Fumiko's playground
Jul. 16th, 2006 11:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
The first thing I ever saw by Fumiko Imano was a 2002 piece on the ShowStudio site called Dream Closet. In it, Fumiko videos herself trying on expensive clothes in London fashion stores. There's something furtive about it; we're voyeurs of an obsessional, escapist private ritual, glimpsing someone else's narcissistic fantasy games. Then, on May 1st last year, while making a podcast in Paris, I ran into Fumiko in person. She was working at the time in select store Colette, up in the art gallery. She was dressed in pom pom slippers and a zigzaggy dress, and I shyly asked if I could take her picture. Not fitting any existing hipster or subcultural stereotype that I could identify, Fumiko seemed like an eccentric, a one-off, a Yayoi Kusama character floating around the fringes of the fashion world. "The most interesting-looking person I've seen in Paris," I reported at the time.
So I was delighted to see that Fumiko was holding an exhibition of photographs of herself (called, ironically, "I Look At You") at Ideal Showroom at Cafe Moskau during Berlin Fashion Week. "Every day life scene is Fumiko's playground," said the Jinglishy blurb of these self-portraits from the last seven years. "Whenever she gets inspired by beauty of any sense, finds a story or a concept or a scene, she sets the camera, pauses on her stage looking through the lens for an unseen future audience. So her picture concludes when she confronts her viewer directly, pretending to have a small affair. Until you see her, Fumiko is waiting to look at you."
Rather than a "small affair", Fumiko and I had a 12-minute conversation about her work, which I find reminiscent of the self-portraits of African photographer Samuel Fosso, star of the Africa Remix exhibition currently on show at the Mori Museum, Roppongi Hills. In a Guardian article about Fosso, the Central African dandy is quoted as saying:"When I'm taking a self-portrait, I'm not looking to find out more about Samuel Fosso. I'm searching first of all to see my beauty. That's how I started. When I look at myself in the mirror, I am not looking to find out if what I see is an Ibo, a Central African or even a black American. The only thing I can see is Samuel Fosso, who is trying to make himself as handsome as possible before taking a self-portrait."
In our conversation, Fumiko attributes her self-portraiture to a childhood complex about her looks and figure. When I ask if her work is "political", she demurs. "Life is about clothes and food and how to live and stuff... I think it's very important... We don't know from where to where is politics."
Video conversation between Momus and Fumiko Imano (14 minutes, Google Video). If it's taking a while to load, you can watch this film of Fumiko on a shoot in Paris to pass the time.
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refreshing
Date: 2006-07-16 09:39 pm (UTC)<< When I look at myself in the mirror, I am not looking to find out if what I see is an Ibo, a Central African or even a black American. The only thing I can see is Samuel Fosso, who is trying to make himself as handsome as possible before taking a self-portrait >>
Such vanity! Such honesty!
Once recently I was inhaling nitrous from a canister. I was alone. It put me in a space where I closed my eyes and saw myself, a compelling, intoxicating version of myself, superimposed against a black background. There were green streaks of lightening all around.
I did not want to leave that place. It lasted two minutes. I haven't done nitrous since.
I am intoxicated by visions of myself as a beautiful person.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-16 11:58 pm (UTC)The city is basically comprised of a train station, a shopping strip, a big modern Hitachi headquarters building, a few green lush mountains and an empty dirty beach.
Because of her designer fashion obsession, Fumiko seems to be going through a Shimotsuma Monogatari (http://www.bookmice.net/darkchilde/drama/shimo/shimo.html) phase. Or maybe it's just an Ibaraki girl complex.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-17 12:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-17 06:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-17 11:48 am (UTC)Hitachi (off topic)
Date: 2006-07-17 02:38 pm (UTC)/bug
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-17 06:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-22 12:39 pm (UTC)ibaraki girl complex? i never had complex about it.my childhood was in brasil so. im much more complex about being japanese. you sound very japanese to me even you are not..
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-22 12:54 pm (UTC)I never said you're goth lolita, what I wrote in my comment was basically a (bad) comparison based on a fleeting thought I had.
It sounds like we have in common a complex (or are complex) about childhood in Brazil and adult life in Japan.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-23 03:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-17 12:15 am (UTC)It reminded of Godard when he said something like - the question is not how to make a political film but how to make a film politically.
Also interesting is the idea of digital shop lifting. Obviously if you are duplicating magazines or something you're engaging in a type of piracy. But I notice more and more people being put off by my video camera. Especially if I'm taking a picture outside of a shop. The shop owner will shoo me away as if I didn't have a right to be there. I suppose they are afraid that I may make a million dollars from the image. I should be so lucky.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-17 06:12 am (UTC)Ah, yes! It's all about the adverbs, not the adjectives!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-17 12:27 am (UTC)Have you read Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens? This idea of life as playground/playspace has been a key element in everything creative I've done since my freshman year of college, when that book was suggested to me and became a permanent part of my psychic text. There's so much to be said, as you've hinted at in your last two posts, in the child-like aspect of the apolitical, "aesthetic" life. I definitely see that in Fumiko's work, from what you've presented here and what I've Googled.
Also, I completely sympathize with the childhood complex about looks and figure. It's good to see that sort of psychic strife turned into beauty instead of angst/ennui. I don't think we get enough of that.
Here's my "pompous universalism" for the day: only through regression to childhood memories and aesthetics can a modern artist truly reach the sublime!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-17 06:57 am (UTC)I haven't read the actual book, but I've read a lot of commentary about it, including my friend Pat Kane's work on The Play Ethic (http://www.theplayethic.com/pages/172935/index.htm). It's interesting to connect it to the Sublime; the other day we had Jerry Saltz connecting "relational aesthetics" (ie loose, casual encounters between people as art) to the Sublime.
Tomorrow's entry is also going to be about this playfulness, which was noted (and criticized) in last year's Nathan Barley, which presented a nightmare office (in a nightmare district, Hosegate) in which everybody played all the time and nobody ever seemed to work.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-17 06:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-17 09:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-17 05:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-17 10:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-17 11:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-17 04:05 pm (UTC)"Life is about clothes and food and how to live and stuff... I think it's very important."
What are we supposed to make of such statements? Do these two intend their comments to be refreshingly candid and naive, or is that your intention, by reporting them here? Fasso, I find marginally interesting because his photos have a combination of novelty, voyeurism and rusticity. And maybe it's just me, but Imano's "thing" (performance? modeling? navel-gazing?) seems more like the Emperor's New Clothes. Being an artist myself, I don't normally ask such things, but please--where is the substance in their work? Where do they fit relative to other artists who seem to have gone miles beyond either of them?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-17 04:15 pm (UTC)Perhaps they're closer to Cindy Sherman and Matthew Barney, artists I find much more sympathetic, and whose oeuvre is more Ovid-ian; more about personal metamorphosis (and the art of self-love, too, without a doubt -- and what I'd say is that self-love is much more interesting, and has a different meaning, when people are somewhat non-standard or even downright weird than when they're models of physical perfection).
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-17 04:24 pm (UTC)I'd add that this is a very important statement to me just now. First, it's admirably materialist (Brecht would have agreed). Second, how to live: in that simple phrase lies a huge amount of stuff. Putting l'art de vivre before money, for instance, is important. Putting the accent not on verbs or nouns or adjectives but on adverbs is also very important. People have a tendency to think there's only politics in actions, in what you do, in content. "Where's the beef?" and all that. But there's also politics in how you do what you do, in etiquette, in form. "How's the beef?", we could call this. It's subversive in a subtle way; the basic conditions may be set by the powerful, but the way you deal with what you've been given is up to you. The powerful dispose, but the powerless can pose (the French poser captures it better: to pose, but also to arrange, to lay out).
Which brings us back to the freedom of children, and the idea that we don't always know, as Fumiko says of politics, where freedom begins and ends. Perhaps not where we think.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-17 05:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-17 05:34 pm (UTC)I'm a practical gal
Date: 2006-07-18 04:06 am (UTC)Reminds me of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs (http://www.businessballs.com/maslow.htm).
I am rich. All my needs are met!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-17 06:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-17 11:54 pm (UTC)Someone flamed you at LJFlameCup. I can't really figure out why or how it makes any sense.
http://www.ljflamecup.com/?p=79#more-79
Date: 2006-07-18 03:11 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-18 05:32 am (UTC)