By Gijs van Tuyl
The Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki (Tokyo, 1940) is, like the American artist Jeff Koons, a great communicator. His thousands of photographs reach a Japanese public which runs into millions; his person, too, has a mass appeal. He publishes in a wide variety of print media: photo-books, serious literary and philosophical journals, porn magazines and SM periodicals, popular calendars and scholarly exhibition catalogues; he exhibits in locations ranging from stations, department stores, cafes, photo galleries, bars, art galleries, noodle shops, museums, bookshops, cultural centres and shopping malls (places where his publications are also on sale). His work can furthermore be seen in what are known as “Arakinema” slide shows, on video cassettes and CD-ROMS. All this makes him known to a large and motley public, a circumstance to excite the envy of a Kunstverein or Kunstmuseum – ours too – in view of their strenuous efforts to mediate contemporary art, to strike a responsive chord in people in a desire to narrow the gulf between art and the public.
Araki always gears his subject-matter to the context in which he is operating no hardcore in a cultural publication, no cityscapes in a porn mag. He has had more than eighty one man shows to date, and has published more than a hundred photo-books, not to mention his countless contributions to dozens of journals, each of which employs special staff whose sole task is to cover Araki. Araki photographs in a frenzy, in a race against time, as if every day might be his last. The many single photos in circulation are never published in edition, as is the case with photographers who operate strategically, and prints are only made on order, as is the case with this exhibition, Tokyo Novelle.
Araki the man is likewise a phenomenon- The intensity of his life and work attests to a vitality so fierce that one is involuntarily reminded of death. the reverse of life, the shadow cast by a bright light. A small man – lithe and limber, his round, balding head crowned by two tufts of hair on either side and accentuated by round-rimmed spectacles above a thin moustache -, his combined spiritual and physical impact suggest a synthesis of samurai and monk. Not without pride, he once related that his father, a cobbler who died in 1967, resembled Emperor Hirohito. On location in Hakone, a mountain resort near Mount Fuji (in a ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn with tatami mats and a hot tub against a background of rocks), wearing a shirt and jeans held up by braces, he is constantly in motion, darting around, chattering non-stop to his model, directing, praising, pressing the bution as if pulling a trigger, all the time sweating profusely. When he is taking pictures it is as if he is performing a ritual dance with the model, engaging in a passionate duel, In a trance.
On his nocturnal excursions around Tokyo, preferably in the dynamic entertainment district of Shinjuku with its teeming crowds, or in Roppongi, the in-place for the young, he is again perpetually on the move, recalling the great Japanese woodcut artist Hokusai (1760-1849), who reportedly had more than ninety dwellings, In an entourage of two faithful assistants who have been working with him for more than twenty years now, a manager and a croup of admirers, the scene shifts from restaurant to bar and thence to music club. Araki is invariably the cynosure. dominating the conversation with wisecracks, quips and pranks, constantly staging and directing his surroundings, everybody photographing everybody else in an orgy of observation. In this kind of company he is like a medium whose extraordinary powers, drawn from the knowledge of the secret of life and death, intensify the experience and consciousness of those present. Spellbound by his libidinous world, they break down the borders that separate them from one another and from things, their perception is heightened; it’s like looking at a painting with a clairvoyant painter. In the street girls address and embrace Araki. His nightlife races on at the breakneck speed of his working day, coruscating like the neon advertisements of the entertainment centre Kabukicho in Shinjuku. Heading a Karaoke, he will sing to the accompaniment of a jukebox, even enkas, sentimental Japanese songs. Blue-suited executives who join in are given autographs. Araki enjoys the popularity of a media star, because he, too, is the medium.
His popularity is also linked with his notion of photography, which he does not relegate to the domain of high culture, seeing it instead as folk art in the true sense of the term, i.e. as part of what is perhaps a lower popular culture. That is why photographs have something to say to the man in the street, because they show a personal slice of life which couples the banal and sublime instead of making a distinction between them, as in the west. Realistic. sentimental, erotic, humorous, emotional and at times obscene, in keeping with the nature of folk art, and above all perfectly clear and totally communicative. The grotesquely trussed-up female nudes – Araki sees parallels here with the calligraphic caprices of Japanese script – cause his ratings to soar even higher.
Araki is fascinated by cinema – he started off as a filmer, was influenced by film at first, made a few films – and takes pictures as such a speed that the rapid succession of shots reminds you of films. However, another time bound art supplies an even more appropriate metaphor for Araki’s notions of photography, although not ostensibly It is narrative literature – In his youth he wrote essays and short stories, and he sometimes accompanies his work with literary texts. He is also extremely well-read in modem Japanese literature and possesses a literary sensitivity and talent which are expressed in his constant linguistic games, from which emerge all kinds of new words, often puns with humorous and erotic innuendo. 223 “Arakeywords” have apparently been recorded and are scheduled for publication in a lexicon shortly (6). Some of his photo-books have ambiguous titles too: Photo-Novel, A Senti-Roman of 1981, for example, “roman” meaning a soft porn film in Japanese and novel in French; the book, then, is really a soft porn photo-novel.
Araki’s fundamental idea is that photography is an “I-Novel”. In Japanese literature – in European literature too, from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to Nabokov’s Lolita, the narrator tells his story in the first person, partly to lend verisimilitude to the fiction by making it seem as though everything is experienced by the “I”, and by describing the outside world from the inside. Authors like Nobel prize winner Yasunari Kawabata, Junichiro Tanizaki and Kenzabur often resort to this literary form, sometimes even writing fictive diaries. Araki first employed it in 1971, when he privately published Sentimental Journey in a limited edition. It is a photographic report of the honeymoon trip he took with his wife Yoko. With its snapshots of typical scenes from their life, it is more like a private album than a traditional photo-book. The short accompanying text, appropriately couched in the subjective form of a letter, holds the key to Araki’s photographic Oeuvre. Adopting a stance against fashion photography, his source of income in those days, he opts for a personal, subjective form of photography: “Anyway, what’s happened is that my debut as a photographer coincides with the beginning of my own I-Novel, and together they are an act of love. I’ll always be writing this I-Novel. 1 believe the I- Novel is very close to photography.” The camera’s role in all this is comparable to that of the fictive narrator. Araki’s custom of working with several cameras at once suggests that there are several narrators. several “I”-s telling the story, just as Araki himself shows different faces all the time, constantly changing the angle and pose during the dialogue with his subjects. The evanescent game of intersubjectivity in which he communicates with his models and reacts to Tokyo, makes the “I” in the photographic I-Novel into a person of many facets.
Araki’s aversion to the shallow, sham and mendacious character of fashion photography fired him with the idea of photographic truth. At first he copied reality like a machine, and although this retained a function in his work, the procedure did not provide enough scope for conversations with his models, for personal emotions. Nor do the factuality of photographic reportages or the ostensible objectivity of documentary photography reveal photographic truth. Kawabata is said to have employed a subjective form of realism in his novels that resulted in a prosaic fiction which, being based on authentic feeling, is more plausible than reality. By that token it might be said of Araki that his autobiographical and subjective approach to photography yields more lifelike pictures. He has often presented his photographs in the form of diaries, like Tokyo Diary: 1981-1995, published in 1987(!) or the journal intime published this year for his exhibition at the Fondation Cartier pour I’Art Contemporain in Paris- Sometimes spurious dates underline the fictive character of the photographs – a facetious April 1 for instance, or August 6 and 9, when atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or August 15, the day on which World War Two ended for the Japanese. The dates in the title of Tokyo Diary are also out of real time, an attempt to cheat truth.
As a means of questioning truth and reality content, Araki frequently calls his works pseudo-diaries or pseudo-reportages. He also draws on his own life, though: in 1990 he photographed his dying wife and exhibited and published the pictures, shocking some people. A similar merciless urge to unveil the truth is the mainspring of Tanizaki’s short novel The Key. Here the fictive diaries of an elderly professor and his young wife are woven into a single story in which the couple reveal their innermost selves, describing their sensations, longings and fears, their sadomasochistic relationship, in the knowledge that each has a key to the other’s privacy and is furtively reading and enjoying it. A student whom the professor has forced into the role of co-lover gives him a polaroid camera with which he photographs his drunken wife asleep after making love. The sad tale ends with the professor’s tragic death. This is a double I-novel with a photographic denouement and near-pornographic scenes which place the reader in a voyeur’s position.
The setting for virtually all Araki’s photographs and hence all his photographic observations, emotions, obsessions, experiences, dreams, intimacies, narratives, obscenities and humoresques, bathed in a dark-grey melancholy light, is the megapolis of Tokyo, which he rarely leaves. Although many photographers in the west since Atget have adopted as their principal theme the city they live and Work in, Araki’s chief exemplar in ihat connection is the eighty-two year-old Kineo Kuwabara. Here, too, Araki shows himself to be a record breaker, having already published more than twenty books on the Tokyo theme: Tokyo (1973), Tokyo Autumn (1984), Tokyo Story (1989) and Tokyo Love (1994), to name but a few The books of Tokyo views are more epic in tone than the diaries, even though Araki’s subjective vision is coloured, or rather overcast, by a dark haze of nostalgia.
Araki’s cityscapes form a penetrating picture of Tokyo: of building and demolition at a terrific speed, of skyscrapers and wooden houses, of decay and pollution, of new constructions and modern ruins, of people’s daily doings, of concrete monsters and wasteland, of draglines in building excavations, a tangle of power and telephone lines in the sky. In Araki’s eyes Tokyo is a gigantic organism, ever-changing, living and dying. Although it is a megapolis, the scene Araki often presents is one of desolation, somewhat like an archeological excavation site but more like a science-fiction planet really, its streets both impenetrable and labyrinthine, peopled by lonely individuals with no regional or local tics- The city is dramatically scarred by history: in 1923 an earthquake destroyed most of the old Edo of the Meiji period, and in 1945 Tokyo was bombed to smithereens. Postwar reconstruction first took the form of low-rise buildings, followed by the skyscrapers of the booming seventies and eighties.
In compiling Tokyo Novelle, the exhibition and this book, I have tried to present the kaleidoscopic microcosm and macrocosm of Tokyo in all its different facets, the way Araki sees and photographs it. From more than a thousand black-and-white photographs, 199 have been selected and enlarged. The total picture is of Tokyo as a panorama with details in the foreground and the skyline in the background. The invisible centre is Araki’s apartment, with photographs of the balcony, of dead lizards dragged in by his beloved cat Chiro, of still lifes with withered Rowers, of objects silhouetted against the sky, of high, cloudy skies. And then there are city and street views photographed this year with a big camera: a business centre, a cemetery, perspective views of streets, city squares photographed from the side, people in the streets, soft-drink vending machines and more curious objects. On a more private, intimate level there are the girls – portrayed, naked and trussed-up in various positions. But here private and public are -so closely intertwined that they form a synthesis, endowing this picture of the city, presented in the public domain of the book or museum, with a depth which distantly recalls James Joyce’s portrayal of Dublin in all its layers, from mundane occurrences to sadomasochistic nightmares- just as Joyce ran the gamut of literary devices, Araki employs different photographic styles, throwing in the occasional reminiscence of such great names of this century as Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank and Man Ray.
The themes of Tokyo, vital or moribund, and the nude, bound or unbound, are the two leitmotifs of Araki’s work. They are inseparably linked, because of their organic connection, their interaction, even though the one seems to possess the communicative quality of a chronicle and the other the intimacy of love and sexuality Their very inseparability generates a field of tension which charges the relationship between the social and the individual so powerfully that the sparks fly. It is what prompted the writer Nobuhiko Kobayashi to encourage Araki to give Tokyo the same. photographic treatment as his nude models, with a view to creating a new vision of the city. In their joint publication Tokyo: Private Opinions on a Flourishing Document (1984), this theme is elaborated in an autobiographical text by Kobayashi. Araki is intensely aware of the city’s female character, and in interviews has spoken of the erotic allure of the metamorphoses of Tokyo, which like a human body is perishing and decaying.
Tokyo is the photo-model and the nude is Tokyo. The wheel has come full circle. Araki endeavours to communicate passionately with both. The secret of his photography lies mainly in his relationship to his models, whom he treats the way a film director would, giving instructions, provoking reactions. But he also lets them do their own thing. The one’s poses, gestures and expressions change, reacting to the other’s, as in a dialogue, Different cameras have different effects: a model is more relaxed in front of an instamatic, more self-assured with a miniature camera, and really poses for the big camera on a tripod- Araki swaps cameras all the time. as if choosing a different brush for different calligraphic characters instead of using a typewriter or computer Photography is a kind of handwriting, enabling the photographer to give women individuality and expression, to free them from the rigid patterns of a life which offers few prospects for the future other than travelling, shopping, watching TV and marriage. A session with Araki is a special event in a woman’s life, with a concrete souvenir in the form of a photograph to boot, For a few hours a woman forgets her humdrum existence; she is a star.
Araki has photographed nudes, women in bathing suits, schoolgirls and in the early days, as a deliberate provocation, vaginas. The Japanese photo magazine deja-vu interviewed seven young female editors who work for Araki and sometimes even figure in his photographs because, as one of them said, while they may not possess the requisite knowledge, they do have the necessary energy and passion and willingness to take risks. Another reported that although Araki had the reputation of a pornographer in the seventies and eighties, nowadays girls were queuing tip to have him take their picture. The shooting is characterized as a fictive act of adultery, a false or flash love affair enjoyed because it is a game situation. “Love and happiness are so transient in real life. But moments of happiness and love are fixed forever in Araki’s photos.” Feelings of shame or guilt are irrelevant, even in the bondage scenes, participation in which is always voluntary it may be taboo in the West, they say, but not in Japan, something which oddly enough does not seem to apply to pubic hair: “The photos are done by mutual agreement between Araki and the women. He has no disdain for women.” He observes with the eye of an artist, and simply wants to see what women look like when they are tied up. At a recent exhibition of his work girls sat proudly under their nude photos in which they expose something of their personality. Nowadays they come to Araki with their own ideas about how they wait to be photographed and how they would like to be tied to the bed.
Bondage is a form of the intimate relationship between the. photographer and the model. The subject is not sexuality but the love and eroticism which are associated with death and life. Actually, this kind of work by Araki derives from the folk culture of the Edo period, when there was nothing mysterious about sexuality and jokes were made about it, as in the shunga or “spring-time pictures” with erotic subject-matter. Even the great Hokusai made his contribution to the genre. His anonymously published albums Young Pines and Picture Album of Couples contain lifelike representations of coitus in all sorts of variants. Araki originally came from the Shitamachi district, Tokyo’s Lower City. Its denizens, the Edokkos, seem to be the cultural descendants of the Edo period (1613-1868), whose manners and attitude to sex were notoriously free and easy. Prints and paintings from the Meiji period (1868-1914) actually show bondage and women hanging in ropes. as an erotic game.
In Araki’s case a deeper meaning can be assigned to the phenomenon of bondage. In the context of photography it has a double meaning- Tying up the body and limbs paralyses life, as it Were – a metaphor, really, for the frozen moment, arrested time, captured in a photograph. By that token, shooting a bondage is a double homicide, because the subject is first tied up with ropes and then captured on film. But there is no struggle, because Araki works with great intuition and because the subjects offer themselves voluntarily: “I’ve the great luck that my victims walk into the trap without, so to speak, me doing anything. They come to me and want to be murdered. Yes, I’m a genius, but then again I’m merely an assistant in the fulfillment of destiny”. To Araki, a bound woman is not an object or a prop for a decorative photo. Physical bondage is not what it’s all about, but its psychological aspect: fettering the female heart. Communication is paramount. the space and time between Araki and his model being expressed in the photo- There is also that special aura, which the camera traces like a seismograph. The erotic moment in all this is that the model becomes pail of the photograph and vice versa. Eroticism is one of many ways of describing the soul.
As in the Ukiyo-e, the “floating world” pictures of the Edo period, photography captures the essence of the everyday floating world. But captured images of moving, flowing, floating, meeting and evanescent reality are inevitably out-paced. The photographer always lags behind the visual facts. That is why Araki works and produces in such a frenzy To him, life and photography are so intimately bonded that they are at loggerheads, like life and death. Life is sucked out of the subject, killing it, “freezing” it. The photographer plays the role of a parasite. Paradoxically, though, this immortalizes the moment every time, rendering it supreme. “It can be said that this cosmic second uses the photographer to dismantle the notion of time. The second becomes endless – a marvelous contradiction”. Arresting the flow of time for that fraction of a second in order to preserve the moment supreme, to prolong it, is simultaneously the murder of life and the conquest of death, Photography is basically always erotic because a state of perpetual duration, almost like nirvana, a state of satisfaction, transcends the ephemerality of daily life Eros strives for eternal bliss and is therefore at loggerheads with time and reality. Memory in the form of a photograph has the effect of liberation from Thanatos. Photography, then. has a liberating effect.
The association of photography with death runs through Araki’s development like a black thread. Since the death of his beloved wife Yoko in 1990 the connection has become even more compelling- Taking pictures of the dead, of his father and mother for example, has given him a more acute insight into the intrinsic nature of photography. “After Yoko’s death, I didn’t want to photograph anything but life – honestly. Yet every time I pressed the button, I ended up close to death, because to photograph is to stop time”. For a time after her death he photographed nothing but clouds.
Gijs van Tuyl
(Translated from the Dutch by Ruth Koenig)
ASX CHANNEL: Nobuyoshi Araki
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(© Gijs Van Tuyl, 1997. All rights reserved. All images © copyright the photographer and/or publisher)
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