I, slenderly, like to be dirty

[imomus]

This is a photographic approximation of my first column for Japanese art magazine ART-iT, which recently migrated from a paper to a web publication. To read this on the ART-iT site you have to go through a rather tedious one-off registration process, but considering it makes the magazine available worldwide for free, it's a small price to pay.



One of the peculiarities of the ART-iT site is that the magazine -- which has been bilingual from the start -- uses mechanical web translation for its contents. So if you click the Japanese / British flag at the top of the page, your English text automatically goes into Japanese, and vice versa. Just for fun, I google-translated the Japanese version of my column back into English, and came up with the following. I've picked out a few "found poems" in bold:

I, slenderly, please give the event a collection of art and MAKARETA Map dilapidated buildings. I am a happy person. Or Not Museum dim pure white cube for me; I like to be dirty but my art venues. I, And peeling wallpaper, the accordion by crush, and prefer to feel a bit damp and wet and that they are. I The Kerameikos in Athens was abandoned as the district office, county amended plots between the two events Perez recently called They are inherited in the same place for the Gallery project, we prefer to be re-occupied.

Event Type Art gives you a map to the art if not bigger - and, in revised county parcel, it marked a significant And elephant - no longer a winner even if the cluster of buildings to explore unfamiliar. Glass display case for a temporary art And over the entrance was converted into apartments or workshops, adventure amazing city break a padlock of a forbidden I want the house.

2006 was a big city adventure biennial Berlin; Maurizio Cattelan and his co-curator, the re-building of the upper and lower. The art was, it was necessary to match the wallpaper a basin and discard them inspire Auguststrasse Residential flat used by the stables, mobile utility shed, a Jewish school for girls and older people. I sense In addition they were inside the two-day, 48 hours Neukolln I held near Berlin, as part of the event called Last weekend to explore as I SHAGAMIKOMI meager.

Tokyo is the closest ever to arrive, the town was building Shokuryo-Saga. "Site of emotion" - former U.S. cooperatives -- Is this for Ishii and KOYAMAGYARARI home earlier than 10 years, to inspire. It was taken in 2002 RI has been paid. However, Omi Biwako bee man as a biennial event, since they use the old movie tradition, the living to hold a sake museum and tea house at a factory.

However, there is a risk. Last year, I collect old streetcar repair shop in the Berlin district of north-filled immigrants to marry I saw the show was first called KYANPUBERURIN. It is a dialog between the artist and from Berlin Been thought, but for me to Hiroshima, it is the tram shed full of atmosphere and it became more store art Like the charisma of the competition. The building won.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Not for me the pristine white cube or the sombre museum; I like my art venues dirty.

Actually, I want to say more about this as a statement. First of all, the "me" in the phrase "not for me" is a journalistic convenience, a place designed to accommodate both the writer and the reader, and to evoke appetite for something. It's as if you're saying "Come, reader, and join me in these photographs, these experiences. This text both recreates an experience you didn't have, and provides an experience you can have." The me becomes, in context, an us, and the apparent statement of fact a proposal.

But it's not just the writer and the reader, joined at the hip, who walk together through this landscape, agreeing to agree on the delightfulness of it all. It's also that the consumer of an experience like ReMap2 is temporarily constituted and constructed by "the ReMap experience". Just as every book makes its own ideal reader, so an art event like ReMap2 encourages you to enjoy its vices (shitty, shabby buildings) as virtues. That's how it frames itself, and it's pretty difficult to dissent. Or, rather, you lose out on possible pleasures -- the pleasures that would justify your coming in the first place -- if you dissent from this contextual understanding, this frame.

It's a bit like RFID tagging. You walk through an environment and pick up the information necessary to enjoy it. Once you've passed through the environment, you pass out of range of the RFID transmitters, so their temporary structuring of your persona -- the persona necessary to enjoy the environment -- ends. You can see how this would militate against the idea of consistent opinions, constancy of personality, "hypocrisy", and so on.

Maybe Aki Sasamoto's idea of the "judgmental hopper" (http://imomus.livejournal.com/426633.html) is a much better model for this than the idea of the "hypocrite" who is "contradicting himself". Or maybe we just need to quote Eno again:

"I don't have any embarrassment about what I like. It doesn't threaten what I've liked before even when it appears completely inconsistent with it. I don't mind the tension, and I don't think I have to compromise my whole theory of life to accept this thing. If I'm attracted to something, I immediately surrender to it. I offer no resistance to being seduced. Because I offer no resistance, I think that I sometimes touch things more quickly than other people do."

[magick-temple.livejournal.com]

So can we summarise your six replies above as 'I changed my mind'?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Nah, leave summaries to Humperson (http://imomus.livejournal.com/468556.html) and Twitter (http://imomus.livejournal.com/449715.html). As Humperson once told me:

"There are twenty-seven kinds of people in the world: the kind who think there should be one explanation for something, and the kind who think there should be twenty-seven."

[magick-temple.livejournal.com]

Oh for sure, I was only summarising your explanation, but you're right, you have actually offered more than one, so my attempt can only be considered a partial summary.

The explanation given by the anon above was fairly well summarised in itself.

If I might offer one of my own: The difference between a pristine art space and a dirty squat is defined by how closely you look.

I do like summaries though. They take information and distill it into lack of information, which is a pretty neat trick.

Looking forward to the others :)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I do like summaries though. They take information and distill it into lack of information.

An insight worthy of Humperson! I would summarize it thus:

"I do like."

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Or, to quote Humperson again:

"No misrepresentation without taxation."