MISHIMA PROJECT

MISHIMA PROJECT

DESCRIPTION

EMIL MEMON November 25, 2004

New York City

PROJECT MISHIMA

Project Mishima is based on the extraordinary personality of Mishima the famous Japanese post-war writer, some of his short stories and a series of photographs for which Mishima posed. The photographs by photographer Eikoh Hosoe were published in his book Ordeal by the Roses in 1961.

The project has 3 main parts; film,series of 5 large format drawings and a series of photographs. The photo session that produces the photographs is the integral part of the film. The result of this project will be presented as a straight film projection as well as flexible space installation.

The reason that Mishima interests me are the power of his writing, the visual imagery of the photographs for which he is using his own body as a symbolic projection of his writings. He sees his nationalism, militarism and the cult of the Samurai as an antidote to western capitalistic values overtaking Japanese society, although at the same time his political values are in contradiction with his strong humanistic art. Similar to Pasolini his sexual and political passions and his intellectual nonconformist brought him to a logical and tragic end in a ritual suicide (seppuku) in the headquarters of the Japanese army in Tokyo. The Hollywood film Mishima touched on this subject.

I’m fascinated with the work of artists of the second half of the 20th century, a period that is becoming disconnected and remote to our (more and more bizarre) reality. He is a co-traveler with Fasbinder, Beuys, Warhol, Margarite Duras, etc., artists that worked between madness of WWII holocaust and new millennium, our time of extreme contradictions of technological quantum leaps on one hand and obscurant religious wars and total collapse of civil society in large parts of the world on the other. It’s a new world where fiction in its extreme form can materialize in reality as our collective nightmares, like in a Tarkowsky movie Solaris. These artists have their roots in WWII and they reflect with a critical eye on the postwar insecurities that are being manifested at that time in a collective will to forget horrors of the war through material reconstruction and the creation of a massive consumerist society as a painkiller. In theirs criticism and pessimism is incorporated basic optimism, hope and rationality. Briefly after the fall of Berlin wall and the end of Apartheid in South Africa, when a notions of Human rights as a guiding force

in world politics was being contemplated there was a sense of optimism and unprecedented possibilities for more humane future, future that learned not in a small way, from the work of post war generation of artists, from the horrors and mistakes of the first half of the century. When I contemplate their work I realize that their voices are fading away fast. To retain minimal sense of reality and a memory of a possibility of more humane world, it’s important to maintain connection with that exceptional generation of artist and their work.

MISHIMA/DRAWING/2011

MISHIMA/DRAWING/2011

MISHIMA/DRAWING/DETAIL/2011

MISHIMA/DRAWING/DETAIL/2011

MISHIMA/DRAWING/DETAIL/2011

MISHIMA/DRAWING/DETAIL/2011

MISHMA/DRAWING/DETAIL/2011

MISHMA/DRAWING/DETAIL/2011

View Art Show/"Hot in a Disco" Art Happening,brooklyn,NYC

View Art Show/"Hot in a Disco" Art Happening,brooklyn,NYC

MISHIMA/DRAWING/2010

MISHIMA/DRAWING/2010

MISHIMA/DRAWING/DETAIL/2010

MISHIMA/DRAWING/DETAIL/2010

MISHMA/DRAWING/DETAIL/2010

MISHMA/DRAWING/DETAIL/2010

MISHIMA PROJECT/BROOME ST

MISHIMA PROJECT/BROOME ST

MISHIMA PROJECT/BROOME ST

MISHIMA PROJECT/BROOME ST

MISHIMA PROJECT/BROOME ST

MISHIMA PROJECT/BROOME ST

MISHIMA PROJECT/BROOME ST

MISHIMA PROJECT/BROOME ST

MISHMA PROJECT/BROOME ST

MISHMA PROJECT/BROOME ST

MISHIMA PROJECT/BROOME ST

MISHIMA PROJECT/BROOME ST
Bushwick, Brooklyn open studios show/2013

DRAWINGS & FRIENDS

Friday, February 17, 2012

MISHIMA PROJECT



                       

PHOTOGRAPHS/SLIDE SHOW
PHOTOGRAPHS/SLIDE SHOW

TEXT EXPLAINING "MISHIMA PROJECT"

EMIL MEMON                                                                                May 22, 2007, NYC                                                                              


Gerhard Richtar

“August30, 1977”, MOMA permanent collection

Walking through MOMA permanent collection galleries , the room with Gerhard Richtar
“August 30, 1977” has a powerful effect, it’s a work standing apart from the rest of the art and rooms in the museum.  The fact that a whole large space is dedicated to this work ,
 where every inch of space it’s a precious art real-estate  its extroodenary and rightfully so.

First time I ‘ve seen this set of 15 stark and severe paintings was at  the NYU Gray gallery.
The work was produced in 1988. I was  impressed  by  its unusual seriousness and thoughtfulness. Apparently Mr. R. attached  condition for this work not to be displayed in a commercial  gallery and to be always kept whole as a set., obviously attaching a special meaning to it . 

Paintings are dealing with the Baader- Meinhof group,  final fragments of life and death of  Andreas Baader, Jan –Carl Rasspe and Gudrun Ensslin, (Ulrike Meinhof committed earlier suicide in the police custody)., They were members of Red Army Faction (RAF) who grew from 68 student revolt across Europe and US. In 70’s they took to armed struggle as a logical and  extreme  evolution of 60’s anti capitalist radicalism. The deaths were considered group suicide. The prison where they died was a notorious high tech facility, build exlusively for them, with constant surveillance , so there was a suspicion that they were murdered by the state..The unique alignment of content and form in this paintings , evoking  so many memories and issues  central to German and European post II world war generation , coming to maturity or growing up in 70’s is extraordinary, but can be obscure and almost esoteric to today viewers ,without a detailed knowledge of European history of that period.  But,  even if they are floating without a context, their monochrome  heavy gray intriguing imagery is loaded with gravity and sense of history, like a Zeppelin ready for combustion dropping its anchor in to viewer mind. 

A decade later I’we seen  this paintings  again at MOMA as a part of his retrospective.  This was  the last exhibition  before renovation of the museum and its  temporary exodus to Queens. It was in 2001, but symbolically it was the last  show  of 20 century and there couldn’t be a better choice of the artist to do it. His work incarnates, among other things , the supremacy of  Euro/Usa dynamics  as central to art after II World War till the end of the century. His art dasn’t come across as  segregated   in a fragment of time , because he is simultaneously following few different tracks of work , figurative , abstract paintings, objects etc.  and is thematically  constantly renovating himself. His work looks fresh, contemporary  and not dated , but he is in fact the ultimate post WWII 20 century artist  and that he is able to do that , shows the strength of his work...

When Millennium hit, it was not perceived and seen just as a change  from number 1 to 2 on the  date  , but especially with the attack on WTC, time opened a crack . There emerged 2 sides of a very wide river , getting wider and dipper with time , accelerating  to most unexpected  scale. There is this side and there  the other one, how something that had only a symbolical meaning, just a change of numbers,  materialized  a real divide ,sharp and beyond imagination. It’s like being that  proverbial white bear on a slice of ice, victim of global worming, broken from Northern pole,  drifting in the ocean and there on the other broken piece of ice is a friend, a family or a lover, somebody that is and  faster you move away from each other , is becoming a was. This goes for our sense of history, politics, economy, art, whatever represent a sense of culture , civilization that was formed in a drastic moment of change at the begging of 20 century.At the beginning the symbolical change of 1 to 2 was not  a recognizable shift,  suddenly just like that,  those pieces of ice in cold Atlantic were drifting away, ,two sides of expanding river  were getting out of reach, getting lost. Something intimately familiar  suddenly become cold, alien and lost in the fog. The disappearing of familiarity brought  a sense of anxiety and fear. The scary and unfortunate part of all of this, is that what is on this side of the river is not reassuring, it’s illogical and mainly dosnt’ have what the other side has, a logical , dialectical, even with all its horrors of the last century,  a linear narrative.   (Marxist dialectics and  Hegel’s spirit of history) with its inner basic optimism that has a potential  of delivering a better world. Well, as they say, modernism was replaced by postmodernism or something else happened , something deeper and more sinister and non quantifiable.  People are being blown apart by people blowing themselves and more being blown by others with intent to prevent blowing ups at the first place and all in the name of religion, having religious wars in 21 century, how!?What happened  to religion being opium of the masses?The question is what is going on  or were do we stand.?  The corse is being dramatically changed,  our near past is unrecognizable in an accelerated  way. On a superficial way the new digital technology, specially communication and media revolution could be pointed out as the reason for this perception, but that is not the case, because  this technology should actually reinforce the sense of reality and optimism and basically is not so different as previous technological  jumps. A  basic thing,   humanism is  being demolished  from all sides and blamed for existing  problems and to be dealt with.   It is crucial that we don’t lose that contact  with the other side of the river , or the ones stranded and slipping away on that sheet of ice on the cold ocean of time. That we trow a line to the other side  is  almost existentially urgent,  before is to late , here the work of  some great post WWII artists has a great role to play ,  work as this one of GR.

.The horrors and the magnitude of insanity manifested in Fashizem and Stalinism and WW I  and especially WW II with the unspeakable Holocaust  was an epic struggle between god and evil. With all resilience of the human spirit , of which  art was an important driving force, god won with a huge hard learned lessons. Those lessons become drawing force and central to anything done after 45. Art was important especially to one , never forget, relax and lose the vigilance. That was especially true for German artists, GR among them, facing the fact that their culture gave birth to such a monster  as Nazism, guilty of the biggest monstrosity in human history, they  had embarked on a hevy self examination  of  their collective guilt.  The work of  great post World War II artists was hard, cutting  and desperate,  but at the same time liberating. It’s deep criticism of contemporary society, politics and especially  alienating effects rapid economic growth and the raise of consumerism  had on  individual, was to keep human mind sharp. Art ‘s total depression and nihilism in some cases was in its essence optimistic, with deep believe in future. Works of artist like Mishima, Pasolini, Celine,Visconti, Kurosawa, Beuys, Warhol, Fasbinder, Duras, Myrlin etc. .. and work like the  “August 1977” by GR are great examples  of this. At the same time, they were actively shaping change for better in nascent youth  and pop culture , making difference in a fight for individual human rights, like women's and ,gays and racial equality in more and more  complex world. There was support for liberation movements of colonized people to regain their independence (“Battle for Alger ”) and a sense of possible utopias, obviously everything with the Cold War with the potential nuclear annihilation as a constant  beat looming on the background. The other side of that Iron Curtain divide ,with their paranoid high premium value placed on art, produced body of deep personal insights in works of artist like Tarkovsky, Wayda and many others.. In a brief moment, when the end of Cold War with the fall of Berlin Wall, dismantlement of South African Apartheid and Mandela’s freedom, other long conflicts like Israeli and Palestinian, Northern Irelands … being on the verge of the solution, combined with the new digital globalizing revolution, for a brief moment it  did looked as things are really getting better  and  the ship is finally arriving to a home port, after being on stormy seas for a very long time. Art was the light house providing direction to safety from dangerous tempest. Well, all of this utopia in making didn’t last for a long time.  New, at that moment considered unthinkable and  ahistorical , not recognized as a serious thing, that would eventually start dragging everything to the bottom, horror of Sarajevo and  Rwanda  materialized . It produced something new , a  virus infecting human body of history. It was  beginning of a disease , that symbolically with the new millennium, like Aids, was devastating  our common immune system,  taking over and rewriting all the rules and spreading rapidly.The big crack started to materialize.

Film as the ultimate incarnation  of the art of the 20 century , reached its highest point  in 70’s and peaked before the century was over. It influenced other forms of expression , especially  Visual Art  and that is  well manifested  in “August  30, 1977’. Images are edited as a movie; cuts , one sequence following the other. Rhythm is materialized in the placement  and different sizes of canvases in the space. Color of the paintings is monochrome  dark gray, like a black and white movie.  Story that is told is a documentary of tragic and traumatic  events in 70’s Germany ,with deep political consequences , based on cold photographic documentation from police files and newspapers. It’s a personal , humananazing  film, something on the line of a Fassbinder movie , at first glance  looking dispassionate, cruel and removed. As Fassbinder was fascinated with Warhol and America, so was he and other German and European artist, including Beuys. In this paintings he is mimicking mechanical  reproduction of  Warhol silkscreens  and  he is follow him  thematically,  replacing American icons( Merlin, Jacky O, Patty Hirst..} and iconographical American tragedies (car crashes, electric chairs., police mug shots…) with a symbolical German one. The interesting twist is that he is using instead of the direct silkscreen print, to come to the similar impact ,  oil paints on linen and careful time consuming soft brush work. 

Why were those events  he is describing so important to GR?.  How do they relate to our time? GR with his stately and often very spectacular art is in a way very reassuring artist, confirming that art has still high cultural ambition and in this way with his mastery and high minded topics in an inside out inversion of progressive and simultaneously conservative stand , is producing highly priced and sought after marketable  art objects . Politically his work is far of being radical, so why is he eulogizing the Bader Maincof group, that committed  acts of violence against targets, that they identified as the symbols of oppressive capitalism . Fascist terror groups at that time in Europe, especially in Italy, targeted innocents in mass massacres in squares, trains,  etc, with horrific acts of violence, not unlike Iraq, with the goal to destabilize civil society and  bring in right wing military coup. One reason he was attracted  to this subject matter  could  be, that even in their extreme , the romantic idea of youth fighting and being sacrificed for their idealistic believes, in a struggle for just future, has an enduring appeal and explores the long tradition in Western art of historical  paintings immortalizing  acts of bravery , struggle and death; Goya’s execution of Spanish resistance fighters by the French,  David’s “The Death of  Marat” , Picassos Guernica among many  examples.  There is also the long Christian tradition, starting with crucifixion and  through art history, numerous representations of saints dying and sacrificing themselves, or images from Bible of violence and death, like the intense image of  Caravaggios  “The sacrifice of Isac”. He is working with and reinterpreting the Western  cannon of  large scale historical  and religious paintings.  The other reason , since the work was produced in 1988, was a cautionary tale of the future that  came to pass. Politically in Germany and Italy with  it’s Red Brigades in late 70’s,  the state and politicians used  cynically the excuse of fighting terrorism (RAF in Germany the topic of this work) to crash civil liberties, opposition and nascent youth and civil society. Those groups were isolated and manipulated on the margins, with no connection  to lively (especially in Italy) student movements and other progressive parts of society. Example of this crack dawn were the raids by police in Italy on independent papers and radio stations and universities.  In Germany the state in an infamous act, started  to do political checks on teachers, preventing left leaning to be hired. The damage done was severe with long lasting consequences on the civil society. The parallel to were this work is coming from and relevance of this paintings in our age of permanent  war on terrorism is obvious,  the civil liberties can go out of the window  incredibly fast. This are history paintings in action.