Review | Of particular intere...

Generated on 2021-11-30 10:09:55

Result #1

Here, the process of transforming and questioning the very nature of the self is reflected on through a kaleidoscopic series of collages of fabricated images and objects that circulate between the border zones of visual language. In a single, surrealistic image, a hand is inserted into a paper fan. A hand, a hand, another hand—at times the two are bound together, at times they are in contact. The hand of the fan is formed by a red curtain, the curtain is an afghan-style fabric and the hand is a cutout of a phone. The photo booth is a gallery with a giant photograph of a screen facing a shutter, a hand is placed in the mouth of a fan, a fan is placed in a fans mouth, and the viewer feels a combination of jealousy and a suspicion of identity as well as of culture.

Result #2

Of particular interest to the artist are avatars, self-optimization, photo booths, kawaii culture and the question of queer sensitivity in a strongly standardized and normalizing performance society. Since 2000 I have been involved with the topics of identity, queerness, transformation and digital image processing and image creation in reference to image worlds from advertising, film and digital media. In staged and heavily reworked “self-portraits”, identity and gender constructions are questioned with the means of exaggeration, pose and shifting in the border areas of current image production: Photoshop disasters, Snapchat filters and “Uncanny Valley”. The “uncanny valley” (“phenomenon of the uncanny valley”, bukimi no tani genshō) first described by the Japanese robotist Masahiro Mori in 1970 would be a starting point for further new work and research in Tokyo.I would argue that this is not so much a critique of media consumption, however, as an invitation to a new self-reflexivity, a self-reflective process, a mental and physical barrier for the artist to break with. To do this is to question the status of the very possibility of self-expression, and thus the very possibility of experiencing a certain self. In doing so, the artist, if he or she is to be taken seriously, must choose between two possibilities: first, an active engagement with the media, in which he or she is not a passive recipient of media images; or, second, a self-conscious and self-reflexive, but self-reflexive, engagement with the media. The former approach is possible for both an artist and his public. Both can be a self-reflexive, but also both can be a self-conscious, as the artist can be, or a hegemonic, as the viewer can be.At the moment when such possibilities are explored, an artist must become aware of the differences among the media—both the means of production (photography, painting, and video) and the mediums image, in order to understand the process through which images are produced, reproduced, altered, transposed and dispersed. He or she must also acknowledge the ways in which the media in which he or she uses to develop his or her self-image is intimately connected to the ways in which the media he or she is represented, which is directly connected to the images produced by the media industry. That is to say, the artist must continue to investigate the problem of the media, and the result of the artists relationship with media.An artist who has chosen the former route is no longer an individual, and not only because of the media consumption in which he or she has become aware.

Result #3

Of particular interest to the artist are avatars, self-optimization, photo booths, kawaii culture and the question of queer sensitivity in a strongly standardized and normalizing performance society. Since 2000 I have been involved with the topics of identity, queerness, transformation and digital image processing and image creation in reference to image worlds from advertising, film and digital media. In staged and heavily reworked “self-portraits”, identity and gender constructions are questioned with the means of exaggeration, pose and shifting in the border areas of current image production: Photoshop disasters, Snapchat filters and “Uncanny Valley”. The “uncanny valley” (“phenomenon of the uncanny valley”, bukimi no tani genshō) first described by the Japanese robotist Masahiro Mori in 1970 would be a starting point for further new work and research in Tokyo. Two events would take place concurrently: the 20th Biennale of Art, curated by Nobuyoshi Araki, was held in Paris, and on September 2, a day after the Guggenheims MoMA retrospective, the artist Fareed Armaly launched his Archive of Aesthetics, on which he has gathered and displayed the work of more than three thousand artists, from Van Gogh to his friend Yoshitomo Nara. The exhibition is not a retrospective, however; it is a collection of a hundred-odd pieces, all of which are shown with considerable variety in the Biennale itself.The exhibition starts with a series of sixteen portraits of musicians in a style that recalls the photographs taken by Morisawa D. Kashiura in his paintings of his brothers and sisters, which he made in the 1950s. By the 60s and 70s Armaly, who was born in 1976, had become a kind of grassroots figure in Japan, often quoted as an influence on young artists. His portrait of himself, in a rather imprecise pose, also comes from a self-portrait, a self-portrait that, in its feigned innocence, does little more than play up the Japanese-American conflicts between the two-and-a-half-century-old tradition of portraiture and the genres ambivalence between the two- and the two-dimensional, the image of the artist, the photo. For this reason, his portraits of the young, the old, and the male and female, as well as those of his brothers and sisters, do not come as a total surprise. Rather, they are rather familiar—to be sure, they have appeared in public and private moments, on the streets of Tokyo and in the cities of London and Paris, and in the empty rooms of museums and galleries, among other places.

Result #4

For instance, if Mori is concerned with the intersection between technology and humanity, he could consider the possibilities of creating a sculpture out of its technology—an ironic and powerful association between these two processes of production, the symbolic quality of the origami dolls and the spectacle of mass media in the same room.

Result #5

In this way, Masahiro Mori, a pioneer of the digital age in Japanese culture, might be considered a hero to a younger generation of artists. In the process, Masahiro Mori is becoming a heroine to a younger generation of artists.