A funny thing happened on the way to "Le Forum." Outside Ochanomizu Station, a small group of neo-Nazis had set up shop and were playing the Japanese national anthem. One of them was wearing a modified SS uniform and proudly let me take his picture. I noticed that his jack boots and Sam Browne belt were slightly scuffed and cracked.
Apart from the opportunity to start this article with a groan-worthy pun using the title of a '60s Sondheim musical, it seems worth mentioning the encounter in this particular review, as a strong theme in Grasso's exhibition at the Ginza Maison Hermes Le Forum is the end of empires. And one of his video pieces features the fascist buildings of Mussolini's Esposizione Universale Roma.
With the deliberately dodgy CGI of a low-rent History Channel documentary, deserted colonnades, vainglorious statuary and the infamous Palazzo della Civilta Italiana become gradually illuminated by the dawn light of two stars, the sun and Nemesis, a hypothetical dwarf star that, it has been suggested, was the cause of Earth's periodic mass extinctions.
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