Holidays from being human
Dec. 2nd, 2006 12:39 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
A Japanese female artist in her 20s, Sako Kojima, transformed herself, in 2004, into a gigantic hamster. For a week she lived in an art gallery equipped with straw and a big wooden hamster house. She wore a hamster costume and ate large sunflower seeds, sending darting, wary looks at the people staring at her.
When asked why, Sako explained that when people usually look at her, they see someone with a particular job, of a particular gender, nationality and age. "A Japanese female artist in her 20s," they'd say, just like I did. But these words are boxes, you get trapped in them. Sako wanted to break free from these limiting perceptions. She also wanted a break from the bombardment of words and information. So she took a holiday from being human.
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Sako Kojima "La Femme Hamster", Lille, France, 2004
Like Edwina Ashton, Sako is fascinated by what happens when humans become animals. But human problems are never far away. Her sculpture and painting combines animals and cuteness with gender issues, sadism and masochism and sexuality: Close My Gap shows a seal sewing up a vagina-like gap in her groin, Lace Me Up has a rat or ferret giving birth while tied to a chair. In Baby Hip a small rodent gets used as pin cushion, and in Pain the same treatment gets meted out to a thumb. In other sculptures we see one animal watching as another, neck all noosed up for execution, steps off a cliff, or a circular sheep licking its own ass.Sako says her work is about "the forest inside every woman", and how it's held in balance by the dual forces of emotion and control. Her furry performance work reminds me of an eccentric musician I once played a show with at Cafe Aux Baccanales on Tokyo's Meiji Dori. Jon the Dog is a Japanese woman who plays ramshackle, cute and crazy music about being a dog, while dressed up as a dog.
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Jon the Dog: Performance 1
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Jon the Dog: Performance 2
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you are just Japgirl holic
Date: 2006-12-02 01:11 am (UTC)Re: you are just Japgirl holic
Date: 2006-12-02 02:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 01:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 07:00 am (UTC)This thread is forming in your bloggage, that connects Japanese women to animals. Not in a bad way, like, "oh, wild animals in cages!" but like, "oh, yeah, something in the woods that makes a little home." It's hard to explain, but I love it.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 07:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 08:07 pm (UTC)I wonder if he's into macrame. (http://www.tagame.org/gallery/contents/natsukage.html)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 01:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 02:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 07:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 01:56 am (UTC)(It's a late night sort of thought, but you used to post from Berlin early in the morning and more recently seem to have become more of an evening poster. Any particular reason?)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 04:46 am (UTC)It's when we rise above instinctive impulses to steal things we want but don't have or kill our competition that we are truly better than animals. I am unimpressed with this "art" that is little more than a ludicrous publicity stunt. Hell, if she was naked, she'd at least be appealing to my instinctive needs...that'd be a million times more "animal" like than wearing fuzzy underwear and chewing on paper for a week.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 09:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 05:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 06:07 am (UTC)I can't figure out exactly what this set of videos and images makes me think. It is evocative, but apparently not thought-provoking. I really feel like I need to know why this is making me want to watch it quite so much, though. I've watched Sako Kojima's video three times, now, twice when you posted and once now, hours later, and I can't look away. But I can't figure out why.
I kind of like Jon the Dog #1, too. She (it?) is so happy!
Very, very strange.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 06:19 am (UTC)My first reaction to your description of Sako Kokima's performance was along the lines of: "What about when she needed to pee? It would suck to have to pee with no privacy. And then would she have a toilet? And wouldn't she get bored? And then I watched the video and promptly became bored. It comes across as an attempt to be super cute but ends up as incredibly mindless and annoying.
I'm not even going to comment on Meiji Dori.
The sad thing is, even though Kokima was trying to escape being "a Japanese female artist in her 20s", she ended up confirming that very stereotype. The stereotype for Japanese females in their 20s is to be unrelentlessly cute. And quite a few artists do performance art.
Maybe I just can't handle that much cute in one sitting.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 07:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 07:15 am (UTC)[Error: unknown template video]
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 03:41 pm (UTC)I suppose it does get mostly the same reaction. I can't watch it the whole way through. Maybe I have many many steps to go before I understand performance art, but this really does not speak to me.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 08:30 am (UTC)and as the guys above say an animal or a human 'becomming-animal' (deleuzian, shamanistic etc if there really is such a thing) has little to do with performance but it's a good go at playing an antropmorphized pet hamster kind of thing. in a way she's raising the stake a bit high for herself since unlike the serious male artists she's eliminating both metaphor and irony - from her stated intent at least. then she kind of succeeds through persistance. two weeks is reasonably convincing.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 03:48 pm (UTC)Maybe I shouldn't comment until I have a better understanding and appreciation for performance art. It's a world that I've really not paid any attention to.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 06:23 pm (UTC)sort of
Date: 2006-12-02 06:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 07:38 am (UTC)http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003007171_hamster20m.html
Although we were "performing" later than Sako Kojimo, we were purely doing it for the love of pranking, not "art".
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 07:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 09:27 am (UTC)Whereas in the West power is often seen as having the "strength" to stand alone, to be a maverick individualist, or dominate other people against their will by force, in Asian cultures it's more likely to be seen as the ability to co-operate with and to charm other people. Power here is the successful ability to make others let you join their social groups.
So disguising yourself as an impossibly cute animal has this paradoxically human function: the act of dressing up as an animal reveals a desire to be integrated as a human. Maybe that's why, when I look at Sako's performance as a hamster, I see someone becoming even more of a twentysomething Japanese female than she is without the costume. Then again, I see us all becoming Japanese females eventually, if we know what's good for us. Because I think their definition of social power is not just a humane, but a correct one.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 03:58 pm (UTC)From your experience of Japanese culture do you observe this former charismatic approach also being utilized by Japanese males or is it a uniquely female perspective on power?
Regards. Thomas.S
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 05:17 pm (UTC)us all becoming Japanese females eventually
Date: 2006-12-03 06:21 am (UTC)an alien invasion or something similar might be required for all humans to become japanese females since that condition either presoposes the existence of a different ontological class or opens up an enormous space ripe for neomarxian paranoia and speculation.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-12-02 05:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-04-08 03:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-05-22 02:51 am (UTC)ziegler
Date: 2009-05-09 04:23 pm (UTC)