Yasumasa Morimura Actress and Art History Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne
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Yasumasa Morimura,
Self-portrait |
Yasumasa Morimura Actress and Art History Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne
|
Yasumasa Morimura,
Self-portrait |
| This year's Melbourne International Festival featured the most comprehensive collection of Yasumasa Morimura's work ever shown in Australia. The two series of works, 'Actress’ and ‘Art History', present an assemblage of carefully crafted colour portraits in which the artist employs a number of photographic techniques (he dislikes being classed as a 'photographer') to reproduce his own image as a variety of familiar art historical and popular icons. Typically, Morimura works provocatively 'inside' Occidental imagery; from the high brow production of the great European masters to the more popular nostalgic images of Hollywood stars. | |
Yasumasa Morimura, |
Morimura has always played with the ontological as well as political strings that command the dissemination of Western imagery. Underlying his work is a lucid understanding of the power of well known images, a power he appropriates to deliver a whimsical but strong contestation of the hegemonic canons of art history and the culture industry. In the series 'Art History' this contestation results in an intriguing union of photography and painting where both procedures are clearly indicated yet not entirely left to their own logic. Morimura's ubiquitous presence as anything from fruit to brass buttons in Self Portrait as Shounen I, II and III or the Siamese twins in Seven Brides, drags us deeper into allegorical confusion and marks the place where the artist's own body becomes a medium for the disruption of Western pictorial conventions. |
Yasumasa Morimura, Portrait Flora, 1994 |
This use of embodiment is
equally effective in Morimura's more recent 'Actress'
series. The double movement of surrender and
appropriation is a complex one where the mimetic impulse
of the former is played out to near self-obliteration
through his dramatic impersonation of film stars, while
the latter is augmented by the "turning
Japanese" of Western icons. The real catch of this
series consists of the likely complicity of the viewer.
The photographic character of these self portraits (where
painting is perhaps only obliquely signalled through a
generous use of make-up) highlights the directness of
Morimura's invitation. In Michael Tausig's terms,
Morimura's self-construction communicates "a
sensuous sense of the real, mimetically at one with what
it attempts to represent." And the object (s)he
incarnates is unabashedly erotic. The result is a most
provocative invitation to breach the propriety of
aesthetic distance and indulge in the carnality of visual
involvement. Morimura's images are more than just innocent two-dimensional surfaces. 'Actress' and 'Art History' proves that rather than rejecting invasive images it may be more profitable to occupy them. Appropriation as political praxis means regaining cultural agency. The imitation of images may allow us to share in their power. That's the magic of mimesis. Jorge Lopez |
