On the importance of having big balls
Dec. 18th, 2007 12:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusTwo inspiring things for you today. First of all, Berlin-based artist Tino Sehgal has his first solo show in New York just now, a piece called This Situation at Marian Goodman. The Village Voice describes how it works. As you enter the large, empty room, six "players" greet you in unison with the words "Welcome to this situation". They're normal people, standing, sitting or lying on the floor, distinguished only by coats they carry over their arms. "Each of the six," reports the Voice, "will then walk backward in a generally clockwise motion, find a new spot to occupy, freeze in a mannered pose, and wait for a fellow player to utter a previously memorized quotation, all of which begin with a date and anonymous author: “In 1693, somebody said: ‘Be dead to the world but diligent in all worldly business,’ ” or, “In 1670, somebody said: ‘True eloquence has no use for eloquence.’" The players then spend anywhere from a few minutes to upward of 30 discussing the introduced idea. The afternoon I was there, topics included labor theory, gender relations, the art of conversation, technology, and environmentalism. Occasionally, one of the players will turn to a visitor and ask directly, 'What do you think?'" (It sounds a bit like a live version of Click Opera, actually!)
So excited was I by this idea that, after reading about it, I went to bed and dreamt I'd flown to New York to see the show. I ran into Zach Feuer, who told me he'd pioneered shows like these years ago, when he'd exhibited a cloud of fertilizer chemicals in upstate New York. So successful had the cloud been, Zach said, that he'd had as many letters about it from farmers as art-lovers.
The other thing I've really been inspired by is the amazing, crazy 2005 film by Seijun Suzuki, Tanuki Goten or Princess Raccoon. It may well be the 84 year-old director's last film (he suffers from emphysema and doesn't feel up to making more), but it's probably the most energising and visually glorious film I've seen all year. It's basically a musical, a revival of a genre popular in the 1940s and 50s, the tanuki film. Here's a scene from Suzuki's version, a song-and-dance number called "Man is an Epidemic":
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The tanuki film tradition is perfect for Christmas -- it's like going to see a pantomime. There are frogs, fairies and princesses, sword fights, and above all lots of songs, in every style (there's even some Japanese hip hop in Suzuki's film). To show you what the genre used to look like, here's the wonderful torch singer Misora Hibari dressed up as a scarecrow in the 1958 tanuki film Shichihenge Tanukigoten.
The tankuki, or raccoon dog, is an important symbol in Japan -- as the 1991 Studio Ghibli animation Pompoko explains, tanukis are magical animals capable of transforming themselves into ghosts and other fabulous creatures. They've learned not just to use their own energy, but also to harness and amplify the energy of fire, electricity, levitation and other natural forces. They also have phenomenal testicles, the size of eight tatami mats (as anyone who's seen the statues of them outside Japanese drinking establishments can testify).
In his tanuki film, Suzuki uses a different kind of magic -- digital graphics -- to bring Misora Hibari back to life. She appears at the end of the film as Kwan Yin, singing a song, despite having died in 1989.
I think what Sehgal and Suzuki both embody is the idea that anything is possible if you give yourself enough license. Or, as The Guardian put it in their interview with the elderly director, "Suzuki puts anything he likes into his crazy little world, be it a femme fatale who lives among dead butterflies or a protagonist with a fetish for the smell of freshly boiled rice, or some ingenious assassination techniques - one victim is shot through the plughole of his sink... "
Such idiosyncracy comes with a commercial price, though: "The qualities for which he is celebrated by today's postmodern cultural magpies are the very ones that cost him half his career." Suzuki, you see, was blacklisted by the Japanese studios for more than ten years ("Your films make no sense!") but saw his fortunes revive partly thanks to being championed by Quentin Tarantino, who, in the 90s, loved and copied Suzuki's energetic, stylish 60s yakuza movies like "Tokyo Drifter".
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The Tarantino endorsement produced a questionable tribute-to-the-tribute, 2001's too-Tarantinesque Pistol Opera. But, with Tanuki Goten, Suzuki has become a sort of King Lear of directors, outliving his enemies, outgrowing his fascination for gore, and reveling in his capacity to say -- and film -- anything. In the winter of his years, tanuki-like, he's grown eight-tatami balls.
So excited was I by this idea that, after reading about it, I went to bed and dreamt I'd flown to New York to see the show. I ran into Zach Feuer, who told me he'd pioneered shows like these years ago, when he'd exhibited a cloud of fertilizer chemicals in upstate New York. So successful had the cloud been, Zach said, that he'd had as many letters about it from farmers as art-lovers.
The other thing I've really been inspired by is the amazing, crazy 2005 film by Seijun Suzuki, Tanuki Goten or Princess Raccoon. It may well be the 84 year-old director's last film (he suffers from emphysema and doesn't feel up to making more), but it's probably the most energising and visually glorious film I've seen all year. It's basically a musical, a revival of a genre popular in the 1940s and 50s, the tanuki film. Here's a scene from Suzuki's version, a song-and-dance number called "Man is an Epidemic":
[Error: unknown template video]
The tanuki film tradition is perfect for Christmas -- it's like going to see a pantomime. There are frogs, fairies and princesses, sword fights, and above all lots of songs, in every style (there's even some Japanese hip hop in Suzuki's film). To show you what the genre used to look like, here's the wonderful torch singer Misora Hibari dressed up as a scarecrow in the 1958 tanuki film Shichihenge Tanukigoten.
The tankuki, or raccoon dog, is an important symbol in Japan -- as the 1991 Studio Ghibli animation Pompoko explains, tanukis are magical animals capable of transforming themselves into ghosts and other fabulous creatures. They've learned not just to use their own energy, but also to harness and amplify the energy of fire, electricity, levitation and other natural forces. They also have phenomenal testicles, the size of eight tatami mats (as anyone who's seen the statues of them outside Japanese drinking establishments can testify).
In his tanuki film, Suzuki uses a different kind of magic -- digital graphics -- to bring Misora Hibari back to life. She appears at the end of the film as Kwan Yin, singing a song, despite having died in 1989.
I think what Sehgal and Suzuki both embody is the idea that anything is possible if you give yourself enough license. Or, as The Guardian put it in their interview with the elderly director, "Suzuki puts anything he likes into his crazy little world, be it a femme fatale who lives among dead butterflies or a protagonist with a fetish for the smell of freshly boiled rice, or some ingenious assassination techniques - one victim is shot through the plughole of his sink... "Such idiosyncracy comes with a commercial price, though: "The qualities for which he is celebrated by today's postmodern cultural magpies are the very ones that cost him half his career." Suzuki, you see, was blacklisted by the Japanese studios for more than ten years ("Your films make no sense!") but saw his fortunes revive partly thanks to being championed by Quentin Tarantino, who, in the 90s, loved and copied Suzuki's energetic, stylish 60s yakuza movies like "Tokyo Drifter".
[Error: unknown template video]
The Tarantino endorsement produced a questionable tribute-to-the-tribute, 2001's too-Tarantinesque Pistol Opera. But, with Tanuki Goten, Suzuki has become a sort of King Lear of directors, outliving his enemies, outgrowing his fascination for gore, and reveling in his capacity to say -- and film -- anything. In the winter of his years, tanuki-like, he's grown eight-tatami balls.
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Re: Did someone say Tanuki?
Date: 2007-12-18 05:24 pm (UTC)Now, not every ICA show "pushes boundaries" of public taste, decency, tolerance. It doesn't purely exist to epater les bourgeois. But that's the battlefiend the tabloids, and semi-tabloids like the Standard (for whom I, for instance, am "uncomfortably close to insane" (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/music/review-23380595-details/Mad+Momus+is+an+inspiration+/review.do?reviewId=23380595)) understand. And in this review, it's The Standard which raises (in scare quotes, NB) the idea that Sehgal is being subversive. They then say he's failed because he hasn't challenged the ICA audience (who do not overlap in any significant way with the Standard audience, though you keep trying to drag in other papers they might overlap with).
Just consider the messages flashing through this conclusion:
"the typical ICA crowd this will attract are just too art savvy to think this a genuinely thought-provoking piece. For where once the pushing of boundaries in art gave the ICA its purpose, that very concept now appears extremely tired."
Okay, the Standard does think there's a progressive "ICA art crowd" -- it calls them "savvy". They, however, won't be "thought-provoked" by Sehgal's very original installation because they've thought of everything already. (Highly questionable, but anyway.) If this were so, you might think the Standard would find Sehgal "reaching his challenge out" to other groups -- for instance, readers of the Standard who might not have thought every possible thought, even the content of a Tino Sehgal installation, in advance.
But not a bit of it. Although they grudgingly "get where [Sehgal] may be coming from", the paper wants it to be a failed provocation staged in an institution which has outlived its remit to shock and challenge. There's even, I'd say, a veiled threat to the ICA in that ending -- the Standard thinks the ICA no longer has a purpose, since its purpose was to challenge, but that purpose is now "tired". That's just one small step away from saying the ICA should stop receiving public funding. And all this is based on the completely silly premise that to subvert should mean to subvert subversion. It at once gives a progressive institution one reason to exist -- its progressiveness -- then says that progress can only consist in self-questioning, and that the whole idea is tired.
Why are you defending them? Don't you think the paper should question itself rather than the ICA? What happens in a world where the Standard (with its self-confessed dislike of children, its boredom with art) wins and the ICA loses?
For the record, I actually think Sehgal's piece at the ICA was more subversive than, say, Chapmanworld. Chapmanworld played into the UK tabloids' view that children = filthy sex. Sehgal's piece routed around it entirely. It avoided the "self-sacrificial pervert" syndrome the UK tries to force its artists into (cf Genesis P Orridge getting hounded out of the country via accusations of Satanic abuse). It was original rather than subversive. The "failed subversiveness" line the Standard tried to pedal was simply a newspaper reductionism originating, I think, from a sad and cynical and conservative form of defensiveness -- a defensiveness anchored, perhaps, in frustration that there wasn't some more tabloid-friendly sort of scandal going on (abuse of the children, perhaps).
Re: Did someone say Tanuki?
Date: 2007-12-18 05:26 pm (UTC)Ha ha, that's funny! Do you know the Evening Standard's motto? "Everyone needs standards"! And, for once, they're right. There is no society on earth "with no standards or fundamentals".
Re: Did someone say Tanuki?
Date: 2007-12-18 06:55 pm (UTC)what struck me as tragic first time i saw this exhibition mentioned here is the seeming impossibility to generate a critical, political, intelligent discussion on the content and possible meaning(s) of that exhibition.
if we're talking of a dislike of children then it can surely be read on both sides .
chlidren as neutralized other made to look friendly (a la colonialist tourists talking photos with 'friendly' and 'intelligent' natives
or as a stand-in for the yuppie (whatever the new word for that old concept may be) kidult self ?? where does the proverbial single mother in the council flats (yes they still exist) stand in regards to the current hegemony of the childless couple etc etc ???