Les Joynes

Currently writing: The Form Laboratory - the process of form in contemporary art, to be published in 2012 as part of PhD. Author of 100 plus proprietary reports and stidies in arts, education, new program development, industry.

Previous published writing.

Yoshitomo Nara at Ginza Art Space
Art in America

Yoshitomo Nara titled his exhibition "No They Didn't." That's an answer. So it forces a question on viewers of the wall of acrylic-wash-and-pencil paintings that opened his show. They are portraits of wide-eyed or shiftily squinting cartoonlike children with engorged, encephalitic heads. One look at their evil eyes and you know that they did it--whatever "it" might be, from mischievous to monstrous. These "innocent babes" express an inner rebellion bordering on demonic possession.

Some of the works.-are executed on top of magazine pages whose images and text peep through the paint in that hasty and knowingly naive style currently popular in Europe and the U.S. Like many Western artists, Nara, who has a studio in Cologne, works with binary oppositions. He plays with conflicting metaphors such as high art/low art, innocent/sinister, safe/dangerous in both his paintings and sculptures, and uses symbols and words recognizable in both the West and his native Japan.

Nara's work is influenced by Japanese comic books--manga--but he is unique in the contemporary-art scene here for bedeviling his typically cute and vulnerable figures with a Western-influenced horror-film element. The children peer at the viewer through black-void, dagger-blade eyes, clutching a knife or saw in a final stand of rebellion or incipient insanity. One recalls the Diane Arbus-inspired twin girls standing in the bloody hotel hallway in Kubrick's film of Stephen King's The Shining. Nara's tapping into Western horror through the medium of the innocent child is particularly poignant in Japan's controlled society of rigid language and social structures, especially considering recent shockingly violent crimes in Japan involving children as the aggressors. Some people have regarded Nara's work itself as threatening.

In the gallery's second room was Three Dogs from Your Childhood, an installation of three identical 5-foot-tall puppies circling an empty comic-style dog dish. They stand on 2-foot-tall wooden stilts based loosely on traditional wooden platform sandals, or geta. Originally Nara intended to perch them on stilts several feel taller, to heighten (so to speak) the conflict between cuteness and danger. However, because of the gallery's low ceiling, common in many Tokyo venues converted from office space, he had to shorten them, so the dogs look more cuddly than worrisome.

Other Japanese artists influenced by manga include Takashi Murakami, who creates paintings and sculptures that evoke a sense of a hyperreal cartoon world where floating, big-eyed, grinning characters meander aimlessly through a candy-colored void, and Isuru Kasahara, whose sculptures are troll-like characters. Nara distinguishes himself by merging Western and Japanese concepts to create images that leave the viewer feeling both seduced and perturbed.

- Les Joynes

“The Changing London Art Scene: From Conceptual to Romantic, Simple and sometimes Pathetic”

Springer magazine, Vienna

The late 1990s British art scene sees a shift from the artwork-with-attitude to the artwork that takes on a deliberate tone of modesty, evoking a sense of the day-dreamer, the romantic, and the sometimes pathetic.

The early to mid-90s have been marked by YBAs (Young British Artists) such as Sarah Lucas, Gavin Turk, Sam Taylor-Wood and Damien Hirst whose art has been aggressive, focused on impact and attitude. Shows such as Freeze (1988, London) and Brilliant! (1995, British artists at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA) and Sarah Lucas’ Got a Salmon on (Prawn) (1994, Anthony d’Offay, London) encapsulate the exportable confident and sometimes arrogant showmanship of British art of the last ten years.

There is a now a move in the London art scene away from the showmanship of the Hirst generation, where the artist became an integral part of the show. Rather than pose as an artist-cum-movie star, more British artists make work that focuses on the artwork alone. The artist, like a craftsman, invests himself in the work where the work stands alone (sometimes dejectedly) without the aura or persona of the artist beside it. Rather than slick media dazzle, more and more artists concentrate on the informal and the modest.

Often they may investigate, as in the case of Transmat (London, June, 1997), the human and sometimes (purposefully) failing or pathetic side of the artist as an individual unable or unwilling to keep pace with changes in society. Young artists in London are portraying this human failing side; as the day-dreamer who wants to live out a romantic illusion. Or, they merely reject the contentious art stance of the early 90s in favor of a more innocent attitude towards expression.

This trend began in the early 1990s with shows in alternative art spaces in London such as Lost in Space (1995-96) at the home/gallery of London-based artist Martin Maloney. Here artists pushed away from the clean, conceptual work of the YBAs in favor of artists who, at least initially, were reflecting the grunge or ‘slacker art’ scene then recently imported from America. This was artwork focusing less on elegance and attitude and more on the anti-showmanship of the Sunday-afternoon painter style of artist.

Recent London art school degree shows (including the Goldsmiths BA and MA degree shows, considered to be the barometer of the London art scene) show an increase in less aggressive and “dumbly profound” work. London art students today are no longer the disenchanted post-punk generation, and are gradually shifting away from aggressive towards more modest art often with an ‘aesthetic for failure’.

In a recent show at London’s leading alternative space, City Racing, British artist David Thorpe showed Riviera Rendezvous (February, 1997 -also showed at Vienna’s Bricks and Kicks Gallery, February 1997). These were cut colored paper silhouettes of romantic settings such as a beach or next to the carnival at dusk where, on the edge of a balcony or on the banks of a river, tiny outlines of couples arm in arm point in awe at a passing shooting star. Thorpe draws upon a lifelong interest in the romantic 1960s films by Eric Rohmer and Jacques Démy to provide a sense of a time gone by when there were simpler pleasures. The landscapes evoke the sense of an artist sitting in his cramped basement studio making modest work with modest materials dreaming of glamorous lifestyles and romantic sunsets. Instead of challenging the London art scene the work evokes a sense of the artist’s personal involvement and reveries.

In other recent London shows including Low Maintenance (Hales Gallery, August, 1997), Transmat (June, 1997) and Beck’s New Contemporaries (September, 1997) British artists including Brian Griffiths and Scottish-born Keith Farquhar are also working with impoverished or modest materials. Griffiths attempts to comprehend a digital society of telecommunications systems, satellite relay stations and space command centers in his recreations of Blue Peter inspired computers using raw, unpainted cardboard boxes which employ water bottle caps and other plastic detritus fixed on with sticky tape as knobs, dials and antennae. One senses that this is the way the artist copes as he sits in his kitchen making home-made versions of the electronics in an effort to comprehend an ultra-fast technology age that has somehow left him behind. Griffiths wants to keep alive the excitement of the modern world - but on his own terms. Likewise, Farquhar is using simple materials such as bright colored markers on white shiny stretched surfaces that look like some kind of flow-chart diagram made on a middle manager’s office presentation board.

These artists are trying (and failing beautifully) to come to terms with a changing world. They find a niche of glamour, of hopefulness in the handmade attempt to recreate totems of reality. Introverted, non aggressive and even sometimes embarrassed work shows a growing trend among young British artists signaling a shift in the tone of the art scene in the U.K. More and more young artists in Britain who are disinterested in the aggressive YBA dominated London art scene are shifting towards the opposite - a more and sometimes even a romantic stance.

- Les Joynes

Yuichi Higashionna at Nadiff Gallery, Tokyo March 2000

Yuichi Higashionna is a Japanese artist best known for his use of banal repetitive images that are imported into Japan from the West.

In his installation show Hina Gata (The Template) Higashionna takes familiar images imported from the West and then redefines them by isolating them as symbols that pathetically reach for an adopted ideal that is intrinsically non-Japanese.

Higashionna's vision reflects a combined attraction and aversion to Western elements that have been steadily imported into Japan since the late 19th century and often signify a desire for social advancement towards western culture.

"I grew up with these things," Higashionna explains, "- the white lace curtains, the patterns on the walls the fake woodgrain - these are all imported motifs from the West. They are desired and yet they are alien. These images function differently for Japanese people, the lace curtain motif and the ribbons and the imitation wood wallpaper imply comfort and a desired completeness in a Japanese middle class ideal replete with Western symbols of progress.

In this installation, Higashionna has transformed small rectangular space into the interior of a little house. On the two pink, long walls silkscreen images of windows covered in net curtains reminiscent of a mother’s apron; they drip black down the wall as if the night outside is dripping into the house in some modern day Amityville Horror. Another wall is covered with masculine dark-grain imitation wood wallpaper that surrounds a bright green window print barred with somber chintz hangings that resemble window bars. The opposite wall is a field of disembodied hair ribbons floating on a sky of moiré striped fabric. The floor swarms with the chaos-pattern camouflage used in Desert Storm uniforms. Yet this pattern is pumped up to a sickening cacophony of fluorescent pinks and greens.

Higashionna's use of bright candy colors reminds one of the garish plastickiness of Tokyo's entertainment and fashion districts and there is a cartoony feeling about some of his work in some ways similar to work by fellow Japanese artists, such as Yoshitomo Nara and Tadashi Murakami who use motifs from manga (Japanese comic books) and animé (Japanese cartoons). Yet upon closer reflection something much more interesting is at work. Higashionna is exploring the dualism in his culture from a visual as well as a philosophical level of what remains after the superimposition of Western values and images. This is an exploration of an intrinsic otherness of objects adopted from an alien culture - the template, of sorts, placed on top of all things Japanese.

Hina Gata is curated by Takashi Azumaya