Japan High Court Thinks Long & Hard About Mapplethorpe Book
February 19, 2008
Japan’s Supreme Court has issued a landmark decision opening the way for the sale of a book of collected erotic photographs by the late Robert Mapplethorpe.
This would over rule a 2003 decision by the Tokyo High Court that banned the book’s sale because it was deemed indecent. Tuesday’s ruling is believed to be the first time the top court has overturned a lower court decision on obscenity.
Publisher Takashi Asai called it “groundbreaking” and predicted the ruling might “change [Japan's] obscenity standard.”
Justice Kohei Nasu said the black-and-white portraits were from an “artistic point of view” and led the majority opinion of the five-judge panel that Mapplethorpe was “a leading figure in contemporary art.”
The justices did, however, throw out Asai’s demand for government compensation of arround $20,000 US.
Japan’s domestic obscenity laws were relaxed in the 1990s but imported publications are handled by customs and the laws still ban images of genitals.
Asai, of Uplink publishers, had argued that the import ban was obsolete, pointing out the Mapplethorpe book was in the Japanese parliament’s library and that copies were offered for sale on the internet.
His company had been selling the Japanese version of Mapplethorpe’s 384-page book since 1994. The book, entitled “Robert Mapplethorpe”, contains 20 close-up photos of male genitalia.
Everything changed in 1999 when airport customs officials in Japan confiscated a copy of the book that Asai had been carrying.
Then Tokyo police visited him and gave him a warning, causing Asai to voluntarily suspend sales of the book in 2000.
Asai decided to go to court and in 2002, he won a case in Tokyo District Court. The government was ordered to give back his book and to pay $6,480 US in damages. But a year later, a higher court overturned that ruling. At that point, Asai took the case to the highest court in the land. Leading to today’s ruling.
Episode 126: Meszmer/Müller and Book Review
January 27, 2008
The Central European Bureau, “EuroShark” Mark Staff Brandl and his new partner Lamis El Farra interview Alex Meszmer of the art team Meszmer/Müller.
Meszmer discusses the exhibition they curated at Projektraum Exex titled “Deconstructing Eden – Fragments of a Perfect Life,” their transitory museum-in-progress called Zeitgarten, the Swiss professional artists’ organization Visarte, and the new group of highly active “alternative” art spaces in Switzerland united under the rubric “Off-Off.”
Terri and Joanna give their book review of Eeee Eee Eeeee by Tao Lin . The “shitty drawing of novels.”
Duncan rages about how F-ing angry he is at the Art Institute of Chicago, and in order to make up for it, rumor has it that he intends to increase his donation to them. If you work in development, please make a note of Duncan’s generosity and contact me at badatsports@gmail.com and I’ll pass along his phone number. He really wants to talk to you ASAP.
Episode 123: Anne Elizabeth Moore
January 6, 2008
Duncan and Terri talk to Anne Elizabeth Moore about her book Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity and related topics.
For years the do-it-yourself (DIY)/punk underground has worked against the logic of mass production and creative uniformity, disseminating radical ideas and directly making and trading goods and services. But what happens when the underground becomes just another market? What happens when the very tools that the artists and activists have used to build word of mouth are co-opted by corporate America? What happens to cultural resistance when it becomes just another marketing platform?
Unmarketable examines the corrosive effects of corporate infiltration of the underground. Activist and author Anne Elizabeth Moore takes a critical look at the savvy advertising agencies, corporate marketing teams, and branding experts who use DIY techniques to reach a youth market—and at members of the underground who have helped forward corporate agendas through their own artistic, and occasionally activist, projects.
Covering everything from Adbusters to Tylenol’s indie-star-studded Ouch! campaign, Unmarketable is a lively, funny, and much-needed look at what’s happening to the underground and what it means for activism, commerce, and integrity in a world dominated by corporations.
Anne Elizabeth Moore is the co-editor of Punk Planet, the Best American Comics series editor, and the author of Hey Kidz! Buy This Book: A Radical Primer on Corporate and Governmental Propaganda and Artistic Activism for Short People. She has written for Bitch, the Chicago Reader, In These Times, The Onion, The Progressive, and Chicago Public Radio WBEZ’s radio program 848. She lives in Chicago.
I will mail 5 bucks to the first person who can identify the name of the artist and title of the song used to close the show, it has bothered me for years that I don’t know who it is.
Episode 120: Intuit and Literago.org
December 16, 2007
First: Shannon and Duncan talk Robert Reinard, Program Director, Collections & Exhibitions and Amanda Curtis, Program Director, Education from Intuit.
Intuit is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1991. Our mission is to promote public awareness, understanding, and appreciation of intuitive and outsider art through a program of education and exhibition.
Toward this end, Intuit strives to discover, document, maintain, preserve, exhibit, and collect examples of intuitive and outsider art; and to operate a permanent facility in which to pursue such activities.
Intuit defines “intuitive and outsider art” as work of artists who demonstrate little influence from the mainstream art world and who seem instead motivated by their unique personal visions. This includes what is known as art brut, non-traditional folk art, self-taught art, and visionary art.
Next: Terri and Joanna talk to Gretchen Kalwinski and Eugenia Williamson from Literago.org
Literago.org is intended as a portal to news and information about literary goings-on in and around Chicago. The site features a curated calendar with a corresponding weekly newsletter, news and photos, post-event write-ups, and the occasional essay about the state of literature in Chicago.
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Episode 114: Carol Jackson, Anthony Elms, and Jubilee City
November 4, 2007
On this week’s exciting Episode, number 114… Art Forum’s Anthony Elms and Bad at Sports’ Duncan MacKenzie interrogate Carol Jackson about her dynamite exhibition at Gallery 400, and Terri Griffith and Joanna MacKenzie take apart John Andoe’s “Jubilee City: A Memoir at Full Speed”. It doesn’t get any better then this.
Also, to the person who scrawled “I MISS RICHARD” in lipstick on the mirror of the men’s bathroom at BAS HQ, we know who you are and this is unacceptable behavior.
From Gallery 400:
Carol Jackson’s signs, sculptures, gouaches and drawings use common, everyday “signatureless” styles to let loose the grandiose morality within the picturesque languages and visuals of advertising. Her work is a bitterly humorous send up of the demands and promises commercial representations make for goods, be they detergent, food, or real estate. Long focusing on a series of meticulously hand-tooled leather reworkings of both store advertising and real estate development signage, Jackson replaces the found text with disdainful, mistrustful and self-depreciating thoughts that sales language represses. What remains is the epic longing and promissory nature of the address.
From Publishers Weekly:
n this charming memoir, Andoe narrates his journey from his Tulsa childhood through redneck, hard-partying teen years to a highly successful career as a (hard-partying redneck) painter in New York City. While Andoe may not be a professional writer, his humor and offbeat artistic sensibility make up for any lack of prose-writing chops. Through discrete anecdotes that seldom run longer than two pages, Andoe assembles vivid portraits of his family and friends and of the various environments he inhabited—the working-class Tulsa neighborhoods of the 1960s, the high school and college drug culture at the end of the hippie era, and the New York art scene of the 1980s. Andoe rarely said No to drugs, and the marginal characters and dangerous encounters of the lowlife provide the book with a great deal of energy and pathos; at times his memoir reads like a more amateur version of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son. Yet whenever the gonzo stories verge on tedium, Andoe modulates his tone and shows himself as the stay-at-home dad, the outdoorsman, the artist. While Andoe has an occasional tendency to settle scores (his ex-wife receives particularly brutal treatment) or trumpet his status as an outsider, for the most part his wide-eyed sense of wonder and keen observations make the everyday strange and fresh. (Aug.)
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