The red curtains come apart (on Disappearance)

© Kimiko Yoshida, Writing (Silence by Yves Klein). Self-portrait, 2010

Just like an author of a book or an actress on stage, when the red curtains come apart the sovereign individual tends to disappear as, in a manner, is removed by the personage. The disappearance occurs in the instant she or he – in coded political language – goes missing, to give way space on the central stage for the perennial image living in representational conventions

In Becoming Invisible, an exhibition of works by Ian Whittlesea (1967, Isleworth, UK), the artist continues to explore “the use of the text to instruct and transform the physical and psychic state of the viewer,” (Whittlesea, 2013) while demonstrating an exercise to disappearing from view by “splitting light into its constituent parts and then reconstituting the seven colours of the spectrum to form a glowing white cloud that would envelops its creator.” The transmutation of the body into light and light into bodies seems to disrupt the historical continuum of representation and meaning that are characteristic of modernist art – a “cultural practice oriented around the negotiation of difference” (Kester, 2013) The changed nature of the formal conditions of the objects standing still in front the seven colours that constitute the physical spectrum of visible light, is to be found in the aesthetic experience that tends to “challenge conventional perspectives and systems of knowledge.” A condition that is not limited to the specific set of representational conventions and hegemonic cultural systems, since it can vary infinitely in a continuous sequence within its adjacent elements that are not perceptible different from each other.

Whereas, in popular culture, The Illusionist (2006), a movie written and directed by Neil Burger, a new system of conventions faces the prevailing one and, as a consequence, transforms the existing field of possibilities. The happenstance is two people are able to disappear from authorities’ control and watch. However, that indisputable case continues to be an illusion, a trick made for our entertainment only impacting on two levels: the first, because it is a movie, a visual representation of something; whereas, the second, is possible to be “seen” and “followed” at the level of the movie plot. The same impossibility happens on the historical dimension of recorded and documented events: Columbus discovered the American continent, when, it is known that other people, Europeans and non-Europeans, have marked and made their presence known before, so the later had recede from the historical view; the same goes for the Earth have been created on the first days, and Man on the sixth, by God, so all other accounts and theories are made to disappear from life story. The repetition of illusions, or, non-realities, transforms them, therefore, in realities. But that is only one of the realities of what has happened, in particular, when we consider all the other possibilities that exist in the world that surrounds us, and the always-growing space of that same field of possibilities.

© Kimiko Yoshida, Painting (Doña Isabel Cobos de Porcel by Goya). Self-portrait, 2010

The self-portraits, which are the source of Kimiko Yoshida (1963, Tokyo, Japan) body of work, solidify through the constant recurrence of a conceptual repetitive protocol: the same object, the same subject, the same framework, and the same set that is laid down in a specified place in time. “El protocolo conceptual de esas imágenes, su principio de repetición y su lógica de abstracción lleva esos auto-retratos más allá de la problemática de la representación de sí mismo” (Yoshida, 2013). It confines History through repetition, whilst creating space in a linear thought. Yoshida’s self-portraits subvert the existing historical established system, whilst undermining its structures of power, authority, and hierarchy, and making present a different reality through modes of repetition, one that tends to be more universal. The lost singular in the infinity conceptual abstraction of the self-portraits emerges as a disappearance. “Es gracias a esa aspiración a la abstracción, al infinito del color, y es gracias a esa mirada hacia lo inmaterial que cada auto-retrato se impone como una desaparición“ (Yoshida, 2013). How is, then, that one disappear? Through the repetition of the same with the exception of territorial symbols and markings, which are repositioned! When brought together and taken away from their unique state those forms suffer a détournement. Talking here about those elements that induce behaviour and social relations, those representative elements of identities, for the matter, everything that has to do with identity, such as fashion accessories or clothing, for example. In Yoshida’s Self-portraits (2001 – present), which are kidnapped from their initial semantic condition and suffered a diversion from their normal communication course or use purpose, the distinctive use meaning that is intensified in a recognisable culture, what is from the community character and function is integrated into a new sociocultural sphere. Where expressions are turned against the institutionalised forms of governing social relationships and to the sovereignty of the nominal meaning – in Nature the bright white is made by the aggregation of the seven different colours from the spectrum and it is this that constitutes and drives the medium in which Yoshida works, i.e. photography.

Photography does not make the subject, the object to disappear instead it reveals them. But reveals what? Photography unveils latent images. That is also the trick of any illusion. The repetition of the same makes it invisible, bringing in to the foreground what lays beyond it, the different elements; an homogeneous mass that is composed of heterogeneous parts. Yoshida’s self-portraits are photographic images in where we distinctly see those different visual elements (society clothing and accessories) with which she dresses herself in order to disappear. Entitled Painting. Self-portraits (2001-Present) and Writing. Self-portrait (2009-2010), for instance, those works refer to images existing in the history of art, “Doge Loenardo Loreda” (1501) by Giovanni Bellini, “Judith” (1530) by Cranach The Elder, “Doña Isabel Cobos de Porcel” (1805) by Goya, Vermeer, Watteau, Delacroix, Matisse, Gauguin, etc., as well as from ethnography, the Bride’s series: the Dong Bride, the Kenya Bride, the Akamba Bride, the Mao Bride, the…, and so on. Images built around elements connecting the object to things, creating relationships and remembering history. Yoshida’s artwork has encouraged a critical renegotiation of identity. Whilst we get lost in the twine built by the colours reflected by the different elements, which differ from picture to picture, one element remains present in all them, the white colour composed through by the combination of constituent parts. It becomes a puzzled state of loss, of emptiness, of removal of any content that might refer to a cultural background or geographical identity, except for the unveiled face of Yoshida. The representation brought by History (of what has occurred) is reduced to a minimum whist the author reveals what she wants to make of it. The truth is derived from a deprivation of referential historical representation, of relations between the chosen objects and predications, of signifiers and significations. Her photographic self-portraits “show us the characters and selves that exist in her unbridled pictorial imagination. She’s not there” (Saltz, 2014).

A small parenthesis here, since the social term selfie, and photographic genre, might come to mind. As the art critic Jerry Saltz has recently expressed, selfies are distinct from all other genres in art history, “have their own structural autonomy … [s]elfies are usually casual, improvised, fast; their primary purpose is to be seen here, nor, by other people, most of then unknown, in social networks.” Further adding, “[t]hey are never accidental” (Saltz, 2014). Selfies represent a shift from memorial function to a communication device. The other aspect is in that selfies are participatory. Those who take it are both and at the same time the producer and the consumer, “prosumers” – a term that was coined by the American writer Alvin Toffler – where provocations and disruption are expected, venerated, and savoured. Presently, the cult of the self is been replacing all others cults (religion, economy, and science) seized from the false context of the historical continuum. But, if the body condition as taken power as the new trend-authority in contemporary western society as our new truth system - that is heavily biased by political ideologies –, hasn’t also form threaten to take power over this condition?

Kimiko Yoshida, The Blue Kenya Bride with Luo and Turkana Ornaments. Self-portrait, 2005

There are really two decisive shifts in Yoshida’s work. It depicts a double-infidelity reproducing those ethnographic elements reproducing life through composed movements brought into existence by the photographer’s eye. While double dealing with the dynamic of loss and with the limitation of the visual arts in terms of narrative capacity. Through her pictures she shows an interests in transcending those stereotypical images that we attach to individuals and which resonates from cultural identity discourses. She challenges the deadening representational conventions while revealing, instead, the experiential specificity of the world around her and around them. Through this, she captures a basic truth, the hegemony of cultural systems that surrounds us. There is not meaning involved, only the emptiness of symbols. Whereas, the second important position in Yoshida’s work acknowledges the importance of communicative exchange rather than been mere physical objects which she ‘wears’. The “correct” output is set by rules for or an analysis of the same elements to find the correct arrangement of word and phrases, in order to create a well-formed sentence in the chosen language, influencing the storytelling. Although we might consider and be led to consider that what is told visually are about the semantic properties of the images, but, what really happens, is that it becomes the dissolution of forms and the predominance of the legacy of loss, of the psychological states (internal output) that had caused other psychological states.

Her visual work approaches the sphere of theatre where the body is reified; she suggest a decision to participate while sharing and offering a different articulation of a capacity away from a “textual” mode of production, instead of remaining organised around bare observation central to the constitution of modernist art in general; a somatic response to the increasingly isolationism (a policy of nonparticipation in relations), and the “memory loss” effects of the virtual world of limited possibilities. Kimiko Yoshida’s self-portraits predicates on her own critical condition of being an observer, on reporting on the human potential.

Bibliography:
Kester, G. H. (2013) Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Parr, A. (2005) The Deleuze Dictionary, Revised Edition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Rogoff, I. (2006) ‘Irit Rogoff: What is a Theorist?’, in Kein.org. Retrieved February 26th, 2013
Saltz, J. (2014) ‘Art at Arm’s Length: A History of the Selfie’, in Vulture.com. January 26th, 2014. Retrieved August 27th, 2015
Whittlesea, I. (2013) Becoming Invisible, in Ian Whittlesea. Retrieved October 5th, 2015
Yoshida, K. (2013) ‘Pintura. Auto-retrato’. in Kimiko Yoshida – Guest Honour. FINI-Festival Internacional de la Imaginen. UAEH. Mexico, April 18-May 31st, 2013. Retrieved August 25th, 2015

Published at VASA Project: Where Do We Go Now! Kimiko Yoshida