Wannabe Asians

[imomus]

Well, should I title this entry Edinburgh is (almost) a city in Asia or Fashion Goth bis? Yesterday Hisae and I met my friend Suzy off the London train and took her to our favourite Edinburgh restaurant for lunch, Bonsai. The kitchen staff there are really Japanese, and the food is pretty much what you'd get in Japan. The Asian-flavoured stuff we've been seeing on the Festival, on the other hand, is the artistic equivalent of a Japanese restaurant owned and run by Westerners: a kind of Asian-fusion art made by non-Asians (should we call them—us—"aspiring Asians"? "Wannabe Asians"?). First there was the Russian film about the Japanese emperor, then the Mexican silent film presented as if it were being shown in Japan. Then, last night, the dance piece based on the Ring trilogy.

Darren Johnston, the choreographer, video artist and sound designer behind Ren-Sa, is British. But his imagination has clearly been encamped (so to speak) by the spooky, beautiful witches of the Ring films directed by Hideo Nakata. (Read the history of the films here.) I can totally understand that: I too was blown away by these films at the Edinburgh Festival back in 2000. "These films (I'd recommend parts one and two, but not the prequel, Ring 0) were so scary I was in tears throughout, but maybe that's because they got me missing my girlfriend," I wrote at the time.

Darren Johnston's tribute was also scary, although this time only to my girlfriend. Once we'd been ferried in darkened mini-buses to a warehouse out at Granton (I know because there was a tiny chink in the tarpaulin), the audience was ushered into a big smoky dark hall and encouraged to cluster behind a circular mesh curtain, behind which the action took place. Sadako and Samara themselves emerged out of the ground (they'd been lying in sand) and did their familiar lame vindictive twitch-walk, hidden behind cascades of hair. But it was a bit like the Thriller video; all too soon beats began and the horror turned into synchronised choreography routines. Hisae still managed to cower in horror (it was Suzy she hid behind, not me) each time "Samara" came rushing up to the curtain, and it was rather disconcerting to see the spooky child mere inches from your face, her (or was it his?) rigid mask staring through the thin curtain into your eyes.

But I wasn't scared. Oh no! I was too busy watching the video, which looked like multi-screen CCTV footage of Sadako's asylum, or some kind of fashion goth reality TV show. The highlight of the piece was when two more witches rose suddenly out of the sand and struck hideous postures under a staccato Morse Code strobe light, as the music shrieked and roared and scary children's voices filled the warehouse. We were then bundled back into the blacked-out buses and driven back to town. Actually, the most disturbing thing about Ren-Sa is that there are no toilets out at the warehouse. We all returned to the land of the living with desperately full bladders.

Much more impressive, for me, was Teaming, the art show about collaboration we saw at Embassy Gallery earlier in the day, which contained film of The Boyle Family's 1965 destructo-art happening at the ICA. I'd just written about Mark Boyle in a big article about the history of VJing I did for the Adobe website, and described this action from accounts on the web. To see film of the event I'd only imagined was indeed a thriller.

Comments

Re: the dorks and the poonanies

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Is this some kind of publicity stunt?

I think it's a plug from Andrew Marr (the BBC's political correspondent, retired) for his new book, "I Hate Them". Extract:

"They are in their twenties, probably lovers, certainly unmarried. He wears a thin grey jersey and leather trousers, with carefully maintained stubble and wraparound shades, despite the dim light. She is Japanese, dressed in a bright plastic jacket, child colours, unsmiling. They are standing among a scattering of domestic electric detritus on a polished floor. They exchange a look, impossible to interpret. The man mutters and they move on, glancing at a book he holds... All around there are people like them, all part of a modern tribe, a vast nomadic group, mostly young, urban, clever, a little intimidating, given to expensive hodden clothes and rimless glasses. They speak a dialect closely related to that of neighbouring peoples, but studded with other names - Ofili, Opie, Sensation-Apocalypse, Takahashi. And anyway, they are not voluble, as they stand in front of inscrutable images or slow, silent films. They seem poised. They treasure silence. I am talking, obviously, of the followers of contemporary art... I hate them. It is time to elbow them aside and fill up the galleries with the rest of us."

Re: the dorks and the poonanies

[dandy-darvish.livejournal.com]

who does he mean with "the rest of us"? who are the rest of us?

Re: the dorks and the poonanies

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, it's him arm-in-arm, shoulder-to-shoulder with the lumpen proletariat, innit? I mean, forget that he went to a school (Loretto) quite as posh as the one Tony Blair went to (Fettes). He wants to make a populist gesture and close the gap between himself and the people. So he attacks nomadic, miscegynating, unmarried, non-mortgage-paying, non-chattering class contemporary art fans and envisages a scenario in which they're ejected from art galleries by "the rest of us", an unholy alliance between the political elite and the masses. My hero!

Re: the dorks and the poonanies

[dandy-darvish.livejournal.com]

I don'think the lumpen proletariat are aware of such places as art galleries and if they are don't really care. he preaches for a parochy thats deaf.

Re: the dorks and the poonanies

[(Anonymous)]

Do you really mean that everyone going to art galleries fits the description of the type he professes to hate?

Re: the dorks and the poonanies

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

Sorry, that was me. For some reason the default keeps returning to anonymous.

Re: the dorks and the poonanies

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

Me.

Re: the dorks and the poonanies

[(Anonymous)]

Reading on in Andrew Marr's article:

"I feel ambiguous about some of this, but the main point is that most of the contemporary art around in 2000 is not immediately difficult or chilly. The artists themselves are breaking down the barriers. The Chapman brothers' 'Hell', swastika-set of eight glass boxes inside which 5,000 tiny Nazi models do unspeakable, Bruegel-like things to one another, is something which, once seen, will stay with you for life whether you think you are an art intellectual or not. That is in 'Apocalypse'. Susan Hiller's work 'Witness', in which hundreds of earphones dangle from a darkened room, while recorded witness statements from people across the world who have claimed to see UFOs or aliens whisper in scores of languages around you, like fingers brushing your ears as you walk through - well, just amazing, simple and beautiful. That was in 'Intelligence' at Tate Britain. And there are literary hundreds of other examples."