What the Neighbor Taught Me About Art

When I was small, a young person lived across the street who owned two pugs and showered every evening at exactly seven o’clock without drawing the curtains. Little Marci, whose life at the time consisted of Pokémon, pork schnitzel, and teen magazines, started looking forward to that particular moment all day long. Especially after my uncle gave me an expensive pair of binoculars for Christmas. I wouldn’t have called it art, exactly.

Which brings me to Kohei Yoshiyuki, who apparently felt the same compulsion about the park near his Tokyo home in the 1970s. Armed with an infrared camera, he spent nights crawling through the bushes, photographing everything that moved—couples, colleagues, strangers—all the groping and fumbling and accidental intimacy that parks absorb after midnight. Then he printed the results large and exhibited them at the Komai Gallery in Tokyo and at MoMA in New York. Viewers were handed flashlights and walked through the images in the dark, which is either the best curatorial decision of the decade or proof that the art world will sanction anything given sufficient pretension.

The work is unsettling in exactly the right way—not because of what’s shown but because of the watching itself. Yoshiyuki isn’t hidden from the images; his presence is the point. The people in the park didn’t know he was there, and now you’re standing in the gallery with your little flashlight, implicated in the same act. Voyeurism is art if the institution will have it. The binoculars just needed a gallery wall.