WHAT: Kansuke YamamotoWHEN: Through May 14WHERE: Taka Ishii Gallery, 23 E. 67th Street, New YorkWHY IT MATTERS: Certain popular-press critics have a rhetorical device they use to introduce non-US or -European artists to an audience unfamiliar with them. The writer refers to the individual as the “Damien Hirst of India,” the “Andy Warhol of Asia,” the “Picasso of Iran.” It is a patronizing, if well-meaning preface. Intended to boost the profile of the artist and situate him or her in the (uninformed) imagination of the reader, it ultimately belittles both parties.That said, the Japanese surrealist poet and photographer Kansuke Yamamoto (1914-1987), whose work is on view at Taka Ishii Gallery, seems to consciously invite such a comparison. During his many-decade career, Yamamoto has lifted from French surrealist imagery with unapologetic aplomb: detached lips, floating cages, lost ships, bare backs. His appropriation, however, is more postmodern than derivative. The surrealists influenced Yamamoto in the same way that Walker Evans can be said to influence Sherrie Levine: They offered him source material to fashion according to his own political ends.The son of a photo studio owner in Nagoya, Yamamoto came of age during the flowering of surrealism and New Photography in Japan, which overtook the Pictorialism in the 1930s. It was also the era of the Sin0-Japanese War, followed, of course, by World War II and the US occupation of his country. In those repressive times, Yamamoto lauded the “disobedient spirit against the ready-made things of society.” Is it too contemporary a reading to suggest that the “ready-made” might also be imported European art forms? Perhaps.But Yamamoto imparts a certain exquisite violence to the canonical imagery of the surrealists. The barebacked woman in one photo is not punctuated with the violin f-holes, as in Man Ray’s “Le Violon d’Ingres” (1924) but instead has a sterile column of staples running down her spine. Elsewhere, butterflies, which might seem to reference André Breton, actually refer, in Japanese, to strippers’ G-strings. And the floating lips, so evocative of René Magritte, suggest the quashing of freedom of expression during the 1930s by the Tokkō, or “thought police,” who enforced the Peace Preservation Law by targeting communists and leftists.Did Yamamoto cut and paste, not just surrealist imagery, but the entire movement, with its emphasis on juxtaposition? In his 1924 “Surrealist Manifesto,” Breton cites the following quotation from French poet Pierre Reverdy: “The image is a pure creation of the mind. It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two or more less distant realities.” Yamamoto presents two (geographically) distant realities juxtaposed to work that is not an analogue but a combative retort.
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