|
Visuals, Poetics and the Artist The Silver Braid Summer feature 2006 |
Mannequin Envy |  |
|
from the Yukiko series
 |
 |
|
CHERRY You told me I should visit in spring when the cherry blossom is in bloom and take a walk down by the river For a moment your romance had won me as I imagined eating you beneath pink scented boughs. But such notions seemed incongruous in Starbucks in Harijuka and you wearing a cappuccino foam mustache Leaning over I shaved you with my razor tongue The aesthetic violence  |
AI NO BOREI We sprawled on the futon Closeted in her wardrobe sized apartment Eating ramen from the late night store And watching Ai No Borei Patiently she insisted she would educate me In the genius of Japanese film Happy to be taken where she would I was compliant tourist, wide eyed and eager With Seki's submission to Toyoji's persistence He lifted his head from between her legs "Shave it!" "I've never shaved myself." She whispered I raised an eyebrow and cruelly smiled to see She had curled like a child, tight about its blanket Protecting the secret she had revealed Soft silken strands of unspoiled growth A fern of delicate musk aromas A peasant woman defending her husband's crop Having foolishly dallied with a wayward lover One by one I unlocked her clasping fingers Releasing her from her comforter Naked in all but her clothes she gave To the direction of my persistent hand Lifting her arse in way of collaboration I gently teased off her flimsy underwear From my vantage point I coldly scanned Her limbs splayed in a satire A crucified butterfly in display Her wet brown eyes darting for a focus Did I impose or did I discover this need in her? To incrementally unfold this desire for humiliation Does she do what she does because she does it for me? Her eyes, unable to escape mine. Yes, I am Mesmer A ghost could not elicit such unflinching horror As I juggled my Swiss army knife "Scissors." was my snide reassurance And sake. It procures foolish trust With bitten lip and wide eyed pleading She fueled this base and heartless lover Licking my fingers and plaiting her pubic hair Into convenient cowlicks to be scythed Her belly quivering and her thighs trembling As though each hair was a live wire of nerves And each cut scarring with an indelible brand As I carefully harvested each curled lock Placing each bundle of silky fibres neatly in rows On a sheet of startling white paper Each crescent intensifying the abstraction Of our interlocked motives, her complicity I brushed the stubble on her mound Describing in detail her five o-clock shadow Its coarseness against the grain The roughness of a coconut, I mocked Pulling her skirt from her shrouded face We locked eyes and silently laundered lies While I creamed her with mousse "Wider!" I gently insisted, should I nick her Her grimace provoking my conceit Rounding her curves, stretching her skin Pulling to the side her fleshy ridges As I scraped the blade across her contours Gently dabbing my labour with a crisp clean towel Before basting my prize with my tongue Her fresh and glowing pudendum Her unzipped labia * Oshima's film, Empire Of Passion |
Artist's Bio: I was born in Liverpool, England in 1955 and brought up in a mining village in South Yorkshire. I left school at fifteen and did several jobs before training as a coal mine mechanic. After finishing my apprenticeship I went to Europe where I traveled around and spent several years doing 1,001 dead end jobs, all involved menial tasks and were totally pointless but for their education in the glorious absurdity of life. I studied fine arts at the Rotterdam Academie Voor Beeldende Kunst and Sheffield City Polytechnic (Now Sheffield Hallam University). Since then I have worked for the Probation Service where I taught art to offenders and in tertiary education which was similar to working with offenders, with added hard labour. It has always seemed absurd to me to approach life rationally when social interaction is so irrational. A view which has been reinforced by having spent much of my working life listening to the preposterous logic of social workers and education professionals, who spout nonsensical theories while refusing to believe their own eyes as their theories collapse around them. An experience that has influenced my artwork. Artist's Statement There is a theory that I find compelling and that is, cavemen like children drew such vivid imagery because they lacked sophisticated language. The act of depicting their world was a way of internalizing and experiencing it. We however, exist in a culture of sophisticated verbal language and cannot escape it. When I was studying art in Sheffield and Rotterdam, the lecturers would encourage the students to create art intuitively and then ask the students to verbally explain the work or at least explain why a particular piece of art worked or failed. Language and imagery was linked. Again, should we go to an art gallery, we understand the art on display, not because we intuitively understand the visual language but because we have learnt the theories that underpin the art through language, whether that be through formal education or absorbing the information through a cultural grapevine. Again, verbal language and visual language are inextricably linked. For a long time I endeavoured to contrive to separate visual and verbal language, thinking as a good modernist, that the visual exists on its own terms. Picasso was about creating imagery intuitively, yet we had to learn through written language his theories behind this. It is quite ironic that Picasso was one of the artists that popularized collage and written words being incorporated into a visual image. The linkage between the verbal and the visual was there yet again. Where once I saw this linkage of the two forms of language as problematic to my visual work, I am now at ease with it. I have always written poetry, though only recently had the confidence to write it for public consumption. This poetry has always informed my visual work and my visual work, my poetry. I often find myself tackling the same subject matter through the two mediums simultaneously but I’m always conscious that at the same time one should not be subordinate to the other. I am careful that the visual shouldn’t illustrate the written and the written shouldn’t explain the visual, they are created in parallel. Both art forms being primarily concerned with imagery whether through line or words so there is inevitably an intuitive and an intellectual link. Why deny it? My series of work about Yukiko, of which some are here published on Mannequin Envy are created in such a way. Being posted together, it might appear that the prints were made to illustrate the poetry but this is not the case. The Yukiko prints were made independently and to stand on their own, though informed by the same experience as the Yukiko poems. They were created with the purely visual in mind. To me, the prints cover parts of the experience that can’t be covered by written language and vice versa. I do not have a need to create work on a particular subject matter in both art forms. It is that I am usually so consumed by a particular subject matter that I find myself thinking about it both visually and verbally. My ideas in one form of language bounce and ricochet off the other but the visual remains purely visual and the written, written. I have found that being concerned with poetry and language has affected my visual art in ways that being a purely visual artist wouldn’t. Paint and clay etcetera, is very therapeutic when dealing with it purely as a medium, process is the main consideration. A purely visual artist might and some have, accused me of illustration of which I strongly dispute. I do concede however, that being concerned with language does take my visual work in directions that a lack of concern about language wouldn’t. This acknowledgement by me has led me to looking into ways of combining the two art forms into a homogenous whole, where each element is dependent on they other, rather like the cogs and springs in clockwork become a complete and working mechanism. The work I am currently working on is called Philosophie Absurde, which is an attempt to amalgamate visual imagery and language and involves satirical portraits and imagery, poetry and bastardized quotes. It is an attempt to magnify how imagery and language can combine to misinform and corrupt ideas, though to over intellectualize it, is to miss the point, as it is effectively a Dadaist work. More work by Keith Brighouse: http://www.keithbrighouse.co.uk/ |