'Goth' at Yokohama Museum of Art

‘Goth: Reality of a Departed World’ at The Yokohama Museum of Art was firmly rooted in a post-Marylin Manson landscape fully replete with nose-hooks, tattoos and horror sources. This is a very different set of references to the goth subcultures of my experiences going to school in the UK, which emanated from bands like Siouxsie and the Banshees, Ghost Dance and The Cure. Unfortunately for me at least, the exhibition did not explore these recent manifestations of goth subculture and chose to reference its artistic and literary history instead, delving into grand themes of death and life. The exhibition did not clearly delineate these distinctions in its presentation or texts. Compared to its older sister, punk, goth subculture is less concerned with the social space, with confrontation and politics, preferring to carve out subjective spaces of poetry and imagination. The historical references of Goth subcultures have thus usually been the Romantic movement of Northern Europe in the C19th.

Alien Sex Fiend: excessive, camp theatrics, funny.
The work of the Mexican artist Dr. Lakra presented a highly engaging and complex layering of readings regarding our potential understandings of ‘goth’ today. Dr. Lakra is interested in tattoos. He draws intricate tattoos and markings onto the bodies of models and personalities adorning the covers of popular magazines, original Japanese woodblock prints and mass produced plastic dolls. Like Guy Debord and the Situationists, the work is a highly effective detournement of readily available media images, transforming them into completely different signs for social deviancy or subversion. Dr. Lakra spent two months living and working in Tokyo, and he has made several new bodies of work. Particularly memorable was an eagle like relief head made up entirely of colorful wax food samples bought in the Kappabashi area of Tokyo. Mounted on a stained wooden board, the work seemed like a trophy of Dr. Lakra’s detourning skills, a testament to the power of the imagination to turn readymade objects into strange, unruly totems which pierce the rules of commerce and capital. This work related to a series of powerful portraits by the Japanese artist Pyuupiru, who has been documenting her male to female sex change process since 2003. The series showed her face covered in various substances and materials including strips of raw meat, psychedelic colored liquids, clay looking paste and hair. Each portrait bore a suggestive title such as ‘A surgeon who sells skin’, or ‘An ecstatic drug addict’. Pyuupiru’s presentation seemed linked to Dr. Lakra’s in its explorations of marking as a form of transformation and transgression, although the ‘ready-made’ in Pyuupiru’s case was her own body. Pyuupiru’s portraits pointed to a contemporary concern of many ‘goths’ with the body and its transformations through fashion, decoration, piercing and perhaps ultimately with altering one’s subjectivity in relation to the society one inhabits.

Theda Bara, Goth Vamp icon, US silent film actress. 1885-1955.

Elegant Gothic Lolita fashion brand EGL.

The only documentary style work in the exhibition was a room of photographs by Masayuki Yoshinaga who took pictures of Japanese Gothic Lolita followers. These photographs were at once both a testament to an intense subculture of deviating from social norms, but also a peculiar confirmation of a homogenous and marketable fashion trend encouraged by street fashion magazines like Fruits. Although in parts, the exhibition seemed to slide into a parade of visual clichés (skulls, blood etc) which moulded it into a kind of ‘freak show’, there were just enough works which propelled the exhibition beyond these readings, into areas of transgression and dark unconscious desires.

I have always thought of UK goths as, on the whole, considerably dirtier and unkempt, compared to their contemporary Japanese counterparts. This relates to the historical lineage with Romanticism, and with a sense of returning to nature etc a la Wordsworth, or CD Friedrich.

siouxsie.

Note: The reviewer was a Goth in his younger days, living in the UK.

Comments

[Joanne Allsopp]

Thank goodness! Finally found some up to date info on Dr. Lakra. Thanks,if you have any more info about him would you please email me or point me in the right direction? I am a Fine Art student and have a presentation to do and would appreciate any help.
Thanks Joanne.

[Roger]

check out his galleries - I only know Kate McGarry in London.