Sunday People (baby baby)

[imomus]

We begin our Sunday full of Sunday People with a trip to Sangenjaya, where artist Yukiko Sawabe wants to show me her contribution to the Kappan Saisei Ten (Letterpress Printing Revive) exhibition. In fact it's our contribution, because Yukiko has taken a song we made together back in 2005, when she came to Berlin to work on a project about the fairy tale Allerleirauh, and turned it into a homage to typographer Claude Garamond. You can hear our original song here.

Yukiko then joins us on a trek up to Ueno Park, where we catch the opening of the Makoto Aida and Akira Yamaguchi two-man retrospective The Seasons in Art. Despite the deceptively bland title, this show by the two heavyweights of the Kotatsu School is dynamite, full of sex (Aida's massive canvas of naked girls in a huge blender really shouldn't be sexy, but close up it is), dark humour (a toothless Japanese farmer pulls Louis Vuitton handbags out of a field where they're growing like turnips, exclaiming "Another bumper harvest!") and violence (Aida's "Picture of an Air Raid on New York City (War Picture Returns)" shows New York in flames after being attacked by kamikaze stukas).



Since Aida also made a video (clips are included in the show) of himself as a sake-fuzzy Bin Laden, I asked his gallerist Mizuma whether the painting of New York in flames was a response to the comparisons often made between 9/11 and Pearl Harbour, the Saudi terrorists and the kamikaze. Mizuma pointed out to me that Aida made this image in 1996. His first thought, when 9/11 happened, was that Aida had anticipated it. He told me to look at the flames in the painting -- they're painted in the style of the flames in traditional Buddhist images of hell. This, then, is an image of hell.



After a walk through the wooden streets and graveyards of Yanaka, we head to Shibuya to meet with fashion artist Fumiko Imano and photographer Kawashima Kotori. Fumiko is about to take a flat in Yokohama (since returning from Paris she's been living with her family in the sticks) but for the time being she's staying with Zoren Gold and Minoru in their house on top of the hill in Naka-Meguro. Kawashima, a bit like Gold, tends to work with just one model. He's recently published a photobook -- phonebook thick, the book contains hundreds of colour photos all of the same girl -- called Baby Baby. She looks about 12 on the cover, but turns out to be in her late 20s.

Comments

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

"Aida's huge canvas of naked girls in a huge blender really shouldn't be sexy, but close up it is."

Your irony radar is as sharp as ever, I see. Ouch.

[(Anonymous)]

Do you ever meet people your own age?

[hello-mike.livejournal.com]

I'm so predictable. The one at the top of the blender is the sexiest to me.

America's poisoned me, Momus. Or maybe it's always been in me and it's just let me reveal my true colours.

[bricology.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed walking around Yanaka a couple of weeks ago, but I find the contrast between the old town and the JR tracks and fashion hotels on the other side of them bizarrely incongruous. Plus, they've made the cemetery so damned difficult to get into (for the living, that is). Still, it's good to find any part of Tokyo that survived the fire-bombing.

I'm curious about that orange shoulder bag/sling in the lower-left photo. Did you make it, buy it or discover it growing on some other planet? It's really interesting.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's from the bookstore of the ethnographic museum at Dahlem, Berlin. I think it's Tibetan. Buddhist, anyway. Sometimes, draped over your shoulder, it looks rather like part of a civara robe.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm not quite sure what the implication behind the question is. Should people only hang out with people of their own age? How about their own race, their own nation, their own gender, socioeconomic group, political opinions? How do we enforce that?

Sure, you gravitate to people who live and think and feel as you do. That's called friendship. Your friends aren't necessarily from the same time and place of origin, though. You find "elective affinities" rather than obligatory ones. If that leads you to Japanese in their 20s who think of themselves as artists, well, that says something about who you are, how you live, and how you feel.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, Aida has painted his painting so that the women nearest the red mush at the bottom of the blender have the most ecstatic expressions on their faces. And it's true that there's something generic built into sexuality and also something reckless and death-related. We lose ourselves in a collectivity of heaving flesh when we hump, and we lose ourselves in death.

The blender image is perverse, but no more so than, say, The Rape of the Sabine Women. (http://www.wga.hu/art/p/poussin/2a/17sabin1.jpg) It's Poussin turned on its side, with black humour added.

It's also, of course, the conclusion of a series of images Aida was making at the time of women as food; Mimi Artificial Edible Girls (http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=14675). The series critiques/celebrates Japan's twin obsessions: food and sex, pushing them into Chapmanesque areas (the parallel would be with Chapmanworld, a mockery / celebration of the UK tabloids' obsession with pedophilia).

[bricology.livejournal.com]

Ah -- so that's what it is. I learn something new every day.

[(Anonymous)]

She looks about 12 on the cover, but turns out to be in her late 20s.

Momus's nippophilia in a nutshell.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, cos in the rape of the sabine women the women are made incredibly diminuitive, and squashed together into an indistinguishable mass instead of being at least portrayed as individual figures with reactions to what is happenng to them. As opposed to the blender image.

OH WAIT.

[mandyrose.livejournal.com]

With Japanese folks, it wouldn't surprise me if your friends actually WERE your age, but were just healthier and more photogenic.

[mattbauman.livejournal.com]

oh, that reminds me...
what do you think about child popstar Maya Bond?