Since February 19th, 1996
in "MIDWEST"5, Dunedin Art Gallery, NZ,1994
Art As Rotten Flesh--Beyond New Territorialisations
In March I was in Wellington to speak at Under Capricorn, a conference concerned with the question "Is art a European idea?".
In the foyer of Wellington's City Gallery I viewed two large photographic works by Yasumasa Morimura, a Japanese artist whose work I have followed from its beginnings. Morimura's works reproduce elaborate tableaux usually based on masterpieces of European art. He has treated paintings, for instance, by Rembrandt and Van Gogh. Morimura appears throughout these works. Elaborately made-up, he takes the places of the original figures; sometimes he even transforms himself to animals, fruit or flowers. The works in Wellington were based on nineteenth-century paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel Rossetti. There were his contribution to the conference.
Morimura's work is often understood as part of that international tendency of the late 1980s known as Simulation Art. Influenced by the writing of Jean Baudrillard, Simulation Art generally offered a critical take on consumer society.
Morimura's work however is different. Rather than obtain a critical position, he seeks to give way to the world. His works are informed of imagery that characterises life in contemporary consumer society. Morimura revels in the sensual and delightful moment when oppositions are denied and everything is accepted. In such moments, the conflict between the World and the Self disappears.
Morimura's strategy proved highly successful in Japan, and in Europe and the United States. He has been included in many important exhibitions. While his works are thought to characterise contemporary Japan as Baudrillard's hyper-real simulation society, they also evade the various dichotomies -- east/west, male/female, human/animal, art/popular culture -- that have structured modern consciousness. Morimura's magnificent images offer an unprincipled, limitless feeling, affording the viewer a kind of vertigo. His proliferating, melting flesh offers us a (re)turn to the "flesh of the world" as discussed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his last book Visible and Invisible and described by American science-fiction writer Gregg Bear in his novel Blood Music. It is the fundamental flesh that preceeds any kind of differentiation; or the state of indifference following saturation within the endless game of difference.
In his 1994 series Psychoborg and Dress-up man, Morimura transforms himself not into art images, but instead into pop idols including Michael Jackson and Madonna. Jackson and Madonna are cyborgs rather than humans -- zombies even. They are artificial; they lack essential, inherent properties. They transcend race and gender. In these images, closer to pin-ups than tableaux, Morimura poses grotesquely before plain backgrounds. Costumed and made-up in the manners of those stars, Morimura reproduces their kitsh images with his own body.
This new work suggests an important change in direction for Morimura. For him as Japanese, a Western painting and Madonna are equivalent as objects external to his own culture. But in the latter case, there are any distance between the real and its simlacrum. With Jackson and Madonna there is no difference between the World and the Self to conquer, no separation to recoil. They are nothing but signs of our existence, which have been transformed into simulacra. Morimura inserts his body into this endless prosess of autointoxication. Like the retro-virus, which rewrites the DNA code of its host, he has invaded their images rewriting them with his "rotten" flesh. Morimura's body, which used to melt completely into the perfect composition of Occidental paintings, has suddenly become a foreign substance which interferes violently with, and changes, the meaning of its host. While previous works suggested harmony in acquiescence to the World, these works speak of discord and the decay of both the World and the Self. In short, he turned from the illusion back into the reality again. My hunch is that this will be the key issue for Morimura's work in 1990s.
Since the downing of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the world's established ideological frameworks have become meaningless and invalid. The opposition of east and west, which governed the world during the cold war, and the opposition of north and south, have lost their self-evidence. Our new chaotic world is haunted instead by the ghosts of nationalism and regionalism. Culture cannot be indifferent to such changes in the economic, political field.
Many speakers at Under Capricorn equated "post-modernism", "post-colonialism", " the resurgence of margins" and "regionalism"(localism or neo-ethnicism). This equation was brought to bear on the co-existence of Pakeha and Maori in New Zealand, the position of Australia and New Zealand within the English-speaking world, the relationship between Asia and Europe, and the situation of "minorities" such as gays, ethnic groups and women. Since these problems are almost completely hidden in the discursive environment of Japan, I was impressed by the openness of the discussion. At the same time, don't think things are so simple.
Certainly we are living at the end of an era -- a period of cultural hegemony presumed to be "international" operating in the name of western humanism, protected by American economic power. But it is naive to simply replace this "internationalism" with regionalism or localism. Such thinking is itself a medernist, rationalist distortion assuming the homogeneity of space and time. In the world of electronic media, ringed by communication satellites, it is reactionary and reducive to think of culture as independent, distinct and identifiable.
Morimura's new work provides an answer to this cultural condition. His project is difficult: to escape from all manner of essentialisations and reifications of identity, whether they be informed by modernistic ego or ethnic consciousness. Why is this difficult? Because there can be no "outside" from which to pursue it. The world is now made from the flesh of Michael Jackson,Madonna...
In Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari described the fugitive moment away from structures or systems--including those of nation, self,sytle and langue --as "deterritorialisation". Deterritorialisation doesn't mean living outside the notion of discrete territories, but rather becoming rotten flesh inside the territories of our chiasmic world. It accepts the collapse of the modern universalism which once dominated us while also rejecting the new territorialisation and new ethnocentrisms.