Goth: Reality of the Departed World
Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan
Dr Lakra, Untitled (Hiroshima Tomonohira-Take-Emon) (2007), courtesy of the Artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City
Creating an exhibition on a theme that itself evades definition is always going to be a challenge. In the opening remarks for ‘Goth: Reality of the Departed World’ at the Yokohama Museum of Art, an exploration into the influence of the modern goth subculture on contemporary art practice, the curators resort to throwing words at us: ‘death, sickness, pain, fear, cruelty, the bizarre, the barbaric, darkness, decadence, heresy, estheticism.’
The term goth can’t be defined because its uses are so diverse. Since it was applied to morbid and romantic post-punk British bands such as Siouxsie & the Banshees around 1980, the term has clung to each of those bands’ traits: plaintiff wails in music; black dress in fashion; morbid narratives in horror films; and, in contemporary art, ‘death, sickness, pain, fear, etc…’ Or so the curators would have us believe.
Six artists, three of them Japanese, have been selected for the exhibition. Australian Ricky Swallow gets things started with his explorations of that favourite stomping ground: mortality. Tusk (2007), a sculpture of two skeletal forearms shaking hands, serves as a kind of threshold, a secret handshake granting entry to a mysterious world. Perhaps more arresting than the sculpture, though, is his set of ten watercolor portraits, One Nation Underground (2007). Arresting, that is, not for their Marlene Dumas-like lightness of touch, but for the eerie resemblance they bear to your fellow museum-goers. One tall, forward-slouching youth I saw, his hands buried deeply in his pockets, must have thought he was gazing into a mirror.
Mexican artist Dr Lakra seems to enjoy elevating goth’s esoteric visual language – skulls, ghosts – to the level of high art. So much so that he adds it to high art. Usually he makes drawings on the photos in vintage fashion magazines. Here he has added tattoos to the subjects depicted in antique ukiyoe woodblock prints. The sumo wrestler in Untitled (Hiroshima Tomonohira-Take-Emon) (2007), for example, has acquired a full complement of decoration over his (very) full body. The element of desecration might have been acceptable, thrilling even, if the additions were not quite so obvious: consisting of intricate webs of fine lines, they could not possibly be the product of wooden blocks. Dr Lakra’s vintage photographs work better, thrilling viewers for an instant with the suspicion that the tattoos just might be real.
Japanese artist Tabaimo is next, but her video projection of veins bursting from fleshy hand-like objects takes the goth fascination with body and soul to a level that is all too abstract for this show. Her work is unfortunately juxtaposed with Masayuki Yoshinaga’s very in-your-face photographs of goths in get-up – one has carpenter’s nails protruding from her lower lip.
Pyuupiru, Self portrait #02 A 12-year-old Boy Bearing Scars (2005-07), private collection
But the real shock is yet to come – and it isn’t IngridMwangiRobertHutter’s babies-and-geriatrics-writhing-around-on-the-ground video installation, although the sugarcube flooring adds a cynical sweetness to their depiction of a life that begins and ends in pain. No, what surprises most is a series of photographs by Japanese artist Pyuupiru, which documents his transformation into a, well, her. And what a long, violent, surreal and crazy journey-in-38-self-portraits it is. Eyelids are slit; genitalia are present and then not; measles-like infections are endured; his/her head is covered first in bandages and then in cum (Self portrait #17 All you have, that one is called). In Self portrait #14 The Time a Soul is Taken Away there is even a return to a sexless state of hair-covered bestiality.
It is a powerful series, enough to stand on its own in any number of contexts, but here it serves also to confirm a suspicion that niggles from the start of this show: more than video or photograph or bronze or paper, is not the human body the preferred canvas of the truly devoted goth?
Edan Corkill
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