• photography by JÖRGEN AXELVALL

    MARIKO MATSUSHITA: EAST ASIAN IDEALS IN A POSTMODERN SHELL

    Written by Ksenia Rundin

    Japan has never ceased to be a source of inspiration for the Western culture, starting with the two-hundred-year-long isolation under the sakoku (“closed country”) policy and ending with Japonism, whose influences have embraced artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas, Alphonse Mucha and also art movements from Realism to Art-Nouveau and Symbolism. Odalisque Magazine was given a chance to talk art with the Japanese artist Mariko Matsushita, whose art works speak the language of philosophical aesthetics, bringing the matter and form into a conscious meaning for the beholder.

    The references we see in Mariko’s art are a merely reflection of our mind, where those have already been hidden for a long time and now, provoked by the sense of exoticism, caused by the art works, are swiftly trying to break out. These are emotions that make us human, make us strong and make us feel real and alive. Looking at Mariko’s art we deal with a postmodern interpretation of East Asian ideals, where digital technology challenges our authenticity and questions our identity. Mariko makes you unpretentiously live it.

    Why did you decide to become an artist?
    I never thought of becoming an artist. I needed my own language to speak about myself. I seek for expression being driven by necessity. I am not an artist, I want to become myself.

    When I look at your drawings I think of Frida Kahlo and Finnish artist Markus Heikkerö because I see a touch of surrealism, sexuality and vulnerability. Could you say what message you are placing into your drawings?
    The message I breathe into my work is about the sense of “being alive”. During the course of one's life, you might feel pain like someone would be peeling off your rawhide. You feel a dark loneliness that no one can understand. You may experience a feeling of freedom, living like you were flying unconcerned. You feel the fate given to you by heaven. You feel the happiness which is warm and natural, spreading itself to every corner of the body. And you also feel the irony as all these might just be a lie.

    I strongly feel that I am alive, especially through physical sensations. I do exercise, daily training my body. And this practice reminds me that in spite of the technological innovations, we humans are all given a small body, as a mass of very sharp sensory organs. Our own body tells us that it contains a certain flame similar to the sun’s, and that it is complex and mysterious like the universe, as much as it constitutes a very small and insignificant existence in comparison to the latter.

    I always think about my sense of body and sense of time. Through experiencing my life, I think about life and death. Why are we alive, why are we humans, and why am I myself? In my actual sense of living, I also strongly feel an impulse urging and seeking for others.

    You paint female body a lot. Who is/are the woman/women on your canvas?
    Regardless of female or male, what I paint recently is myself or my close friends. My paintings are also words, mirrors, friends in my heart. So my models are often someone intimate or emotionally involved. The relationship may have ended, while painting. I interact and bring them back out of somewhere they don’t know they belonged to. In such a case, painting is also a ceremony of a fatal encounter and alienation.

    I could also see a shadow of Van Gogh in your brush strokes. Am I right or wrong? Please comment.
    I think that when you confront with painting, it is all up to the beholders, regardless who they are and how they think. The painting also acts like a mirror. Van Gogh lives in your heart, the heart that sees the shadow of Van Gogh on my painting. I think that is precious. In the movie “Fahrenheit 451”, there is a line saying something like, “There are humans behind the book, I am attracted to it”. I think that it could be applicable to all literature and all arts.

    The impressive power that art can hold, is not only about creating the art as such, but also to deliver tremendous messages to someone through time and space. It is a message directed to life, which is not so easy to verbalize. It is a message directed to love and humanity.

    Please tell me about your collaboration with the photographer Mikito Tateisi. What did you endeavor to create?
    This is the record of myself. The day will come, when my own body dies. Until that day, I will continue to record my body and feelings of myself and others with paintings, photos, videos and poetry. I understand that I am an insignifiant person, but I feel that the record might help someone else to live. The place where human consciousness awakens is a very dark place. I think that art can be done by placing the next stepping stone in the dark without any concrete meaning.

    In 2017, I spent the summer in the Delfina Foundation in London. While in residence, I hung a red cloth on the window and thus, lived everyday in a room reddened with the sunlight. In the room there were daily necessities and what I wanted to create was something overflowing and accumulated. The red room was also mentally influential, I was experiencing various psychological conditions … The room would turn pinkish with the daylight, then it turned into deep red with the evening light… It made me slightly nervous, giving a strange feeling. I gradually started thinking that I would like to create an art piece using meat, imitating a fetus placed in a pseudo-uterus called “a red room”.

    At first I was making a small sculpture carving a little piece of meat in the shape of an animal, but the meat grew gradually and finally I walked around the city with a mass of meat weighting 14.4 kilos and spent time naked with the meat in my room. Thus, collaboration with Mikito is the record of the “red room” which also has been an installation and a performance.

    You have had collaboration with a fashion brand. Tell about your experience as an artist entering fashion.
    First of all, I merely lent the paintings, I did not participated in the designing process of the clothes as such. However, it was a very interesting experience of my paintings going to the town not only in the atelier and the exhibition place but also on the people's clothes.

    In the 1990s, when I was a teenager, there were several magazines that snapped Japanese Harajuku Fashion, and the fashion was the street culture for me.

    Two brands that I collaborated with are also brands for young women. Some people might get sceptical of such collaborations, but I would like to go out more on the street through production. I think that it will guide me to expressions that are not just paintings, such as images, performances and poetry.

    I hope that not only prints with my art works are to be viewed but also many people wear art, become art, live powerfully and be free. And paradoxically, even if you do not wear anything, you do not have anything. No matter how old you are, you can be yourself, you can jump into art from writing only one verse, this is what I want you to feel with my art.

    Do you have any future fashion collaborations planned?
    I have not decided anything yet, but personally, I would like to make kimonos. Kimono is traditional Japanese clothing. I would make it very planar and play with it as it was a painting hanging in the room.

    Like many Japanese people, I have had a modern childhood and thereof, have been separated from the traditional Japanese life. However, as I deal with art and deepen my various ideas, I gradually return to the Oriental ideas and thoughts.

    When I stayed in the Delfina Foundation last year and traveled all over Europe, there were many cases that reminded me of Japanese culture. I think that fusing not only clothes but also wisdom of the West and the East is important.

    What do you think art and fashion can learn from each other in the aspects of creativity and sustainability?
    I am not specialist concerning fashion. However, looking at the changing society, various things can be considered. For example, a genderless world expressed and driven by fashion, a screened communication of the body deployed on the Internet. Furthermore, the manufactured limbs such as artificial arms and feet which are concerned a necessity today will be eventually transformed from the perspective of trans-humanism. 
    Medical development encourages people to dress. The design of artificial legs is already quite artistic now.
    Imagining the future, the body expansion will be in the field of general fashion, I think that the sense of “human beauty” will become more diverse.

    An era may also come when you can genetically customize the skin color, hair color, height, etc. of a child coming to be born. Why, is it me? Where on earth do you live with your heart? With the expansion of physicality, there will be a time of reincarnation, when many people listen to themselves and the question of “human”. It is very important.

    We are living in the midst of the flow of the canal in the era of technology increasingly being developing.
    Every art, music and literature will play an important role for not losing your human self, growing to an intelligent, lovely adult, and always keeping paying it forward to the next generations.
    I am planning to travel the world from now on and I would like to know about gender and death in various cultures. I think that I will learn a lot about fashion and art as well.

    And I will never stop dreaming about the future, drawing my sense classically and magically like a cave painting.

  • GRIND – A MOMENT OF TRUTH WITH YOUR OWN SELF

    Written by Ksenia Rundin

    Yesterday I discovered that silence could be constructed of something immaterial. A darkness followed by a sound and a light went through my emotions, my thoughts and my body, turning into a material product – the silence. Surrounded by the Bauhausian atmosphere of the Orion Theatre in the company of approximately two hundred people, with a pitch darkness squeezing me, electric sounds hunting my blood and a feeble light manifesting its fragility, I felt left in a dead silence completely alone with my body leaning from the fifth row desperately trying to reach the stage. It was a pure moment of me experiencing the authentic nudity of my inner self. Jefta van Dinther was performing his imminent GRIND, while I was grinding away in my fears, memories and desires, having dialogue with myself. It felt like during one of those moments when you are standing in front of an audience and the silence gets so deep that you have an obligation to break it here and now. Yesterday, was the moment when I had no choice but to break the unbearable silence between me and myself.

    Glancing back at the history of modern dance and performance art, I think of John Cunningham’s idea that no medium should be subordinate, where he used music and décor as independent elements as opposed to complementing the choreography. Jefta van Dinther, Minna Tikkainen and David Kiers have now moved a step forward, creating both a new dimension for uniting the independence of movement, sound and light and also a unique way of perceiving those as a new material product. The product in its turn becomes unique for every individual beholder based on the individual complexity of his/her mind containing memories and feelings. Such approach can be considered very democratic as the influences, which you as a spectator become a subject for, are merely based on your own feelings and experiences. You are alone in your game, where you are exposed to your own self. Isn’t that a kind of experience we need in our times of political uncertainty, fashion race and social insanity based on the power of consumerism, exterminating our ability to stay individual? GRIND is a pure luxury to have a look inside your own self.

    How did you decide to become a dancer? When did you first time discover dance as an art form?
    It is a long story that goes back to my very early ages. Normally, I would say that my dance story starts with my proper dance training, which began when I was seventeen and I entered the dance school already one year after that in Amsterdam. I moved to Amsterdam when I was eighteen, studied there and had a bit of a normal trajectory as a dancer, slowly becoming a choreographer. But in fact, I think it started a lot earlier. I grew up in quite precarious situation. My parents were missionaries and they would travel around the world and I would actually have my first performance experience on the streets as a kid. So I would be a storyteller, staging stories from the Bible. My parents would perform on the streets and I would be the flower. That was actually the first time when I was performing in front of people. And then I also was, as a kid, a part of Christian groups that would do singing and dancing on the streets. I only made the connection to the kind of performing I do nowadays quite late in my life. In a way, the lifestyle is very similar.

    So, your art was kind of born out of a religious mission?
    In a way. In a way you can say that. And I think my work, my art work deals a lot with, what people keep calling, - something religious. I guess, it has spiritual quests. There is something about transcending, what is the material world and how do we use the material world to transcend to the immaterial world.

    How did the idea of this particular collaboration in GRIND between you, Minna Tikkainen and David Kiers arise?
    It started with Minna and me. We had known each other for a very long time, because I was dancing in productions, where she was a lighting designer for. And we said like “Let’s try to do something. Let’s meet and see how to work together!” Then we got a residence here in Stockholm at Weld, a space by Odenplan. It is an amazing space, a studio in a basement, like a shaft. They gave us a chance without any demands. They practically said, “Here you have the studio. Play around!” We started in materials and ideas that we had not managed to fit in other productions. Very soon we started noticing that it started boiling down to a kind of concept, which had to do with synaesthesia. We did not start studying synaesthesia. We did not want to get into it from the theoretical point of view. But we were interested in this idea of what happens when elements start to mix in way that they also become inseparable. And how music, light and choreography or body starts to act as if it was synesthetic. To perceive sound through the body or a light as sound, or vice versa. Later we brought in David Kiers, the sound designer. How could we create a body that exists because of the kind of intertwinement of these elements? How does it create something that is not light, nor sound, nor choreography, but actually is another kind of body that only can exist because of this interaction? So, if you put on the light, it would kill the show. If you turn off the sound, it would kill the show. If you took out the body, it would kill the show. Looking for only materials that actually create that otherness together.

    It is very interesting concept, because the body here loses its centrality which it used to have in traditional dance, like ballet. The angles and forms it creates becomes unimportant.
    Exactly! There was a kind of movement, a kind of stream of taking away the body. It was a conceptual approach to dance where choreography can exist not only in movements of the body but also could be a movement of plastic bags or something like that. Here, I think, in the end what we are choreographing is something immaterial, very dark. It is literally very dark in the show, you hardly know what you see. You can see the stuff but you cannot actually grasp what you see. But it is something about that it really collides with your perception and it brings about some sort of almost like a hallucinatory state. Thus, it is very material, although immaterial.

    In one of your interviews you were talking about your other show “Plateau Effects” and you said, “Think of the performance as plateau effects. Let’s say various plateaus that change level but are also stable.” How should we think of GRIND in such case?
    Many of my pieces deal with a kind of plateauing. Someone wrote once “Jefta is equivalent to a slow food cook in choreography.” The time is really elastic, stretched out. I often work with very slow progressions of building up, you have this tension that evolves but extremely slowly. It really builds up in you and you need it to change. And I think GRIND does that too. There are five or six scenes that are interconnected but each scene is somehow based on a labour interaction with a material. The person on stage, which is me, is interacting with a cable or interacting with a big piece of cloth. And every scene is very slowly leading to a trance. But each scene is also made of an effect, such as visual, sonic, corporeal effect, which normally would last for maximum thirty seconds (otherwise it is not an effect anymore). But instead of providing effects we are continuously building up to these effects.

    The performance slightly reminds me the famous ballet “The Rite of Spring” (1913) composed by Igor Stravinsky with Vaclav Nizhinsky dancing in it, where the plot was considered as a succession of choreographed episodes instead of the classical storytelling with a clear narrative line.
    Some people view GRIND in a very abstract sense as it is about a play of perception, like a visual arts piece. Because of their dramaturgy and the figure who is going through it, it starts to become narrative and give rise to associative potential. People see a lot of things. There is a struggle the dancer is going through and people associate to murder, torture, ecstasy, violence.  They have something very particular in their memory about being scared. Thus the form is very explicitly abstract while the experience is not. This is what creates a very interesting game. People realize, “This is an abstract work but I am actually having so many memories, so many associations and so many stories.”

    You said once that you are challenged by things you do not understand and you try to create something that provide uncertainty. If we apply these to concepts on GRIND. What is that you do not understand about it? And what uncertainty have you created in there?
    People live through the performance not knowing what it was they were going through. It touches quite dark parts in them, dealing with something relentless and violent. It enters a kind of subconscious place. I work often with a kind of altered state. It varies from show to show: it can be through synaesthesia for example but also say, depression. When you are in an altered state, things are fuzzy. And I think, when I was making GRIND, it was for the first time I started to trust the space of creativity that has something more to do with dreams or nightmares – that fuzzy space that I can access not only when I am dreaming but also through having music in my ears, closing my eyes or maybe when I am tired. With GRIND I started to trust that subliminal place, thinking “If I feel this, if I can access this, maybe it is also a way for me to stage that. And for people to experience that somehow.” Unlike a usual theatrical concept, offering a collective experience, GRIND is not a social place actually, not a collective experience. Everyone is alone in the dark. They cannot hear the person next to them, they cannot see anything. Thus, it becomes utterly personal to them.

    I would say it has a certain connection to AI (artificial intelligence), where you bring in the technology having effects on the human beings, hasn’t it?
    The whole AI-chapter I am working a lot with now. It is something that is coming up in a lot of my work now. It is a reality, like it or not. You have plastic inside of you and your smartphone is already an extension of you, even it is outside of your body.

    Do you still practice Kundalini Yoga?
    Yes, I do it before the show. Usually I do work out but such type of training is too heavy when I have to perform. So, I practice Kundalini Yoga then. It is very repetitive and it is a nice way to get in touch with yourself. I also meditate.

    If I translated your performance into paintings, I would think of Francis Bacon because in your performances the invisible points out the visible and the intangible feelings become material. What would you say about that?
    Yes. The reference to Bacon is maybe about making the material of something internal. Maybe it is an easy link, but the monstrosity is a way of choreographing an internal space, manifesting through the face, through the expression. Dance is so much about not dealing with the head and with the face, because the body is supposed to be expressive through its form and tonus. I am very engaged with making manifest the internal processes and put that context in the space, through the expression. I am kind of interested in what leaks out of the process, during the co-creation with the audience.

    Do you use art as a source of inspiration, going for example to any pinakothek in Berlin?
    I see quite a lot. Visual art is very much present. I am into video work and I like Mark Leckey, who is a British visual artist. There is a video, which he actually made about the club culture “Fiorucci made me Hardcore”. It is a brilliant art film that deals with a kind of archive of the club culture of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s in Great Britain. It is a beautiful collage. I also like David Lynch. I am very busy with the uncanny and with this idea of what is familiar but not, what is social but twisted. Visual art, music and a lot of film. My work is also very cinematic.  

    What dancers inspire you?
    Above all, clubbing. It is contemporary clubbing. I entered that world when I was twenty eight. Clubbing is interesting for me because it is one of the only proper contemporary rituals we have. It is one of the only places where people engage in the present moment for the sake of present moment and without making sense. It is useless in some way. It is about having fun and escapism but also is a certain and spiritual practice. To engage in something what is actually present, yet immaterial, I found that very spectacular. Clubbing puts people together, they dance for hours and hours. There is something transcendental about it. You use your body, you use the music, you use the light and that dark space in order to have a collective experience that is not material. 

    Do you acquire any inspiration from fashion?
    Fashion is tricky to work with directly. I am busy but it is something I have hard time to translate into my work. Dance has a kind of strange relation to costume and historically speaking, fashion is considered costume there. Of course, fashion is much more than that. I usually down-dress people a lot on stage or I use nudity. Relatability on stage has been very important to me – how ordinary people can relate to what happens on stage.

    If you got a chance to collaborate with an artist, what artist would you choose and how this collaboration would look like?
    To be honest, I would love to have been there with John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Robert Rauschenberg. It must have been a remarkable time to be in dance.

  • The Waldorf Project

    Written by Fashion Tales

    An interesting art project will be taking place at Ksju in Stockholm's slaughterhouse district. The Waldorf Project is an immersive experience on a grand stage in which art is consumed through all of the senses. A realisation by artist Sean Rogg, has created and directed this project which has had a run of installments over several years; Chapter One/MUSKMELON, Chapter Two/COLOUR, and Chapter Three/FUTURO so far, the next deployment is a fully developed exploration of Chapter Four/BARZAKH which will take place in London in 2018.

    The Waldorf Project is one of the world’s most intense and mesmerizing theater experiences, in which the audience consumes the performance with all five senses. In an intimate setting running from May 17th until the 20th, is has been described as a new art form and will be its first exhibition outside of London.

    According to the press release: The full staging of the fourth chapter of The Waldorf Projects that will take place in the UK later this year. E.R.L.s (Experimental Research Labratories) are shorter performances compared to entire chapters, for CHAPTER FOUR/BARZAKH. This gives Rogg the opportunity to explore the core concepts that make up a chapter and trial them on a live crowd for the first time, often making the E.R.L.s more intense. The Waldorf Project was created by Rogg in 2012 and is a holistic theatre experience that seamlessly blends movement design, costume design, spatial design, choreography, music, and gastronomy into one cohesive experience. It represents the bleeding edge of 21stcentury performance and conceptual art. Sean Rogg elaborates, “Every person responsible for each of the creative disciplines that make up The Waldorf Project is at the very forefront of their crafts. We pride ourselves on our meticulous attention to detail, and our guests in Stockholm will have an experience as close to an actual chapter as possible. Since an E.R.L.s precede full chapters and give us an opportunity to trial ideas, they demand more from us as creators.”

    The world’s most coveted news and art media outlets including Associated Press, The Guardian, The Creators Project, Trend Tablet, WGSN and have covered the initiative since CHAPTER ONE / MUSKMELON. “Having lived in Sweden for over four years I’ve experienced the introverted nature of Swedes firsthand. It’s fascinating to me. Much like London, Stockholm is multicultural, yet the mentality of Swedes is typically much more close guarded compared to Brits. In that sense Stockholm makes for an intriguing ‘test market’ for us before we premiere the full chapter in London later this year,” Rogg explains, “There’s of course also the problem of finding spaces that can play host to what we do. Fristaden is a lot smaller space than we usually work with but makes it up with character. It’s in an interesting area of the city that struck a chord with me. It’s going to be an exceptional series of performances.”

    For more information and to purchase tickets for this incredible experience, visit www.ksju.se/thewaldorfproject

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