Excerpt from a text by Germano Celant, “Araki – Tokyomania,” Edition Mennour, Paris, 2000, pp. 4-5.
Araki’s story is that of a man living in a world-the Japan of the 1960s where the sexual is concealed and goes unmentioned. To free himself from that negation and complex, he began to shoot photographs that spill over from that world, spitting out as it were its dark nocturnal atmosphere. He relied on his camera alone to capture that darkness and repression, which became his angel and his demon.
He didn’t sublimate them, but revealed them to themselves. He shows the shame and the misshapen, the ugly and the sublime, the vulgar and the elegant in a monolog-expression of pleasure that is “in him” as much as it is of the world. His outlook is neutral and merely reveals the phenomenon of the body, female and occasionally male, and its incomparable properties of beauty and sensual “materiality,” freed from any temporal or spatial dimension, action, or narrative. He offers us a being in itself, at its zero degree of passive or active sexual gesturality, which is presented as both an angelic and a demonic creature.
Each lives in a perfect and absolute silence, which renders its solitude desperate and ironic, for it is entrusted with a simple object, a feather or a shoe, a kimono or a cigarette, and seems to jealously guard it as if it were a treasure. These are figures that, albeit voracious, possess nothing for they have only their nudity, imperious, obscene, impertinent, and cruel, until that last vestige of humanity is snuffed out and they live forevermore an existence condemned to inauthenticity and passivity in which they appear like slaves and servants, pinned down and linked to the demented laws of the possessive, domineering desire that engulfs them and spits them out, always the same.
And although continuous repetition pulls them into the void of complete inexistence, they nevertheless exist because they serve to maintain photographic communication, which in itself communicates nothing, save perhaps the existence of a photographic language that is ambiguous and feigned: an illusion or image that is abstraction…
Besides the avalanche of erotic subjects, Araki introduces into his work the entire range of possible communication techniques. He uses indifferently slides, posters, color photocopies, film, Polaroid, color and black-and-white photographs, large and small formats, to construct his erotic mosaics of solitude, which he displays on walls and ceilings or spreads out over the floor in museums and galleries. The idea is to record a world of silent bodies, moving in an icy sensuality where immaculate and obscene pleasures of sex and politics, day to day or novel, create a choreography of the senses in which the viewer is invited to take part as an active or passive…
ASX CHANNEL: NOBUYOSHI ARAKI
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