November 2007 - Eat French Bread

One of the few artist-run spaces in Tokyo, Design Festa Gallery is tucked away in the trendy back alleys of Jingumae. Once you find the right street, you can’t miss the psychadellic monster of a building. In its belly are studio spaces and about a dozen small exhibition rooms showcasing an array of young local illustrators, designers and artists of all persuasions. They have a little café with snacks, yummy herbal teas, sake and lounges, and they sometimes have parties in their outside garden area. With free wifi internet (another rarity in this town) it’s the perfect way to pass the afternoon (and possibly evening), escaping the manic chaos of the world’s biggest metropolis.

Design Festa Gallery is part of Design Festa, a huge biannual exhibiting event held in Tokyo for artists and designers from all over the world.

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ride a bike

November 30th 2007 04:46

photos from mori gallery (see www.morigallery.com.au)
critical mass harbour bridge ride tonight: Really Long Link
bicycle film festival: Really Long Link

“I wasn't really naked. I simply didn't have any clothes on.”
(the wonderful Josephine Baker)

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rusticate

November 30th 2007 04:25

“Nothing is lost, nothing is created, all is transformed”
(the father of modern chemistry, Antoine Lavoisier)

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art on legs

November 26th 2007 11:49

Fashion designer, performance artist, nightclub sensation and model for the painter Lucien Freud, Leigh Bowery (1961-1994) said “I think of myself as a canvas.” He believed that every time he went out it was a performance, and Boy George branded him ‘art on legs’.

His life project was his body, which he distorted and thwarted through the most outrageous self-costuming involving extensions, padding, binding, corsetry, gaffer-taping and piercing. He saw such modification as not only a way of transforming himself but of claiming ownership of his body, which he felt was under constant threat of control from external societal forces.

The most iconic image of him is the one in his orange spot creation, where the large polka dots extend from his jacket, shoes, scarf and trousers to his flesh so that his painted face and hands became one with the clothing. He is his costume, and the ‘natural’ body and ‘constructed’ attire are merged so that his performance is all there is.

He blurred the boundary between art and life; put the banal, beautiful and grotesque side by side; exhibited the marvelous in the mundane, and showed that art can be made anywhere from anything. You could do the same.

Quote of the day:
"Freaks. There's a quality of legend about freaks.
Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle.
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience.
Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats."
(Diane Arbus)

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Dead Starlets

November 14th 2007 02:30

New Zealand photographer Yvonne Todd (www.ervon.com) makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. I find her photographs hilarious and devastating. I feel both far from and close to these afflicted and lacklustre women, somewhere between runners-up in a beauty pageant and zombies. I sense their malaise but they are too dehumanised, phlegmatic and unreachable for me to be truly empathetic.

Her rigidly formulaic images of unthreatening, pristine, uptight and wax-like women reveal on closer inspection that they are muffled and numb, sterile and barren, broken and sickly. Something is off. But then, everything is just right.

Each detail in Todd’s work is a premeditated execution, a studied process of construction that plays with the uncomfortable formality of studio portraiture. They are controlled like Maybelline advertisements and the stark simplicity of the compositions combined with the flat antiseptic lighting expose the artist’s obsessive command of detail.

The boredom in the images also intrigues because it exists alongside and within the notion of glamour. A blandness comes out of the mix between ugly and beautiful, prim and perverted, pathetic and heroic, and it carries an unexpected humour.

Her work can be situated in the ongoing exploration of the complex relationship between photography and truth. With the growing awareness of photography as subjective and fictionalising came the genre of ‘fabricated photography’. Fact, fiction and fantasy were blurred in sets that were created just for the camera lens, and little was left to chance.

Rather than seeing it as a medium to capture the existing external world, artists like Gregory Crewdson, Laurie Simmons and Philip-Lorca diCorcia use photography to fashion alternate universes that are choreographed and self-contained. Like in Todd’s work, the glossy depthlessness and artificiality aren’t detracting; they are the very subject matter.

Todd can also be compared to a series of women photographers who work with costume portraiture to show the elasticity and malleability of female identity. Claude Cahun, Cindy Sherman and Tomoko Sawada are three such artists whose work combine photography and performance art. Like Todd, they meddle with the tensions between truth and appearance, gender and aspiration, beauty and objectification. Using the body as a canvas to configure certain identities, they reveal that ‘femininity’ is a performance.

Todd’s fictional female characters playfully provokes mass-sanctioned ideals of beauty and confront the universal themes of isolation, suppression, vulnerability, stoicism, boredom and disappointment.

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