Araki brings back the idea that everything truly Japanese automatically excludes us from participation. In western eyes, Japan has been the very model of the other, although it remains unclear to what extent the reverse is also true. Araki’s art should actually fall within this category of the other for we know that the photographer rarely leaves Tokyo, that he did not attend a western university and that he speaks only Japanese. Yet his work achieves precisely the opposite effect. We gain the insistent impression that these pictures are addressed “to us” - not in the sense that they are images or reflections of western culture - like the parodies of western art and cinema found in the travesties of the Japanese photographer Morimura - but because they operate according to rules developed within western “modernist” discourse.

Born in Tokyo in 1940, Nobuyoshi Araki was 32 when he left the advertising agency for which he had been employed as a stills photographer. For the next two decades his work remained virtually unknown in the West. Of the 75 books and brochure editions of his photographs produced in Japan during those years, not a single one was available in Europe. His first solo exhibition outside Japan was shown in Graz in 1992 and subsequently appeared at ten other venues in Austria, Germany, Holland. Scotland, Scandinavia and Switzerland during the following three years an extraordinary success story for an artist who had previously been a no-name at European galleries and museums.

But he was not the typical artist - painstaking, introverted, regional - unjustly overlooked by the hectic exhibition scene. Nobuyoshi Araki had long since become a media star in Japan, a figure constantly surrounded by an entourage, like Michael Jackson, a hard-drinking, boyish-tough character, like Damien Hirst, an elegant maverick, like Jean-Luc Godard, and an artist noted for specific eroticisms, like Helmut Newton, albeit for very different ones.

Having sifted through the myriad rumors and the sensational stories associated with the name Araki, one is drawn to such comparisons. As difficult as it is to comprehend Nobuyoshi Araki the artist, the goal of tracing the origins of his ad and determining h real objective is no less elusive. That it is loaded with explicit sexual imagery and heavy-handed sexual metaphors is a given. Yet Araki’s explicitness is not “hot” in the sense exploited by the sex industry, and his metaphors forge links to many other, similarly sensual images - cityscapes and interiors that are often devoid of people and have a metaphorical intensity of their own. We also know that Araki draws from a huge store of photographs that is expanded continuously - photos that bear neither dates (the few exceptions are discussed below) nor titles - and ultimately revolves around a small core of frequently recurring images. The majority of his pictures can easily be classified within a small range of subjects. Repetition - not as a structural principle but as kind of ecstatic obsession - is a part of Araki’s program.

In one sense, Araki's photos, exhibited in great numbers and in plain display, can be taken in with a single glance. They exude a solemn morbidity, they tell of a great journey within a small space, they play urban and corporeal experience off against each other, even interchanging them, suggestively, on occasion. If we examine the photographs individually - a difficult undertaking in view of their sheer quantity and the similarities of the motifs - we find that the city scenes were captured much more hastily than the pictures of semi-nude or nude women with their hands or their entire bodies bound with thick ropes. The city images are like flowers picked along the wayside: here a glance into a desolate alleyway, there a wide shot showing water and a high-rise: and the sky, again and again, lead-gray or paperlike, filled with cheery cumulus clouds or hung like a threatening curtain that seems on the verge of being torn apart.

There is nothing random about Araki’s photographs of women. His models are carefully chosen. They are young, and there is often something extreme about them. The lustfulness of their smiles has a touch of debility, or their glances are cross-eyed, or they remind us of type-east figures from western and Asian B movies. Some of them represent the Japanese ideal of feminine innocence: expressionless devotion, a perfect hairdo, small, firm breasts. A few are not so young at all, seem somewhat deranged, less spoiled than tormented by luxury.

Another aspect of Araki’s considered approach is his selection of shooting locations. Empty streets are relatively rare; we sometimes see hotel rooms, luxurious hotel bathrooms or constantly changing interiors that must belong to apartments somewhere. Some of his photos are done in the studio against a gently modulating non-representational background.

A third aspect is the photographer's use of elaborate detail in dress and props. The latter group includes an entire arsenal of plastic animal models, a signal from nature in the figure of the amorphous. The juxtaposition of the theatrical and the ridiculous appears deliberate. As a result, many of the photos seem plain at first glance but develop a certain eccentric charm in the collage with other images when the gaze returns to them.

Although the biographical trail of Araki’s oeuvre has since been lost again, it was still clearly recognizable at the 1 992 Graz exhibition entitled Akt-Tokyo 1971 - 1991. The catalogue contains a photo of Nobuyoshi and Yoko Araki as a sad-looking wedding couple in 1971. The few pictures of Yoko are intermingled in the following pages with glaring flash photos of women in Tokyo sex clubs from the mid-eighties, some of them even later. Finally, Yoko is seen standing at the side of a freshly made bed in a hospital room. She is smiling. Only a few days later - January 29^th, 1990 - we see her lying in a casket beneath mounds of flowers.

The pictures are dated electronically. An elongated, blackened patch of remaining snow, photographed the day after Yoko's death, becomes a dreadful allegory of mortality. The flash photograph of a naked woman lying on a hotel bed was taken on the day after her funeral. The woman's face is not shown; her legs are spread apart. With her left hand she clutches her completely shaved pubic region, two fingers booked inside her vagina, the ring-finger extended to her anus, which is positioned precisely in the center of the picture.

This violation of taboo can probably be traced to the work of the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer, who did a series of pictures featuring proudly presented labia with his girlfriend, the writer Unica Zürn, in 1958. Strangely enough, Bellmer and Zürn produced another motif that reappears in Araki’s work, although in considerably more artistic form: the female body in bondage. Bellmer’s photos are not portraits but rather studies of bodies bound randomly with packaging tape, from which uncovered areas of flesh bulge as tortured matter – “long folds and impure lips, notched,” as Bellmer noted, “previously unseen breasts multiplied, in unspeakable places.” Whereas Bellmer fragments the body to create a wild proliferation of flesh, Araki judges his subject on the basis of its exceptional role. Bellmer shows no faces; Araki always reveals complete figures in bondage and emphasizes above all the undisturbed contentment in the faces of a variety of very different women. In many of his bondage scenes, the vulva, if it is shown at all, is adorned with a flower, an obvious juxtaposition of lust and ritual.

Bondage scenes. The most astonishing of Araki’s motifs, from a western point of view at least, are those scenes of women in bondage - women crouching on reedcovered floors, tied by the hands to the crook of a tree branch or suspended from a ceiling like mobiles of human flesh in sophisticated networks of knotted cords. Displayed as it for the benefit of guests invited to a bizarre soirée or for a public willing to pay admission for a fleeting moment of sensation, the suspended figures are more obviously what the other women in bondage are, though less obviously, as well: artifice - adept and willing objects of highly skilled masters of ceremonies who exaggerate rather than illustrate sexual fantasies. Placed within interiors (as in the many photos in which the bondage appears relatively uncomplicated), the bound women strike us as part of an intimate ritual in which the man both places the woman in bondage and liberates her from it. There may indeed be intimacy between the photographer and the woman in bondage, but the imagined constellation of two people alone with each other is fictitious.

One of these staged scenes portrays the - apparent - victim of a ritual rape. This vertical format photo shows a young woman, bound and gagged, in the midst of bushes. Her arms are presumably tied to a tree behind her back. Her schoolgirl’s dress has been folded up to her abdomen. Her legs are bound in a bent position and tied like packages in such a way that they are forced to spread. Her plain white panties have been slit open with scissors at the genitals, and the scissors lie, opened, in front of her left foot.

The scene is overstated in every imaginable way. One needn’t be an expert in the history of Japanese culture to recognize that no traumatic event has actually taken place here. Araki diminishes dramatic tension in two ways. First, he embellishes the fantasy to the extent that it is exposed as a reference to pornographic pictures (the slit panties, the open scissors). In addition, the women, depending upon the particular scene, succeed through pantomime in achieving a deliberately sought balance between play and non-play. The iconic overstatement is intensified as the scene is emptied of all anecdotal elements.

And this brings us to the core of the dynamics of obscenity, which George Bataille, in his Histoire de l’Œil, describes as an anti-religious excess that culminates in insanity. In his analysis of Bataille’s work, Roland Barthes isolated the pictorial images of the narrative and discovered that they coexist as in a relationship of mutual subs5tudon (the eye, the sun, the bowl of milk, the testicle, the egg). Rhetorically speaking, the relationship of substitution is known as metonymy; metonymy is related to structure and is entirely compatible with repetition. It may be that the motifs are finite, but in a conceptual sense they are not.

The idea of the dynamics of obscenity is incomprehensible d taken as a suggestion that we should picture society along the lines of “Araki - this is the orient!” That is not the point at all.

The real issue involves an obsessive process of forging links, and in photography, unlike literature, the question arises why women wish to participate as performers in it. As far as bondage itself is concerned - quite apart from the photographic image - it isn't all that puzzling a phenomenon, it one calls to mind tattooed men and pierced women. Why would one choose to turn one’s body - instead of shaping it into a symbol of intellectual, psychic, democratic energies - into an object of mythological imagery, A significant aspect of the tradition of tattooing involves men’s desire to conserve the image of their subjugation during military service or in prison as an experience of pain and unfulfilled desire: a living threat posed to a citizen-society that has no use for these oppressed spirits. In the West, women have joined in this voiceless-decorative rebellion. The experience of Japanese women who submit to bondage must be quite similar.

Yet bondage - even when it causes pain - has one advantage over tattooing. It leaves no evidence on the body. The tattoo's counterpart - as a lasting image - is Araki’s published photograph. The photographic work of art may indeed hold a greater attraction for women than the monstrous theatrical experience of being tied up expertly by a master of the art of bondage. Every woman who plays a part of Araki’s œuvre becomes a substitute for Yoko and is at the same time totally interchangeable with any other image beneath the skies of Tokyo.

Practically no artistic statement can withstand normative questioning. Is R right to do what Araki does? The author of an essay in the catalogue accompanying the temporary exhibition in Vienna expresses the suspicion that western enthusiasm for Araki promotes the restoration of a “notion of the artist which long seemed to be on the way to extinction...” in support of an ‘obviously misogynistic practice.’ An examination of the argumentation reveals, however, that considerable reshaping of the history of western art is necessary in order to find in d the precursor of a Japanese satyr: “The modernist celebration of the liberated (male) individual is thus based on acts of symbolic violence and subordination.” However, Manet’s Olympia, for example, is not meant to suggest that ogling naked women is a privilege that is beyond criticism; what it does tell us is that a society which - for certain reasons carries its money by the handful to whores and mistresses must be able to lock straight into the eyes of these increasingly self-assured women. Back then, in the salons, taking this look was a painful experience.

Satirical reportage. Noboyoshi Araki’s career is also connected to prostitution and its interpretation, This became quite evident last year when a German publisher acquired the rights to a work published in Japan in 1991 under the title Tokyo Lucky Hole. Had it appeared in the West ten years earlier, the book would have ruined the photographer's reputation immediately, The German author Elfriede Jelinek succintly characterized the puzzling phenomenon of the artist’s position as “... the call for the article, this loudest but not always laudable cry of the artist ... “. The work is a bulky compendium of stories from a journal entitled Photo Age, founded by Akira Suei in 1981. The magazine’s focus was an incredible boom in the sex-entertainment industry that captured the fancy of many Japanese until their legislature put an end to it in 1985.

Suei and Araki exposed the rugged gaiety of high-speed pleasure in photodocumentaries and staged scenes made to look like photo-documentaries. In Kabukicho, a particularly lively red-light district in the Shinjuku quarter, Araki photographed street, bar and sex scenes in highly dramatized detail. We become witnesses to a bizarre ware, devoid of inhibition, in which lusty, still fresh-looking women appear to await the photographer with radiant smiles - nor do their customers mind having the hallway door left open for the photographer's flash while they engage in sex. Araki also took photo still lifes with sobering views of small rooms and compartments, gazed into refrigerators and registered the joyless stickers bearing the whores' portraits.

This amusement business specialized in the immediate realization of a customer's every fantasy. A man is led into a child's room, for example, where he gets a bib hung around his neck and his penis powdered before the predictable part of the program commences. Finally, a ribbon is tied around his flaccid penis - the photographer still on the scene. Another specially consisted in the separation of desires from the proven techniques of sexual service: the invention of the hands-on peep show, for example; the vagina as a shrine; and more bizarre yet, a system of compartments with holes through which customers could stick their penises and have their lust satisfied by women on the other side of the partition, whose pictures - ostensibly theirs, at least were hung on the compartment wall.

Araki’s photo-documentaries appear very strange in retrospect, because the photographer views the mercilessly regressive male fantasies from the vantage point of the women's world, although he does so only for the sake of his own highly amused involvement. AIDS had not yet arrived in Japan, drugs were nowhere to be seen and pimps appear to have played no role at all. The whole scene has the look of a children’s playroom during a pillow fight. The alienation effect, deliberate and forced, turns into satire. Despite their satirical hue, however, these documentaries are fundamentally affirmative.

The focus here is upon a subculture of a society seemingly assured of perpetual prosperity. Araki and Suei use its image to run circles around government censorship. They show the casting off of inhibitions as an integral pad of the popular culture of their country, in which corporations are constituted like great feudal families and men must join their bosses and down their liquor after work.

In order to understand Araki’s role as he moves back and forth between the art and amusement scenes, we must consider that he was not only a satirical reporter for Photo Age but a married man as well. Before, during and after the Shinjuku scenes, a diary of a marriage took shape: Yoko in a taxi and in the bathtub, Yoko looking pensive and Yoko reading, in a kimono and wearing an apron, here with an appealing pout, there in lascivious gaiety - a complex character.

Yoko, the third volume of the new, twenty-volume edition of Araki’s works, contains a photo of her with her head thrown back wildly in an obvious gesture of total sexual abandon, whatever its source may be. This kind of motif has been recycled with increasing frequency in Araki’s sea of images. The portrait of a woman in the throes of ecstasy is often complemented by the pedantically illuminated view of an open vulva. This motif is not taken from Araki's fund of Yoko pictures, however, but from his documentaries on prostitution.

The western world had its own counterpart to Yoko and Nobuyoshi Araki in the husband-and-wife duo of Ilona “Cicciolina” Staller and Jeff Koons, As a visual artist, Koons knew how to make effective use Cicciolina’s status as an Italian porno-film star; her genitals were not exactly the classic well-kept secret. Koons showed himself - in silk-screen prints made from unmistakable photographic originals and in glass and plastic sculptures - in the act of having sex with his wife. The marriage tailed and was followed by a legal dispute over the custody of their child.

A cat named Chiro is all that remains of the Arakis’ life as husband and wife. But Nobuyoshi Araki has transferred the entire sentiment of their marriage, which survived until death parted them, into his photographic oeuvre. And that explains the peculiar mixture of promiscuity and faithfulness, shamelessness and melancholy. Araki’s is the work of a widower who cannot stop mourning his wife's death, yet does everything in his power to forget her.

Araki / Goldin. Although there can be no doubt that the Kabukicho scene catered to a heterosexual clientele, the traditional rules of the business were suspended there. Ordinarily, it is accepted as given that men who pay for sex do not want to be photographed while engaging in it. Also at work here is a theatrical exaggeration of perverse constellations featuring pseudo-offices, children’s playgrounds and jail cells, mirrors and magnifying glasses. We do not get the impression that men with genuine perversions are offered “anything and everything” they crave, but instead that anything and everything is made available - in theme-park style - because it is so amusing to do something different for a change. Deviance is more a function of money than of desire. The perversions seem more like charades than scenes of true suffering.

This leads to a different view of the matter of roles and props. As in the gay scene, where SS uniforms are readily and consistently recognizable as costume - half theater, half stimulus - the rites of reciprocal exchange are also disguised as unequal in Araki’s work. In fact, his women have the same lascivious air, mixed with pride in their being different, as young male hustlers. When more or less conventional middle-class women adopt this posture, even if only partially, it is hard to tell who is who: The boundary between “honorable” and “dishonorabie” is no longer there. With respect to Araki’s photographs, bondage is part of the disguise. While the women in bondage become links in the metonymic chain, the process of exchange is rendered almost totally inscrutable.

Thus it comes as no surprise that the American photographer Nan Goldin recognized in Araki her oriental counterpart, that she worked with him and helped to promote his success. Like Araki, Goldin also made her own immediate world the subject of her work. She witnessed the rapid growth of bohemian culture in New York during the 1980s - an excess of trash, which she romanticized in her colorful photographs, to include her own blackened eyes. Aside from her macho lovers, she focused her attention on her gay and transvestite friends, many of whom fell victim to AIDS. A sense of mourning in the face of unrecoverable loss links Goldin’s work with Araki’s, even though the aesthetics gained from the experience are not the same. Many of Goldin’s transvestites and transsexuals could not survive outside of the milieu of shows, bars and commercial sex. Both Araki and Goldin leave the shifting back and forth between the milieu and an everyday hedonistic lifestyle unquestioned.

In 1994 Nan Goldin worked with Araki in Tokyo taking photos for a book that was later published under the title Tokyo Love. Goldin made the rounds of bars and apartments of people from the scene, focusing not so much upon their particular preferences but upon a characteristic defiance in their attitude towards the world: Take pleasure where you find it - no matter how high the stakes. Hectic life in tiny apartments filled to overflowing with paraphernalia appears as the ultimate model of a classless lifestyle far removed from the world of work. Araki saw, of course, what Goldin was doing, and he counteracted her urban-underground odyssey with work that is much more sharply defined than we might expect of him: photos of school girls in both formal and informal dress, posed standing, crouching or sitting in front of candy-colored studio backgrounds and photographed - each individually - with a flash and in colon Their awkward poses are the real theme of these pictures. Araki’s meticulous but rude technique does not exactly emphasize their sunny sides.

It is astonishing to see that Goldin, whose poetics are oriented towards defeat and destruction, ultimately finds refuge in idyll. Next to Araki’s, her work locks naive. Yet at the moment in which he is forced to take a position relative to the western photographer Araki does not expose the vitality of his concerns but instead emphasizes the recalcitrant nature of his view. He has little in common with the stereotyped image of the gallant.

The returning memory. Film director Nagisa Oshima refers to August 15^th, 1945, the day the Emperor of Japan surrendered in a radio address, ending World War II, as “the day I learned that there was nothing of which one could say that it could never happen.”

Araki was five years old when his native Tokyo was almost totally destroyed by allied bombs. As a twenty-year-old college student of photography and film he witnessed the first great wave of grass-roots political resistance that overtook Japan in 1960 - well in advance of the first rebellions of Blacks in Alabama.

Nobuyoshi Araki, or so it would appear at first glance, is not greatly affected by this memory, which continues to haunt Japan to this day, not least of all because the question of war guilt has been left unsettled for decades. Yet we do find subtle signs of a concern with the memory in Araki’s work. Some of the electronic dates on his negatives have been set to the 6^th or the 9^th of August, the dates of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; others bear the date August 15^th - the day of Japan's surrender.

The theme appears once again in Araki’s recent work. It includes images from a film made by Araki many years ago but stored improperly during the intervening years. Little is left of the motifs themselves, just enough to reveal that the film is not a cinema production but a collection of scenes of everyday life and holiday celebrations. The modes of dress and models of cars recognizable in the stills suggest that the film must have been made about 1970. The perforations are meant to allude to their movie origins - in fact, however, they are the product of a photographic intervention, since the perforations do not appear on the left and right but instead frame the pictures on the top and bottom. Thus Araki has deliberately appropriated his own photos - much in the same way that Richard Prince takes details from advertising.

While some of the images are almost totally black and others are merely spotted, most of them have an apocalyptic lock: Acid, fire and ice sweep through the streets, bashing holes in faces and bodies. It is impossible to avoid thinking of Shomei Tomatsu’s pictures from his series “11:02 Nagasaki,” studies of burned skin and grotesquely deformed objects (1966). A recently published Araki book containing hundreds of film stills bears the title Lost Reality. Remembrance of Things Past.

Araki has never really been a straight photographer. His techniques include the manual manipulation of photographs - collaging, etching and watercoloring. These photos undermine the suggestion of documentary photography (the edition of Araki’s works is full of such playful tricks). Yet all of his motifs are substitutes for one another. All of them have their place as links in the metonymic chain: sky, Chiro, women in bondage, street, vulva. Even the brightly colored blossoms on view here belong to it as well. As we view the flowers and film stills in combination, we realize that the devastated stills put a damper on the substitution game. They stand apart from the metonymy. What we see here is amazingly aggressive work on the image of Tokyo.

No stylist. In an informal interview, Nan Goldin asked Araki about his sources and his ambitions. The photographer’s answers reveal that he associates photography with a specific pattern of production and distribution. Of Cindy Sherman he says: “I like Cindy Sherman’s things - they are not all that far from photography,” an astonishing statement in view of the fact that Sherman exhibits only pictures composed of photographic materials. Araki suggests that “photos should be taken quickly and published. The medium is not the kind in which one has to think everything through and work it out perfectly.” Thus photography stands for momentary experience that is shared with the public immediately. Apparently, the mechanics of looking and the productive power of the camera count for more than the outcome: “I like photography, and that’s why I also like all photographers, even when they are bad or don't appeal to me.”

We realize, to our surprise, that Nobuyoshi Araki does not actually follow the recently established approach to the marketing of photographs. He neither dates his prints nor limits them in number; and he allows photographs of different sizes to be offered at the same price. Whereas Europeans and Americans expect the photographer, as an artist, to be involved in every detail of darkroom work, framing and, if possible, even the hanging of photographs, Araki is content with a rough idea. He supplies entire exhibitions on order.

This does not mean that Araki is unfamiliar with the most significant positions in international photography. During the sixties, while still employed by Dentsu, a major advertising agency, he saw photographs by many of the most influential western photographers. His feeling for articulate façades is reminiscent of Eugéne Atget. He learned to pay tribute to commercial tristesse from Walker Evans. He shares Ed van der Eisken’s urban melancholy. From William Klein Araki borrowed techniques of scattering people in urban space and capturing the psychological configurations that emerge.

It goes without saying that Araki is familiar with Japanese auteurs photography of the sixties, whichs brusquely abandonned reportage in favor of a subjective approach: the insistence upon the ritual of visual probing, close-up, often on the threshold of pain. From 1974 to 1976 Araki was involved in a photo workshop with several of these authors - including Eikoh Hosoe and ahe above-mentioned) Shomei Tomatsu, both noteworthy figures in Japanese photography. Araki was its youngest member.

Given Araki’s extensive knowledge and connections, we are astonished to see how little heed he has paid to established styles. Unlike William Klein in the West and Eikoh Hosoe in the East, Areki is not a stylist at all. He applies his photographic experiences to his subjects as If they were techniques. What he has adopted from his immediate predecessors is the overlapping of fact and fiction. And in order to ensure that everyone notices, he furnishes his scenes with artificial flies and dinosaurs or live and dried lizards.

Although Araki is indeed no stylist, he serves nevertheless as the f lag-bearer for a very specific aesthetic code. And this quite naturally fits the cliché associated with the western image of Japan: the idea that Japan invents nothing but still does everything better than anyone else- And in this sense it is only logical for the photographer to neglect the West and glorify Tokyo. He has cultivated a Japanese slang full of expressions regarded by blushing translators as “untranslatable.” And he also fits in well with the western cliché of the Japanese, constantly clicking a camera shutter. like so many other confusing signals received before his time and from his own surroundings, Nobuyoshi Araki also nourishes the suspicion that the Japanese are difficult to comprehend - and most of all that they might no longer completely understand themselves.