Hiroko Okada's 'Aizou Bento' (starring me) and 'Gag Art'.

Hiroko Okada is an artist whose works have tended to emerge out of her own experiences, as a young Japanese woman artist, a mother, a lover. Hiroko is maried to the artist Makoto Aida now. I first met her in London in around 1997 when she was in a group show there in Brick Lane. I have worked with her since then and had the opportunity to 'star' as one of her fictional husbands in her latest video piece which is currently showing at the Mizuma Art Gallery in Nakameguro Tokyo. The exhibition is called 'Aizou Bento - Love and Hate Lunch Box'. The video is set in California, on a set of a cruddy daytime TV cooking show. Hiroko is the show's host chef. There are three video segments, each starring her with a non Japanese husband, with whom she makes one specific bento, or lunch box. Artist Mario A is a lecherous husband full of sexual innuendos. I am a professor from Berkeley and we endevour to make a 'PC' (politically correct) bento, with foods from various parts of the world. There is a scene where Hiroko pours dollops of brown sludge (actually chicken feed grain mixed in water) from a bucket on which her husband Makoto Aida has written 'UNHCR'. The last husband is artist Pol Malo who makes a 'Chance Operation' bento in silence with Hiroko. Its funny and full of gags - art very much in the lineage of many Mizuma artists - Makoto Aida, Muneteru Ujino...but also the Showa 40 nen kai group (Group 1965) which includes Tsuyoshi Ozawa and Parco Kinoshita. For many art world people, this kind of work is simply beyond the pale, kitsch of the highest order. But there does seem to be a rather impressive roster of artists who have made works in this vein. It remains largely unwritten about. Perhaps because it does play to the viewers most deprived and base desires, it is usually left out of more official histories. I suppose European equivalents might include some of the work of the late Martin Kippenberger and his Cologne posse or what the artists groups BANK were up to in London. This is a kind of work which certainly quotes quite specific cultural references in Japan, and thus may be difficult for non-Japanese to fully appreciate. However, Hiroko's video is actually mostly in English with Japanese subtitles (similar to Makoto Aida's 'Bin Laden' video which I showed at the Singapore Biennale last year, which also deftly uses subtitling). Having been brought up in Japan until 1980 and watched a lot of TV, I often see the kind of popular slapstick gag comedy which used to be on, in the work of these artists - particularly The Drifters, a five person gag sketch team with a full complement of falling stainless steel buckets, fart jokes, food fights and slippages. I suppose Hiroko and the artists mentioned above are of a similar generation - a time when we could still be genuinely amused by endless one-liner gags and then be told off by our mothers for imitating them at home.