© Julia Waugh
Pauline Liu-Devereux
Galleries & Drift
Mapping Undermined Landscapes - an extract.
The more personal narratives in this collection reveal a different undermined landscape:
ideas about romantic constructions and inheritance led to explorations of nostalgia, memory and identity. Life events became life writing and many of these narratives reflect a search for direction and for a missing person: the artist I once was, but there are other disappearances in these narratives and the final chapter gives an account of family events that had to be recorded but which raise ethical questions that life writers cannot ignore.
We must take responsibility for the way we write about vulnerable subjects and recognise what this writing tells us about ourselves: that, as Nancy K. Miller has suggested, by exposing our lives to others through life writing, we too become vulnerable subjects.
***
Live in Translation, an exhibition by the Japanese artist Tatsumi Orimoto, is at the Exchange Gallery in Penzance Cornwall. I have missed his Breadman performance, when he attached baguettes to his head and with a group of bread clad assistants, toured tourist spots in the town, offering baguettes to anyone who was hungry as a gesture of kindness. I wonder how many accepted, but mainly the exhibition consists of photographs the artist has taken of his mother, whom he calls Art Mama although her name is Odai and has nursed since she developed Alzheimer‘s disease. Tatsumi Orimoto says the two of us enjoy creating these collaborative works. "Perhaps she is happy that her existence will remain in my work after her life. Also, she hopes her face will be recognised and become more and more famous."
And it‘s true that some of these photographs resemble photographs of the famous, but they are those pictures snatched in vulnerable, telling moments, Madonna looking her age, Jennifer Aniston overweight Princess Diana at the gym. Art Mama‘s face is photographed in close up again and again and over time it loses definition, gurns and pouts, becomes pliable like dough. She does not smile, she rarely looks happy, often gazes, unfocused, into the camera lens as if she no longer cares if she is here or there. There are intimate photographs of Art Mama performing intimate tasks. Peeing, sitting on the lavatory, her behind exposed as she fumbles to pull up her big pants. Art Mama lying on the floor between coffee table and TV, Art Mama sleeping.
©Tatsumi Orimoto
In the kitchen series, Art Mama stands in the corner of a busy commercial kitchen. It doesn‘t look very tidy or hygienic. Art Mama has a pile of newspapers tied to the top of her head looks very heavy, no-one is acknowledging she is there. Then there is a photo of the Orimotos in the kitchen and he also has a pile of newspapers on his head. I notice how similar mother and son are and I think perhaps they are collaborators after all. But who would volunteer to be weighed down by all that weight even for her son?
There are photographs of Art Mama feeding pigeons, the pictures are dull and grey and have no particular merit unless they are just records of her day. If they weren‘t Art they might end up in a collection like Philippe Lejeune‘s. Art Mama is photographed with two friends, they are sitting on a bench, doing their best to ignore the camera. One looks up to the sky, all have rubber tyres round their necks. I remember the way my mother and grandmother would preen for photographs, the delay while they straightened their hair, even put on a strand of beads. Do these women enjoy being necklaced in black rubber? I find it hard to imagine they do.
But look! Tatsumi Orimoto has fashioned a gift, a pair of shoes for his mother who always felt too short! Huge Minnie Mouse clogs that make her eight inches taller and could contain her small feet many times over. She can‘t walk in them, only just stand upright and shuffle if supported when wearing them.
Tatsumi Orimoto says he wants to make the disabilities of older people, once revered now forgotten, more visible and that too much is thrown away in Japanese society and this is why he used the tyres, "to give them one last life, as an art work", a little like his mother.
© Tatsumi Orimoto
During the show, there‘s a discussion called Where Art Meets Dementia which is about
making art about and with dementia sufferers. I am one of a group of middle aged women and one man who sit on the chairs lining the room, looking at each other across the divide. Are we artists or carers or both, are we newly diagnosed?
A woman introduces a film she has made about her mother, an absent, mind-wandering woman with the high cheekbones of a model. It‘s full of romantic images, long corridors, dressing table clutter, drifting drapes and it‘s very beautiful. I think the audience sighs because it‘s the sort of film we wish we‘d made ourselves. Another woman has produced a very different film about her father. The screen is divided into images of him and you select which version of him you want to see. When you‘ve chosen, he talks about all sorts of things. Though he is ill, there‘s humour and poetry in what he says and you are glad to hear his voice, his opinions.
When the discussion begins no one talks about Tatsumi Orimoto, which is really why I came, to find some different points of view. But people don‘t want to say much about art, instead, they talk about their personal experiences, the stories of their lives of coping and caring for parents and partners. A robust young woman talks about the project she runs where dementia sufferers dabble in arts and crafts. Did they do that before they had the disease? We‘re told that having dementia doesn‘t mean you can‘t learn new skills and I wonder if Art Mama could learn to use a camera, take photographs of Tatsumi Orimoto pulling up his pants. When I ask if anyone else found the photographs voyeuristic there‘s a long silence. I have spoken out of turn, we aren‘t at the gallery to criticise the art. I try to explain my position: I‘m a life writer and the ethics of life writing narratives concern me.
Now it‘s an academic point I‘m making, the silence alters, becomes less antagonistic, but still persists. Then the woman sitting beside me says, "But what about the shoes! Surely he made them out of love!" No, I‘m tempted to say, he made them out of recycled cardboard but the moment passes and she goes on. There‘s a different culture at work here and we really shouldn‘t criticise what we don‘t understand. So I feel ashamed, it‘s only when I‘m driving home and thinking I hope my sons won‘t do that to me, though I know at least one of them could, when I think of foot binding, of how young female feet were once crippled for cultural and aesthetic reasons and I think again about Tatsumi Orimoto‘s
gift.
There‘s a Fluxus weekend during Tatsumi Orimoto‘s exhibition and I‘m hoping it‘ll be an opportunity to learn more about his work. There‘ll be live art performances, speakers and discussions, a Fluxus Feast and a procession through the town. Fluxus was an avant garde movement that emerged in New York and was prominent during the sixties and seventies. It challenges the commodification of art and perhaps because of its zany, do-it-yourself aesthetic and emphasis on collaboration and communication, it remains influential.
There were many young students who went to art school in the sixties, thinking they could draw and paint, who learnt that really wasn‘t a requirement. Entire fine art departments went out on a limb. Unless it worked for you, unless you could go with the flow, your creativity was blasted to kingdom come and you left art school with shards and a third class diploma.
I‘m thinking of Mick, who, after three years of fine art study, could only feed fish in an aquarium,I remember walking into Liverpool‘s Hope Street College of Art in 1971 and finding a group of students staging their degree show. Every minute, for twenty four hours, they were writing the time on the walls of the main hall. I‘m reluctant to say this was a pointless activity but if the manifestation of an idea has no power, doesn‘t communicate anything beyond the obvious, it seems fairly redundant to me.
At the Fluxus symposium, the keynote speaker talks the talk, he‘s an attractive Glaswegian so I don‘t mind listening, or is this a sexist remark? "See the point is hinny, does Fluxus break down binary oppositions or even recognise they exist? How exactly does it represent the symptomatic disfunction of the state"? (I can‘t help but think, if he had been talking symptoms, disfunctions, states instead of the state, I could make the leap to Alzheimers here).
But now, there is a slide show and this photograph might be of the Dresden bombings or is it Blackpool illuminations? And does it really matter? The question is what‘s the relationship between photo and event, between the myth and our understanding of it? And how do concepts of eternal networks function today? What are the principles of Fluxus now?
I drift, I hear Falmouth, free drink, music, sex, a bottle of whisky, a cassette player, vibrator, a plastic vagina but because I have momentarily slipped away from the event I don‘t know anything about the myth. I‘m puzzled, then I hear him say Blackburn and I‘m wide awake again. It seems that in 1972, the year I came to live in Cornwall, a Fluxus show was travelling in the opposite direction.
FLUXshoe left Falmouth, showed in Exeter and eventually ended up in Blackburn. The Lancashire Evening Telegraph of Monday July 9th 1973 reports a photograph of a naked woman covered in whipped cream from head to toe, hangs from a wall in Blackburn Museum and Art gallery... another photo, captioned Solo for Guitar, shows a man kicking the remains of a guitar along a New York street. Organiser Mr. Dave Mayor, a 24 year old Cambridge graduate in mathematics and fine arts explains. "On a simple level the idea is to show art does not necessarily have to be about paintings... People in London have seen all this before and they tend to say "So what?" This show won‘t be going to London."
Mr. Mayor says he is studying for a doctorate in all this, but the newspaper isn‘t
overly impressed and says, as if to put southerners in their place, that Dave Mayor is not the only one involved in bringing the avant garde to Blackburn. "A Hungarian artist Mr. Endre Tot, who specialises in typing noughts on pieces of paper, is already here."
© Graham Gaunt
This is all news to me and I‘d like to find out more but the Glaswegian, though friendly, isn‘t very forthcoming, so we go into the bar until we‘re invited into the live performance. While we are having a drink, I notice a Japanese woman dressed formally in a tidy white shirt, black skirt, pale stockings and court shoes, as if for the office. It‘s a different crowd here tonight, so her outfit might just be a particular fashion statement but when we go through to the gallery I see she is the main event. the artist Anti-cool (Tomoko Freeman) sits at a table on which there are plates of different foods: marshmallows, cubes of cheese and meats, bread, assorted fruits. She sits passively while a contraption is attached to her head. It‘s a metal cap, the sort of thing that might be used for reading brainwaves in a medical situation but attached to it are three jointed mechanical arms and it is wired to a control pad on the table. Secretary has become robot.
At the touch of a button a mechanical hand swoops down, selects, clasps a piece of food and in a series of clicks and jerks trundles it towards her face. She opens her tiny pink mouth, waits until the food is deposited inside, then chews and swallows. This continues for some time, the food does not always reach her mouth but mostly it does and she feeds without expression. I wonder how long this can go on, there is a lot of food on the table, must she eat it until she is sick? Then a man steps forward and fiddles with the machine and I am relieved because I think it‘s all over, but I couldn‘t have been more wrong.
Now we spectators are invited to control the machine and what little control she had before is removed. After an embarrassed pause, someone steps up to the table, presses the button, selects what she should eat and, without looking at him, she chews and swallows. He seems to be enjoying the situation because he keeps pressing the button and she keeps chewing and swallowing. I‘ve had enough and we leave before the end but I do wonder, afterwards what the end would have been.
There‘s a seam of cruelty in this work I don‘t understand unless it‘s to teach the spectator
something about power, about how far they will go, what they will do in what circumstances. Anna tells me that she could not go into the gallery during the early days of the Tatsumi Orimoto show. She lives round the corner and passed by every day but after glancing in through the window, she didn‘t think she could stand to see the humiliating images more closely. Then one day something drew her in and what she found there surprised her.
She discovered tenderness in the photographs and a man, an artist, who was trying to bear the unbearable. You bear your experiences she said, you inflict your humiliations on others or you act them out in other ways. I‘m unsure what she really meant by that, do these photographs allow Tatsumi Orimoto to act out his humiliation in caring for his mother or Art Mama‘s humiliation in suffering her disease? What I think, after visiting the show again is that there is a void of understanding, but perhaps that is the point too.
