of raw scraps of wood, a crumpled crescent of blue tarp hanging from string giving it a sense of paused motion. The angular, roughly canine-tooth shape of the wood offcut of十八 18 (2024) holds a crescent of painted white, its surface flecked with sawdust and light pencil markings. While the smaller wall pieces feel spontaneous, the serendipitous beauty of minute accidents or decisions, these are a selection of works from Tuttle’s solo show at Tomio Koyama in Tokyo last year. It speaks less of the “profound” and “concrete response to this era, this place, and this history,” which Tuttle writes of in the Opera City handout, and more of quick solutions and shipping costs.

At the top of the stairwell leading to the upstairs galleries, one of the baskets hangs at eye level; some of the dry branches are looped along their length with steel wire, while one broken branch is held on at a severe angle by a messy knot. Nearby, the floor is lined with several of the pallet-shaped stacks that have topped the looming columns throughout the show: up close, it becomes apparent that the “wood” is just Styrofoam painted a dark brown. Dissipating with the sense of gravity, the sense that Aoki’s and Tuttle’s columns and counterweights were actually doing any work propping up their reimagining of the institution, or altering it in any fundamental way, also evaporates.

Making the building into an airy artwork is a lovely gesture. But I start to wonder if “Almost Sky” feels playful because it’s such a hefty, clunky toy, a solemn building given momentary levity; and also about the responsibility of being given such toys to play with. Aoki and Tuttle evidently want to do more than sail through blue-chip gallery shows or high-end fashion shop design, like Aoki’s Louis Vitton stores, but their remodeling the institution ends up feeling like a promise half delivered. In altering the galleries and suspending the building’s usual manner it’s meant, if anything, to provide a moment of reflection. Any institution can be changed, but if artists in this era, this history, actually wish to do so, they need to be more risky and reckless in their play.