Essay
Clitoral Study Essay
MA in F ART
Chelsea C o’ A’n’D
Shintaro Yamakawa
for my Mom and Dad
Premise
I have been writing papers in a very dreamy way for the past two years. It is partly due to my lack of decision making and of commitment to dig deeper into more methodical way. And it is, to a degree, for self-indulgence and arrogance; only thing I was doing was mystifying and enigmatizing my writings for avoiding inevitable criticism. However, if I forgo my style of writing at this moment, then, I feel like leaving my mission unfinished and not being able to explain fully about my work. I have to take into account about the nature of how I think, how I make Art, and my admiration of the writings of Nietzsche;
“For the moment that Nietzsche begins to write about the mythically inspired Greeks he rejects the language of concept and logic in favour of a vocabulary of libidinal drives and trans-individual affects”[1]–“[A]rtistic energies [that] burst forth from nature itself without the mediation of the human artist”[2]
For this reason, I have decided to continue writing in the fantastical way, and some parts of this paper are disturbingly poetic for some readers. Nevertheless, I try to compose this paper in systematically poetic or poetically systematic way to meat the learning outcome of this course. Also, I will not present any pictorial figures in this essay for not disrupting the flow of poetic streams.
Foreplay
For the course of this year’s MA studio practice, I have tried be as flexible as possible to accept whatever the area of topics that I was interested in, and my art making practice was drifted around in different areas. But I was mainly focused on an idea surrounding by ecstasy in a relation to aggression, anger, cynic, and laughing. I have been researching about past artists who have dealt with in this topic, and a book, Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, was always on top of a stuck of books on my desk. At the beginning of the year, I collected protesters’ placard in London, un-politicized them, and made them into objects of aesthetics. Then I made a fake nail bomb that has no function other than being passively looked at; my aim was to make objects that trigger audience deep contemplation on Death and, ultimately, to cerebrate and appreciate Life and well-being of the Body: an object to automatically trigger audience Zen Buddhist meditation.
In this paper, I will write about a work that I exhibited in the final MA show in the mid September, 2008, the jackhammer chandelier, Arsequake–my idea and intension was best manifested in this piece. I conducted my research particularly on this jackhammer piece as a practice based research.
Research Question
What effect does the triggered jackhammer, Arsequake, have on viewers in the setting of confined exhibition space? Why do people react in certain manners? Does the reading of the work changes if the machine is not set off? Why is this art work with jackhammer–the externalization of aggression and anger– relevant in the contemporary art setting?
Forecast
At the first section of the paper, I will be describing about the experiment for the case study that I carried out during the MA show. I will analyze the information: both manifest and latent effects. I am also talk about the historical and contemporary background about the work. Then it is followed by a deductive textual research in answering the questions and related topics. To explain this, I will be looking at the fear and horror in films and of natural disaster and, Ecstasy, and Nietzschean dichotomy of Apollonian and Dionysian.
Experiment
The experiment was taken place during the MA SHOW at Chelsea College of Art and Design, starting from 18th of September 2008 and ending on 22nd of the same month. My exhibition place was at the entrance room of D-block, the vaginal of the long stretched building, running north and south. The jackhammer chandelier, Arsequake, was hung from the ceiling. The area surrounding the object, located at the left side of the room from the vaginal (“the elongation of the door way or other opening so as to extend the act of entry”[3]), was securely closed off by low fences for the health and safety reason. The power plug of the machine was connected to a remote controllable on-off switch plug, so that viewer would not know how and when the machine is activated.
I sneakily separated the visitors into two groups, half-and-half: the treatment, randomly selected visitors to whom I triggered the machine, and the control, those whom the test is not applied. The treatment group received 0.5 to 5 second activation for once or twice during their each visits. There will be a collection of empirical data produced by subjective observation; there will be no interview taken place so that the visitors’ experiences with the work are not ruined.
Result
There was a distinctively different reactions observed between the two groups. Although the setting was not the ideal condition to conduct the research. Some visitors were looking to see textile design students’ works, and because it was located at the entrance area, there were a lot of traffic at certain times; it was hard to tell whether they were there to see art works or just to look for a toilet or the textile design.
I was interested in to find out about the physical reactions that visitors pertained in the space. (“Reaction: the phenomenon that transfers energy from one body to another, such as violence, passion, horror…. The city is the summary of multiple action and reaction.”[4]) Reactions are separated into three types: failing to recognize the presence of the machine, noticing but showing no apparent reaction, reacting.
When the machine was set off, almost all the time, people looked up and noticed about the presence of the machine. About 85 percent of people showed the apparent physical reaction. Among those who reacted, the reactions were varied. At the moment of surprise attack, some showed glimpses of terrified facial expressions, quickly turned their head toward the object (the whole body does not turn as quickly as the head does), discovered the source of the discord. Some screamed; their hands are on their mouths or chests. In some extreme cases, one guy squatted down by a swift dodge to the ground, covered his head with both hand, and dashed out to the outside. Unexpectedly 70 percent of those who reacted laughed immediately after their petrifaction. About 20 percent of the reacted, showed apparent shock and discomfort and left from the room as in escaping from any danger.
On the other hand, for the control group, when the machine was not triggered, about 80 percent of people fail to recognize that even there was the jackhammer attached and hanged from the ceiling. They just gave a quick glance at the light below and proceeded to the next room. Other 20 percent of people looked up and, seemingly, acknowledge the machine, but they did not show any apparent gestures of reactions.
Gustav Metzger in Arsequake
Gustav Metzger came to see the show on Friday the 20th. I put him into the group, the treatment, so I triggered the machine. He showed an obvious sign of discomfort in his face and quickly dashed to the next room. About ten minutes later, he came back to my space. As soon as I recognized him, I activated the work. He again showed the hectic facial expression and walked observably faster than usual men in his age, he slightly bent his upper torso away from the machine, and his arms were up in the air toward the machine, as if he was trying to block the intense sunshine. Still I was excited to see the legendary man walking in my space. My heart beat was going up as he came toward me; an expectation to have a conversation with him; “Yes!” he asked me a question; “Where is a toilet?”
After telling him where the hell the toilet was, I did not see him coming back again.
Analysis
It was clear that when the jackhammer was set off, levels of engagement with viewers, in terms of level of their reaction, was greater than the times which only the object was visually and passively presented. Without the explosive sound and physical movement of the work, the actual work itself did not have a power to make people jump, scare, and laugh. Also the latent effect of the machine, making people laugh, gave the work different dimension of meaning. A machine from a construction site became the object of entertainment like a rollercoaster in an amusement park. A pleasure of being shocked and intimidated will be discussed in the later part of this paper.
Vanity
The traditional image of vanity, skull, mortality, is now the body of the beholder themselves who are experiencing the art work. Beyond the intellectually conceived visual information, the whole phenomenological bodily experience: the coordination of the body with the object and the physical sensation of sound and vibration. Rather than contemplating on an imagery of skull, here, viewers are focusing on the very bodies that are DIRECTLY threatened and violated, feeling the annihilation of the body; the excessive pride and assurance of life in the pleasure of the moment are challenged. At G-spot, dazzled by the fucking machine, the scream in the metallic orgies, livens the banality of the routine lives. At this glimpse, the rapture of stress and the acute flow of adrenalin, triggered by the rapturous sound, were firing throughout the body. Heart rate, blood pressure, stroke volume, level of oxygen and glucose, blood sugar level, immune system, all thunderously go up: the natural defence system protracted[5]. At the next moment of awakening from the dream of becoming “threatened”, in a metamorphosis of the body, they are overwhelmed with the sense of relief, and you thank god for not being ass fucked by “the thing”. With intensified sense of time that running slowly, moment of the feeling, resonating, experiencing the precious twinkle of encounter, there left sheer vanity of the very momentary exposure to the time and their well-being.
The holy shit becomes Ecstashit.
Influences
Dada
Going back to the 1910s and 20s, Dada artists, particularly Picabia and Duchamp, were the first reference to explain about the historical context of Arsequake. Their iconoclastic approach with tastes of dark humour influenced greatly in the making of my work. I had to take into account about their uses of mechanical devices or structures as a motif to criticize their modern way of living and as symbol of which male sexual fantasy was projected toward objective woman. The idea of the machine and the body was conflated to express machismo, and this anthropomorphic images in the paintings were executed in very industrious manner. The “mechanomorphic” approach was used by Picabia “to draw scurrilous sexual parallels”[6] with the machine. “[S]exual act is not consummated, so that we would hardly know whether to classify these as machines of pleasure or of torture.” The metaphor of the machine “is an erotic simile which excludes procreation and states man’s absolute right to pleasure”, and Picabia’s “frustration constitutes the determinant structure of his machines.”[7] I do not share the idea of criticizing Bourgeois ideology of progress and logics with him but this protrusion of sexual fantasy toward machines of the day, in a dream of jacking female body to give absolute pleasure and of getting rapturous satisfaction from the action. It is Arsequake, possibly sodomy, the superb action of the proper fuck.
Minimalism
“Human experience, including perception, is embedded in a corporeal self, that the world is accordingly understood from within a physiological being, and that reality is conditioned by a perceiver who is herself always responsive to unfolding circumstance.”[8]
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
I was interested in Minimalist art works that were influenced by Phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and mainly Robert Morris and Richard Serra’s work. Robert Morris was interested to generate wholeness among different objects in one space and to concern about the bodily relationship between objects, space and viewer. His viewers were “one who is embodied and whose experience exists through time and in real space.”[9] Secondly, on top of the perceiving the physicality of a work, Serra’s work was unhesitatingly vigorous and aggressive on the viewer. In his Tilted Arc, it was massive scale, the cold industrial material, and was sitting in the middle of a public square, cutting the sight and the flow of people’s movement; it was intimidatingly powerful on the bodies of viewers. In Arsequake, my intention was to create the same kind of bodily and sensory relationship between the work and the viewer. The viewer notices the usual circumstance of the situation which the jackhammer was hung high, and they were confronted with uncertainty of the circumstance. As soon as the machine goes off, the sound and the vibration, a vector of the viewer’s mind, bond the spectator with the work as one: bodies, minds, and the object. The visitor’s coordination in the space was disappeared, but only after the awakening from this intoxication the visitors will gain their orientation in the space.
Contemporary
There are two artists who are concentrating on creating the Minimalist like phenomenological sensation on viewers: Carsten Höller and Olafur Eliasson. In his Upside-Down Mushroom, Höller created upside-down giant mushrooms spinning on the ceiling made the whole room look upside-down. In this, he incorporated the idea, what he calls “synchro system”, which are “to induce trance-like states in the viewer” and “a materialized hallucination”, and which the work is “not you and the object; the object and you are you.”[10] He expects the audience’s active participation with the work, and, by that, he creates bewildering experience of disorientation on the viewer of the space, which becomes a dreamlike hallucination. “Like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, he distrusts the understanding of subjectivity in modernity as a fixed and fully formed ego capable of mastering nature.”[11]
In Olafur Eliasson’s work, I was particularly interested in his incorporation of nature, like Robert Smithson’s works, into the exhibition space. On top of inviting phenomenological encounter with the viewer, his works serve as “phenomena-producers”[12] and “imparted a sense of awe and spirituality, a feeling of peace bordering on the religion.”[13] In the Weather Project at Tate Modern, rainbow in diffused mist, and rain like droppings of water, casted with repetitious strobe flashes, there is a contemplative aspect and a slight sense of horror in concerning the beauty and the sublime of the powerful nature. “Eliasson’s instalation connects directly to the synaesthetic experiments with color and sound that took place at the beginning of the twentieth century, in which spiritual transcendence could occur through the action of sound and light vibrations on the body.”[14]
Earthquake
Arsequake is a devise to simulate an earthquake like situation in a gallery like space: conveying and instigating the fear and horror of natural disasters. For an emptinessly short ephemeral of time, flashes of emotions squirting furiously from the hole of the body– confusion, disorientation, dismemberment, uncertainty, shock, and awe—Your Highness!—she said “Oh, my god.” In recent years, some parts of the world experienced tremendous destruction and causalities from catastrophic earthquakes and tsunamis.
Destroying and dismembering of cities and bodies, bringing down the structures, flesh and bones,
A fear of banged down from the above, bliss
The jackhammer,
Gravity against the will to live, the liquidation of the power of individuation.
Woman on top.
Thrown into the chaotic fluidity of molten metal,
Bacterial decomposition, and exposing oneself to the vast stretch of the ecology.
Angry Father above, banging the shit out of the Mother-land’s arse,
Spinning of the generator.
And the city, generated from/on top of the Mother-Earse,
The ultra-slow flights of the tectonic plates, molesting each other.
Scrapped, dissipated, and regenerated.
The force,
Geo-Orgasm.
Construction sites in this city, everywhere, development for the five rings and underground water pipes, setting ready for the up-coming ejaculation.
Constantly digged and filled the hole,
Dislocation of the gallery space, to the very place, where you live, where you walk by.
Over and ever again.
“Certainty (knowing your role and exactly what happens next) often causes insecurity. Uncertainty spells opportunity, and therefore a certain quality of life. Unlike comfort and certainty, pleasures tend to build on a lack of predictability. Shared values are formed as much by the sum of conflicting individual desires as by a sense of collective responsibility.”[15]
In article “Horrality”, Philip Brophy explains about contemporary horror films of 70s and early 80s, which I find similar points in my work. “The gratification of the contemporary Horror [sic] film is based upon tension, fear, anxiety, sadism and masochism—a disposition that is overall both tasteless and morbid. The pleasure of the text is, in fact, getting the shit scared out of you—and loving it; an exchange mediated by adrenalin.”[16] He also talks about trend of the films based on “the destruction of the Body”[17], not so much on the fear of Death. The fact that Arsequake threatens the body but impotently nonlethal.
For countless images of shock overflowing in the media and art world, especially of YBAs, we need something more intriguing than the mere visual information itself; to shock ourselves, to re-writing and to renew our habitual boundary of perception. “Flooded with images of the sort that once used to shock and arouse indignation, we are losing our capacity to react. Compassion, stretched to its limits, is going numb.”[18] This is why the enormous discord can work as one way to engage with the viewer.
Ecstasy
Salt, adrenalin shot, lemon, and Ales in the Wonderland,
Falling down into the abyssal sky,
then asked I; “Why doesn’t orgasm last long?”
Feel the Cocaphony; “FUCK TIBET” transposed onto the exasperatingly euphoric transcendental space travel in the enlarged Su Doku grid.
“Ecstasy goes beyond pleasure…. It is the reduction of known coordinates for perception and space, resulting in a loss of self and reason that is pleasurable or uncanny.”[19]
Those people who escaped from the space during the experiment just could not take the unmediated power of sublime nature or reality with is northing more than omnipresence of suffering; they were directly confronted with “the horror and absurdity of existence”[20] and ear-plugged the wisdom of Silenus.
“Art”, says Nietzsche, “alone can turn these thoughts of repulsion as the horror and absurdity of existence into ideas compatible with life: these are the sublime—the taming of horror through art; and comedy—the artistic release from the repellence of the absurd.”[21]
Experience it
and join the party, Your Ecstashit.
In fucking earthquake, you are shaking along with everything around you. This ubiquitous transcendental force binds with surroundings. Conscious about the body, its boundary: making sure that it is not violated; your body boundary is merged firstly with furniture and people around, then building, city, and finally with the omnipresent earthquake itself which leads to the path toward attaining the spirituality. Now images and architecture, like a drug experience (Ecstasy), melt into “the temporal continuum,” and music (standing tones and repetition of sound) “becomes spatial.”[22] In this very space, you are singing and dancing with the satyr along with its chorus in the Dionysian dithyramb. Calling Spinozan body: “the body is the main locus of knowledge, open to phenomenal occurrences of the world…what affects the body affects the mind.”[23]It is the ecstasy of “self-negation”[24] and of “destroying individuality”: sense of connectedness, empathy, and the power of grasping the “total liberation of all symbolic forces.”[25] For Nietzsche, ecstasy is “the physiological condition for creating nature,” and physiology has to be involved in “adventures in philosophy.”[26] So was for Walter Benjamin, when he was experimenting with drug to “study the intensification and ‘physicalization’ of psychological and literary effects in his own experience.”[27]
After the quake is receded, the process of individuation takes place, and everything around including one’s own body is individualized. Apollonian rapture, concentration and proliferation of “forms of itself,”[28] becomes the ultimate “life-affirming power,” “a potent formative force,” and “power that actualizes its internal virtuality.”[29]
Awakening, resolution after the tremendous emotional cliffing, dive and upheaval; the bigger the gap, the more peaceful and blissful one would feel.
Thank Gods, Thank parents, Thank family, Thank friends and teachers, Thank everybody, everything that I have encountered with. This is the exact moment and feeling, roaring rapture of life-affirming revelation, I wanted to convey to the audience.
Both intoxication and awakening, but becoming into the different self through the experience of being mixed and shuffled with everything else around you.
Now I know why the viewers laughed after they experienced the Arsequake; in the blink of time, they saw the figure of satyr in the half-jackhammer, half-chandelier object; then the viewer became the satyr, “a symbol of nature’s sexual omnipotence,”[30] dancing and singing around unhesitatingly with their friends.
Resolution
This paper is a compilation of wisdom about the relationship between the machine and the state of ecstasy, rather than of the new knowledge that contributes to the discourse of art. Yeah, I will do, I will do, doh. Sweaty, smelly, steamy, tender. What comes next, I wonder.
Thank you very much, John, and
God Bless America.
[1] Marsden, Jill, After Nietzsche: Notes towards a Philosophy of Ecstasy, (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 31.
[2] Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. by W. Kaufmann, (New York: Vintage, 1967), ch.2.
[8] Grynsztejn, Madeleine, “Attention Universe: The Work of Olafur Eliasson,” Olafur Eliasson, (London: Phaidon, 2002), 40.
[12] An excerpt form Eliasson’s comment in an interview with Daniel Birnbaum, Olafur Eliasson, (London: Phaidon, 2002), 14.
[13] Christov-Bakargiev, Carolyn, “Transcendence and Immanence in Some Art of Today”, Ecstasy, ed. by Lisa Mark, (Los Angeles: MOCA, 2005), 150.
[19] Larsen, Lars Bang. “When the Light Falls: Notes on Ecstasy and Corruption,” Ecstasy, ed. by Lisa Mark, (Los Angeles: MOCA, 2005), 178.
[20] Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. by Shaun Whiteside, (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 40.
[22] Diederichsen, Diedrich, “Divided Ecstasy: The Politics of Hallucinogenics,” Ecstasy, ed. by Lisa Mark, (Los Angeles: MOCA, 2005), 190.
[23] Matsui, Midori, “Regaining the Plane of Immanence: Perceptual Challenges of Optical Experience and Flexible Sculpture,” Ecstasy, ed. by Lisa Mark, (Los Angeles: MOCA, 2005), 171.
