Katrina Van Ryn

Yasumasa Morimura & Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe �

Self Portrait – After Marilyn Monroe

Portrait

Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura’s work often requires a double take. First, you see a familiar image, such as a famous work of Western art like the Mona Lisa, or an image of a Western pop icon like Madonna or Michael Jackson. You almost dismiss the image because you have seen it so many times before. However, you notice that something is a little off with that female nude. You take a closer look and realize it is not actually a picture of Marilyn that you are looking at, but a Japanese man dressed and posed exactly like the Hollywood icon. That is not Manet’s Olympia. That is not even a female nude, but a male one. The servant in the background is not black, but is painted brown and is actually the same person as the sprawling pale nude. Morimura’s transformation of his own image to fit into self-staged photographs of iconic images of Western society fit very well with Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe’s statements on the state of contemporary art, especially concerning gender, blankness, and the relationship between photography and painting.

Gilbert-Rolfe’s makes an interesting point about contemporary gender in regards to traditional definitions of beauty and the sublime. Referencing such 20^th century superstars as Mick Jagger and David Bowie (as Ziggy Stardust), he states, “the sublime is androgynous and beauty irreducibly feminine… the masculine has become absurd” (47). Morimura creates the absurd by re-creating mostly female icons, using his own body. He not only dresses up in women’s clothes, he goes so far as to display his nude self as female. In some photos, he even attaches larger breasts to himself to make the illusion more complete. Morimura is not trying to actually become female. His photography requires that he is androgynous in order to mold himself into all the roles of Western iconic culture.

This shedding of gender roles and stereotypes creates a blank canvas from Morimura’s body. This blankness, according to Gilbert-Rolfe, is not free of meaning, but rife with it. In the late 20^th century, blankness is not empty or shallow, but deep and vast (110). The author uses the fashion world to signify blankness. Contemporary blankness is active. A computer screen is blank, but it is on. This blankness “precludes communication by communicating incommunicativeness” (114). The viewer makes of this blankness what he or she will. By forming himself into all Western icons, Morimura’s blankness allows the viewer to be shocked by his presence in beloved and beleaguered images.

Morimura’s photos of paintings present another signifier of the late 20^th century: the relationship between painting and photography. Gilbert-Rolfe uses the example of Gerard Richter trying first to imitate photography through methods of paint and then creating paintings so that they could be photographed. In a sense, Morimura is attempting the latter. His setups are very elaborate. He does not just point and shoot to create his images, he has to research each pose of each figure in each image. In his famous actress series, he imitates not only Marilyn Monroe, but also Greta Garbo, Ingrid Bergman and many other Hollywood starlets, each with their own distinct personality. Unlike Gilbert-Rolfe’s idea of instantaneous photography and video, an ever-changing image, Morimura presents images, which are just as work intensive as painting and which actually involve panting. The artist paints himself to look more like the pose he is creating and, in addition, paints the photo itself in post-production. Nowadays he also uses computer technology to slightly altar poses and backgrounds to make his illusions more complete. In his early work, which focused more on iconic pieces in the history of Western art, Morimura even painted on the photographs to make them look as if they were paintings. This willingness of some photographers to imitate painting, instead of vice versa, is not really touched upon at all by Gilbert-Rolfe.

Morimura’s photography is concerned with the beautiful because he deals with well established, if not overused, icons of Western beauty and art. The issues of muddled gender, blankness and painting-as photography-as painting are shared between the artist and Gilbert-Rolfe. Morimura’s blurring of the lines between gender, race, and art forms create photographs that are sublime in that they are formless and limitless (44). The confusion of pre-conceived notions of art history and glamorous beauty obliterates these iconic forms.