I have come to an end of this apologia for the novel as a vast net. Someone might object that the more the work tends toward the multiplication of possibilities, the further it departs from that unicum which is the self of the writer, his inner sincerity and the discovery of his own truth. But I would answer: Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.

Italo Calvino, “Multiplicity” (Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 1988)

A different kind of creative energy characterizes Nagatani’s Novellas in relationship to his comprehensive projects Nuclear Enchantment, the Japanese-American relocation camps, and Ryoichi’s excavations. Novellas are not grounded to specific geographies – albeit fictional ones – nor to a broad narrative that evolves around a theme, an historical investigation, or one character. Like short stories, these are fragmentary and pungent allegories that unravel, in groups of five pictures for each chapter, Nagatani’s own passions, memories, fears, and political commentaries, provoking both laughter and melancholia. The experience of writing short stories versus novels described by Haruki Murakami is comparable to Nagatani’s personal tales:

You can create a story out of the smallest details – an idea that springs up in your mind, a word, an image, whatever. In most cases, it’s like jazz improvisation, with the story taking me where it wants to... [as] a kind of experimental laboratory for me as a novelist (1).

Visual experiments that reveal the artist’s curiosity for all sorts of mediated images – among these, scientific illustrations, pictograms, advertisements, fashion photos, news photos, postcards, snapshots – Novellas convey the freedom and playfulness of a storyteller and collector of the ephemeral, who speaks about himself through the layers of cultural myths, enigmas, and fetish. How these stories are formed, and what type of archival material constitutes their seemingly random creations, will be the subject of this essay.

I saw the early stages of Novellas in 1992, when Nagatani had just started to collaborate with Jeff Ryan, a graduate from the Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, on a group of five waterless lithographs. It was an exciting time, when Ryan was engaging artists (2) to experiment with the new process at his own printing shop, “21 steps:” the process consisted of a new and sophisticated type of lithography on silicone-surfaced and waterless plates – a faster, highly detailed medium, that transferred every little dot and lines onto a specially clay-coated rag paper. The layering effect was superb, and I believe it was the material quality of these objects that made me captive of their stories.

Overall in Nagatani’s work, and particularly in Novellas, the choice of the medium lives symbiotically with its image, and the wide range of surfaces and materials - waterless lithographs, color photographs of tableaux vivants, 20x24 Polaroid images with applied drawings, photo linens with Polaroid transfers, and a variety of hand-crafted collages – is an indication of the lively narrative content of this series. In particular, the quality of the waterless lithographs invites a “collage-like thinking” (3) and weaving that is in perfect tune with Nagatani’s own life and creative ideas. As he said in the past, “everything about me consists of a kind of layering” (4) - cultural, religious, geographical. The visual intricacy of the first chapter of Novellas is further confirmed by the titles in Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, and Native American, which add allegorical meanings to the images. The core issue of this first group is about the meaning and manifestation of the mask - sexual (Kairos), social (Katabasis), mythical (Dharmakaya), ritual (Viaticum), and ethnic (Canandaigua).

Kairos appropriates images of love and death to address the enigma of fate, “the right or opportune moment” when the mysterious Being we call God determines our life. The epigraph from Yukio Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask – a striking passage about the mystery of beauty that Mishima borrowed from The Brothers Karamazov – runs like an iridescent text over a sensual and tight grid of thirty kiss scenes in black and white and color, and is enmeshed with drawings made of the same silvery tone: in the center is the image of a skeleton holding hand with a male body; on top, the shapes of four skulls containing other shapes, and representing, from left to right, a smiling mask, two fingers crossed in a “good luck” gesture, a new-born baby held by an obstetrician, and a gun pointed towards the viewer. With such radical juxtapositions and the direct reference to Mishima’s confessional story - of an outcast boy who hides his homosexuality in post-war Japanese society - Nagatani gives us a hint about his own feelings of being an outsider as second generation Japanese-American, but also, indirectly, he reflects on AIDS in the early 1990s as the most daunting aspect of homosexual love, as the dark side of passion. “Beauty is not only terrifying but also mysterious…” - writes Dostojevski.

The bleak substance of Kairos is recurrent throughout the five waterless lithographs. Katabasis – the Greek word that explains the experience of Orpheus descending to the underworld – investigates the process of acculturation and consequent loss of identity so many populations go through as they step into a foreign country. This cultural transformation is illustrated with different typologies of photographic portraits – commercial studio portraits in the early 1900s, portraits by photographers of the twentieth-century, and fashion shots – which suggest how the convention of the pose and of clothing bring different cultural groups into one global formula. Nagatani reflects on his own past as he includes a portrait of his father and older brothers: three Japanese children initiated to American culture in the 1920s, wearing similar shorts and hats, deprived of their individuality. Beside them is a found photograph of two women, black and Hispanic, in traditional Western clothing, appearing similar social persona in a studio set-up. The anonymous portraits of three races plunged into the costumes of North American culture are juxtaposed to iconic photographs of social outcasts (taken by Diane Arbus, August Sander, Richard Avedon, Jacob Riis, and Jeffrey Silverthone) and, at the bottom, glamorous fashion shots. The artist’s line drawing of people parting and drinking, across the top of the composition, represents the anonymous faces of those who “belong” to society. In the middle of the image, Nagatani sketches the contours of three cows being dissected, as a metaphor of consumer culture fragmenting the individual body into a series of usable or even edible fetish. Such dehumanizing and violent transformation is part of the history of descent from one culture to another, from an individual’s face to a social mask.

Canandaigua, referring to the town in NY State where the Iroquois treaty was signed in 1794, addresses similar issues of (forced) cultural assimilation of Native-American populations. The mask, in this case, is that of history – the treacherous history that granted land to the Iroquois, but never followed up with its promise. The subject of exploitation of Native American land has been very relevant for Nagatani, particularly since his move to New Mexico, in 1987. In this piece, unlike the episodic vignettes of Nuclear Enchantment, he chooses a blatant symbolism: faces of Native American Chiefs are scratched and entombed underneath figures of American wealth and entertainment - the World Trade Center (!) and a party crowd - while a cocoa advertisement branded in Dorchester, Massachusetts presents a racist message in its global motto: “Little Indian, Sioux or Crow, Little Frosty Eskimo, Little Turk or Japanese, O’ don’t you wish that you were me?” Three male figures (Nagatani himself, Jeff Ryan, and the dealer Richard Levy) turn towards the Native American ghosts, covering their eyes, ears, mouth, in the gesture that says “I do not see, I do not hear, I do not speak Evil,” restating what American history has done to these populations.

Nagatani shows a recurrent attraction in this group of Novellas towards ancient rituals and civilizations, opposing them to contemporary North American practices as vulgar, shallow, and aggressive. In Viaticum, he reproduces cave drawings that visualize female and male initiation - becoming a woman through menstruation, growing from boy to warrior – revealing an interest for the study of Robert Bly, Iron John: a Book about Man and overall, for the mythopoetic movement. In Dharmakaya, he copies a section of The Book of the Dead – the instructions for the afterlife in ancient Egypt – and layers this text, like a lacy and delicate blanket, with the symbolic mask of death in the West - the face of a man subjected to radiation therapy, looking at us through a head restraint (5). Western society seems to have lost touch with the rituals that connect to the primary experience of death: a juggler tosses around African, Japanese, and Western masks, having fun with the absurdity of our modern condition.

In comparison with these multi-layered images, the second chapter of Novellas shows Nagatani’s self-portraits as installations about his dreams, nightmares, and objects of affection. Each of them has a distinct color palette that activates different emotions in the viewer (passion, sadness, envy, loss) in a similar way in which the earlier Chromotherapy series associated the color of a painted room with the artist’s inner life. The directorial mode of these pictures follows the same strategies used in the Polaroid installations and in Nuclear Enchantment: figures and props float in space against painted or collaged backdrops, creating a mise-en-scene for the photographer. The influence of South-American literature, that Nagatani claims so important for Novellas, becomes very clear in this group, and the titles, all in Spanish, restate this parallel reading.

In the prologue to his short stories Strange Pilgrims, Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes a state of mind that recalls Nagatani’s creative freedom during the sabbatical year when this group was produced:

I did not have to ask myself where life ended and imagination began. Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation. (6)

It was a dream from Nagatani’s youth that inspired “nacimiento,” or birth: the dream of falling into a black pool and coming out of it, transformed into a salmon. Here, the artist celebrates the act of creation as a metamorphosis of elements and natural beings, as he swims in a red sea of salmon fishes, symbols of immortality and fertility. Like a puppeteer of his own life, this lonely figure pulls the strings of his emotions and recollections, transforming them into objects for colorful fairy-tales. The visual horror-vacui of these saturated interiors, “the obsessive covering of objects with images,” can be interpreted as an attempt to “mitigate loneliness with the activity of filling a space, much as a prisoner records the passage of days with marks on a wall” (7). The transformation of the squalor of solitude into something physically improbable but imagistically possible – so frequent in magic realist literature - is visualized in the green-toned tableau of the artist playing a card solitary. This floating figure recalls the alienated existence of a fictional character like Jose’Arcadio Buendia in One hundred Years of Solitude, who “conceived a notion of space that allowed him to navigate across unknown sea, to visit uninhabited territories, and to establish relations with splendid beings without having to leave his study” (8). Nagatani looks at his double self in the process of levitating on the floor with his table and chair, becoming camouflaged with a fabricated landscape of tropical plants and carps. This tableau inscribes itself into a photographic tradition – from Oscar Gustav Rejlander to Jeff Wall – of the artist looking at his own double, playing with the notion of photography as a mirror image. Nagatani’s cardboard clone wears the same shirt and glasses, and has the same haircut: it is the reflection of his own creation, holding a card as if he was throwing a dice, gambling with his new fictional, and perhaps liberated, existence. The fish continues to be an allegorical prop in Nagatani’s work, but the context has changed from Nuclear Enchantment, where carp banners were hanging to celebrate the Japanese Children’s Day, and from the installation “Great Yellow Father” (1988), where the fish was a signal of chemical pollution.

By recycling objects and images, he reveals the allegorical nature of his work, based on interpretation and repetition of the same forms in different contexts. Craig Owens explains that “allegorical imagery is appropriated imagery; the allegorist does not invent images but confiscates them. He lays claim to the culturally significant, poses as its interpreter. And in his hands the image becomes something other” (9). The grid of kisses he had used in Kairos and Viaticum reappears in one of these self-portraits, as a reminder of love that once was. The kiss pattern is colored pink against bright red, creating a wallpaper-storyboard on how to keep a love-story alive. Nagatani is sitting at the right corner of this tableau, sadly holding a flame that can no longer send fire to burned out firecrackers. A bunch of roses on a table are withering and the figurine of an Indonesian sculpture flies away towards new stories. The kiss pattern reappears in a different chapter of Novellas where Polaroid transfers as well as drawings are layered onto Belgian photo linen, and where “the overall theme is about the dark side of love, irony, and negative emotional links” (10). In The Line French postcards (a large one in the center and smaller ones to the side) are layered onto the romantic kisses and tell the story of a man cheating a lady. Nagatani finds a visual vocabulary to explain that this man is telling a “fish story” by adding, literally, a series of carps beside the postcard.

Different tight grids appear in the “blues” tableau – another melancholic piece about the experience of waiting for a love letter - where the portrait of the artist wearing his traditional cap becomes part of a wallpaper full of effigies with blues and jazz musicians, and in the “Altar,” where a montage of Nagatani’s portraits (from newborn to artist) is floating in space, projected onto a chair, and dangerously exposed to flames rising from the ground. The elegiac substance of this image makes reference to the use that French artist Christian Boltanski has made of anonymous vernacular portrait photographs in monumental installations about photography, death, and memory. Unlike Boltanski, Nagatani digs into his own archive, recording a temporary installation about his own mortality and the fragility of his own memories.

The darkness of this tableau is even stronger in the series of Novellas shot with the 20x24 Polaroid camera in dark green tones. This is a radically different use of the large Polaroid technology from his work in the 1980s. The colors are very somber and the Polaroid pictures become like sketching pads onto which he further draws his own marks. These images reveal two steps, two layers, and two ideas, as Nagatani travels from Albuquerque to the Polaroid studio in Boston with his luggage full of objects, and comes back with sensitized surfaces onto which he draws or collages his personal notes. In Yume (physiognomy) he carries across the country portraits of high-school Japanese-American friends, sketching in his mind how these faces can be plunged into the Polaroid fibers. These are friends he still remembers, whose lives and deaths he has followed, and whose physiognomy he is trying to recompose as if in a dream. The faces are sunk inside a deep dark glow, framed by the horns of a ram, and these surfaces are covered, later on, with the black drawing (black on black, almost invisible) used in ancient Japanese physiognomy, reading portions of the face, like a quest for truth. This is the most cryptic and abstract series of Novellas. Significantly, they all present Japanese titles, as if Nagatani hinted to the enigma of his own culture. Yogen (prophecy) presents a grid of medieval sign language, while two hands are photographed in the sacrificial gesture of offering the letters of the alphabet. The drawing of a broken finger on top of these patterns emphasizes the difficulty of communication and translation between two languages. A similar impossibility intervenes in Sakkaku (illusion), where the artist’s muddy handprints touch a screen that is covering shimmering cactuses. I remember looking at this particular piece as a work in progress and feeling distressed about this gesture. It was as if a clumsy kid had ruined a beautiful surface, pretending that the real work of art was in his hands covered with mud or ketchup. But then again, rethinking about the uniqueness of that gesture – different for each Polaroid – and the direct physical experience of making that gesture, I realized that the message was, specifically, in that childish action paint of hands drawn to touch dangerous objects, and of a young soul attracted to beauty and illusion.

In the more recent groups of Novellas, Nagatani looks at the impact of media on our world, dealing with a more collective dimension about representation as simulacrum. He appears as a virtual persona and narrator in each picture, shaking hands with President Clinton, in a digital manipulation that cost only $5 in Washington, D.C. The covers of the Weekly World News are the centerpieces (photographed with the 20x24 Polaroid camera) for an elaborate reflection on the make-belief effect of photography as proof and evidence. This is the world of shared fantasies that permeate North-American culture. Images reflect mythologies, imperialistic power, fundamentalism, and collective terror – perceptions that, sadly, are still current today.

Historic photographs surround the “Spectacular Proof” about humans living on Mars. To the right of this news is a picture of Wernher von Braun, the famous rocket scientist who served the Nazis during World War II and developed the V–2 ballistic missiles. After the war, this man served the U.S. Army, becoming director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and chief architect of the Saturn V launch vehicle that would propel Americans to the Moon. Colorful rocket stickers surround the news, adding a playful dimension to the paradigmatic male fantasy about conquering space that permeates the Sci-Fi literature from Jules Verne to H.G.Wells. The “Miraculous Photo” of Jesus appearing in the desert forms an interesting allegory about “Desert Storm Operation,” the propaganda of religious crusades (with drawings of medieval knights at the bottom), and the possession of new colonies. Furthermore, Jesus’ photograph is a snapshot taken by U.S. Marines, a “proof” of the new kind of point-and-shoot photojournalism that has been so effective with the recent stories of Abu Ghraib. An exotic photograph of a Somalian woman wearing traditional costumes and jewelry is collaged beside the face of Jesus, and a poster advertising the screening of “Latuko, the primitive man” reiterates the quest for authenticity that permeates Western society and imperialism, from the founding of National Geographic to the creation of ethnographic museums (11). Latuko is exemplary of this story and collective hysteria about primitivism: a technicolor documentary film made in 1952 in the equatorial Sudan by an official expedition of the American Museum of Natural History, it provoked a huge scandal when it was first screened in a newsreel theater in New Jersey due to the representation of nudity of the Latuko tribe, recorded during their daily life and ceremonies. These layers of stories are woven together onto the Polaroid surface, questioning with dark humor what constitutes a truthful representation of “Otherness.”

The “Terrifying Photo” is a commentary on the social imaginary and superstition concerning Evil: the artist draws with thick red paint an image of witches making a pot of magical fluid, and at the bottom, a black snake, symbolic of Satan. In the center, the “real photograph” of Satan enmeshed into the vapors of Hurricane Andrew conveys absolute visual terror, reminding us about the tendentious media coverage of more recent hurricane catastrophes.

This media critique is heightened in the most recent group of Novellas, which are mixed-media objects combining dense collages of pictures from glamour magazines, cartoons, and one recruitment poster from Life (1943) with 3-D miniature figurines fabricated for hobby train set ups by the German company Prieser. Collecting this minuscule world with a spirit that resembles that of Ryoichi’s playful models, Nagatani lines up the figurines like a child who is building up stories. “The toy - Susan Stewart explains – is the physical embodiment of the fiction: it is a device for fantasy, a point of beginning for narrative… [it] presents a projection of the world of everyday life; this real world is miniaturized or giganticized in such a way as to test the relation between materiality and meaning” (12).

The core or meaning of these narratives is based on the superficiality of physical appearance – both male and female - and the attraction towards power and violence. While the figurines perform like happy little people doing their gym and going to work, or form scores of penis-shaped missiles against a mountain of flesh, the collages above them present dismembered body parts that appear grotesque, scatological, and monstrous. Looking at these jam-packed surfaces, one is reminded of Bosch’s damnation scenes, Hannah Hoch’s aggressive commentaries, and Cindy Sherman’s grotesque prostheses. Even more appropriately, the influence of Nagatani’s mentor and friend, Robert Heinecken, is pervasive in these cut-and-pasted tableaux that use images of flesh as metaphors of chaos and violence. One thinks of the famous “Periodicals” series where gruesome photographs from Vietnam were layered onto glamour ads, but also of Heinecken’s Shiva variations as colorful palimpsests about sex and consumerism. The comparison here goes beyond the obvious appropriation of mass-media imagery, investigating these artists’ playfulness and experimentation with photography and imagination, “credibility and deception” (13).

Such a fine balance between the world seen and imagined defines Nagatani’s Novellas, as he gathers symbols from his personal archive as well as from picture magazines and codified histories of photography, transforming them into short fictions about the mask, the lover, the gambler, the outsider, the mourner, the dreamer, the child, the puppeteer…, and inviting his viewers/readers to discern all the layers, play with the fragments, and retrace the process of forming his short stories about the Self.

Maria Antonella Pelizzari

NOTES:

1) Haruki Murakami, Introduction to Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. 24 stories, New York: Knopf, 2006

2) Mary Carroll Nelson, “Printer Leaves Water Behind In Technique,” Albuquerque Journal, January 5, 1992. Among the artists who worked with Jeff Ryan are Tom Barrow, Miguel Gandert, and Lorna Simpson.

3) Clinton Adams, “Conceptually loaded. A Conversation with Patrick Nagatani,” in Linda Tyler and Barry Walker, eds., Hot Off the Press, Albuquerque: Tamarind Institute, 1994, p.101

4) Artist’s words transcribed in Eugenia Parry Janis, Nuclear Enchantment, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1991, p.27

5) This figure recalls plate 33 in Nuclear Enchantment.

6) Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Prologue to Strange Pilgrims, New York: Knopf, 1993, p.xii.

7) Leigh Anne Langwell, “Patrick Nagatani,” in Uncommon Traits. Re/locating Asia, Buffalo, CEPA Gallery, 1997, Part I, p.3

8) Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, New York, Harper Collins, 1991, p.4.

9) Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism” in Beyond Recognition. Representation, Power, and Culture, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1992, p.54

10) Conversation I had with Nagatani on June 1st, 2007.

11) On these issues about authenticity and primitivism see James Clifford, “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern”, in The Predicament of Culture. Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Harvard University Press, 1988, pp. 189-214.

12) Susan Stewart, On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Duke University Press, 1993, pp.56-57

13) Robert Heinecken, “Manipulative Photography,” Contemporary Photographer, vol.5, no.4, 1967.