Concepts and Themes essay

BA (HONS) Illustration
                                               
                                                    Concepts and Themes




Mohan Ballard


Nobuyoshi Araki: Untitled (“Vaginal Flowers“)

Nan Goldin:“Roommate, New York City”



            Nobuyoshi Araki’s art is crazed, inventive, obscene and often very graphic. Some of the photo’s on display are stomach churning which often display’s exhibitionism of the highest order. This is Araki’s aim though, and he succeeds in doing it. Born during the Second World War to parents who ran a shitamachi geta shop, the fifth child in a family of seven, little Nobuyoshi Araki, or "Arachy," as he likes to be called, has become Japan’s best-known photographer and its most controversial cultural export. Controversy has followed the talented photographer everywhere he goes since he was a young artist. In 1988 police ordered the removal of a magazine which published Araki’s early photographs. Then Obscenity charges were then levelled against the daring photographer during a 1992 exhibition and the arrest of a gallery curator who dared to display Araki’s graphic nudes in 1993. You get the impression that Araki was and is a rebel testing the system. It was during this time Japan had banned all artwork containing nudes and there genitalia. What was Araki to do ? This was his lively hood they were outlawing. To Araki though, what you saw was not only the obvious. If you looked deep beyond an image there would lay a deeper meaning. It was with this initiative that he started his works on flowers, which was under the title “Tokyo Love”, with many of the flowers left untitled.
            On the other hand, Nan Goldin is a  completely different artist, in the way she portrays her pictures. Nan Goldin's images of her friends: drag queens, drug addicts, lovers and family -- are portraits that, create a document in a generation. Goldin once said that her work "derives from the snapshot. It is the form of photography that most closely stands for love." On September 12, 1953, Goldin was born in Washington, D.C. and soon after, her and her family moved to a suburb of Boston. When Nan was 14 years old, her older sister, Barbara Holly Goldin, committed suicide. Upset by this event, she created an alternate family of friends. She also decided that traditional schooling was not for her, living with a series of foster families, and enrolled in an alternative school called Satya Community School. It was at Satya, located in Lincoln, Massachusetts, that Goldin met two people who would be great friends and influences for many years to come: David Armstrong and Suzanne Fletcher. There Goldin's fascination with photography truly began to take shape. Over the course of 16 years, Goldin worked on "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency" addressing the "blurry line separating the genders" and photographed drag queen beauty contests during the early 1970s and became friends with many transvestites. Goldin saw drag as a way to reinvent oneself, and took photographs of friends in full drag dress, as well as in various stages of preparation. It was in this section of her work that she took the photo “Roommate, New York City”,  which was not a photo of someone in drag, it was quite the opposite, but of a women who felt comfortable enough in her own surroundings to be in the nude and portray her own body to the world.
            It is these two images that I will compare together while using the methods of semiotic analysis.


      
Nobuyoshi Araki’s ‘ Untitled ‘            Nan Goldins ‘ Roommate, New York City, 1980’
Flower from the Tokyo Arts              This was taken from the hugely successful  book
Collection. This was produced        “The ballad of sexual dependency”.
In 1997.

The first Image, by Nobuyoshi Araki,  Shows a pink, red, white and yellow flower close up. Is this what Araki had intended to show us though ? . To an average viewer this image is exactly what it looks like,  a close up image of a pretty flower in full bloom. This is not what Araki wants to show though. It is his determination and thought provoking ways that make him force you to look deeper into a photo, scratch beneath the surface. Araki's world is loaded with images of a sexual nature. In fact all of his work contains references to the sexual & intimate. Close-up shots of these flowers resemble women's genitalia & are an obvious indication of the photographer's interest, but despite their evident connotations they are still awash in mystery and eroticism rather than the crude. For him, An orchid resembles a pelvis, the pink blossom of which sits evocatively at the centre. It is inescapable and penetrating. In turning everything and everyone into sex, Araki turns sex into all of these things, he controls our perspective. An example of the signifier in this image is the shape of the petal in the centre of the flower. The wide open shape indicates an entering available. Also the white tip on the end of the petal at the top of the entering signifies a woman’s clitoris. While the meaning or message (Signified), is simply that Araki views this flower as parts of a woman’s genetalia. The simple fact was that if Japan had not outlawed photography of a nude person, then Araki would have continued his work in that way. This was though, a way of getting round the problem presented to him.
          The second Image, by Nan Goldin, is simply called ‘ Roommate, New York City, 1980’ . I have decided to choose this image for many reasons. My first consists of the comparability between this image and Araki’s flower. At first the image’s seem to have no likeness or similarities at all, but they do. As I explained beforehand, Araki’s flower showcased  hidden connotation’s in relation to the female body. With this image by Nan Goldin, there are no hidden messages or meanings to do with the female body, everything is on show, apart from the genitalia which the young lady is covering with her hand, but I think she has done it unconsciously, due to her sleeping nature. Both artists are displaying something completely different in imagery terms, but when looked at closer they are both displaying the same image.
        Photographs don’t portray things just as they are. Araki is quoted as saying ,


“If your only interested in creating a likeness, you might think that all you have to do is take a photograph, but photographs really aren’t likenesses  at all. They both do and don’t resemble their subjects. You might think that photographs depict things as they really are, but a camera doesn’t  create a real likeness.”


This is exactly the ideas and morals Araki takes into account before taking each of his photos. The flower doesn’t just represent a flower in full bloom, it represents a strong passion for the female body, in this case.
        In examining the ‘Roommate’ further more, I believe it sends out a much more stronger and vivid message then originally thought of. During the time period of which this photo was taken, a more free and sexual lifestyle was being taken by the people of this era, to devastating effects. Aids was rampant, along with other sexual transmitted diseases. I think this photo highlights exactly the loose and comfortable lifestyle people led. The woman in the photo has no remorse or even shame that she is laying in her bed, covers Strawn across, fully naked for everyone to see, but why should see ? In that era this was common practice. Judging from the posters and papers on her wall I gather she was a practising artist, either a student or she was in a job relating art. Also, to the left of the picture, still on the wall, is a tear out from the New York times newspaper,  which headlines “ SMASH THE STATE”. This was a common phrase for anarchists.
        Do both images look the same ? No. Do they both portray similar aspects ? Absolutely. Araki’s flower image might not be as obvious in a way of showing the female body in a free and expressive way as Nan Goldin has done in her image, but it is definitely meant to portray the same amount, if not more, of the female body. Had it not have been for the outlawing of nude photography in Japan, This image might have never come to realisation. For me though, the Nan Goldin image certainly communicates more messages and meanings then Araki’s flower. Not only does the image include a nude woman, it sends out messages as to how the mind worked in that era, I.e.  sexually. They also both deliver messages that are completely the opposites to each other. For Araki’s shows us life, the essence of youth and the female body parts, Goldins offers us yes, the female body, but danger in society, anarchy in sexual terms and to some points, death. Could the female woman with her eyes closed be showing us death ?, in Goldins eye’s, no, not consciously , but sub-consciously I think yes, she does signify death.
        
This is a close up picture of          This is another close up picture but this time of the
The poster in the girls room          naked girl laying down on her bed, possibly
Which has the quote “Smash        sleeping or posing.
The state”
     

"A lot of people seem to think that art or photography is about the way things look, or the surface of things. That's not what it's about for me. It's really about relationships and feelings…”

        This Nan Goldin quote above is similar to the Araki quote mentioned earlier. They both recognise that everything is not what you see in art and photography, that you have to scratch beneath the surface and identify what’s really underneath. Goldin uses relationships and feelings in most of her work, but Araki has a hint of that in some of his work too. They both create visual diary’s of their lives, But in these two images they separate from there comfort zones to bring us two intriguing and thought provoking images.
          Together, Both images look at first sight to be a total miss-match, but look within the photo’s and you’ll find they are more similar then they look, Just like the Photographers themselves.
          In my conclusion, I have found that both images have been a delight to critically compare while also being a challenge. I have studied both images intensively and I have learned a great deal about the artists and there works.


                                                 


                                                    Mohan Ballard