Please, Please -- Identify Me!
Yuji Sone: Works, Texts and Commentaries
Colin Hood
Thus we grasp everything -- we cling to everything -- we are anxious about time, place, people, things, all that is and will be; we are ourselves but the least part of ourselves. We spread ourselves, so to speak, over the whole world, and all this vast expanse becomes sensitive.
-- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile
We sat together in the large auditorium watching the words flash by on the electronic billboard. There was nothing particularly modern about the experience at all. I felt -- for a moment -- like a Florentine choir boy pressed into a collective reading of the psaltery. My voice, frozen into one of Della Robbia's low reliefs, soon melted into the audible appreciation of the scripted humour.
Now for this part I was going to use phrases from Beckett's Waiting For Godot. However I did not ask the publisher's permission. Therefore, I cannot use them. What I would like to do now is ask you to imagine a scene in Act 2 of Waiting for Godot and put the image onto what you are seeing now. Those who don't know the book, ask a person next to you, or please refer to the book later in order to complete this part of my performance.
Switching
one's gaze across the small platform, a man's body appeared lying prostrate
before a fuzzy TV set, openly mimicking -- or so it appeared to this member
of the audience -- the actions of Vito Acconci's heard but not seen masturbatory
antics from a 1972 performance Seedbed in New York's Sonnabend
Gallery. A voice -- which seemed to issue from the TV set -- wound up
the techno-body collage/performance to a climax of pop song titles with
erotic/romantic nuances.
Imagine
the Rolling Stones' I Can't Get No Satisfaction ... Imagine the Beach
Boys' Good Vibrations ... Imagine Carol King's You've Got a Friend ...
Chicago's If You Leave Me Now ... The Doobie Brothers' Minute by Minute
... Madonna's ... Justify My Love ...
Yuji Sone's Nonetheless Marinetti was first performed at the Third International Symposium of Electronic Art (TISEA) in November 1992, and again for Melbourne's Experimenta performance program. It belongs to a series of intertextual, 'intercultural' performance works developed over the seven years of his Australian residency.
The emphasis in my work is on defamiliarising an audience in a performative situation, not to create a seamless hybrid or a fixed perspective. Thus my focus is on 'simultaneity' and to make the topos of heterogeneity visible in order to reveal the problem of frozen knowledge, the categories of art, culture and the body.
Yet there was more to impress in the piece than the simple disjunction between textual devices, mechanical voice and appropriated modernist transgression. For Sone played out the faux-naiveté of an immigrant struggling with the language, a bizarre ritual of auto-didacticism shading into a comically aggressive scene of linguistic and cultural pedagogy.
In an
earlier work, Nonetheless Duchamp, Sone works the frustration of learning
a second language into the performance context. For Sone, the commodity
art stratagem of Duchamp (which is ultimately sublated as acceptable fine
art within the dialectic of avant-gardes) becomes analogous to an opaque
(but ultimately effective) teaching strategy. For perhaps the audience/class
is as dumbstruck by the foreign sounds as an art lover may be by a bottlerack
or a urinal.
As an
application of Duchamp's readymade, I taught Japanese with a language
teaching method called 'Direct Method', in which only the target language
is spoken by the teacher.
In a number of Sone's works, performance, as the activity of 'true visual communication',1 is substituted by an impure vocabulary of the rebus, installing delay, static and repetition in the space of 'uncontaminated' communicative exchange.
In relation to [their] textual materiality, a division between 'reading' and 'seeing' becomes ambiguous. The very act of both 'reading' and 'seeing' is a structured procedure in which one of the many levels inherent in textuality is thematically focused while others remain as undifferentiated background.
Sone's references to masturbation and communicative (in)competence produce what Thierry de Duve has described as a mode of aesthetic questioning, the insistence on 'the enunciation of a contract' rather the 'proper' consummation of communicative or artistic praxis.2 This splitting of the artistic ego born under the sign of painting, performance and the inspirational 'other' of modernist orientalism is also enhanced by Sone's utilisation of discourses on the technological and ethnographic hybrid.
Sone undertook his early theatrical training with Shuji Terayama's Tenjosajiki Theatre Laboratory followed by two years of full-time performance with the Banyu-Inroku Theatre Company. Sone describes the work and rehearsal schedules as gruelling, requiring typical Japanese dedication and discipline. Departing from family-approved career paths, many of these budding avant-garde performers supported themselves with fish market and sex industry occupations.
My very first performance in Australia was in 1987. I wore a white kimono, and a white wig, and used lots of candles. The reason for the use of typical traditional Japanese imagery was that I had never used this material when I was in Japan. I was in an experimental theatre company which used mostly western imagery as opposed to Butoh or traditional Japanese theatre. When I left Japan, I wanted to explore different areas unavailable to me in the Japanese experimental context. Butoh imagery was one of them.
Scratch the surface of Butoh and you'll find a complex historical, cultural and generic patchwork. A 1968 film of Tatsumi Hijikata's Revolt of the Flesh clearly reveals the citational origins of this style of dance/performance. Within the frenzied mix of fur, sun-shade, G-string and The Beatles' Oh Darling, Please Believe Me, Hijikata played out of role of midwife to a later Butoh style rooted in history and a Japanese culture of the earth.3
The naturalisation of Butoh (the masking of the heterogeneity of its origins) illuminates other aspects of Japanese cultural identity. The incorporation and parodic assimilation of other cultures and languages (where even the thoughts of a cartoon rabbit or infant are expressed in a foreign alphabet) threatens the idea of a culture being defined by its 'natural' language. According to the music critic Shuhei Hosokowa, those import cultures parodied in the Ur-Butoh of the late sixties and on the streets of Japan's alphabet cities, are ultimately constrained through the gestural micro-politics of Shinto and a re-affirmation of the 'superiority' of the spoken Japanese language.4
The export culture of 'traditional' Butoh performance becomes an early target of Sone's work. Set against this simulacrum of traditionalism and a western desire for the physicality of Butoh movement (as well as Tadashi Suzuki's stomping method), Sone's performances have developed as a kind of 'inverse Butohism', moving from the Butoh parodies and guerilla pieces of the late eighties into fractured and sonorous appropriations of cultures, languages and image repertoires.
My [early] guerilla performances were meant to be phantasms of a modernist avant-garde -- appropriated and fetishised versions.
The word 'phantasm' also evokes the fictional circuitry of cultural dialogue as opposed to the originary seduction (mutual or aggressive) of western cultural imperialism. The effect -- in his later work -- is one of an unstable inscription of cultural or media identity, a space of enunciation where art history, orientalism, the Beckett of Krapp's Last Tape, the work and writings of Duchamp and Trinh T. Min-ha (to name just a few of his 'referees') are all left suspended in live quotations and footnoted program notes (the textual supplement to all of Sone's later performances).
For
Sone, the rupture between semantic space and physical space, the encounter
between one language user and an 'other' has to be maintained (at the
performative level) as a dynamic and heterogeneous event. Sone remains
wary of the 'symbolic topography' of the contact event, the performative
model of exchange which Paul Carter (in Living in a New Country) counterposes
to the levelling discourse of a theatricalising historiography.
The
problem I have with his [Carter's] argument is his emphasis of the poetic
structure of a contact event. For whom is it poetic? To identify a contact
event with the western notion of the poem may be another trap for taming
the Other.
In 'Voice of the Masked Other', Sone performs a theoretical intervention into the debate around alterity and the levelling of linguistic difference through the globalisation of information and media technologies. The work consists of a series of taped voices sourced ambiguously to both a live performer (a mime punctuating the vocal patchwork with scare-quotes and rhetorical emphasis) and a TV screen filled with static.
As a performed paper, it not only presents my analysis of the Western notion of the Other, it also demonstrates the [linguistic] problematics accompanying them. In other words, it presents the enunciation as an enunciation, not as an enunciated. It juxtaposes an electronically manipulated female voice through a TV monitor with a Japanese body...The performance set-up reveals the gap between preconceived cultural images and gestural vocabulary, dislocating the system of ordinary enunciation.
There are two dominant narratives for understanding and/or subsuming cultural difference. The first analyses morphological similarities in kinship, language and art; the other unites cultural differences (which are also internal to any culture) back to a higher, level of understanding either mythic or transcendental. Drawing on the writing of Naoki Sakai, Sone creates his own performative model of the crisscrossing of 'different' voices, comparing the slippage from 'I' to 'you' (through the arbitrariness of pronomial attachment) to lived scenarios of cultural and linguistic difference.
When Sone performs his 'difficulty' with the English language, sampling the range of linguistic and postcolonial critiques of culture, identity and language, he reveals irregularities both within and between languages and genres.
I have used the irregularities as 'noises' against the purity of language based on linguistic correctness. The 'performance' of migration between genres, reveals the heterogeneity within established art categories that are, after all, 'languages'.
For Deleuze, the slippages and anomalies within language reveal the collective condition of enunciation, an energetic, transformative process within and without the 'mother tongue'. There is a kind of unnatural and unpredictable coupling between the breast which animates the thought and the sounds -- intelligible or otherwise -- that emerge. Not a hiccough, or a stuttering -- the standard Deleuzian trope of entropic causality -- but the burst of laughter caused by a bad joke on speech disorders: 'I meant to say, "Pass the cornflakes honey" but instead I said, "You fucking bitch, you ruined my life!"'. Jokes and their relation to molecular sonority -- now there's a topic for future discussion. Sone's performative 'I' detached from expression and returning to the body in brief moments of gestural emphasis (scare quotes, mood indicators and the like), speaks frankly, but the frankness points only to the anonymity of what Brian Massumi describes as a 'transpersonal agency'5 rather than the true confessions of a male Japanese performance artist working and living in Australia.
I wonder if the reason why I love my girlfriend, who is a white woman, is because she has white skin, or, simply because she is a white woman...This is not true. I am lying. These are nothing but the statements of a mask. But to say this is already a mask. Then this last statement itself is a mask. Then another mask, then more ...
The telos of language will always fall short of that mutual understanding which co-ordinates 'appropriate' social action. Language, like an 'endless high school', conceals the anonymity of what -- we thought -- she said -- he did. The 'marginalised', communalised performance event, the language class, the 'white-anting' at yesterday's staff meeting -- they all have in common this 'unsaid doing of a saying'.6
Thus I will remain suspicious of any euphemistic phrases regarding cross-cultural communications ... Well I am tired ... All of these statements are too schematic ...
When you are silent, it speaks
When you speak, it is silent ...
John Cage once claimed that it was the unframed 'noise' of reading which challenged the dominant conventions of sound performance. This is in keeping with Carla Zecha's remark regarding musical composition: 'that in the absence of noise, which is a by-product of notation, the [written] work would cease to exist.'7
In Sone's most recent performance, 'This is Sound Art', the noise is composed of gestural, pictorial and textual indicators. Sone, the virtuoso mime artist, plays the smartly dressed conductor, stenographer and unplugged keyboard player. The audience is being asked the question 'What is Sound Art?'. Noise and sound are invited to appear -- as if in a séance: the prestidigitator raises his hands; keys are struck; slide images -- cartoons, questions, audience cue cards, musical notation of the joys of sex -- blend in glissandi of images and in the clicking of the apparatus. Not an invitation -- as Cage would have it -- to a listening to ambient or environmental noise. No, my attention holds firmly to the question -- another thought balloon slowly filling with air. Will it finally burst and make a noise which mouths the words which brings yet another question to mind: 'Who can tell?'?
1 Liberation from the (fine) art work offered 'the possibility of moving toward an art in which the idea would dominate. Performance, like Conceptual art, would enable the artist to shun mere pictorial values in favour of true visual communication: art as a vehicle for ideas and action', Robert Nickas, 'Introduction', in The Art of Performance: A Critical Anthology, eds. Gregory Battcock, Robert Nickas, New York: Dutton, 1984, p. xi.
2 Thierry De Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: on Marcel Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, p. 98.
3 Mark Holborn, 'Tatsumi Hijikata and the Origins of Butoh', in Butoh: Dance of the Dark Soul, New York: Aperture, 1987, p. 8.
4 Shuhei Hosokowa, 'On Tokyo-go: Pidgin Japanese', in Against Nature: Japanese Art in the Eighties, New York: Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 1989, pp. 35 - 38.
5 Brian Massumi, A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992, p. 33.
6 ibid.
7 Carla Zecher, 'Reading the Noise: Performance and Textuality', in Criticism: a Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, 32/2, Spring 1991, pp. 159 - 173.
