Aki Sasamoto, judgmental hopper

[imomus]

Aki Sasamoto -- a performance artist and dancer, born in Japan but educated at Wesleyan and Columbia -- is the kind of figure I'd probably have to invent if she didn't exist. In her performances she's used potatoes as percussion instruments, supped with the devil with a long spoon (actually, a very long knife), smashed three hundred dishes to powder, collected discarded furniture, divined people's habits from their polythene bag collections, stuffed clothes down her clothes, scrubbed up suds while making conversation with no-one in particular, delivered lectures, cooked pasta in the sky, and made the perfect sauce while wearing a wallpaper apron.



Despite the domestic sound of some of these activities, Aki feels her brain is rather male. "Since I do not own an urge to express my femininity," she says, "and since I feel as though I think more like male (What does this mean?), it surprises me when they talk about femaleness with what I produce... I may appear more feminine than I think. I have masculine purpose in me who wants to converse with my outward femininity. My skin is a line between such sexual divisions. In performing, I balance right on my skin."

Aki only graduated from her MFA degree at Columbia in 2007, but was already selected for the Yokohama Triennale in 2008. Here she is (courtesy Tokyo Art Beat) talking about her performance there:

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Sasamoto reminds me of a composite, better-organised version of various Japanese art student and musician friends who ended up in New York. Where some others foundered, Sasamoto seems to be succeeding, winning grants, prizes and prestigious showcases at places like the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. One reason she's doing so well is that she's full of good ideas, and personable. Another is that she works very hard -- even while pulling art world performances together, Aki is appearing in, and co-choreographing dance performances with her friend Yvonne Meier. Finally, Aki is very aware of the power of collectives; she's a member of two artists' groups, Lower Lights and Culture Push.



Aki says something very interesting in an interview, something about the relationship between being an expatriate and being judgmental. (Aki wants to encourage judgmentalism.) "More and more expatriates," she explains, "tend to be what I call Hoppers. Those who are aware of crossing borders of any kind seem to be more judgmental."

But if they're inwardly judgmental, these expats master an outward conformity, a kind of Zelig-like quality: "They are also experts in blurring differences, to mask the consequences of their judgments. As a survival technique, Hoppers fool themselves to ignore gaps, or believe in mingling as the most natural, or even embrace characteristics, while positioning themselves out of such horizontal references... Whatever the resulting attitude is, border crossers face the choice of how to locate themselves in relation to sets of plural realities and values. This is the consequence of hopping-around. Being an expatriate is not the only method of hopping-around. But it seems to be an easy category in these days. This is what I mean by Hoppers."

This culture-hopping judgmentalism informs the performance Aki gave at ExitArt in New York in March 2007, which involved "bungee potatoes":

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Comments

A pedestrian question

[rurritable.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

The long distance slicing of potatoes requires an attenuated blade. Does she use a peening hammer to develop the cutting edge, or waterstones?
I've found that hammering the blade produces an edge that will cut very fine slices in vegetables, but is dull enough to alert you to possible finger dislocation.

[(Anonymous)]

I've found people have a hard time distinguishing judgemental (postive) from prejudgemental (negative).

[bonsai-human.livejournal.com]

I have masculine purpose in me who wants to converse with my outward femininity. My skin is a line between such sexual divisions. In performing, I balance right on my skin.

Reading this, I feel the need to pinpoint the moment when art ceased to be about creating beautiful things and started to become a competition between artists to see who could emit the greatest number of steaming bollocks from their mouth.

Jesu...

[(Anonymous)]

When was art about "creating beautiful things"?

[bonsai-human.livejournal.com]

When was it not, anonymous?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Personally, I find a woman's skin (animated qua cultural locus in a performance) one of the most beautiful things in the world. But I may be biased.

But as Dan Treacy asked "Is It Art, Darling?"

[(Anonymous)]

I agree with the above caller. As Momus inadvertently pointed out, those who more often than not attain some sort of fleeting fame in the bite sized world of contemporary art are: 1. diligent students with the ability to fill thirty page funding applications with academic art sprek (as exemplified above). 2. photogenic flower children guaranteed not to be sick on the shoes of the boss at the annual Xmas dinner. That means career in the biz for dyslexics, the Amish, first time heroin users and those infected with nematode parasites... out the back door of the Tate with them, along with the rest of the moldy potatoes. But I'll tell you what, as one who works in the "industry", as a technical casualty underwriter (look it up) specialised in the art market, the really scary thing about these "artistes" is that they actually BELIEVE what they are saying and doing. It seems a bit of a trite remark... but next time you are the presence of one of these creatures please engage them in a conversation, you will be chilled to the bone, I jest you not.

[fishwithissues.livejournal.com]

A lot of people who went to Wesleyan make good artthings happen. I don't know what it is and I went there. RISD also. And schools with a lot of ideas and looking.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

They also produce a lot of shmucks. I lived in the region for a large part of my life (within an hour of both places). Of course, I've hated most of the art students I've met. Not all, but most. I hate drama students even more, though. Compared to drama kids, art students are top shelf.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Not to break up the party, but you babies might want to export your LJs:

http://valleywag.gawker.com/5124184/the-russian-bear-slashes-a-social-network

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Cutting 28 employees to 20 is hardly "the beginning of the end of LiveJournal", what a ridiculous story. If anything, it'll just mean leaving the interface alone, which is what we users want. It works, and it's as likely having too many employees (especially wizard marketers) which will break LJ as having too few (the same way as developers and booms are as likely to ruin cities as neglect and slumps).

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh, wait, they cut 20 of 28 employees? Well, that's a bit more serious. But growth is overrated, and shrinkage isn't always a bad thing.

[bonsai-human.livejournal.com]

Not sure how they're going to keep running without any engineers, though.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

http://www.ljbook.com

[bonsai-human.livejournal.com]

They've cut 20 of LJ's 28 employees i.e. they have 8 left.

It sounds pretty grim.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I really get the "judgmental" thing. Could you explain it as you understand it?

My take on Aki's point is that expats or "Hoppers" (she's one, and I'm one, and perhaps others here are too) are people whose exposure to multiple cultures makes them stop taking certain arrangements of things for granted. A temptation arises to pick and choose -- to develop a pick-n-mix, supermarket approach: "Okay, I'll retain Western critical thinking, but adopt Japanese gender definitions." This is judgmentalism -- which culture, in my view, gets what things right?

But traveling around the world also makes one adept at finding ways to quickly blend in. One gets good at disguising oneself as a native. So hoppers are also Zeligs, the ultimate conformists, when they need to be (to survive, as Aki puts it).

Thus the dynamic in the expat or Hopper: inward judgmentalism, outward compliance through mimicry.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

Okay, now it seems more clear. I would say that's pretty accurate, as I've taken on sort of a pick-and-choose mentality with Korea. It's kind of impossible to ever disguise oneself as a native here, though, at least if you're a white American. The best one can probably manage is to appear, to other foreigners, to have been here for a substantial period of time, and to not appear totally green to the natives.

dynamic in the blended expat

[pay-option07.livejournal.com]

There seems to be some quality about her that takes me back to the story you did on water and an island farming family. It was a BW film with brutal undertones. Do you remember it ?
Aki has an agrarian feel of practicality and brutality regarding the precious natures she explores.

Re: dynamic in the blended expat

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think you mean this entry on The Naked Island (http://imomus.livejournal.com/347308.html)?

[(Anonymous)]

Oh come on! it's not as if culturally savvy educated space hopping individuals like ourselves (and I think I can safely generalize aobut the people who read this blog) are exactly SAS in Iraq... we don't have to "blend in with the natives" (a phrase with ugly overtones) to survive. I know people who have lived in cities like Berlin, Paris, Brussels and never learned to speak the lingo, which one would assume would be a pre-requisite for living in a country. In my experience as such an elastic space hopping object bouncing around countries that are not my native one I find the reverse of what you state is often true, it's what differentiates you that allows you to open up communication, and therefore "integrate" (although that is not possible in pluralistic modern cities, is it?) and "survive" (although that almost almost comes down to money and the ones who are the least integrated seem to be the richest around me). I don't know about this phrase "outward compliance through mimicry", I have to learn another language so I can buy bread in the morning and when I imitate the friendly greeting of the shopkeeper it's not exactly compliance in the way you put it is it? Myself I am an alien even in my own family, so I don't know about anywhere else : "You see, I don't want to be like everyone else, that's why I'm a mod".

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

I think the point is that there's an essential difference between the expat who retains everything from his/her native country, and therefore always lives on the outside of the new culture, as a "foreigner" ... and the "hopper," who takes the (subjectively speaking) best bits from each culture he/she encounters, thereby becoming essentially more a "native" of that culture. Such a person, it is argued, also becomes adept at blending in, at mimicking but not adopting those cultural aspects that he/she retains from his/her native culture.

...

[(Anonymous)]

Look now, all you're doing here is making us fall a little bit in love with someone on the other side of the world. I resent this.
-D.L.

[(Anonymous)]

KrsKrft,

Boy, we could used ya on all the other art-related posts that had comments in the single digits.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

I'll try to chime in more often!

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

On a tangent: there was a rather interesting piece (http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/jan/07/morris-dancing-longsword) in today's Guardian about endangered British folk dance forms even more peculiar than everybody's favourite, Morris dancing (whose death is again being predicted), with YouTube video of each.