Sexual State Experiment 「性態実験」 (2009-10)
ISHIGURO Kenichirō 石黒賢一郎

About a week ago, I posted an entry about the contemporary artist ISHIGURO Kenichirō 石黒賢一郎.  In it, I talked at some length about this striking, provocative life-size drawing, and so I thought I would post a better version of it here.

In looking at it again now, I realize once again how challenging this image is.  At the same time the artist is revealing the woman to us in astonishingly vivid, photographic detail, he also hides her from us with the mask.  For many viewers, this combination of hypervisuality and hiding, sexuality and danger, may take on sinister overtones, reminding us of Abu Ghraib, which is still uncomfortably close to us in memory. 

The woman’s body is available to us in this picture, but her interiority (as read through the face) is not.  Meanwhile, all the BDSM tools surrounding her (ropes, gags, etc.) are precisely things to reduce her presence to her body by hiding or suppressing movement, speech, and facial expression.  One could read this work as an allegorical study of the knowability of the interior.  How much can we ever read desire on the outside of the body?  Aren’t we constantly testing, constantly experimenting with sexual states through the gaze? In fact, as Freud taught us on his work on the fetish, the very interruption of the gaze represents the mechanism that incites desire on the part of the viewer. 

In some ways, this painting replicates the mechanisms of the gaze so common in art history (male, dominant, objectifying), yet at the same time, the interruption of the gaze caused by the mask compels us to question that very act of looking.  What exactly are we seeing in this picture?  Her or ourselves?  In the end, our gaze turns back upon ourselves and inward, as we question ourselves, our motivations for looking at this picture, and the feelings (sexual or otherwise) that it provokes within the viewers.  In the end, the subjects of Ishiguro’s sexual state experiment turns out to be us. 

ISHIGURO Kenichirō 石黒賢一郎 (1967- )
For Ishiguro’s website and galleries, click here.

Ishiguro is a contemporary artist who works largely in large-scale paintings and pastels.  I first heard his name recently at an exhibition called “The Aesthetics of Existence” ｢存在の美学｣ at the Osaka branch of the Takashimaya Department Store.  Although some time has passed since the exhibition, his drawings have continued to haunt me. 

His paintings and drawings are lifelike to the point of being photographic, and since they are usually life size, they have a powerful sense of presence.  Among his most striking images are portraits of people wearing gas masks, some of whom are naked women.  In these images, he takes a symbol of modern murderous excess—an image that has special resonance in our era of fear of chemical weapons—into something fetishistic that incites curiosity, interest, and perhaps even desire on the part of the viewers. 

This is especially clear in the pastel drawing Sexual State Experiment 「性態実験」 which shows a nude woman standing in front of a gynological table and a board covered with gags, handcuffs, ropes, a flogger, and other SM gear.  While ostensibly, the painting depicts an experiments to test the naked woman in the image, it also tests us, as we gauge our reaction to the provocative image before us. 

At the same time, the people in the gas masks are also hiding, as if keeping safe from us and our scopophilic gaze by a barrier of anonymity.  What does it mean to have a self-portrait concealed in a gas mask as at the top of this posting?  The subject is reduced to a body that is seemingly vulnerable and endangered, yet its interiority is put off limits, resistant to interpretation and identification. 

Ultimately, I wonder if what we see in Ishiguro’s work isn’t really ourselves.  At the same time we gaze at the mask from the outside, we find ourselves imagining ourselves donning it from inside it as well.  At the same time we look, we are visually cut off from the face of the person inside, and that interruption just makes us think all the more about our own act of looking.