Title

Forbidden colours - for Mishima: a suite of 7 prints.

Author

Emmerson, Neil.

Source

[Not applicable]

Publication date

July 2000

Type

About the work

Language

English

Country of context

Australia

Full text

Forbidden colours — for Mishima.
by Neil Emmerson.

In 1999 I was invited to Japan to learn wood block printing. Ukiyo-e, the term used to identify this tradition I discovered during some reading up beforehand, translates as pictures from the floating world. Initially this inscription was meant to convey ideas about the fleeting, impermanence of things, commonly signified through the natural world and hence by analogy human existence. Highly philosophical stuff. However in reality much of Ukiyo-e production might have seemed far from such lofty intellectual pursuits. Whilst regularly engaging images from the world of the theatre and entertainment, portraying kabuki actors, beautiful geisha and theatrically staged events it was also equally as possible to see common, everyday scenes of daily life, the ordinary and the everyday. For me Ukiyo-e seemed to best describe the world of the kabuki that it characteristically came to represent, for here there is surely quite a literal suspension of reality, a realm of the fantastic and the symbolic, an imaginary world at once suspended between the light of the stage and the shadows of real life.

Shortly before I found out about going to Japan I had decided to re-read all of my Mishima novels. It had been quite a few years since I had fervently read them and I wondered how they would appear to me now. I picked up Forbidden colours first, set in 1950s Tokyo and centred around a closeted homosexual protagonist who is employed by an aging, heterosexual misogynist to take out his revenge on a number of women from his past. I particularly enjoyed it this second time around for it’s scenic portrayal of homosexual life in 1950s Tokyo in the light of what I’d been reading about gay histories elsewhere. It seemed to me that this world could easily be included in the floating world I’ve just mentioned. A closeted collective with hidden rendezvous, a secret brotherhood ever threatened by the hazards of exposure. There are numerous scenes in the book describing gatherings were men would socialise privately, drinking, gossiping and dancing together. More recently in contemporary western gay communities there has been a resurgence of tea dances, were gay men can dance together in the style of the 50s in a different sort of social atmosphere than that operating in the more typical scenario of discos or bars.

I became interested in making a short film/video piece of two men dancing together. No details, just the silhouette of two men moving confidently and intimately together, foxtrotting or the like, on a loop. As and extension of this idea and in order to take with me to Japan a project I could immediately begin working with I made a short digital video sequence of myself and a friend dancing (rather clumsily) together from which I took stills, scaled them appropriately and printed them out. I liked this notion of changing or converting contemporary digital material into a traditional hand crafted form. In retrospect this idea corroborates my impressions of Japan as a place where the present actually seems like a cacophonous amalgam of the past and the future, a hyperspace where traditional Japanese forms, both social and material, are constantly at an interface with futuristic technologies, loaded as they are with Western concepts of identity related to consumerism.

So I made a suite of 7 prints and named them after Mishima’s Forbidden colours. Across a horizontal format, evenly spaced with vertical coloured panels bearing the Japanese characters for tea and dance and imitating the panels of a standing screen, a designated partition between public and private spaces, I choreographed a bevy of couples (actually all the same couple), either singularly or in groups, caught in the motion of dancing together. The entire sequence can be read quite simply like a manga, illustrating various stages of a tea dance as such. However the figures are suspended, grounded only by the panels that are in turn only grounded by the figures moving across them. To engage this particular notion of the floating world shadows are cut, proposing at once to show the particular through an articulated outline and to eliminate detail through the flattening out of the form. This tension between figure and ground can perhaps act as an analogy to the tension present in the open secret, a trope that I have been investigating for some time now. Likewise, the formal tension between individual pieces and the collective piece, mapping out silences through mute or empty spaces, might also allude to this analogy.

The space between the dancers is dissolved by the lack of detail as if they are shadows cast against a coloured screen, or silhouettes, over-exposed in the shaded foreground of a sunny afternoon (tea dances are usually afternoon affairs). As innocent or inoffensive as this scene might be, dancing is also considered a display of romantic or erotic intensions, a sanctioned form of public seduction or foreplay. The teashop in gay speak is the American version of the British cottage and the Australian beat, secret locations, paradoxically usually in public places, where men go to have, or organise to have, sex with other men. In this case the screen panels could deceptively metamorphose into toilet cubicle doors and the dancers interactions take on more intimate and less innocent connotations. Social tensions surrounding the physical relations between men might seem temporarily suspended through the simplicity and innocuous appearance of this suite of delicately coloured prints, however the intent has been to conjure up this floating world that is homosexuality, as it occurs in Japan and as it still occurs in the West, where to varying degrees silence and secrecy are the modus operandi and the door to the closet (or the panel of a screen) has well oiled hinges.

© Neil Emmerson, July, 2000.

Last Updated

24 Sep 2020