Dear Adrian,
I am in love with images. Again. I just whirled through the Paris Metro. Each station is an image-overload—a total onslaught of the visual that engulfs you after you are spat out of the black tunnelling void of the underground train journey between each stop. The stations are a line of billboards. Their presentation is clean and simple; stark and bold. In other words, they are effective. I am struck, too, by the uniqueness of each billboard image; spring-loaded by its unfamiliarity. Each one is like a strobe flash that stuns me, holding itself steadfast while I am frozen by its Medusa-like force. I now remember what it is like to be tongue-tied by image, to be caught in the act of gulping down and unable to talk with a full mouth. But yet it is more than that. It is now a state of calm rather then the frustration sometimes felt before when I found myself in a territory where semiotics became not workable, but futile. I now feel a knowing ignorance that can accept the images more fully on their terms (the presence of their statement) than within my analytic frameworks.
One can look at imagery and, either disregarding or not caring for the density that the images carry, absorb the effect of their function in a form of pragmatic and perfunctory interpretation that borders on the non-existent. The ‘message’ of imagery (complex in its nature as a semantic fragment yet simple in our encounter with it) is not the only thing that is digested and consumed: it is the event of consumption that is also consumed by the very act of consumption. The ‘message’, as consumed, lives in us through a series of transfers and recalls; encoded in our perception, memory and articulation. But the event exists as instantaneous excrement. Thus, the image leaves a penumbral existence while our precise and specific relationship with it reminds lost.
A problem then exists—that is to say, a problematic presents itself because basically I want to articulate a problem where quite realistically one doesn’t exist. And the problem is the burden of knowledge. Not in the sense of a privileged scholarly tradition, but in the sense of consumerable information that we are consumed by. As linguistic beings we are doomed to see animals in the clouds, races in abstract paintings, patterns in mathematics, meanings in words. Our relationship with image evokes all these silent processes and more. Our perspectives on culture, our concept of taste, and our evaluation of our ‘selfs’ all go towards determining the breadth and depth of our image consumption: different digestions for different bodies. Our different interpretations of imagery are in fact not so much to do with the angle of our viewpoints as they are to do with the degree that we are to bother about our relationship with imagery. I can talk semiotics until I’m blue in the face and still will be totally thwarted by a shrug of the shoulders and a line like “but why make such a fuss over dumb picture, anyway?” Here then is the un-glorious reality of semiotics as a science: the drunkard needs no chemical breakdown of alcohol-effects to get pissed, and semioticians don’t have a monopoly on image-consumption. Semiotics (or at least the greater bulk of semiotic application to date) often becomes a mode of analysis that can’t recognise its distance from ‘reality’ as contained in the language of this analysis.
Images become most interesting when they tell you too much by not giving you enough; a situation caused by unguided multiplicity whereby an image appears to instantly mean something or some things clearly to you, but upon further wondering it throws up a whole set of indefinite factors. The familiar suddenly becomes unfamiliar: clouds in the animals and abstract paintings in the faces. The image kills its defined status by being too clear-cut through appearing to accurately present its message. The ‘reworked’ image—be it an object of artistic appropriation by some openly deliberate activity; an instance of cultural dislocation on your part as a viewer; or simply something that for no tangible reasonable cause appears strange—simultaneously draws you into it like a comfortable domain and repels you from it in the most alienating way. All your resorts to description fail, as does any subjective rationalisation that might constitute clearly to yourself the mechanics of your own perception. The effect is like being able to discern and experience both the rabbit and the duck in in Wittgenstein’s famous psychological illustration. One is disallowed the satisfaction and the pleasure of consuming the image because one is transfixed by the event of consumption. Yet, another pleasure is still obtainable—but only on the condition that one cares to bother about “the dumb picture anyway”. It is the pleasure of not fully understanding something— and of embracing that very fact. This, for me, is the reality of images that exists unseen by both semiotics and its more conservative pre-existing modes of analysis.
I think I’ll catch it another train. Hope you’re having fun back home. See you soon,
Philip
Dear Adrian,
Everyone tells me not to go to Los Angeles. They say it is ugly. Real ugly. I was forewarned of a city that had apparently never heard of ‘aesthetics’. I felt like my taste was in danger of being extinguished, that I would be swallowed up by the moronic rhythm of this gaudy city. Its version of architecture; its vision of the arts; its excuse for culture. Naturally, I couldn’t wait to get here.
Being an avid devotee of American film and television, L.A. is a dream come true. It’s like walking into your television set. Every physical location is a scene from some film or tele-episode. Every street has been referred to a million times over. Every strange speech idiom, every bit of slang is familiar in its utterance. Even every brand-name presents itself as the solution to the mystery evoked by my initial encounter with them on television. Like the enigma of the familiar yet unfamiliar image, L.A. similarly joins the encounter with the experience. Just like Intellevision home video games say: “you are there”. And I am here. But as a place, a location, and environment, I find it difficult to specify dimensions, measure volumes. In this moment I’m more convinced that the artificiality of American film and television reproduces L.A. in its physicality, rather than a visual fictionalization which signifies an attempt to depict L.A., rendering it real. The difference between the real and its depiction becomes a meaningless issue as I drive down the L.A. Freeway listening to Chaka Khan, Shannon, Run DMC and Pat Benatar, stopping for some Dunkin’ Donuts here, a chilli burger from Fatburgers there. My only previous relationship with L.A. was with images. Products of its city, products of its Dream Factory. Now that I’m here I can’t really feel any presence that marks its images (in my memory) as being different or separate from my current experience of what was represented by those images. L.A. is an Image Factory; a self sufficient whole that disperses not fragments but wholes, because when I stick the pieces together they are identical: images become image. My perception floats not through a circulation of symbols but through a flux of entities.
I have a camera and I want to take pictures, to play out being a tourist. But where are the monuments? Where are the sites, points of interest? I discovered that there aren’t any. I can only substitute some:
(i) The Hollywood sign. In L.A. it really makes sense that a landmark ins are being a sign; a self-declaration of place without substance, the form of which is given by its presence more then its materials. It stands as a sculpture at the intersection of abstract and concrete language, telling us nothing, only saying itself.
(ii) The intersection of Hollywood & Vine. Another point that is organised linguistically (we talk about it, hear about it, etc.) but does not functionally exist as a space. Where am I to position myself in order to get a picture taken of myself here? I look around and among a hundred signs, lights and images resides a small street corner sign: Hollywood & Vine. Then I am bowled over by a huge sign made out of lights that bellows: HOLLYWOOD & VINE! Obviously they had to make another sign that in someway equated the bloated presence of this enigmatic place. The ordinary original sign had become outcoded.
(iii) Griffith Observatory. Not so much of a big deal (it functions more as a recreational facility for the people of L.A. than it does as a tourist attraction for visitors to the city) but a personal thrill to walk around in all the settings from Rebel Without A Cause. The driveway where Jim and the gang play little knife; the theatrette where he moos at Orion; the entrance where he screams “I got the bullets!” The Hollywood sign, Hollywood & Vine and Griffith Observatory all function as mythical places of mythical scenes from mythical movies, the reverberations of which drown out whatever banality they are contained in their lost state of the ‘real’.
Then there’s the car wash from Car Wash; the valley girls from Valley Girl; the used cars in Used Cars. Locations become lived and liveable facades, such as Venice Beach in Breakdance; Sunset Boulevard in Angel; the Huntington library in Chinatown; or even downtown in Michael Jackson’s “Beat it”. L.A. doesn’t need a ‘sense of place’ because there’s no way you could be in a position that could disconnect you from the incredible surface of the city. Duchamp wanted The Large Glass to rest in no particular direction, galvanising its image content onto glass, a sheet of transparency, rather than a substantial surface. L.A. assumes the same form in that you can only ever been in it—nowhere else. Hollywood is in L.A.—but L.A. is in Hollywood. Disneyland is in California—but California is in Disneyland.
And what about Disneyland? Far be it from a fantasy land, it mirrors L.A. like a hall of images. Just as L.A. and Hollywood entertain the real of their image production in film and television, so does Disneyland present a ‘reality land’ in its four kingdoms of wonder: Frontierland, Tomorrowland, Fantasyland and Adventureland. Disneyland stands as the perfect crafting of the manipulation of perception. All that you take in is precisely controlled. Its physical dimensions are constructed not in accordance with any sense of reality, but in total consideration of the position of the subject of its encountering. I remember a long time ago seeing a documentary on Disneyland about the making of Disneyland. I have a strong memory of Walt Disney walking across a spread of paddocks, counting his steps (similar to Jet Rink in George Stevens’ Giant) as he marked out what Disneyland would be in the then-future. As I wandered through Disneyland, that memory seemed to explain it all. All its perspectives were totally designed around where the viewer/subject/voyeur would be. In the submarines of the Submarine Voyage ride, all the flat fakeness of the underwater objects as viewed from above the water take on a full-blooded artificiality when you position your head inside the submarine’s portholes, viewing the scenes through the distortion of the glass and water as you listen to the soundtrack of voice, sound effects and music. Even a slight flow of air is pushed upwards toward your face pressed against the glass so as to prevent the window from fogging up.
But it is the Pirates of the Caribbean ride that is the pièce de résistance. Out of all the rides in Disneyland, this is the one which goes all-out in ridiculing your perception of reality, your constitution of its codes and theatrics. The duck/rabbit syndrome of a monomorphic effect arises in a different form here while you cruise down the river in your row boat, bombarded with effects that are blatant in their mechanics, ruthless in their presentation. Their artificiality screams at you—but you’re not listening. When a bomb drops on you, you get blown to pieces despite your never having seen the bomb as either whole or fragments. The effects of Pirates of the Caribbean engulf you in a similar way. The journey traverses through the water at night-time—and I have never seen a more realistic recreation of night. I couldn’t discern how it was made to look like night with all its shimmering stars, but it felt like night. I knew it wasn’t night—but I was helpless in proving otherwise, as my perception was governed by the experience of being the middle of the Caribbean Sea as pirates waged a battle from the galleons and on the docks of the coastal port. It was the stuff of theatre: wood, paint, lights, sound, mechanics, paper, water. But formed as images, it worked not through the suspension of belief, but the manipulation of disbelief.
A popular video on MTV at the moment here is Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.”. This is very strange considering how old song is now. When I first saw it in Australia, I puked. It was full of all the ‘ugliness’ that I presumed people were referring to when they were trying to shield me from L.A.’s vampiric power that would suck all my aesthetic values drive. And Randy Newman—the poetic commentator upon this ‘ugliness’—didn’t look much better, as I presumed him to be just another boring old fart forced into having an image-consciousness for the media spectacle of the music video market. Now that I’m in L.A. and watching it on MTV, I see it differently. I even like the song. The clip is full of people from all over L.A. saying individually or in groups that they love L.A. (“We love it!”) intercut with stroboscopic editing of L.A. locales, signs, symbols, icons, objects and images while Randy Newman drives along Wilshire Boulevard, Melrose Avenue, Rodeo Drive and Venice Beach in a pink Cadillac wearing a palm tree shirt sitting next to a blonde girl with red Lolita glasses (très style). Beverly Hills, Burbank, the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood, Santa Monica—it’s all there with one-hundred-and-one nerds, jocks, bimbos and turkeys. And I love everyone of them. I love L.A.!
Hope you’re having fun back home. See you soon,
Philip
Dear Adrian,
As you know, there was only one reason for me to come to Tokyo, one aim. That was to visit Toho studios and collect as much paraphernalia as possible of Godzilla, and perhaps even see some of the old sets and props from those magical productions from the 1960s. This mission was accomplished, but I have encountered a lot more here than what I had bargained for. I have found myself caught up in ‘things Japanese’ and the mythology of the Nippophile. Not that I am seduced by the stances and projects related to those obsessions, but that I can’t make any sense out of what good a Nippophile could actually get out of Japan’s capital, Tokyo (considering the amazing lack of Easterness in the city) or figure out where were the trajectories of all these ‘things Japanese’.
In Paris I flicked through a book called Japanese Style which was in awe of this twilight zone inhabited by ‘things Japanese’. But I’m extremely sceptical toward and suspicious of identifiably cultural traits in objects from any country. I’m ignorant of them and treat them with disdain when I encounter them. I’m sure that a certain French woman whom I met in Paris wasn’t too amused when, after her listing to me a mundane collection of Australian images (all of which I have no connection with whatsoever: Ayers Rock, the beaches, the vast landscape, etc.) I gave her my one image of Paris: hundreds of dogs and lots of dog shit everywhere. Otherwise Paris held nothing peculiar for me in its self-proclaimed (read: historical) identity, even though its presence as a city afforded me fun, pleasure and excitement. All the fragments of identity of Japan, its global circulation of images, have always gone in one eye and out the other with me. All this stuff about Eastern philosophy, skill, craftsmanship, design, etc. struck me more as Western cringing than anything else. (Yeah, and I’m a honky-middle-class-smart-arse-pseudo-intellectual, and for sure I feel real bad about it).
Well, Tokyo has had nothing to do with any of my preconceptions. Its sense of image is like a hectic jungle housing natives who have turned our Western image content and form upside-down. The image collision brought about by the Westernisation of Tokyo is not in the form of juxtaposition—it is in the form of mutation. Tokyo is a city that refracts the West more then it reflects it; a populace of pod-people that have not fully formed—attempting to assume the appearance of the Other (the West) but instead becoming what in music composition is referred to as the inverted retrograde: a motif, figure or gesture that is reassembled and redistributed into a form that re-illustrates its original form. Only the Japanese can mimic the Americans in a way that codes their mimicry as an inimitable style.
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (which in no more than five years time will probably look as strained as Ken Russell films look now) is a film that is pregnant in its direction and an abortion in its fiction. Wandering around Tokyo itself makes Blade Runner look like a badly made documentary. The atmosphere of Tokyo (especially at night) is one of dry steamy wetness, like a dry-cleaners; full of dark neon and pulsating fluorescent like a 7-11. Its layout carries a sense of design born of claustrophobic whereby no space is vacant, no place unoccupied. In Blade Runner, strange machines hover majestically yet menacingly in the night skies, communicating messages with succinct yet strange clarity. Tokyo forms a womb of images and messages that floats me with in its density. I am gently ushered along from tube to street to department store and back again. Over and over again, like a film loop without any sound: frantic repetition calmly regenerating itself. If there were image machines floating above Tokyo skies, I probably wouldn’t have been able to single them out from the humming high-tension surface of the city, from its constant rhythm. In Tokyo, space is space: one continuum that defines its place as an endless surface of image. Even the handles that I hold onto standing up in the absurdly crowded trains have full-colour advertisements no larger than an 8 cm square. My whole eyeball becomes one—no splitting between pupil, retina and cornea—is it roams randomly over all the images in my gaze. Tokyo will only cease when I fall asleep.
I love department stores and shopping complexes. And so too, it seems, does Tokyo. All hail the Seibu department store in Ikebukuro. For starters, it is as big as the space between two train stations, and it houses its own station in one of its many basements. It totals 12 floors and boasts a museum, a cinema, an art gallery, and about half a dozen small markets. To simply walk the length of one floor at a comfortable pace takes at least a full quarter of an hour. Needless to say, I am a miniature in this incredible model display of consumption. Dwarfed not only by the size of things, but also by their compactness, the power of pervasiveness. The sale at the moment for Seibu features two posters. One is of a big close-up of a little girl with a polka dot ribbon in her hair, superimposed like an oriental putto on a polka dot background, with a meagre splattering of Japanese characters in one corner, the Seibu logo in the other. The other poster features the same little girl dressed in pink, black and yellow, jumping up in the air in a large expansive studio, back-lit in a tonal graduation from grey to white. Next to her and also jumping up in the air is a fake brontosaurus about eight times the size of the girl. The texture of the brontosaurus suit is clearly visible, and once again a small block of typeface hugs one corner of a stretching white space down the bottom of the poster. The thin border of the poster carries an art naïf rendering of leopard skin.
I am awestruck. I have no idea whatsoever as to what any of these posters are about. All I can find out is that they are merely for Seibu’s short winter sale. (And back in Australia all we can usually manage is a cheap silkscreen of “Sale now on!”) These two posters in particular have been fixed in my mind as my personal examples of the image-effect (upon me) in Tokyo. No emptying of signifiers, no recontextualization of symbols here—it is I who is being emptied and recontextualized. Tokyo is not alien. I am the alien. I’m on the verge of worshipping all its images, yet it ignores me. But this unrequited love is of no concern because image exchange is not an issue here. I simply take what I take through not knowing what I’m taking and with no one ever knowing that I’ve taken what I’ve taken.
Tokyo takes the Western world in the same way. Perhaps image exchange is split: workable but never relative. The district of Harajuku is in awe of the mass/popular culture of the West just like the Nippophiles are in awe of the sacred/ritual culture of the East. I’m in awe not of the image of a culture’s imagery, but in the way in which it is subsumed and consumed by a different culture. Harajuku’s Westernism constitutes a gluttony of fetishism, though the objects of fetish only carry that as a use-value and not as a desired inherent quality. When they put the objects and images down, the fetishes disappear and do not live in a limbo awaiting their resurrection, their stage-call for a replay of the fetishistic effect. Rockabilly, McDonald’s, James Dean, Snoopy, crêpes suzette, neon, bobby socks, leather jackets, heavy metal, Charlie Brown, Disneyland, pointy shoes, disco, ponytails—these are the displaced/replaced images which line the lanes of Harajuku and spectacularise Yoyogi Park on Sunday afternoons. Tokyo’s youth present a composite spectacle of a high school restaging of Rebel Without A Cause, turning its fiction into reality, not caring for the differences or samenesses of its setting, only for its image value.
Still, there remains a certain vapidity in this display of Youth, because its nature as image is unbelievably total. After the frenzied spectacle hordes of dancing kids who attempt to do the twist to “At The Hop”, or do mutative calisthenics in Kabuki costume to Japanese disco that even makes Gloria Gaynor sound good, the girls change behind the bushes and pack their 50s costumes into their tidy cases, while the boys pick up all the rubbish they made and put it into the nearby bins. Fetish dissolved; image faded; spectacle disassembled. Back home to the outer reaches of Tokyo to resume life with the family. I find it very disconcerting because I can’t have my cake and eat it too. Their sense of image is real; more real than I can entertain it to be. It is all image. All I can do is continue to take only what I want and participate not in what some would like to have as a ‘cultural dialogue’, but in a situation of us looking at one another. No communication needed: just assimilation and duplication. As I am about to leave a rockabilly store called Big Shout! the proprietors give me a complimentary copy of their magazine, I think because I was like some strange occurrence or premonition of the real that emanated from their fetishized images; like a photo come to life due to my shoes, jacket, hair and face. I was tickled by their gesture as they grinned saying “Plesent! Plesent! Plesent!”
Stories of Tokyo could go on forever—so long as I don’t get to understand their culture and society. I don’t give a hoot for ‘things Japanese’—or worse still, ‘the Japanese’. The Nippophile runs the pathetic gauntlet of trying to understand Japan in its totality, to become Japanese. I don’t want any of that. All I can do is remain in awe of a culture that displays artificial food as a spectacle of effect that generates hunger through an identification of the food as real, and a society which, due to censorship, symbolically depicts vaginae as sea shells and penes as fish. Tokyo is a city where images do not so much exist in spaces, as spaces exist in images.
So, Adrian, my travels will soon end. Next stop: Melbourne. And the inevitable next project: rationalisation. As my image consumption of Otherness reaches capacity intake, I pause, hovering around possible directions my rationalisation of these experiences could take. My only vague intention before leaving for overseas was to home in on the samenesses of other cultures. Having done so, I think I have more successfully come to terms with their differences, leading me to think that rather than playing the tourist, it is perhaps better to pretend to be a cultural zombie.
Cultural difference I feel is no more than the intersecting points of squiggling random lines, the patterns and travels of which would constitute flows of cultural identity as uniplanar in movement and monogramatic in form. Multiculturalism, as such, is no more than the overlapping of these monograms on the lightbox of liberalism. It has only been by default that I have “fallen in love with images again” because my encounters with cultural-sameness/difference have reinstated multiplicity into my dealings with Image. I feel as though I have alienated myself (though neither divorced nor disengaged myself) from the binary oscillations of image/real, theory/practice, meaning/discourse. The failures of many cultural theories and most artistic practices of Image have sent those oscillations spinning off into a dizzy limbo. I am still affected by the continuing vibrations, though I am now comfortably out of sync with their projected rhythms. I no longer wear the red shoes of image-discourse. So many so-called problematics here are no more than the consequences of establishing certain theoretical discourses—which may not be as far-reaching as their tone suggests. To comment upon images, one should acknowledge them as wholes and not as fragments: applicable and shapeable both in isolation and in any context. After all, images come from everywhere—and that is where they belong.
But if I detect some depression or ennui in your letters, Adrian, I hasten to point out that my enlightenment should be considered as minimal. I have found neither solution nor new problematics. I have simply been faced in a different direction, keeping the same location, considering that my encounters with images have probably been more cathartic than dialectic. The former, however, is extremely important in any cultural theory, for if the ideas and their casual experiences are not equal in pleasure, those ‘ideas’ should be questioned. As I savour and ponder my experiences, I can only hope that interesting ideas will be born from them—perhaps into theory, perhaps into practice. For now, I can only repeat that I am in love with images. Again and again and again.
See you soon,
Philip.