Susan Ciancolo

[imomus]

In one of those co-incidences that never seems quite as surprising as it should, I spent Saturday lunchtime reading an interview with the New York artist Susan Ciancolo in a United Bamboo magazine I found in Bonjour Records, Daikanyama. Later, up on the 7th floor of Tower Records in Shibuya, I discovered Susan in person giving a little presentation of her new record, a raw, gentle, hippy-folksy music project called The Magic Star Band. I ended up going for dinner with some of the organisers of the show, Trees Are So Special, including Yoyo, an old friend from my Paris days.

I'm a big fan of Susan Ciancolo's art, which mixes installations with applied art -- cooking, sewing, mystical sketches, stuffed toys, odd and delicate clothes, music. I went three times to her Run Restaurant installation at Alleged Gallery in New York back in 2001, in which Susan constructed a sort of Japanese cafe from plywood, decorated it with folksy stuffed toys, drawings, and floor cushions, and invited guest cooks to prepare lunch menus. She herself was the "waitress", calm, self-possessed, self-effacing yet secretly controlling the whole thing. For some reason the installation appealed particularly to musicians; when I visited Bjork looked in, Michael Stipe was browsing the bookshop, and members of Blonde Redhead and the Magnetic Fields sat on the scatter cushions.

I wouldn't hestitate to call Susan's gentle, playful work "feminine". Flowers, embroidery, cooking all point us in the direction of what are traditionally thought of as feminine values. This work is much better received in Japan than America, where such values are seen by both the left and the right as suspect, so Susan comes here often. Asked by one of the Japanese girls in the audience at her presentation "What do you think of Japanese girls?", Susan replied in her characteristically gentle, slightly spaced tone, "I love them... When I'm here, I see the fashions worn by girls, and it's always been very beautiful to me, since I was coming, since '98. Because it's completely open and forward and I think no-one is afraid of what they wear and how they express... Yeah, it's so inspiring for me coming here."



As we walked to the restaurant through streets thronging with happy, excited Saturday night Shibuya crowds, I asked Susan about something I'd read in her interview. She spoke about a close encounter with death, and how it had changed her outlook, made her more spiritually-focussed, less willing to take life for granted. It turns out that she was assaulted last year in Prospect Park, near her Brooklyn apartment, robbed and badly beaten up. This happened during the day. A friend of Susan's walking with us, a fashion designer called Monica who lives on the Lower East Side, mentioned the recent murder on Clinton Street, where an actress was robbed and, when she challenged her assailants with "What are you going to do, shoot me?" was shot to death. Episodes like these give a real poignancy to Susan's phrase about Japanese women, "no-one is afraid". It isn't just women who feel this way here. I'm also unafraid as I walk around the streets of Tokyo. There are no gauntlets to run, no areas off limits. Tokyo citizens are almost brazenly unafraid. Sitting on the Chuo Line yesterday morning I was astonished to see the man opposite me take out a fat wad of ten thousand yen notes, count them in front of all the other passengers, and put them back in his inside pocket. There must have been $5000 worth there. Nobody in the West would be so trusting of fellow subway users (including an odd-looking foreigner with an eye patch).



I think this issue of safety in Japan is very much overlooked when people talk about the status of women here. Much is made by foreign observers of the problem of Japanese train gropers and the fetishistic mindset of many Japanese men, but the big picture is often overlooked: that this is an overwhelmingly safe place for women to walk about in. The very sexy and expressive way that Japanese women dress is a direct result of their sense of ease and security in public places. Safety and expressiveness go hand in hand. It's also important that Japan doesn't have the West's big race and poverty gaps. The New York assaults I mentioned were the result of one group of people feeling that acts of almost random violence in public places were justified by racial and economic injustice. Since the gaps between rich and poor, black and white are being increased by the current US administration, American cities will only become more dangerous in the short term. That means less expressiveness on the part of the citizens of American cities; restrictions on liberty of movement, restrictions on women's freedom. It might also explain the sharky menace, the brooding aggressive mood I noticed in the foreign magazine section of ABC the other day: in stark contrast to their Japanese equivalents, American magazine covers featured images of men in black walking through sheets of flame carrying machine-guns, dark-helmeted heads with hard cold light reflected in their visors, menacing rappers oozing "don't mess with me" attitude. The gentle imagery that Susan Ciancolo produces -- delicate drawings of deer, plants, girls, clothes -- could easily be found on a Japanese magazine cover (I bought a copy of Relax for Girls yesterday, a magazine which very much embraces this style). But it's getting increasingly hard to imagine it featured anywhere in an American magazine. Neither America's left nor its right wants girly girls or "girly men". In an unfortunate cultural pincer movement, the US left (in the shape of feminism and the ideology of equality of opportunity) has masculinized women just in time to co-incide with the right's masculinization of the streets and the world by sending in soldiers, increasing social tensions, upping hatred and resentment.

The paradox is that the more the US becomes an Israel-style security state, the less secure it becomes. You address security by working on its root causes -- hatred, resentment, poverty -- rather than filling your cities, and the world, with machine-gun-toting gooks. In a recent column for RealTokyo magazine, Maeda Keizo describes what it's like for a Japanese to visit New York now: "I'm in New York once again. Even though prepared to find security measures being drastically re-inforced since 9.11, the endless lines at the customs and the fingerprints and facial portraits they're taking of travellers don't exactly make entering the USA a nice adventure. Once in the city I find policemen with huge dogs all over the place, and although I understand that this is the price people have to pay for an almost impersonally clean subway and safety in everyday life, I have the feeling that it's a bit too much. Due to the watching eyes I'm constantly feeling in my neck I'm getting slightly depressed. But somehow the people I meet and the usual cafes I visit again this time help me clear up."

It's another sunny day in Tokyo, crows are cawing outside my window and I'm just about to catch a Chuo line train to Kiba to see the show of art by women at MoT, Life, Actually curated by Michiko Kasahara. I'm sure the work will offer new insights on this troubling question of the relationship between security, expressiveness, and the feminine.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I understand exactly what Ally means. In our political discourse we're encouraged to attribute threat on an "equal opportunities" basis. So we say things like "Violence is unacceptable whoever it comes from" or "It could be any random lunatic out there with a knife". But we know that violence in a given context is situated, not universal. A politician deals with universals, but a policeman works with situated specifics. We all have an internal politician when we talk about these things, but when we're planning our route home, we tend to listen to our internal policeman.

Violence is likely to come from very specific people, and most of us who live in cities have memorised the specific visual codes of this kind of threat. Who these people might be, what they look like. Weirdly enough, the semiology of violence is mutual. We are attacked, often, by those who look like the kind of people who would attack us, in exactly the places we would expect to be attacked. The etiquette is observed on both sides. When the attack comes, there's a horrible inevitability about it. As Susan said, "I knew I shouldn't have been there alone."

One of the most interesting things, for me, about gangsta rap is how the artists use threat codes to their own advantage. They manage to turn a code of threatening behaviour into a valuable commercial attribute, an entertaining pose. Unfortunately, this also means that a tiny minority of black males is profiting from a semiology of menace which, for the vast majority of their brothers, leads to vicious circles of crime, exclusion, unemployment and despair. Of course, it's the entertainment entrepreneurs who get all the attention. Their success seems to betoken success for the whole community, but nothing could be further from the truth. Their success as "entrepreneurs of menace" actually comes at the direct expense of the communities they claim to support and represent. It's a classic American story, an example of how equality of opportunity inevitably entails inequality of result.

[nickink.livejournal.com]

OK, but if the likely source of a threat is from such a broad social group as 'men', then I think it might be counter-productive for your internal policeman to mentally stop and search every person with that profile.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, (she should answer herself, but) I guess she meant that if all men were removed from the streets, all menace would be removed with it. That's not to say that all men are menacing, but all menace for her is male.

It's worth remembering, of course, that the most dangerous thing for all of us in cities is cars. And in Japan there's an added danger, earthquakes.

[yourpony.livejournal.com]

I think that Momus' differentiation between politician and policeman is apt. As I said in my original statement, I don't mean to suggest that all men are violent and any space with men in it is threatening. Otherwise I would assume that Tokyo would be equally as violent as Brooklyn. And as we've been discussing, this is not the case.

The point I was trying to make is specific to the place in which I live. No, I'm not threatened by every man I see on the street. But were there to be any violence directed toward me, the chances are almost 100% that it would from a man. So my "one night sans men" idea is the idea of removing all possibility of threat, and obviously in the process removing those who wouldn't have been threats otherwise.

Of course I'm not on a crusade to put such a stupid idea in practice. It is merely an exercise in thought--realizing where (as a young woman) my fear (for my physical safety) stems from.

And although the politician says that everyone is at risk from everyone else, I don't know that a man can understand what it is like to walk home late at night as a woman, no matter how she is dressed. It is a psychological state of mind that is imprisoning, and is violence in its own right, though without a specific aggressor. Ranging from an invasive gaze to offensive comments to worse, there is a whole gamut of factors that contribute to an atomsphere of violence against women. And in there is the added factor of sexual violence, of which women are the largest group of victims. This atmosphere is very real.

And I apologize. I absolutely hate making generalizing statements, especially when it relates to gender. I can't stand it from others, and especially not from myself. I could say then, as a person perceived as feminine, or weaker, I am at risk. I know that there are many men who can understand the fear that I am talking about. But now I'm getting worked up and think I'm losing my train of thought.

I don't mean to offend, but this is something that is very real and very personal to me. I've gone off topic here from the broader causes and roots of societal trends of violence, and brought it down to a personal anecdotal observation.

[mckibillo.livejournal.com]

"It's a classic American story, an example of how equality of opportunity inevitably entails inequality of result."

Huh? So, by this logic the inverse must also always be true, "inequality of opportunity inevitably entails equality of result"? And, why is this "classically" American. Societies that have extremely narrow windows of "opportunity", can also, and often do, produce shocking examples of violence.

Also, while you bizarrely single out gansta rap as a prime source of urban violence, the fact is the race relations, between blacks and whites, in the States have been steadily improving... in fact, since the mainstreaming of rap. Granted, the pose of most rap is one of menace, but maybe because of that it somehow, ironically, brings young people together. Well, young Americans at least. Oh wait, rap is a global phenomenon now.

I'm not a big fan of rap, but this singling out of it seems like a bizarre turn.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

So, by this logic the inverse must also always be true, "inequality of opportunity inevitably entails equality of result"?

No, not at all! If I argue that "Any girl could look like Paris Hilton, but only one can be her" do I also have to defend the statement that "No girl can look like Paris Hilton, but any girl can be her"?

Also, I never said gangsta rap was a prime source of urban violence! I said it was interesting that the etiquette of menace is turned into a kind of theatre in gangsta, and that while this theatre makes a few entrepreneurs and stars very rich, it doesn't help the average black man in the US to find work or integrate socially. In fact, it hinders that process by perpetuating stereotypes of irresponsible criminality. I don't think it's gangsta that has improved relations between blacks and whites, it's more likely to be 9/11, and the emergence of Islamist terrorists as the number one "Other" and bogeyman.

I suppose you could make the case that now the US is a sort of criminal delinquent on the world stage, though, gangsta is the only music violent enough to sum up the national psyche. It's interesting that reggae, with its peace vibes and strong moral values, has never taken off in the US. I suspect that if every rap star in the US were to embrace reggae and its values tomorrow, all the white kids would stop listening to black music immediately. "What's all this shit about peace, love and righteousness inna Babylon?"

[mckibillo.livejournal.com]

Violence in NYC was down before 9/11, race relations between blacks and whites was also improving before 9/11 and gansta rap has been around for almost 20 years(!) now and was certainly a commercial success before 9/11. By repeatedly viewing America through the prism of 9/11 you are engaging in the obverse of the myopia that the reactionaries and neo-cons view the rest of the world with.

And rap, gansta rap, and all it's poses of menace is no longer exclusively an American product. It's global, and it's local, and it's quite huge right here in Japan. You only have to turn on any of the music channels to see local artists doing gansta rap.

Reggae? Have you heard Dancehall...? yes, the reggae of Bob Marley was all about "peace, love and righteousness inna Babylon" but it's been a looong time since those days. It's a much different tune you can hear blasting out of car speakers these days.

[bicyclette.livejournal.com]

not to mention the virulent homophobia coming from today's "reggae"..songs played on the radio calling for faggots to be torched...