BRIDGES OF THE UNKNOWN: VISUAL DESIRES AND SMALL APOCALYPSES
by Eron Rauch, for Mechadamia Volume 2
“It’s just that sometimes I think that within those faintly bittersweet recollections, within the past I spent that way, there may be some fragments of memory, still lying there in the depths of my experience, waiting to be awakened, and these are ready to suddenly call forth new memories. Of course I need to interpose a camera at that place.” Daido Moriyama Memories of a Stray Dog
“History says the Revolution attains "permanence," or at least duration, while the uprising is "temporary." In this sense an uprising is like a "peak experience" as opposed to the standard of "ordinary" consciousness and experience. Like festivals, uprisings cannot happen every day--otherwise they would not be "non-ordinary." But such moments of intensity give shape and meaning to the entirety of a life. The shaman returns--you can't stay up on the roof forever-- but things have changed, shifts and integrations have occurred--a difference is made.” Hakim Bey Temporary Autonomous Zone
I can remember one early Sunday morning at an anime convention. I was drunk in a random hotel bathroom, unzipping the oversized zipper of a young woman’s vinyl cosplay costume and sitting on the bathroom counter. She looks up from under her wig, smirks, and says, “Now things are getting interesting...”
Then her friend walks in, and all I can think is, “Fuck! Why didn’t I bring my camera?” In hindsight, I might place this as the satori moment in which I was repurposed from a fan carrying a camera to a producer of art carrying a fandom. But the value of the presentation of this story is based on its ambiguous status as both autobiography and allegory.
Through this body of images, I am telling a “history” but always wrapped in my own conflicted criticisms.
I chose to work with these inherent conflicts of view because it was only in the disturbingly hard battle to avoid mythologizing or reducing to the banal my personal history of grappling with the process of making art, that I found the project.
And for fans, these conventions are their pilgrimage. All across America, nearly ever state has a yearly convention of thousands of people packed into the same type of hotels, awake for days, moving through simultaneous moments of lucidity and uncertainty in terms of what exactly they are trying to enact.
Amidst these intensified conditions, my project asks the question, is there even any value in trying to be self-critical? After all, in Rock My Religion, Dan Graham wrote of the history of the rock subculture: “Taking momentary pleasures to their limit is a way of transcending history and death, and, in a doomed world, is even inevitable.”
An awareness of one’s own desires seems the most difficult choice for the critical artist or academic. It seems to be that to experience the “transcendence” of the fan, we must sacrifice history and critical discourse. But can we go on lusting to fuck that girl in the Rikku costume, or that boy looking lost in his Cloud cosplay (or pass on both and buy a new set of DVDs) after the fleeting intrusion of an anxiety about the hidden gravities inherent in our “participation”?
The choice between knowledge and Eden: that is, a choice between timelessness and chronology. That choice may seem be cliché, but if these photographs are to address the ways that desire is built and navigated, they must start at that trailhead. And into this anxiety-ridden dialogue of desire and criticism, the presence of the camera becomes an astute embodiment of two major thrusts of conventions:
A hyperawareness of the split between the heterogeneous masses undulating in complicated current around the localized “I.”
The loneliness of knowing the boundaries of the self’s presence is continually reflected the awkwardness of imagining what might be outside of the narrow frames presented.
Photographs of such events of personal/temporal intensity reenact a continual, but sudden, realization of the “I” in the reverie of a masked carnival.
Desire may be born of a waiting-- of not having contact, yet anticipating its potential.
Like looking at a photograph, anime conventions are such a dominantly visual affair. “You,” separate and looking, is the dominant method of First Contact.
Specifically, visual forms of communication are the most powerful initial sparks that lead deeper meanings: costumes; signs; hair cuts; t-shirts; shoes; poses; gestures, key chains… All are ephemera produced by both the fans and the industry which function as signifiers of desires in a sophisticated system called fandom that attempt to exert gravities of depth and identity on the masses. In subtle and overt ways, everyone who chooses to be involved is attempting to effect and coalesce the network of fan-trust into what they consider to be an ideal intersection of desire.
There are many threads of photographic significance, both critical and personal, that surge through my growing archive from cons, but a major current is the manipulation and communication via the body of fan culture’s propelling desires.
During a recent con, a group of us were discussing the idea of cosplay sex while watching Ecstasy of the Angels projected across a corner of the hotel room, listening to Sonic Youth, and drinking gin & juice. As the night progressed to morning, an intricate debate unfolded as to wether cosplay sex is or is not “real” sex. But a few days later I was still mulling over the both sides of the arguement and I realized that when it came to my photographic project, how, aside from costumes props and scenery would a viewer know the subjects were fans? Without such visual signs and symbols, how could I have a “visual” project? How too could the cosplayers enact “cosplay” sex without costumes that display their identity and desire?
The camera, which positions the image from an outside point of view, makes the fans into subjects but quickly becomes it’s own subject.
This project is as melodramatic as this rhetoric, but it also is as self-critical and comic. Photography has become my way to structure my dialogue with myself, while at the same time, being a critical discourse on fandom and desire.
Autobiography becomes subsumed by the camera’s (re) presentation; which is not only the method, but also underlying metaphor of power and history, in terms of what can be “known.”
Conscious awareness of a language of desire seems to bring forth the rip tide of change. By allowing my nexus of desire to be the location of an interposing, exploding, freeze-framing, juxtaposing and ciphering view of fan desire, I think I stumbled on what Takashi Okada has suggested during an interview with Takashi Murakami in Little Boy, “...making a sekai-kei [lit: “world-type”] ends artists’ careers.”
Making art with a critical relationship to your own context is an honest trauma – an act of increasing velocity that moves you, as at the end of Utena, out of static, assumed relationships to your context. No longer do the desires and modes of a certain school, house, or fandom seem immutable and inherent. There is a vertigo: but also a growing excitement in the realization that there are other goals, other communications, other desires to be engaged – even if they are yet unknown. Yet, in this moment of liberation there is also a dangerous trap of selfishness: a strong lure of self-righteousness, pretension, even condescension. Beyond the apocalypse of the self, there is wisdom in understanding that the choices of others are not as simple to judge as we could care to admit – understanding that there is not a singular apocalypse of which we have sole ownership. Rather, we should always remember that in everyone it is thus:
“Shigeru: The mind which confuses Reality with the Truth.
Maya: The angle of view, the position. If these are slightly
different, what is inside your mind will change a lot.
Ryouji: There are as many truths as there are people.
Kensuke: But there's only one truth that you have,
which is formed from your narrow view of the world,
It is revised information to protect yourself,
the twisted truth.
Touji: Oh, yes. the view of the world that one can
have is quite small.
Hikari: Yes, you measure things only by your own small
measure.
Asuka: One sees things with the truth, given by others.”
Neon Gensis Evangelion, Episode 26
Rather than dictate, dominate or judge from my position from the “outside,” I must try to remember that the truths we have used to get where we are, have been given by others. I should be gracious and compassionate.
These photographs try to reveal an understanding: that there are always other “insides.” Both with photography and art it is important to avoid settling into either mode uncritically. If I have learned anything from an emerging awareness of the otaku languages of desire, it is that at any moment I should be ready to honor other views that will necessitate moving on again.
So instead of striving to dismantle or conquer every location of culture we stumble onto, we who find ourselves outside should strive to map, elucidate, and respect the relationships and paths of the intricate and compelling landscapes in which we find ourselves. The spirit of critical discourse has a built-in responsibility to those whom we never fully understand, but have given us precious pieces of their truths. And it is our responsibility to contribute our own truths about the continuous complications of desire uncovered by our stumbling trek through that difficult landscape, which is always larger than we had previously seen.
