Dogs and vegetables

[imomus]

Today I have a loose canine theme to my entry. Animator Joji Koyama is based in London (where he studied Fine Art at Goldsmith's) and has made pop videos for Four Tet. His pseudonym is Woof Wan-Bau, a name which combines the sound of a dog barking in the English, Japanese and German languages. You can watch his latest film, an animation entitled Watermelon, on the Mesh page of Channel 4's website. It uses a sliver of music by the talented Tujiko Noriko, whose sexuality becomes ever more stiflingly Bardotesque as she ripens. (Wolf whistle!) By the way, Noriko's fifty minute radio broadcast is worth a listen, even if you don't speak Japanese. It gives a good overview of her music, whose strangeness makes the perfect counterpoint to the silliness of her giggle. (Showbiz gossip: last thing I heard, Tujiko Noriko, who lives in Paris, was dating Julien Loquet, the very talented figure behind musical projects Gel and Dorine_Muraille.)



Atelier Bow Wow is an architecture practise in Tokyo. They also sometimes call themselves Atelier Wan Wan, after the sound of a dog barking in Japanese. (I love the word 'atelier', by the way. I hope one day to have an 'atelier' of my own.) The animal theme continues in Atelier Bow Wow's designation of a certain kind of haphazard, domestic, small-scale architecture found in Japanese cities: they call it 'pet architecture'. I've chosen an early project by Atelier Bow Wow to illustrate what they do, 1992's 'Kiosk for Vegetables'.



Vegetables now take over as the theme of this entry. The highlight, for me, of Osawa Tsuyoshi's 'Answer with Yes and No!' exhibition at the Roppongi Hills art gallery this September was a greenhouse filled with photos of women all around the world holding 'vegetable machine guns' made up of the contents of their favourite recipes, in a cross between Patty Hearst and a cookery show.



I'm sure there are some vegetable clothes somewhere in On Conceptual Clothing, an interesting-looking group show by artists and clothes designers currently being held at Tokyo's Musabi University.

Comments

[tump.livejournal.com]

and furthermore... (http://www.emusic.com/m3u/song/10807077/12820386.m3u)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I agree with the Anon poster above on Voltaire's 'Candide'. I like the picaresque format, and I like novels of ideas. I like pre-19th century fiction. To me 'Candide' is not so far from 'Either/Or'.

think a bit about what sets novelists apart. None really enjoy facing the blank page, yet they are compelled to do so, whether by art or money or misanthropy, something keeps them hermited away for unending hours, shaping their own psyches to something on the page.

I was just reading a NYRB (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17594) review of a biography of Graham Greene yesterday. It said:

'His well-known practice of writing a certain number of words a day (five hundred, later reduced to three hundred) was a ritual that enabled him to carry on a task that he often found agonizingly difficult. The gradual accumulation of words was reassuring and he attributed to the figures an almost magical significance, cabling Catherine on the completion of A Burnt-Out Case: "FINISHED THANK GOD 325 WORDS SHORT ORIGINAL ESTIMATE."'

I must say it doesn't exactly sound like an outpouring of joy. If the reader finds reading equally painful, what's the point? It reminds me of Nick Cave saying how he never listens to his own records. I really like art that the maker and the consumer take real, immediate pleasure in.

The people I mention in today's entry -- Joji Koyama, Tujiko Noriko, Ozawa Tsuyoshi, the architects at Atelier Bow Wow -- I really love what they do. It enriches the world. It's very particular (I can almost smell the earth that vegetable kiosk is made of, and I can 'taste' the soup made from those vegetable machine guns) and yet rather universal (although these artists are all Japanese, their ideas can survive transplantation from the national context to an international one).

The part of western culture I come from -- protestant, bourgeois, didactic, literary -- has an unfortunate aversion to the body, to colour, to sensuality, to sex... it tends to pallid disembodiment, Apollonian abstraction, ratiocination... It fosters national cultures rather than international ones. It fosters puritan and political ways of thinking rather than sensual and embodied ones. Artforms which correct this bias: contemporary dance, the plastic arts, design, music, animation, cookery, crafts... That's one reason I talk about them here. They correct me and my literary bias, and they correct the bias of the culture I come from. (Actually, must talk more about cookery in future!)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Plus, isn't it extremely exciting that Atelier Bow Wow made something a bit like fiction, but made it in the real world?



Doesn't that break down all our body-mind and theory-praxis and real-ideal splits?