DISSONANCES EXPRESS MARGINALITIES
By Andrew Maerkle
All images: Video still from Deproduction (2017), courtesy Comatonse Recordings.
Based in Japan since 2001, Terre Thaemlitz is a prolific multimedia producer, DJ, writer, pessimist and critic of essentialist identity politics. After studying art at Cooper Union, Thaemlitz broke into the New York house scene in the early 1990s playing at queer and trans clubs like Sally’s II off Times Square – first operating under the name DJ Sprinkles, and later producing under other aliases as well. Comparing his composition process to the act of putting on makeup, she collages sources ranging from country, funk, jazz, and rock music to radio broadcasts, excerpts from talk shows and archival recordings into new arrangements, clipping, stretching, repeating and juxtaposing them to tease out their political implications.
Thaemlitz, who runs his own record label, Comatonse Recordings, is known for challenging the limits of the music industry’s dominant formats and distribution channels; her projects incorporate not just music but theoretical texts, videos and supplementary audio materials. Albums include the 1994 debut Tranquilizer (1994), which leads with a track sampling police radio transmissions from the manhunt for Martin Luther King, Jr’s assassin; Die Roboter Rubato (1997), which reinterpets the hits of electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk through computer processed piano improvisations; and Soulnessless (2012), a 16GB microSD card billed as the world’s longest album in history and first full-length MP3 album, which carries an over 30-hour-long piano solo and related content.
While Thaemlitz is best known in a music context, the multiplicity of his production and the rigorousness of her conceptual frameworks allow his work to span a wide range of presentation scenarios. She was featured prominently in documenta 14 in 2017, exhibiting the audio and video installation Interstices (2001-03) at EMST – National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, and the audio and video installation Love Bomb/Ai no Bakudan (2003-05) at the Museum für Sepulkralkutur in Kassel. Additionally, he produced a new commission for documenta, the performance Deproduction (2017), which premiered at the Athens Conservatoire on July 9, 2017, and was then shown at the Tofufabrik in Kassel and the Akademie der Künste der Welt in Cologne.
Later released as a multimedia album on 8GB SDHC card and as a pair of vinyl EPs, Deproduction comprises two parts that each use text and pornographic material to explore the connections between sexual taboos and the family as ideological apparatus. In the first part, “Names Have Been Changed (Sound/Reading for Incest Porn),” Thaemlitz sets short testimonies of miscarriage, forced marriage, female circumcision, sexual molestation and other incidents related to sexual reproduction, gender norms and family structures against visually distorted clips from Japanese incest porn. In the second, “Admit It’s Killing You (And Leave) (Sound/Reading for Gay Porn),” a manifesto-like statement arguing that “having children is unethical” and that familial structures make democracy impossible because they are inextricably linked to “problems of human ownership, coerced labor, sexual fascism, gender segregation, and gender exploitation” scrolls across the backdrop of a Japanese gay porn film. Projected sequentially before the audience, both sections are accompanied by electroacoustic soundtracks: the first with a score that weaves together string chords, birdsong and audio of a domestic dispute; the second featuring piano improvisation and a repeated excerpt from a stand-up comedy routine by Paul F. Tompkins over at-times abrasive electronic glitches and feedback.
Instead of cohering into a symphonic whole, the text, visual and audio elements each have their own depths, intensities and durations, so that they subtly conflict with each other and the spectator’s attention is constantly pulled in different directions. This effect channels the cognitive dissonance surrounding discourses on family values in contemporary society into a restless, motive energy, and underscores Thaemlitz’s warning that outwardly progressive developments such as the legalization of gay marriage are in fact part of a global “reinscription of the cultural power of family, dynasty and birthright” that has followed the era of state and social projects.
Thaemlitz recently presented Deproduction in Japan as part of TPAM – Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama, held from February 9 to February 17 of this year. In the months after the conclusion of TPAM, ART iT corresponded with Thaemlitz by email to discuss the work.
Interview
ART iT: I’d like to start by getting into the theoretical background for Deproduction. I remember receiving the announcement when it premiered at documenta 14 in 2017. Although I don’t recall any specific mention of Japan, your statement about the work struck me as being highly responsive to the Japanese sociopolitical context. Anyone who has had anything to do with Japan over the past two or three decades knows the mantra: The economy is stagnating; the population is aging and in decline; the nation is in danger if we do not produce more babies. We can read this in reverse as a reflection of a phallocentric modernist ideology that valorizes constant growth (what else is the bubble but a metaphor for a massive erection/wet dream?), the persistence of which was underscored by LDP representative Mio Sugita’s recent statement that LGBT people are “unproductive” members of society (not to mention the longstanding right-wing fantasy that Japan was “castrated” by the US after World War II). But it seems to me that, as with Article 9 of the postwar Constitution, Japan is missing an opportunity to go against the grain of dominant values at a time when it is increasingly apparent that the entire Anthropocene way of life is acutely unsustainable. Why not experiment with contracting the economy? Why not embrace the possibilities of a smaller population (which could also extend to taking in more immigrants and refugees)? Of course, it’s hard to speak back to entrenched power structures. That’s why the premise behind Deproduction, as I understand it, strongly resonated with me. Could you tell me more about the thinking behind the work?
TT: Deproduction is certainly informed by my context of production here in Japan, where I have resided for almost two decades now. Whereas you suggest we are missing opportunities to rethink contemporary capitalism and patriarchy, I would take it a step further to say the political culture here flatly refuses any such opportunities. This has been repeatedly demonstrated by political and economic attacks on women, queers and conscientious nonbreeders (who were branded “free riders” by another politician a decade or so ago). Globally speaking, I would also suggest that many of those “opportunities” you and I are thinking of are probably not even necessarily “going against the grain,” if you look to other nations with smaller populations where social services thrive, such as Finland and Scandinavia. Of course, compared to those countries Japan has relatively few natural resources aside from human labor – which is also why work culture here is so slave driven – but there are certainly international precedents that Japan’s political leaders could draw from in this moment of social constriction if they chose to do so. They don’t. They won’t.
At this late stage in Japan’s capitalist development and globalization, sometimes it is difficult to remember that things like democratic praxes and egalitarian ideologies are largely cultural imports. And as such, I think Japanese politics are still plagued by ideological conflict around what could constitute an indigenous social movement (ie, self-liberatory to the nationalist mindset). Relationships to colonialism are also multifaceted, and informed by centuries-old histories of isolationism (in reaction to both Chinese and Western hegemony), contrasted by Japan’s intensive colonization of East Asia around the start of the 20th century which, of course, ended primarily through Western intervention rather than Japan choosing to decolonize. So from a historical perspective, I think the current ideological conflict is understandable – by which I simply mean it does not mysteriously come out of nowhere. From an anti-essentialist point of view, any useful analysis of how to organize amid this conflict would need to be about simultaneity and hypocrisy, rather than resolution. But national identities strive for singularity. Japan is no exception. And unfortunately, as in most countries including those in the West, we know that a particular kind of performance of this debate is important for Rightists and nationalists: it is the performance of traditionalism and family values. In fact, as if on cue, the Rightist name for the next emperor’s reign has just been announced: Reiwa, a term that has nothing but oppressive connotations of an era of Japanese (wa) command, order and dictation (rei). Not a good omen. Even if we go along with the odd government-issued-yet-unofficial translation of Reiwa as “beautiful harmony,” this does nothing to settle my concerns. For example, in the realm of musicology everybody understands that notions of harmony (canonical musical scales, etc) are rigid and tyrannical things. My entire career has been dedicated to critiquing the culturally oppressive dynamics lurking behind such audio conventions. And just ask any Japanese woman how she feels about the pressures of feminine beauty standards if you want to debunk any benevolence behind “beauty.” They haunt my own transgenderism as well.
Of course, the absurdity and violence of such performances was something I had been aware of since my childhood in the US “Bible Belt.” Although Deproduction incorporates the Japanese context of production – particularly in the video’s emphasis on Japanese incest and gay porn – these local dynamics are identified as symptomatic of broader First World and Western globalization, capitalism, the history behind the necessity for nuclear families, how the resurgence in privatization seeks to ideologically situate the family as the most obvious site of social support so that extrafamilial and democratically established social services can be more easily destroyed, etc. Simultaneously, I attempt to remain clearly antitraditionalist (ie, neither respecting nor romanticizing a return to Japanese extended families, etc), as opposed to the current trend of countertraditionalism in many Leftist circles and the arts – which strikes me as idiotic in relation to the overarching problems of precapitalist patriarchy. As you know, I am interested in divestments of power, not the liberal agenda of power sharing, so things like respect and Pride[TM] are not tools I wish to employ.
ART iT: So how do you position incest and gay porn in your critique? Whereas incest is clearly rooted in family relations and taboos, should we necessarily assume that the scenario of a man getting gang-banged (at least that’s what it looked like to me) on his subway commute is incompatible with family values? While President Trump makes headlines for “grabbing pussy” and dating a porn star, President Bolsonaro tweets footage of a man peeing on another in public as evidence of a degenerate Brazilian culture. Do representations of deviant sexuality threaten the ideology, or are they in a way its truest expression?
TT: These represent the two most basic sexual taboos of conventional patriarchy: incest within the family, and nonreproductive sex between men outside the family. We need to keep perspective on “gay sex” as well as “homosexuality,” which are actually very contemporary models of sex between people of the same gender, and which emerged in sync with cultural changes in family structures, the proliferation of the nuclear family, etc. As you imply, all of these things are certainly entwined within a web of petit bourgeois family values. Those values also include humanist and liberal tendencies which, in this particular moment in time, make us wish to believe any antagonism between gay sex and family is more or less something of the past. But, as I write in the text to Deproduction:
Liberal humanist cultures are recognizing they do not need to demand our heterosexuality. They only require our heteronormativity. This is what underlies today’s mainstream “queer moment.” Business culture understands most of all that sexual orientation doesn’t matter, so long as the collective goals of private wealth, full-time labor, credit-debt, mortgaged home ownership, family, and military service are publicly upheld.
And the purpose of this “homecoming” and reintegration of traditional family outcasts back into the family fold is, of course, not about ethical growth or compassion. That sensation of cultural kindness is an ideological inversion that cloaks the systematic dismantling of social services and support networks that allow for life outside of and/or disowned by family:
It’s no coincidence that today’s global proliferation of capitalist privatization and anti-socialism comes hand-in-hand with a hefty dose of pro-family propaganda. To borrow the words of UK labor organizer Tony Benn, the deliberate “restoration of power of those who always controlled the world” can only occur through the destruction of hard fought social services in first-world democracies – along with ensuring they never fully emerge in industrializing cultures. And that can only take place through a reinscription of family as the primary site for social care. It culturally necessitates family values for all walks of life. Enter the contemporary same-sex marriage movement.
It takes time for new models of sexuality to gain their footing and efficiency, and I would say this moment where heteronormativity is culturally more vital than sexual or gender identification represents an arrival at a particular level of ideological sophistication and stabilization within capitalist ethics. It took about a century and a half to get here, but now it seems the capitalist machine is getting its flow. Mainstream First World cultures have figured out how to appear ever more open and accepting, while being ever more efficient at cloaking social exclusions. The trick is to keep people obsessed with identity constructs via a particularly infantilist and ethically charged individualism. The result is conservatives, liberals and leftists all policing ourselves, all proud defenders of “morality” as something presumed common and shared – you know, the humanist model of shared experience and sensibility. Among queers and gender outcasts, this means fewer spaces and chances for perversity and cultural noncooperation even within those sites we carve out for ourselves.
ART iT: What does it mean for you to work with pornography, and what do you think is pornography’s message to us?
TT: Back in the 1980s when US senator Jesse Helms was trying to shut down the National Endowment for the Arts, a lot of women’s organizations were also pushing for antipornography laws. I was a student at the time, and very affected by the censorship debates around Mapplethorpe, Serrano’s Immersion (Piss Christ) (1987), etc. While Helms was clearly coming from an extreme Right position, many of the women’s groups were actually coming from more centrist or liberal positions. Of course, most mainstream public debates on pornography are framed around the exploitation of women – which I consider a completely valid concern, particularly in relation to human trafficking (which we must also remember involves the sexual exploitation of young males). But as a result of this, combined with the statistical majority of people publicly identifying as heterosexual, I think most people have the impression that the majority of pornography is straight. In fact, the majority of pre-internet porn being produced was gay male. (I have tried to confirm if this still holds true today, but can’t seem to find any accurate statistics – they all seem to focus on what percentage of men watch gay porn, which is a far higher percentage than men who identify as gay. For the sake of argument, and without data showing otherwise, let’s assume the majority of porn continues to be gay.)
We might understand this larger production of gay porn in relation to cultural taboos. Around the world, sex between men remains more taboo than sex between a woman and man, making it more difficult for people to socially act on that taboo with others, in turn creating more cultural demand for gay porn as a safer sexual outlet. This is similar to the logic behind the long-recognized predominance of public male sex, male prostitution and other typically illegal sex acts. That which is culturally prohibited must find release in unsanctioned ways. (Similarly, I have written in the past about how the Japanese prohibition on showing genitalia, and mandatory mosaic in adult videos, is likely a main cause for the escalation of themes of rape, pedophilia and BDSM in Japanese straight porn, as a kind of thematic overcompensation for not being able to simply show people fucking. [1]) As a direct result of this connection between pornography and those engaging in cultural taboos, for decades the personal ads in gay porn magazines had been a chief means for gay men to communicate with each other. The PO box addresses and phone numbers listed in those ads were the main ways in which men who wanted sex with other men could establish contact with each other. So as strange as it may sound to most people, historically speaking, gay porn was actually a vital technology for community building.
Therefore, while most people perceived antipornography laws as being about “protecting women,” their greatest impact was – and I think we can safely presume still is – related to the censorship and destruction of gay porn, which constitutes the bulk of all porn. And that is a direct attack on gay social networks. Especially in the pre-internet era, there was no doubt that this also involved the destruction of gay social networks. My being fortunate enough to understand this back in the ’80s really shifted and complicated my sense of how antipornography laws function in reality. Most recently in Japan, as part of an image laundering campaign in preparation for the 2020 Olympics, major convenience store chains are removing pornography from their shelves. I confess, I feel conflicted about this. On the one hand, yes, of course the images at issue are primarily focused on stubbornly unchanging, sexist visions of female bodies. Fuck that shit. But at the same time, this is about sexual censorship, and the removal of straight porn makes it all the more impossible for gay porn to enter mainstream public spheres in the future, right? Once again, gay and other porn never gets spoken about, and that silence directly correlates to a broader cultural silence around sexual variation and tolerance for nonhetero perversity. (Historically, it’s interesting to note how US censorship in the arts has revolved around faggots like Mapplethorpe, whereas those same discussions in Japan tend to revolve around straight guys like Araki. I find that extrication of queerness from most Japanese censorship debates very informative. [2])
In Japan, producing work around pornography is further complicated by the strict censorship laws I just mentioned. So one factor in my only sampling Japanese porn in Deproduction was to start with “legal” footage already containing mosaics. There is a bit of unfortunate yet necessary self-protection in that move, but I wanted to keep that concession up front and obvious. Another factor was that I think the formulas of nuclear families portrayed in the incest porn are more immediately recognizable as coming from a Western influence, which helps denaturalize the nuclear family in relation to capitalist globalization. Also, whereas most incest porn out there tends to focus on the fantasy of a son fucking his stepmom, in Japan it is more often about the fantasy of fucking one’s biological mother. In that way, I think Japanese incest porn is ideologically linked to a deeper notion of the taboo. As you identified earlier, the gay porn was of a “salary man” being gang-banged on the train by faggot thugs during his morning commute. This rather literal image of gay sexuality being an attack on the family oriented “salary man” – the epitome of the petit bourgeois procapitalist patriarch – is contrasted with the audio, which loops Paul F. Tompkins’s joke about the owners of Chick-fil-A: “So these people are apparently very anti-gay. Excuse me, they’re very pro-traditional family. Which is under attack by gay people just being around.” I think it’s a really clever and funny line for a liberal mindset, but it comes with the unintended implication that LGBT organizing posing any actual threat to heteronormative culture is literally a joke – a laughable impossibility. The laughs are centered on the notion that “Of course we’re no threat to anybody! Conservatives are the threat to us!”
In any case, when I work with pornography I try to avoid having it fall into the typical queer paradigm of “sexual empowerment.” I am much more interested in the hypocrisies and shame entwined in all sexuality, which make any moment of “empowerment” inherently violent. I have always been upset by the notion of claiming sexual legitimacy behind Pride[TM] movements and mainstream recognition. That legitimization can only occur through culturally heteronormative compromises, which makes it more and more difficult to critically identify and engage with issues of sexual exclusion. And that leads to increased moralism within LGBT cultures, which further distances us from our historic understanding of mass phobias leading to sexual violence. This is how LGBT agendas are increasingly limited to, and ensnared by, the false comforts of liberalism.
ART iT: Thinking about the typical categories of “straight” porn from a paranoid heterosexual male perspective, we can find a collapse of the rigid straight male identification embedded in the viewing act, which revolves around the question: Whose pleasure do you identify with? Whose pleasure is it that excites you? If it’s the woman’s pleasure, then in a way the male viewer is identifying with the woman, which is a projective transgendering; if it’s the man’s pleasure, then the male viewer is in a sense excited by the man himself, which is implicitly homoerotic. Straight male viewers are presumably excited on some level by the sight of big dicks, since that is generally a desired attribute of the male actors (in mainstream Western porn at least). And an entire postinternet generation of straight men have probably internalized how to give great blow jobs after seeing it done so many times in short clips and GIFs, even if they never get the chance to put that knowledge to use. Then there’s girl-on-girl, which skirts the homoerotic aspect of a man getting excited by another man’s pleasure, but also models homosexual behavior (if two women can do it, why not two men) while at the same time dangerously removing the man from the equation.
This line of thinking suggests that transgender porn – as a category for straight male consumption – really is the ne plus ultra of straight male porn, or the closest representation of what the straight man actually sees and desires when he watches porn. (This is neatly expressed in phrases like “Men want to be him, women want to be with him,” used in reference to charismatic, sexy alpha-male types, where wordplay designed to camouflage male-male desire sets up a mise en abyme of gender slippage – ie, men want to be women in order to fulfill the fantasy of being irresistibly attractive to women, which really masks their attraction to other men. The incestuous love triangle between Luke, Leia and Han Solo in the original Star Wars trilogy is another illustration of this dynamic. The sexually ambiguous Luke is attracted to Leia because she is objectified by Han’s desire, while Han fantasizes about Luke as he makes love to Luke’s twin Leia. The premise of Olivia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy of sci-fi novels reads in part as a critical response to this idea that binary sexuality is always mediated through a third term beyond the binary, or what we might call a “zero” term that is there but not there, like the “missing” subject in Japanese grammar.)
So while there is an assumption that looking at porn is an act of straight male privilege, we might conclude that the collapse of straight male identification enacted through porn is always already internal to straightness itself, or that, when it comes to desires at least, there is no such thing as a straight man.
TT: Sure, the anti-essentialist view on sexuality I have emphasized for decades is that identities are nonsingular, gray, fluid. In fact, sexual identities only exist in strategic relation to cultural mores, which we learn and internalize as means of navigating social power dynamics around sanctioned and unsanctioned sexual expression. Gender expression is similarly entwined with this. And what you are hypothesizing makes sense in terms of an effort to debunk the myth of hetero masculinity as a concrete thing, and especially as a “natural” thing. I think this can also be furthered by not limiting positions of identification to the perceived receiving of pleasure by an actor, but to identifications with the act of giving pleasure, with the voyeurism of a camera person, with a director, with inanimate objects, or also with disassociation, revulsion, disgust, etc.
ART iT: Incidentally, the top 10 searches for 2018 on Pornhub among global male viewers were: Japanese, MILF, Hentai, Korean, Step Mom, Lesbian, Teen, Massage, Anal and Asian, followed by Fortnite and Trans.
One thing I wonder about is how sexting/dick pics and the pornified self-representations of Tinder and Grindr play into the equation. Do they have different implications for “straight” and “gay” users? And going back to the Pornhub statistics: there were 33.5 billion visits to the site in 2018. What does that reflect of the panoptical world we live in today? If we usually assume that the viewer is privileged in relation to the object/category (and that privilege is a factor in enabling desire), does postinternet porn show us a possibility for that not being the case?
TT: I think a lot about this tendency to assume that a viewer is inherently socially privileged. It is perhaps ironic that the “masculine gaze” explained by traditional feminist visual theory is the thing most people continue to privilege. [Laughs] What about that whole other dynamic of the female gaze which is about continual self-surveillance, and the nonsingularity of understanding oneself as both surveyor and surveyed? We might benefit by looking at this “feminine” position as not only about power dynamics around gender, but also around poverty and social access generally – in effect, to de-essentialize the feminine gaze from womanhood so that we can get to feminism’s deeper concerns with class and caste struggles. And I think this then opens up into a lot of insights into consumerism, and how contemporary online culture seeks to cultivate a sense of self-surveillance – to most everyone’s cultural and economic detriment, of course.
If you have ever ridden the trains in Japan, you have seen the onslaught of advertising targeting young women. They primarily focus on high-cost subscription beauty care (laser hair removal, etc), shopping frenzy, and first loans for young women. Now, a lot of marketing firms will spin statistics like “Women account for 85% of all consumer purchases” by aligning them with notions of financial control by women – and this rhetoric is particularly important in Western nations which exploit a liberal desire for gender equality, all the while ensuring people are alienated from practices that would encourage actual social changes. But in reality, the act of women purchasing is very different from women’s earning power. A lot of that purchasing is being done by women running errands for their families, getting groceries, cleaning supplies, etc. And the wage gap between women and men in Japan is the largest of any First World nation at around 30 percent less than men, compared to the US and EU average of around 18 percent less than men. Furthermore, women in Japan have few full-time employment opportunities, and make up over 70 percent of all part-time laborers here. So what does it mean, then, that so much marketing effort is put into escalating the “spending power” of an economically dependent social caste? Of course, this is about fostering lives of continual dependency: manipulating the mainstream psychology of the mythical little girl who always sought to rely upon her daddy, now being encouraged to step out on her own, psychologically still as a dependent under patriarchy via loans, debt and worry free shopping. Now, to recognize and state this obvious, malicious and strategic reality may sound “disempowering” to young women – a liberal mindset might even call it sexist to say it so bluntly. But, yes, this is all about a sexist culture socially disempowering women into the future, and also about fostering a system of male dependency that enslaves men as patrons, too.
In Japan, this is explicit in the tax, pension and health insurance codes that grant free coverage to dependent housewives earning less than 1,030,000 yen per year (a little under 10,000 US dollars). This means most families save money by women working less and remaining male dependents, as opposed to women working more but having all of those costs deducted from their wages. Simultaneously, this means single people are penalized by not having any chance at free social services. Of course, one might also call those fees we pay the cost of freedom from a life of familial dependency! It is all convoluted. So we can clearly see that the notion of privilege as a factor in enabling desire, as you said, is very often socially actualized in an ideological inversion through which the perception of privilege – in particular, the stereotypical carefree shopping-addict young woman and purse-controlling housewife – in fact conceals deep patriarchal dependencies. Dependencies that victimize and strain all genders, but particularly women and nonmales with deliberately limited access to income. These gender restrictions are obviously also compounded by issues of ethnicity, race, migrant status, etc.
So, I am not sure if I am really hearing your question right, but I get this sense that you are pondering whether postinternet porn shows us something new or useful in terms of complicating conventional associations of privilege with the male gaze. I think if one wishes to begin examining that particular question, they might benefit from looking at how we are already operating in a consumerist framework that has historically exploited the female gaze as a means of making disenfranchised people feel empowered – the delusion of what asshole marketers call “girl power” – and attempt to grasp the breathtaking (ie, suffocating) sophistication of this deception.
1. “Of course, sexual repressions find simultaneous and corollary release through enormously profitable sex trades. In fact, it seems the more restrictive a culture is with regard to sexual expression, the more extreme it’s images of sexual release become. Consider Japanese pornography, in which the censorship of genitals is overcompensated for through explicitly staged images of rape [acts of violence distinct from mutually agreed upon SM play], paedophilia [under-aged sex and high-school uniform fetishes], bondage and scatology. While such actions are not the basis of most Japanese sexual behavior, they have become the standard scenery of Japan’s sexual landscape.” Terre Thaemlitz, “Lovebomb/Ai no Bakudan,” comatonse.com, August 2002, https://www.comatonse.com/writings/lovebomb.html.
2. “Japan’s current ban on visual representations of genitalia is a prime example of such trend-based politics. The current restrictions are the result of a series of ever-escalating lawsuits from the 1980s between the Japanese government and the publishers of Photo Age magazine. Photo Age featured Nobuyoshi Araki’s candid photo essays of Japanese sex workers, a community that was then booming through the financial and cultural excesses of Japan’s bubble economy. Somewhat similar to the American government’s response to homoerotic photos by Robert Mapplethorpe, conservative elements of the Japanese government used Araki’s photos to debate definitions of pornography, and began placing restrictions on what could and could not be portrayed in photographs. With a bit of good humor and overconfidence in both the freedom of the Japanese press and an artist’s right to self-expression, Araki and Photo Age took the anti-censorship limelight, responding to each new legislation by pushing it to the limit. For example, after it was deemed illegal to directly show genitals, Araki only photographed pubic hair. It then became illegal to photograph pubic hair, after which Araki photographed women with shaved genitals that were then concealed by manually drawing pubic hair onto the photos. And so on, until legal costs forced Photo Age out of business and Japan was left with today’s excessive censorship laws. (In recent years they once again made it legal to show pubic hair, but this change occurred quietly and there has been little to no additional movement around easing current censorship laws.)” Note 3 of Thaemlitz, “Globule of Non-Standard: An Attempted Clarification of Globular Identity Politics in Japanese Electronic ‘Sightseeing Music,'” Organised Sound 8, no. 1 (April 2003): 97–108. Posted online at comatonse.com, accessed April 4, 2019, http://www.comatonse.com/writings/organisedsound_8_1.html.
Terre Thaemlitz: Dissonances Express Marginalities