On Kinbaku
BDSM starts with Bondage. Being a separate acronym strips submission or sadomasochism from the very choice of being bounded. Branching from this huge category of subculture is the famous Japanese style, Kinbaku, distinguishing itself with exclusive use of hemp ropes and an emphasis on the process rather than the destination. This sexual activity originates from the late Edo Period, and as a sexual activity embedded in the Japanese context whose culture essence is to revere the natural state of things, bondage is addressed as Kinbaku, an art form that holds aesthetic values to itself.
The idea of constraining one’s physical movement, more specifically, a woman’s, is not rare. Inagaki recalled in her book A Daughter of the Samurai that according to feudal Japan’s tradition, an upper-class woman must control her sleeping positions, curving her legs elegantly like the characterき. In a broader sense, however, isn’t all custom instructing people to behave in a certain way? Customs link behaviors with meanings in the mediation of culture, making certain behaviors more valuable than others, and yet certain behaviors unacceptable. Metaphorically, Geertz stated that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun”, which means that one’s action is not restricted, but rather qualified, by its social context and interpersonal relationships.
In this sense, bondage is a limit on freedom. When one is bounded by ropes, she is unable to move or act whatever she desires to, and when one is bounded by social relations, she is unable to locate herself in this complex, losing her own identity, therefore, losing her desire, so that her movement becomes a mere product of the relative movement of other strings. People frown at the concept of bondage because it’s immoral to make other people uncomfortable, or because we are so convinced that any restraints on an innocent being should be condemned as if freedom is something worth pursuing. This assumption is not necessarily true. Sartre compared the encounter of freedom as the experience of nausea, that when sailing on the waters of the world, one gradually begins to realize that this journey is meaningless so that the only way to figure out why we are here in this journey is to think of one ourselves. This arduous task falls on everyone who steps out of the comfort of nihilism and starts to question the meaning of our existence, and in this painful departure from the realm of nihilism, one feels the pull of freedom. Freedom is not a gift, but a condemnation; it is not liberation from heaviness, but gravity to the heaviness. Freedom puts an individual the most powerful, yet the most responsible actant so that we must pay our prices. As Sartre himself puts it, “I must be without remorse or regrets as I am without excuse; for from the instant of my upsurge into being, I carry the weight of the world by myself alone without help, engaged in a world for which I bear the whole responsibility without being able, whatever I do, to tear myself away from this responsibility for an instant.”
And those who tremble under their freedom look at the ropes, the thickly braided fiber that yet still so thin compared to its claimed durability. If only they had strengths, they would have sensed the pitiful coincidence of how their encounters resemble, grittily enduring the heaviness from other things – maybe the only difference is that the rope cannot choose what to hold, but the humans choose their loads themselves. The ropes are labeled as reasonably light and decently strong, then please tie me down and hang me up; all these weights of the world that I cannot bear to carry any longer, please help me to carry them.
On The fountain
“Whether Mr. Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.”
– Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp questioned the difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary in submitting an upside-down urinal to the American Society of Independent Artists’ exhibition in 1917. Not that much of a surprise, this submission was rejected for being “immoral, vulgar” (The Blind Man 1917, 5). Despite its manifesto of accepting any submissions from the members, this society, perhaps the most progressive institution of that time, denied the porcelain’s entry to the Grand Central Palace. It was hidden behind a partition so that no one could see it (“‘Fountain’, Marcel Duchamp, 1917, Replica 1964 | Tate” 2021). The board of directors reasoned that this submission “may be a very useful object in its place, but its place is not in an art exhibition and it is, by no definition, a work of art” (Naumann 2012, 72).
However, one hundred years later, this upside-down urinal, now pervasively commemorated as the Fountain, is celebrated as one of the most meaningful artworks of modern art. Its replicas are stately situated on pedestals, shielded by glass cases in prestigious museums like Tate. Crowned to be a masterpiece with profound conceptual aesthetics, this urinal is no doubt an artwork. The original question brought up with this ready-made – what differs an extraordinary and an ordinary – surfaced in 2000 when two performance artists, Cai Yuan and Jian Junxi, peed on the vitrine of The Fountain, declaring that their indecent transformation of this art piece was in line with Duchamp’s intention of submission, as a mock to the art institutions’ profligate fetishism over things (Mcleod, 2000).
Returning to the question of what differs the extraordinary from the ordinary, or, we shall reformulate it as, who differs the extraordinary from the ordinary, the presence of art institutions is indispensable. One day they can assert that the Fountain is not art, and the next day they can deem it as an icon of art. That is the power of institutions, or, the authoritative representations, and to obliviate this unbalanced power relation, they come up with sets of standards to mask the arbitrariness behind their decisions. In the field of art, the most applicable standard is titled beauty. The discussion on beauty has never stopped because this concept is deceptively objective. The only attribute of beauty that persists is that this concept is a product of the discourse, an in-process product between the circulation of knowledge and power. The knowledge of beauty can be coined in various significances, but the essence is to make it seems like something that underlies the object itself. Wincklemann could argue that beauty is not something that can be defined but only be discovered, but the very action of discovering is part of the quest seeking a definition, because otherwise how do you perceive beauty in the void of knowing that there is a thing called beauty. Beauty is defined and it will always be defined, just because there are multiple definition does not alter the fact that this term is a construction. Aristotle defined beauty as conforming to a certain order of arrangement of parts. Renaissance artists described beauty as constructing perfect proportions. Minimalists want art to be as intentionally simple as possible, while maximalism prefers excessive saturation of components. Art must be beautiful because art must be something to be regarded as art. Beauty is a false god, but a powerful one, that can turn an iconoclasm like Duchamp’s Fountain, into another stair stone under its temple.
On Oh De Laval
Devil Made Me Do It
2019
The Nightmare
2020
Seeing as representations will always have a gap between the reality and the representation of reality, for example, can anyone create a 1:1 scale world map? The shortcoming of mimetic theory, according to which art is a mimic of the universe, becomes apparent in the negative response of this question, because creation is never as objective as reality. A piece of art can, indeed, mimic nature, but it cannot exactly copy and paste everything. Art is an abbreviation of reality and in the process of selecting which to show and which to hide surfaces a set of criteria that, from the expressive angle, reflects the artist’s preferences. In other words, the artwork is not a representation of reality but a selected presentation of it; in fact, the artwork is the representation of the attributed value systems and the personalities of the artist.
Lively reflected in the ribald eroticism paintings of a young London-based artist, Oh De Laval, is this tangled relationship between the artist and their creations. Her fondness in Francis Bacon’s hedonism and Durkheim’s deviation theory greatly shapes her “very raw and sinister, playful and silly” stylistic (McLaughlin, 2020). She claims to be fascinated by the hidden desires of humans in their quotidian interactions, trying to seize the craziness and the naughtiness in each social scenario. Her hedonist outlook for life encourages her to present the characters funnily, yet her engagement with the notion of deviation carved the “highly sexualized, ultra-violent” underpainting of her works (Unit London, 2021). The following paintings display either cheerful decapitation (The Nightmare, 2020 & You Can Tell Me Your Reasons But It Won’t Change My Feelings, 2018) or a curious heart-ripping (The Devil Made Me Do It, 2019). The gory scenes of a female character killing the male character are depicted in a fairy-tale palette, and this grotesque violence is provocative to Oh De Laval. For her “this is part of my joke! I try to show what people would do if there were no consequences in this world” (Paradiserowlondon.com. 2020).
The gaps between reality and the representation of reality, meanwhile, await our attention as an echo in the valley. The artist invites the audiences to actively engage in the artwork by leaving these blank spaces for them to fill out with their idiosyncratic imaginations. From a pragmatic perspective, it is the audiences’ preferences that direct them to look at art in a specific way. That is to say, the artwork, or the perceived artwork, is also a representation of the attributed value systems and the personalities of the audience. In this particular case, her works are perceived differently from the eye of different beholders: “Paris is very kinky so they love my paintings, English people find it intimidating” (Paradiserowlondon.com. 2020).
On Plato’s Atlantis
“Plato’s Atlantis predicted a future in which the ice cap would melt, the waters would rise and life on earth would have to evolve in order to live beneath the sea once more or perish. Humanity would go back to the place from whence it came.”
– Alexander McQueen
In his last runway presentation Plato’s Atlantis (2010 Spring/Summer), Alexander McQueen divined that the romantic metaphor “I got ocean in my veins” exists beyond the imaginative story of Avatar, but as an ultimate presage of human’s devolution: we will return to the water, underneath which the most primitive humans resided, just like Plato’s telling of Atlantis. Projecting his reflection on nature and technology on the vision of a hybridized human, this show borrows the assertion from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) that the evolution of humankind started from underwater and the myth of the lost city Atlantis from Plato’s dialogues “Timaeus” and the “Critias” (360 BCE), a “materially wealthy, technologically advanced, and militarily powerful nation” that got banished to the deep sea by the heaven (Feder, 2010). In McQueen’s own words, the logic of reviving the Atlantis in this collection is to put “Darwin’s theory of evolution in reverse” (McQueen, 2010). If the concept of “evolution” makes sense, then Atlantis, being the utopian civilization, should be the ultimate peak of the pursuit of evolution, in parallel to our unsatisfiable quest for modernization. However, if the most developed stage only leads back to the most primitive stage of life, then is it “evolution”, have we all “evolved”, at all?
The collection per se displays great innovation in adopting digital printing for garment making and in live streaming the show on the Internet with two gigantic, monstrous black camera arms lurking back and forth to the movements of the models. The designs were typical McQueen, grotesque yet overly fascinating: the looks are not humane but resemble a biological hybridization of women with sea mammals. Models had their hair “sculpted into fin-like peaks”, standing in gigantic high heels that look as sinister as sea monsters (Bethune, 2009). The trousers have bulbous flanks that mimicked sharks’ skins, the sleeves are puffed and pleated into connote gills. The prints ranged from camouflage colors (life above the sea) to snake patterns (transitioning to water) and then to the blue-purple ocean animals. Accompanied with the hissing background music hovering on this underwater dystopia, this show is regarded as one of McQueen’s finest collections for fulfilling his ambition to evoke “an uneasy pleasure that merged wonder and terror, incredulity and revulsion” (Bolton, 2011).
The discussion on evolution, as presented in this collection, is a paradoxical linger to seek betterment. We can rethink the old fables and create new forms of presenting an idea; doing something differently equals doing something new, but it does not necessarily mean there is an improvement in the new attempt. McQueen himself had seen his show more humbly, compared to the media coverage on him being groundbreakingly experimental. He contended that he was just creating, and “there is no way back for me now. I am going to take you on journeys you’ve never dreamed were possible” (McQueen, 2010).
