Finally getting back to it -

A few days after Worldcon, Kari Maund and I went out with a plan of visiting art galleries around Omotesando. I still had my cold, and it was raining, so it was a good day for doing indoor things. We couldn’t find the first gallery I’d marked on a map, so we headed for the Jan and Eva Svankmajer exhibition at Laforet, a prominent, easily locatable building on Omotesando. Several people had told me the exhibition was a must-see. It was certainly impressive. Housed in several rooms, it included examples of the Svankmajers’ imaginary natural history book plates, featuring detailed engravings of chimerical collage-creatures, monsters made of bones, feathers, snail-shells and other scavenged animal parts, paintings, designs and props from the Svankmajers’ animated films, and drawings. The exhibits were labelled in Japanese and Czech, and between us Kari (who knows a mindboggling number of languages, dead and alive, and also reads some Chinese) and I were able to decipher most of the labels, but the explanatory notes were beyond us, which left us to take the exhibits as we found them. By roughly the middle of the tour through the rooms the appeal of the grotesque had worn thin for both of us. In the later rooms, whimsy and humour were largely superseded by ugliness and horror, and we started to feel that enough was enough. We both wondered about the Svankmajers’ minds: hadn’t they, as artists, ever wanted a break from the grotesque and the nasty? And if not, why not? This article offers a plausible answer, describing Jan Svankmajer’s work as a “symbolic address of the inarticulable and potentially unspeakable fears rooted in our primal identities, now over-socialised in the contemporary world.” However, dragging the fears up out of the mud and putting them on display is only half the battle, surely. Healing them, waving them goodbye, or transforming them comes next - and for all the alchemical imagery and symbolism in the work displayed, there was little indication of interest in those latter stages.
(Side note: Lewis Carroll’s supposed pedophilia, alluded to by Jan Svankmajer in the article above, is by no means to be taken as a fact; recent evidence suggests that all the time he spent with Alice was at least partly a ploy to be near her older sister!)

After that came - shopping! Or window shopping, at any rate. Laforet is full of boutiques and we had a merry time trying things on. I found a perfect trench coat - beautifully tailored, and, this being a country of small people, the right width for my back and shoulders - and lovely white boots to go with it. However, both items were unsuitable for Bangkok’s weather and, in any case, too expensive. It’s funny what you feel you can splurge on, and what not - I will spend on books, art, and perfume, but in the case of everything else I hear my mother saying “You don’t really need that”, or “You could make it yourself”, or, unconsciously, “You don’t deserve it.” I’ve never been able to lash out on clothes. Shoes, yes, sometimes, within reason; but when you come from a family of women who sewed, and who wouldn’t have dreamed of buying something if they could make it themselves, better fitting, out of better fabric, for a fraction of the cost, no matter how long it took, the retail price of good clothing has the stamp of sinful indulgence about it - the sin not of vanity, but sloth. Of course, you can also argue that it’s a sin to buy department store clothes made in Chinese sweatshops. This no-win situation is possibly an indication of why, in their prelapsarian state, Eve and Adam were naked. Clothing was the first sign of their fall, and the garment industry has been dyed with the colours of one sin or another ever since.

Kari headed home after the boutique whirl, and I headed for the Aoyama Book Centre, fairly nearby on another major road, to see “Holy Land”, a collaborative exhibition of Kouichi Kubota’s photographs and poems and Yumiko Amano’s sculptures. The exhibition was in one smallish room and consisted of large black and white photos of Japanese people and scenery. A series of landscape photographs were projected on a screen, each with a short poetic text, accompanied by quiet music. There was yearning, often elegiac tone to the poems: “Not to forget the man who loved here, I wish I could be the grave”, directing one’s perception of the images accordingly; sometimes the yearning was for the barrier between the individual and all else to come down: “To see the sleeping world, I wish I could be the calm night.” Amano’s sculptures seemed at first glance an odd choice of company for all this - whimsical, appealing, verging on cute figures, with upper bodies and heads resembling crescent moons, they might have wandered out of the world of a child’s storybook or cartoon. They were placed around the room, in groups of one or two, sometimes so that they seemed to be looking at the work, sometimes engaged in inscrutable activities of their own, bending towards vacant areas of wall. After a time, their presence started to gel with the other work. As characters they seemed like emotional notations, devoid of the physical features that make one human being repulsive, or another enviable, so that very simple, heartfelt responses to their apparent circumstances of togtherness or separateness were evoked, making it harder to stand back in the safety of the critical mind.

In light of this, somewhat later, I went back to thinking about the Svankmajer exhibition and wondered if I should have felt more sympathy for the rebarbative images and objects. Perhaps the artists took the process of transformation halfway and the viewer was meant to complete it? I’m not quite sure what I’m talking about here. I don’t think that my eventual feeling of “Enough with all this monstrosity, show me something nice” was unnatural, but I’m wondering now about ways of engaging with the monstrous. First reaction: amusement or pleasant horror; second reaction: I’m sick of this; third reaction…? I don’t know, but it might be to ask questions: Who are you? What’s your story? What do you want…?

In my own work I’ve tended to use the monstrous as a kind of decoration, like gargoyles and mascarons on a wall, I guess; but the fact that I keep using it probably points to some need of mine to explore monstrosity in a more thorough and thoughtful way.