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]

That's a good point, and the "nihilism" of the arrow/frame argument is of course mainly polemical, and dialectical. It stands in deliberate, provocative opposition to the received, established idea that opinions matter.

But consider the difference between the early days of identity politics and its later institutionalisation in the form of political correctness. Now, you may prefer PC as a state in which everyone is "pro-gay", and anti-gay talk is stifled and silenced, branded as "hate speech". In the age of PC, gay people marry just like straight people.

Now, whereas in the heyday of identity politics (IP) there was a dialectical process, a struggle between pro- and anti-gay groups, an argument which resulted in the increasing visibility of an alternative way of life called "gay", the PC period considers such conflicts at an end. Gay people are "just like everybody else" and deserve to "be left in peace" to "get on with their lives", and so on. And my question then would be, but what if the conflicts of the PC period were generative? What if gay identity were not static, but something constantly in flux, created by the social context? Might there not be a way in which the PC period was actually a subtle way to erase and eradicate the whole sense of "being gay" that was fought for during the IP period?

To put it another way, to be classified as "just like anyone else" is also to be discriminated against. No-one is arguing for a return to actual hostility and harm towards gay people, but without conflict there can be no identity. And people underestimate how conflict is actually a way of being inhabited by the otherness of the other (like those Norwegian fascists who turned out to be so well educated about Islam), and how harmony is actually a way of denying the otherness of the other.

As I say, this isn't a way of thinking I'd recommend become dominant, but it works as a provocative alternative to the smug idea that we've "got difference about right". I don't think we have.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'd add: in the IP period there is a sturdy frame around gayness, whichever way the arrows are pointing. Gayness exists as something clearly-defined, whatever you think of it. In the PC period that frame gets dangerously weak and blurry, despite the fact that all the arrows are suddenly super-positive, super-pro. Despite, or because of, that fact? Gay people are good because gay people are just like us, and we're good.

[(Anonymous)]

I think you're begging an awful lot of questions here. You may like the fact that the "other" exists, because their exoticism serves as a nice counterpoint to the dead heart of Western culture you occupy as a white, middle-class straight male. But does the "other" particularly want to be your "other"? After all, why do the vast majority of gay people now think marriage rights are important? In a world where the mainstream is violently hostile to you, identity politics makes sense. In a world where the mainstream may be cajoled into accepting you, entryism makes sense.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

why do the vast majority of gay people now think marriage rights are important?

In the frame-over-arrow argument, that would be because gay people now are living in a world in which the dominant context for gayness is not deviancy, but normalcy. They accept the claim of the frame of normalcy, and they accept the institutions of normalcy. Whether this is a good thing is a matter of opinion -- and therefore (ha!) irrelevant.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

To put this another way, if I were asked the question "Should same sex couples be allowed to marry?" I'd say YES. No doubt about it! There with the 33%! They should be allowed to legally marry!

But look, that's my opinion within that framing. When I pull back, I want to know why that's even an issue. Why has the framing of gay life become so much about the "rights" of gay people to do this straight, conventional thing? This framing (and my irrelevant opinion, if I accept it) is where the problem lies.

[st-ranger.livejournal.com]

Because when gay people get sick, hospital administrators like to use their non-married status to keep their partners from visiting.

[(Anonymous)]

"...how harmony is actually a way of denying the otherness of the other."

But it's a good thing when it's strived for in Japan, right? I suspect we've
encountered another double standard here...

[st-ranger.livejournal.com]

Hmm, you seem to be suggesting that gay people are treated just like everyone else all across Western culture, which is not my experience. I'd quite like to enjoy that particular discrimination, thank you very much. As far as "a return to 'actual hostility and harm towards gay people'" my mind just boggles. I guess I have to put it down to you living in Germany and me living in rural America. But I assure you, real live gay people still live with actual hostility and harm every day.