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Identity. In her art work, Anita Jensen looks into Japanese culture as an
object of the inquisitive Western “I”, but also as a subject in its
own right, entangled – like we are – in a frantic enterprise to fill
the world with order, endow it with meaning, and organize it hierarchically.
For her, thus, Japan stands for the perennial territory traversed
by Western artists in their journeys of self-discovery and enlightenment,
but it also comes out as an ancient culture in a process of intense
self-formation, forging new identities in contact with Western values
and technologies.
Otherness. The eyes of the Other unsettle when they suddenly turn, come close,
focus on the viewer outside the picture, and return the look. There
lie the twilight zones of Self, known and unknown – in the smooth
oval shape of an oriental woman’s eyes arresting, filling with longing
and anxiety. One sees the apparition of one’s deepest fears, of otherness
within, the inscrutability of one’s desire to let go, surrender to
chaos, give up all control, and yield to the deadly stranger handing
out pearls and charms. The desire to see – and to be seen – splits
the body, tearing its members asunder and leaving it in pieces. How
does it feel to be dissected by the omnipotent eye of the foreigner?
Is it to be injured, or perhaps lured? What kind of pains and pleasures
are hidden behind the Gaze, moving from point to point without respite
until everything from finger tip to toe, from north to south and
east to west is named, fixed and still, graven on paper?
Gold abounded in Jensen’s earlier works springing from her late 1990s’
travels to Japan. The color of gold signifies hunger. The essence
of gold is barbarian; civilizations feed on it. Dismantled from
modernist mythologies, Western art has emerged as a material practice
intimately wedded with European power politics in other continents.
Dreams of unimaginable treasures of gold and power egged white adventurers
on to penetrate all corners of the globe. The secrets of earth
and sea were laid bare and native inhabitants lost their souls onto
the pages of illustrated chronicles printed in Europe for the European
audience.
Then, following the same trails, came the priests, scientists,
and – artists, equipped with an increasingly sophisticated
armory of imaging technologies. That is only one part of the story,
though, since the practice of representation marked not only
the object but also the subject, locking them into each other
and making them forever gyrate inside the system of photographic
meaning. The Orient and Occident were born as twins and polar
opposites to each other.
The colonial ghosts of the Camera haunt Anita Jensen’s prints. Both of her techniques, printing and photography,
carry the burden of being the means by which Europeans endeavored
to gain control over other people. Stone Garden, the series of bipartite photographs,
shows vintage images of Japanese gardeners and carriers taken
by the French biologist and traveler Hugues Kraft in the
late 19th century.
Below these exquisite historical documents we find some photographs
of Finnish rocks, singled out, plain and recognizable like
the Moose Head of Huittinen. Juxtaposing the notions of Finnishness
as natural, a-historical, and the Orient as conspicuously
regulated by arcane traditions, cultural codes, and hierarchies,
the series challenges both constructions.
While we, as spectators, can perhaps identify with the gaze
of the photographer zooming in on hardy Japanese workers
who pose for the camera, our position becomes severely compromised
in front of the image depicting Hugues Kraft himself. On
the one hand, reclining on a litter carried between two half-naked
natives, Kraft appears as the master symbol of white privilege;
on the other hand, the entire composition of the image makes
him look like prey carried home by proud hunters. Displaced
from his native environment like the sea shell captured on
film, he, too, becomes an object of voyeuristic pleasure,
uneasily vacillating between “us” and “them.”
Yet, what slips
outside of the representational conventions perforates the boundaries
of a coherent self. There is some absolute value in this encounter
with difference and absence of mutual understanding, as Jensen’s
images seem to insist. For perhaps the only universal human attribute
is the universal longing for meaning, or hunger for meaning, like the
hunger for gold. That’s why the Other becomes neutralized over and
over again, turned into a fetish that hides that which
is lacking in oneself. In an uneasy equilibrium, both the colonized
and the colonizer can inhabit the same body.
Black background sets off the perfect face of a cinematic idol, which stands
for the altar of the spectator’s narcissistic identification
as well as an offering in itself. In unison with classical Euro-American
cinema, mid-20th-century Japanese films and
TV-shows engaged the spectator to identify with the figure
in the image whose ideological meaning was organized
through the representation of ‘Woman,’ that is, the discourse
of essentialized femininity. The Japanese actress Tamao
Nakamura’s elegant fan photographs (reproduced as part
of the series Nature
in the Eye of the Beholder) thus evoke coded cultural
and social structures, Western and Japanese similarly,
which produce gendered meanings in visual pleasure emanating
from the love affair between the camera and the ideal
self. This love affair is embodied by a movie star.
Jensen’s photopolymer gravures command full attention to
the sensitivity of the actress’s face so as to displace
simple sexual objectification. Stereotypical ideas about
Japanese women associated with the geisha, a high-class professional entertainer,
and the musume,
a child-like mistress adorable for her innocence and
self-abnegation, become moot as a multiplicity of social
classes, gender configurations, and female identities
take shape through the actress’s body. Regardless of
how carefully the spectator studies each of her gestures,
though, the meanings of these acts linger in the air,
eschewing a Hollywood-like resolution. Thereby the direction
and significance of her desire remains obscure, devoid
of the fixed co-ordinates that locate the white woman
in the “man-made” scheme of nature. This ambiguity perhaps
explains why in Western narratives an oriental female
has frequently been constructed as a mystery,
As a sinister
counterpart to the images of the Japanese actress,
we find natural forms reduced to fine art and Darwinist
anatomy in the lithographic drawings by Ernst Haeckel,
a 19th-century
scientist and explorer, whose obsession with transforming
organic life into grotesque ornaments verges on geometry
as well as pornography. Equally reified, women and
nature seem to fall into the same category of seductive
and dangerous “other.” But the woman’s face and the ornament of nature,
posed next to each other, also conjure up other, very
different pictorial traditions, namely European modernism
and the Japanese erotic woodcut shunga.
Extremely popular in the 18th century, the
unabashed shunga prints celebrated sexuality as
a powerful life force symbolized by an exaggerated
visualization of both male and female genitals. When shunga images
were imported to the Victorian era Europe, their
meaning changed from mass-produced commercial entertainment
to exotic pornographic art, secretly collected by
writers and artists who interpreted them in the context
of artistic and moral values of their own time period.
Under the pressure of Western influence, Japan eventually
acquiesced to prohibit shunga, and the representation of sexuality
assumed strictly metaphorical forms akin to early
modernist paintings in which exotic fruit and flowers
often marked genitalia.
In the series Casting by Nature, the opposition
of cultural construction and reified nature falls
irrevocably through as we are seduced into becoming
devotees of theatrical artifice animated by cross-dressing.
“Only a man can be a perfect woman,” a line from
David Cronenberg’s film M.
Butterfly, turns into its polar opposite when
we see a beautiful Takarazuka-like actress in her captain’s uniform, sternly
looking into the distance. Contrary to Kabuki, in Takarazuka-theater both female roles
(musumeyaku) and male roles (otokoyaku) are played by women. Otokoyaku actresses, in particular, are
fanatically supported by female fans, whose pleasures
of looking do not evidently reflect the desires and
needs of heterosexual masculinity. In the strictly
gendered, male-dominated Japanese society, Takarazuka makes space for female subjectivity
and spectatorship, creating something akin to the
“female gaze” debated in feminist film theory.
By way of androgynous fantasy, the female
impersonator of a male protagonist allows the woman spectator
to take the position of power and strength denied her in traditional Kabuki, for example, which relies on
a highly caricatured version of femininity. The glossy photographic
finish of Jensen’s images, nevertheless, seems to distract facile
interpretations based only on sexual difference. Although fetishism,
voyeurism, and narcissistic identification quite obviously also
characterize these images, the type of pleasures they induce constitutes
an active, inquisitive, self-generating
female desire, not reducible to prefabricated notions of same
sex romance or a desire to simply play the object of someone else’s
desire.
The same blackness from which the female idols appear also
gives birth to a series of sea shells, perfectly shaped and symmetrical
in their liquid beauty. The sea shells reach out and spiral like
galaxies, alive and dead at the same time, or curl up around the
hidden interior reminiscent of a woman’s body, inviting and terrifying.
These clichéd associations reveal exactly what they are to conceal:
there are no mysteries in nature. The mystery is in the eye of the
beholder, inside the pulsating darkness where imaginary species breed,
pushing out teeth, lips, ears and scaled skin, and reproduce narratives
of human nature, always gendered and culturally specific.
Red is the color of hidden pleasures, carnality, and transgression. Red blood of recognition saturates
the battle field of knowledge and power, sexual par excellence and circumscribed by moral
configurations. On the stage where obscene acts are played out, the
artist is a liminal creature, like the Japanese actress, both adored
and defiled for her extraordinary skill of mediating between here
and hereafter. She is adored as an embodiment of Amaterasu, the life-giving
goddess of the red sun, and reviled as an immoral spectacle, a human
mine churning out raw material for the reconstruction of good and
evil.
The series Collector Unknown calls
forth and deconstructs the ultimate idiom of desire, embedded
in the politics of collecting and exhibiting non-Western objects.
Rather than expressing the history of their own formation, a disparate
array of artifacts is appropriated to articulate the imaginary collector’s
world view and possessions. Framed in red, some thinly glad Victorian
models lounge next to sea shells, frayed Chinese-Japanese dictionaries,
African nose rings (found at the Mission flea market), and other
curio that lampoon the serious business of displaying cultural
heritage.
Originating in a book called EVA, European Classic Nude (published
in Japan in 1998), these erotic photographs seem to testify that
the Japanese have indeed learned to perceive women’s bodies through
Western eyes – titillating, immoral, and vain. Obscenity is one
way to know the origin and the end of the evolutionary narrative
that projects the forbidden area of the self onto otherness. Potential
agents of disarray, the women’s bodies threaten to overwhelm
and spill out of control, unless carefully organized in front of the
camera. Thus modeled, they become part of nature morte, dead nature, together with
fish skin, false teeth, and all other things that waver uneasily
between human and non-human.
If collecting culture
cannot guarantee wholeness, continuity, and meaning, as implied
in Jensen’s works, then where do we stand in the encounter with the
eyes of the Other? Jensen, in reflecting upon the historical
underpinnings of her own art practice, does not offer a shortcut around
the fissures and contradictions of representing otherness. Instead,
her way to redress the problem seems to intertwine two registers –
the image and the narrative – in order to challenge the power of the
artist’s gaze in constructing illusions of truth. A beautiful example
of this would be one of her earlier works, Kimono for Daddy (2000), which contained
her own family story through her father’s photograph embedded
inside a massive painting. Colored in gold, black and red, the work
as a whole connoted the T-shape of a fanned out kimono,
recalling the body of a Japanese woman as well as the body of
the artist herself.
Asta Kuusinen
Yukako Uemura
Literature
Bloom, Lisa, ed. With Other
Eyes: Looking at Race and Gender in Visual Culture. Minneapolis
and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Clifford, James. The
Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature,
and Art. London and
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Konttinen, Annamari and Seija Jalagin, eds. Japanilainen
nainen kuvissa ja kuvien takana. Tampere: Suomen Japanin Instituutti, Vastapaino, 2004.
de Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory,
Film, and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
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