A Self in Action        Steiner Liverud

"It was some time in 1998 that I started working with self portraits. I found myself in a moment of contemplation, where I wanted to go back in time, trying to relate my thoughts to what kind of person I was as a child. At the same time somebody lent me some studio lights which meant that I could photograph myself as those characters of me as a child, re-enacting some of the experiences I had. The fact that I could use the studio lights in the privacy of my own home, meant that I could play with performance and role playing without feeling I was doing it in front of an audience. There is a difference in doing it in front of a camera just to yourself, you control the camera and the whole set up."

Stella Whalley(1)

Whalley's artistic practice centres around the self portrait and the issue of the gaze. Since 1998 she has built up a practice which is floating somewhere in a space between feminist and queer theory  the understanding of self and the notions of the other. Who or what is being looked at?, Who is doing the looking? are questions that occupy her mind and have had a strong impact on the actual shaping of Tokyo Tales.

In Tokyo Tales Whalley freely draws inspiration from the narrative and art techniques of the 12th and 13th century scroll paintings (emakimono) and the 18th and 19th century woodblock prints (ukiyoe). The complexity of view points and subject matter that we are introduced to in this book also explore the manga and the art tendency labelled superflat found in contemporary Japan.

When Whalley disentangle the complex nature of the gaze using self portraits, she creates a world which I would like to compare with a theatre  a theatre that consists of a front stage and a backstage. In the backstage area she masters her actions well and feels secure. Here she can be herself, free from her role on stage. However, in the front stage area she has to be self-consciously aware of the impressions she makes on others and tries to shape her actions in expected ways. The difference between back stage and front stage makes me picture patterns echoing habitus, status and role - terms used in social sciences to discuss the relationship between the individual, its actions and the way we internalise socially appropriate behaviour.

Habitus describes enduring and learnt actions which may be unconscious but are shared between members of a specific culture. It is inscribed into the bodies and minds of each individual, it is internalised, and allows us to act in the world in a way that makes sense. Through time and space habitus gets implemented in culture and moves onto a layer of social reality that lies beyond the intentions of the individual. The power of habitus shapes a world that appears as natural and is taken for granted. The implication of this is that even the most spontaneous of acts has to be channelled through a socially defined mode of expression - if it is to be comprehensible.

Status is the social position of an individual in relation to others. It can relate to class, cast, ethnicity or sexual orientation; it can be cook, friend, customer, hostess, mother, father, teenager, wife, English, samurai, geisha etc. A person is made up of and defined by the sum of the statuses in which he or she exists(2). Some statuses are ascribed, such as woman or man, while others are achieved, such as wife or husband. If we move into the area of gender, some people think statuses such as masculinity and femininity are ascribed, while others see them as achieved.

Statuses are static, but they have a dynamic quality which is role. The role is a person's actual behaviour within the limitations set by the status definition. In many ways role is an acting out of the dispositions circumscribed by habitus. For the sake of the Japanese reference in Tokyo Tales  lets give an example of the status samurai(3). A samurai would act out samurainess by movements and facial expressions. As the samurai knows the codes, he can manipulate his status as a samurai. In other words, he can if he wants to liberate himself from the status. He can decide which expression he projects as a samurai in order to give his audience a certain impression of who he is as an individual. Thus, the status of a person in this case a samurai  never fully defines his actions, because status rarely implies exact rules on how to behave and because no role is ever identical. Status is therefore ambiguous in the sense that the individual will have to interpret it before enacting it.

When we look at Whalleys art practice in this context, it appears that she commences her work by observing how people dress, how they communicate status through language, gestures and facial expressions. By observing these finer details she gradually builds up a reference map from which she sketches roles. She then enacts these roles and the status attached to them by dressing up. By being the protagonist herself, she explores what meanings the status and their attributed roles have and how they can be deconstructed. The implication is a disconnection of the streams of consciousness linked to the roles in question. By doing so she highlights the latent ambiguous characteristics of such roles as well as their unreal and lifeless aspects.

Whalleys choice of subject matter is, of course, not arbitrary. The different social relationships connected to the statuses and roles she plays out require specialised behaviour tailored to fit different situations. The roles are, in other words, constituted through her social relationship and, since the relations vary in content, she must necessarily adjust her behaviour somewhat through impression management when confronted with different people. One could draw on Judith Butlers ideas about gender to describe the way Whalleys enactment of roles produces gender as a repeated series of stylised bodily acts. Through the process of rehearsal gender becomes a natural fact and reality4.

The theme of gender has always had a great impact on Whalleys work. In the photographic series Bodysnatchers (1999) Whalley stars in all the photographs herself 5 acting out various characters such as a pubescent girl unaware of her sexuality, a bored low-rent porn star, an anxious psychiatric patient and a widow who has found peace in prayers.

Some of the images in Bodysnatchers are reminiscent of Cindy Sherman and explore the gaze, the act of looking itself, how it is established within works of art and what kind of outside viewer is implied. Just like Sherman, Whalley takes inspiration from mass media and the way womens bodies are depicted by men, whose desires dominate the portrayal of the female body.

There is however an important difference between the two artists. Sherman's works are not images of her; nor are they art works intentionally made of living or once living people and do not answer key questions about who the subject is, which is the basis of self-portraiture. Typically, the interpretation of portraits relies on identifying, naming and situating the individual depicted within a specific time and place, which is not possible with Sherman's imagery.(6) Whalleys work, however, is very much about portraiture and centring on her own experience.

In Whalleys show for the Digital Responses exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum (2002) her point of departure was to respond to the collection of the museum by using digital media. She chose to link Baroque esthetical flamboyancy with an Old Testament story about Susanna and The Elders depicted in the medieval tapestries.

The story itself has triggered many feminists attention as it revolves around two elderly men who secretly watched Susanna bathing in a garden. Full of lust they tried to force themselves upon her. They threaten to accuse her of being unfaithful to her husband if she didnt have sex with them. She refused. Just before she was killed, justice prevails and the two men are put to death.

What Whalley does in the Digital Responses piece is to show how the pictorial representations of Susanna have changed dramatically through history, from being a role model for female chastity to eroticized temptress. In her typical way, she highlights the fact that ideals and patterns change between time and culture, re-enforcing the fact that much of what we do is based on habit and convention.

The statuses and roles Whalley explores in Tokyo Tales reflect the binary oppositions through which gender roles seem to be defined in Japanese society: the ultra masculine samurai, the symbol of Japanese manhood, and the hyper feminine geisha, the symbol of Japanese womanhood. To make the picture more intriguing she questions such static descriptions through the use of androgyny and fantasy found in the all-female theatre of Takarazuka or the real life staging of female desires in host bars for women where the hosts are in fact female by sex but their appearance and behaviour is that of a man.

Many of Whalleys statuses are located somewhere liminal. Within the liminal stages the protagonists have the possibility to liberate themselves from statuses. This type of threshold can be found in the popular masquerade of cosplay where people dress up as their favourite manga or computer game character. By transforming ones appearance into something fictitious, ones identity loosens up and opens into something new and different.

The stylized images we are witnessing in front stage area the visual imagery in the book stands in contrast to the intimate and private tone that comes forth in Whalleys diary. We become aware of how she deliberately places herself in situations where she feels slightly uncomfortable for lack of complete mastery of the role. In the front stage area she is extremely self-consciously aware of the impression she makes on other people and tries to shape her role and behaviour in relation to expected ways.

Stylistically Tokyo Tales is set against the backdrop of several remarkable characteristics of Japanese art. Emakimono, the long horizontal scroll paintings to be unrolled by hand thematise romances, secular stories and bibliographical accounts. The most famous of them all is the eleventh-century emakimono by Fujiwara no Takayoshi, illustrating the novel Tale of Genji by Murasaki a tale about the life in the court of the emperor preoccupied with etiquette and sophistication at the cost of moral standards. Of uttermost importance were trivial things such as the colours of the costumes people were wearing and the paper quality on which a love letter was written.

The narrative techniques with fictional, sensational and popularizing tendencies illustrate the close relation between painting and prose. In fact the text may set the theme, but the actions depicted are often so descriptive that knowledge of the story is not necessary.

In the pictorial composition we find a continuous representation where the same figures appear again and again. The architecture is frequently roofless in order to depict indoor scenes with intimacy the private goes public. The birds eye view perspective and the tilted backgrounds give scope for illustrating a complex story of simultaneous actions. The technique is essentially linear, the faces simplified and colour is built up thickly in flat masses. The mask-like faces and the staid postures of the ladies with their widespread robes and long, flowing black hair in specific settings hints to the moods of the subjects.

Ukiyoe, or wood block prints, started to get popular during the Edo period, the time when Japan was encapsulated in its isolation politics which prohibited contact with the outside world. The striking ukiyoe were inexpensive and reproduced in large quantities. They give a vivid and insightful peek into the urban life of the capital. The subject matter, more than any art before, relates to the experience of commoners, with scenes depicting courtesans in their meticulously manicured look, portraits of actors in kabuki roles, scenes from leisure trips, high class brothels in the pleasure district, festivals and sumo wrestling. The technique is easily recognizable with flat blocks of colour, shadowless bodies with ornamentations and applied patterns ignoring depth and three dimensionality. Its flatness, expressive rhythm of colour inspired the most cutting edge artists at the end of the 19th century.

While Whalley clearly draws on these more traditional techniques and representations, contemporary visual forms are also reflected in Tokyo Tales. Within the contemporary Japanese art scene it is worth mentioning the 'superflat'. It refers to a trend in Japanese contemporary art which is born out of the self obsessive computer addicts of the otaku, or computer nerd culture. It mixes animation, comics, and computer game aesthetics together with sexually charged pop culture and kawaii (cute) imagery. On a formal level its emphasis on two-dimensionality combine with techniques of mass production and media manipulation. We find a blurring of borders between established genres and between mass and high culture.

Takashi Murakami's My Lonesome Cowboy (1998) illustrates in a profound way the essence and obsessions of the superflat. It is a life size sculpture of a nude cartoon-like man with a big and confident smile, oversized eyes, masturbating his erected penis, captured in the moment of the ultimate climax of having an orgasm which sends out a stream of sperm spiralling over his head. He is grinningly confident with no hint of an orgasmic melting feeling, but instead total focused on his physical and fluid acrobatics. Murakami's work weirdly presages the current situation of art, in which ideas of artistic freedom, critical distance, the market, arts institutions and arts public are mutating into something new, uncertain and brightly, smilingly dark.(7)

The otaku nerd is a part of a great revolt against society, and in some ways, against reality8 . They are so mesmerized and engaged in cyber net life that they somehow lost connection to any cultural responsibility beyond their self obsession with computer games and network of cyber friends. The fascination of living totally in a personal fantasy world is well illustrated by the act of dressing up as a fantasy figures.

In Tokyo Tales, the reader is caught up in a first person narrative which traces the events related to moments in Whalleys relationship with herself in Japan. With the added compositional patterns and spatial frameworks, she introduces a wealth of relations and angles, from floating perspectives inspired by the asymmetrical Japanese scrolls that seem to run endlessly in a horizontal panorama, to the various vanishing point perspectives.

By blending obvious references to traditional Japanese art forms with her own vocabulary, Whalley creates a new and beautiful space, where the reality and imagination merge and where the self is confronted with new and unpredicted aspects. Through her manipulated yet realistic self portraits she suspends the boundaries of what is real and what might become real. She brings in contradictions that heighten the sense of the uncanny and forces the images into spatial simultaneity. The spatial interrelations she creates are deliberately irrational and create a world that looks tangible but is ultimately unreal(9).

Footnotes

1 Interview with Stella Whalley by Steinar Liverud, December 2006.

2 Eriksen, Thomas H. Small Places Large Issues, Pluto Press, London 2001, p.50.

3 Here I have been inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre use of the example of a Parisian waiter when he describes how individuals reflect upon and enact status. Sartre: Being and Nothingness.

4 Judith Butler: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London. Routledge 2006.

5 Mancio, Marie Anne, in Bodysnatchers by Stella Whalley, London 1999.

6 Steiner, Rochelle Cast of Characters in Cindy Sherman, Serpentine Gallery, London 2003, p. 7.

7 Charlesworth, J.J: Takashi Murakami. Something Like a Phenomenon, Art Rewiew, January 07, p 66.

8 Bellini, Andrea and Chiara Leoni: Interview with Takasji Murakami, Flash Art On Web: http://www.flashartonline.com/OnWeb/TAKASHI_MURAKAMI.htm

9 I would like to thank Dr Hendrike Donner for her helpful comments when writing this essay.  Steiner Liverud 2007