{"id":16917,"date":"2022-07-07T22:33:06","date_gmt":"2022-07-07T22:33:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=16917"},"modified":"2022-07-14T23:12:29","modified_gmt":"2022-07-14T23:12:29","slug":"rotimi-fani-kayode-and-eikoh-hosoe-surrealism-and-the-specter-of-death-in-the-1980s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=16917","title":{"rendered":"Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Eikoh Hosoe"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

From\u00a0Art Journal<\/em>\u00a0<\/em>81, no. 2 (Summer 2022)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Portraits are performances, from the studio to the selfie. The evasiveness of the photographed subject\u2014their knowing permutations of identity before the lens\u2014is a given, but what if this now-routine habit could be restored to the strangeness of its origins? What if the portrait was no mere document but a portal into another world? Such apertures are exactly what the UK-based artist Robert Taylor happened upon in 1987 when he met a young, Nigerian-born, American-educated photographer named Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955\u20131989) at a gay men\u2019s social group in London.1<\/a><\/sup> He soon commissioned a portrait for himself. Their encounter typified the forms of avant-garde experimentation in London in the late 1980s, and also belied a decade that New York-centric art histories have long shorthanded as an era of slick postmodernist production, emphasizing deft symbolic appropriations and anachronistic pastiche. Certainly, the suffocating orthodoxy of modernist formalism was then on the retreat in many studios and galleries around the world, but the so-called postness of the moment poorly describes the persistence of long-standing artistic strategies only recently made legible: the metaphysical, the affective, and the surreal.2<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taylor recalls that Fani-Kayode was striking, in both his gravity and his beauty, yet came across as gentle, unassuming.3<\/a><\/sup> Apparently Taylor frequented the artist\u2019s Railton Road studio in Brixton and eventually posed for him, nude save for a beaked Venetian carnival mask and a conspicuously painted member. This Golden Phallus <\/em>series, each image lushly tenebristic, printed in rich chromogenic color, crystallizes Fani-Kayode\u2019s studio work with a coterie of Black models (and with partner Alex Hirst) in the seasons leading up to the former\u2019s untimely death in December of 1989. Bare bodies and multiple resonant props were mainstays of his practice, but his last several series took on a plainly somber tone, depicting scenes of spiritual communion or rituals of death and transfiguration. Taylor notes that in retrospect he was prepared for those sessions, carefully choreographed for the emergence of something beyond the materiality of the picture itself. Fani-Kayode likened it to an aspect of Yoruban religion, what he called a \u201ctechnique of ecstasy,\u201d likely an allusion to the shearing of one\u2019s identity through the invocation of sacred knowledge in the form of the orisha<\/em>\u2014deities that mediate between individuals and the spirit world. According to Taylor, \u201ctypical portraiture was the furthest thing from any of our minds as far as I was concerned. . . . I trusted him and would have done pretty much anything he asked, pretty secure in the knowledge that it would be very likely fascinating, challenging, and beautiful. . . . By the time it came to actually stripping off the body painting and the \u2018gold penis performance\u2019 with the paint, the three had entered a strange little world that was only properly apparent when the lights were cut and \u2018normal\u2019 life resumed.\u201d4<\/a><\/sup>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is tempting to view Fani-Kayode\u2019s photography as idiosyncratic. As I argued in a recent monograph, his work operated at the intersection of art and activism, his pictures drawing together an array of technical and performative modes.5<\/a><\/sup>  Viewed primarily through circulating artists\u2019 books, these images documented a confluence of Victorian pictorialism, Dada and punk-infused montage, Yoruban divination, and the gelede <\/em>veneration of women, gay print culture, Romantic literature, Greek mythology, and contemporary poetry. There are, however, at least two ways in which such photographs resuscitated methods long used by artists to navigate the psychic terrain central of, but until the late 1970s elided by, the rhetorics of twentieth-century modernism\u2014that is, Surrealism.6<\/a><\/sup> Fani-Kayode worked between 1983 and 1989, when European Surrealist photography was brought into focus by several influential exhibitions, and gothic motifs infused sonic and visual culture anew. At the same time, he consistently foregrounded deeper entanglements between those European artists and the Black Atlantic world, elaborating too the Surrealisms generated across the African diaspora.7<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Seated
Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Alex Hirst, The Golden Phallus <\/em>(1989), c-print (artwork\n\u00a9 Autograph, London; photograph provided\nby Autograph, London)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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In writing my book, however, a third Surrealist connection emerged\u2014between Fani-Kayode and Eikoh Hosoe (b. 1933), a noted Japanese photographer who made his reputation during the 1960s but remained active in the ensuing decades.8<\/a><\/sup> I was unable, at that time, to pursue this connection to the extent that I had hoped. My aim in the pages ahead is both to elaborate this work and to explore the far- reaching implications therein for emerging histories of modernism and photography. For his part, Hosoe is perhaps best known for several artist\u2019s books that use avant-garde techniques to explore sexuality and power (Man and Woman<\/em>, 1960), the fallout of the Second World War (Return to Hiroshima<\/em>, 1970), and a 1961 collaboration with novelist Mishima Yukio entitled Barakei<\/em>. The latter bears striking affinities with the scene outlined by Taylor, of a portrait session that assumed ecstatic dimensions, the resulting photographs mediating libidinal, even spiritual terrain. While Fani-Kayode and Hosoe worked at a great geographic remove, both mobilized Surrealist photographic strategies to mediate ongoing forms of collective trauma, and did so by positing a deeply intimate application of the medium. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both artists also engaged with specters of death that prefigured those crucial years leading up to 1989: the cultural alienation forged by occupation and its aftermath, and the trauma of cells that betray their bodies in the form of radiation poisoning and HIV. Beyond the many procedural and thematic similarities in their oeuvres, Fani-Kayode and Hosoe, when considered together, bring into view new cultural bases for Surrealist practice and patterns of influence that bypass or complicate more Eurocentric histories of twentieth-century avant-gardes. While it is common to speak of Surrealism as an international enterprise, all too often that map is one of European artists\u2019 exilic itineraries and romantic projections out into the world.9<\/a><\/sup> Instead, the interplay of Fani-Kayode\u2019s and Hosoe\u2019s work provides a powerful lens into the genuinely global ambit of Surrealism as a mediating force during the twentieth century. At the same time, what follows aims to build on what Kobena Mercer has posited as a \u201cnetworked\u201d model of diasporic practice, a polycentric model of exchange, relation, and iteration that defies more conventional art historical mappings of value and meaning.10<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Death by Roses <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Fani-Kayode\u2019s photography centers representations of race and desire, there is arguably no more consistent prop therein than vegetation\u2014fronds and leaves, lush perennials, and funereal arrangements\u2014as in an iconic contact sheet of a man bearing a tulip in full bloom, printed in the ochre hues of gum bichromate. Yet, the pose of Fani-Kayode\u2019s sitter is not altogether new, echoing a signature image in Hosoe\u2019s Barakei (Ordeal by Roses)<\/em>, first published in 1963. Indeed, Ordeal by Roses #32 <\/em>(1961) features Mishima gazing intently into the lens, his face center frame, partially obscured by the titular rose, much as Fani-Kayode\u2019s sitter would some thirty years later. As Hosoe remarked of the portfolio in 2010, \u201cA rose is beautiful, but it has thorns; the outside is beautiful but the inside is dangerous. That kind of symbolism was very much close to him. . . . This is a subjective portrait of Mishima, interpreted very dramatically by a photographer.\u201d11<\/a><\/sup> Fani-Kayode printed both a c-print and a gum bichromate version of his image, Tulip Boy <\/em>(1989), each apparently attuned to the composition of Hosoe\u2019s precedent. To make this connection clearer still, Hirst (who penned much of the firsthand writing on Fani-Kayode) evokes Hosoe\u2019s photographic subject: writing of the arduousness of creating in the shadow of a plague, he notes that \u201cI have made a place in my heart for such jokers as Edith Sitwell, Zippy the Pinhead, and Yukio Mishima.\u201d12<\/a><\/sup> A once-prolific writer, Mishima by \u2021 had taken on a politically performative character that veered between camp and reactionary delusion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Red
Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Tulip Boy<\/em> (1989), gum bichromate print (artwork \u00a9 Autograph, London;\nphotograph provided by Autograph, London)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Barakei <\/em>was republished in 1971 and again in 1985, based on an original design by Kohei Sugiura. Enrolled in university, then art school, and living in Washington, D.C., from 1976 to 1980 and New York from 1980 to 1983, Fani-Kayode would have had access to a range of photo catalogs, both new and in reissue. Among these, it is clear from his wider body of work, were noirish portfolios of 1930s-era Surrealism and fashion photography (Man Ray, George Platt Lynes, Brassa\u00ef) and a growing body of Gay Liberation\u2013era image making, from pulp magazines to the Apollonian black-and-whites of contemporary Robert Mapplethorpe. Within this collection, it seems likely, was the 1985 Aperture edition of Barakei <\/em>(now \u201cOrdeal by Roses\u201d rather than the original \u201cDeath by Roses\u201d or \u201cKilling by Roses\u201d), or the accompanying book for the 1974 New Japanese Photography <\/em>exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, which introduced American audiences to the groundswell of art photography circulating in Japan throughout the 1960s. Among the fifteen photographers featured there were Hosoe (images from Barakei <\/em>and his iconic Man and Woman<\/em>) as well Kawada Kikuji and T\u014dmatsu Sh\u014dmei\u2014three of the six members of the VIVO (\u201clife\u201d) photo agency that operated a studio and office in Tokyo from 1959 to 1961.13<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Black
Hosoe Eikoh, Ordeal by Roses #32<\/em> (1961), gelatin silver print (artwork \u00a9 1961 Eikoh Hosoe; photograph provided by amanaTIGP)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The 1974 MoMA exhibition, the formation of collectives such as VIVO, and short-lived publications such as Provoke <\/em>were in turn crucial for global circulation of Japanese avant-garde photography. This work was by design at variance with the formalism that typified much American photography and attuned to the dissonances of a Japanese order increasingly defined by late-capitalist mass culture and a sense of a postoccupation \u201cAmericanization,\u201d including the circulation of modernist conventions (for example, Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism).14<\/a><\/sup> Japanese photographic and film critics fiercely debated throughout the 1950s and 1960s the ratio of photojournalistic realism and object-driven images to more \u201ctraditional\u201d Japanese artistic modes that focused on more ineffable \u201cideas.\u201d15<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Image
John Szarkowski and Shoji Yamagishi, New Japanese Photography<\/em> catalog, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1974, cover with reproduction of T\u014dmatsu Sh\u014dmei, \u201cAftermath of a Typhoon, Nagoya, 1959,\u201d from Nippon series (1967) (published under fair use; photograph\nprovided by Museum of Modern Art)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Both sides of this debate tended to emphasize on one hand the influence of European precedents, and on the other the capacity of seemingly literal or immediate work to resonate with creative \u201cenergy.\u201d T\u014dmatsu himself responded to influential critic Natori Y\u014dnosuke\u2019s 1960 conceptual essay in Asahi Camera<\/em>, saying that \u201cto prevent photography from becoming sclerotic, I believe we should drive away spirits that haunt \u2018photojournalism\u2019 and destroy the preconceived ideas carried in the term.\u201d16<\/a><\/sup> Ultimately, as curator Yamagishi Shoji argued, not only did most art photographers in Japan have \u201clittle regard\u201d for high finish, they also had few outlets\u2014such as collectors and galleries\u2014and relied extensively on the artist\u2019s-book format.17<\/a><\/sup> At least several of the photographers in the MoMA group show adapted what European audiences would recognize as Surrealist methods (double exposure, solarization, and perspectival disorientation) and motifs, from sexual desire to the recurrence of traumatic memory. This is unsurprising, given that Japan was itself a hub of Surrealist experimentation during the years leading to the war. After two decades of state repression, such experimentation resurfaced in the 1950s.18<\/a><\/sup>  This was certainly the case for both T\u014dmatsu and Hosoe.19<\/a><\/sup> The latter recalls that he was influenced by Surrealist practice since at least 1952, when he joined the Demcrato artist\u2019s group led by Takiguchi Shuzo\u2014the latter a friend of painter Joan Miro and a catalyst in the development of Japanese modernisms in the 1930s.20<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Image
Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Prohibited<\/em> (1986\u201387), silver gelatin print (artwork \u00a9 Autograph, London; photograph provided by Autograph, London)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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There are many obvious symmetries between Hosoe\u2019s photographs from this time and Fani-Kayode\u2019s some twenty-five years later. Most obviously, they worked in the context of art publics that did not valorize their photographs. Fani-Kayode displayed almost exclusively in community spaces and niche galleries in working-class areas of London during his life, only gaining wider exposure after his death. His definitive portfolio of images, published in the United Kingdom and Germany in 1987\u201388, responded to a lack of mainstream visibility by relying on the circuits of queer counterpublicity.21<\/a><\/sup> Yet in form and substance that book, Black Male\/White Male<\/em>, can also be understood as building on the model of Hosoe in his respective artist\u2019s books Man and Woman <\/em>(note the binary in each title) and Barakei<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In formal terms, too, there are many instances of Fani-Kayode citing Hosoe. The rose-bearing shot of Mishima Yukio was prefigured, for one, by the second photograph in Man and Woman<\/em>, a full two-page print of a woman\u2019s face set against an inky abyss, her shadowed eyes peering at the viewer over a daisy borne in her mouth. Fani-Kayode, in turn, printed a version of Tulip Boy <\/em>where the titular flower is held aloft, between the sitter\u2019s teeth. He rests strikingly similar white flowers on the sumptuous curve of a back in Prohibited <\/em>(1986\u201387). Hosoe\u2019s 1959 image is playfully ghoulish, suggestive of consumption and desire, availability and withholding. Fani-Kayode\u2019s black-and-white works from 1985 to1988 share this tonal quality\u2014directed gazes, by turns searing and manic, or figures looks occluded by \u201csee no evil\u201d hands. Elsewhere in Man and Woman<\/em>, legs are tangled in warped foreshortening, the bare soles of feet are revealed. A muscled arm overlays a bare breast, creating biomorphic geometries, and seeming differences collide: X and Y chromosomes, dark and light. Alex Hirst, too, saw the pages of Black Male\/White Male <\/em>as a crossroads of seeming binaries, of race and place, of colonial, scopic, and sexual power. Theirs was also a space of erotically interweaving subjects.22<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Image
Hosoe Eikoh, Man and Woman #20<\/em> (1960), gelatin silver print (artwork \u00a9 1960 Eikoh Hosoe; photograph\nprovided by amanaTIGP)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Indeed, at least three compositional motifs in Hosoe\u2019s collection are closely limned, if recontextualized, in Black Male\/White Male<\/em>. In one, the upper torso of a man\u2014all sinuous fascia and vigorous flesh\u2014cradles a woman\u2019s head, floating in the void as if disembodied. He is the monster in the labyrinth who suggests other unnatural substitutions, the grafting together of seeming opposites. Such emphasis on the muscled chest held in contrapposto is pervasive in Hosoe\u2019s portfolio. Sometimes a breast appears in the frame, or the figure gazes skyward, or two hands cradle white birds close to the sternum (in Man and Woman #33<\/em>). Flipping through these uncaptioned, full-bleed reproductions is to see different kinds of bodies, certainly, but also to partake in gothic atmospherics resonant in Fani-Kayode\u2019s book. The latter\u2019s nude bodies are folded and cropped, not to heighten their fetishistic prurience but to make them strange. And like Hosoe\u2019s, his acephalic forms often bear metonymic heads, here by way of his Yoruban spiritual lineage: the gelede <\/em>mask, or an If\u00e9 bronze, both sanctified forms desublimated and brought into collision with new vectors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Man
Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Ebo \u00d2rish\u00e0<\/em> (1987), silver gelatin print (artwork \u00a9 Autograph, London;\nphotograph provided by Autograph, London)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Perhaps the most famed scene from Man and Woman <\/em>shows a sitter\u2019s lower back and curvaceous posterior, shot from behind. This stereotypically feminine form\u2014overt in its voyeuristic charge\u2014renders the subject as object, so much flesh on a slab, ready for delectation, visual or otherwise. She appears throughout the book, in a play of Edenic temptation, as site of communion and transubstantiation. In the two-page sprawl of Man and Woman #24<\/em>, the same body is approached in the right register by three columnar forms, a man\u2019s arm with clenched fist driving into the floor. This version implies a percussive step and the repetitive pulsations of the multiple exposures by which this \u201cthree-legged\u201d form appears to have been realized.23<\/a><\/sup> It is chthonic in the extreme, amplifying the sense of bodily fragments made vital.24<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Female
Hosoe Eikoh, Man and Woman #24<\/em> (1960), gelatin silver print (artwork \u00a9 1960 Eikoh Hosoe; photograph\nprovided by amanaTIGP)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Paging through Fani-Kayode\u2019s black and whites also finds muscled extremities in stress positions or overlaid multiplicity. In both cases, for all of the photographs\u2019 suggestiveness, they are each oddly obscure, redolent of sexuality but never graphic, open about the sex of the body but ambivalent about gender.25<\/a><\/sup> Such ambivalence is more pronounced still in the Barakei <\/em>project, wherein Mishima\u2019s loins are carefully clothed, and his interlocutors\u2019 genitalia clasped underhand. For his part, Fani-Kayode\u2019s fragmented bodies were almost always desexed through a tucking here, an arched back there. They were often frontally draped by a series of props, be they flowers and crucifix, medium-format camera, or taut raffia. For the 1989 session with Taylor at Railton Road, the desired phallus was bowdlerized with gold paint and a supportive filament truss. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For all of the stylistic and psychic resonances to be found, it bears reiterating that Hosoe and Fani-Kayode were playing with different stakes: one meditating on sex and gender in the context of a deeply patriarchal society undergoing the convulsions of so-called modernization in the wake of the \u201cyear zero\u201d of 1946; the other mediating the three strands of his outsiderdom, as he noted, in terms of race, queerness, and class.26<\/a><\/sup> As many of the key historians of Fani-Kayode\u2019s work have observed, the artist\u2019s many intentional elisions and defamiliarizations also sought to short-circuit the fetishistic gaze in relation to Black bodies and especially the Black phallus. Yet, there is power in the look\u2014of the spectator and the camera\u2014and in 1960s Japan, Hosoe would have wielded authority of one kind over his sitters; Mishima another still, working as he was to rebrand himself, to develop a personal mythology through his collaboration with the former (women, in Barakei<\/em>, are functionally props, foils, and counterpoints). Whatever agency the camera granted him, Fani-Kayode also saw his work as collaborative with the various artists, writers, activists, and models with whom he worked. He actively sought to reformulate the strands of scopic power by which modernism had been woven over the previous century. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Three
Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Technique of Ecstasy<\/em> (1986\u201387), silver gelatin print (artwork\n\u00a9 Autograph, London; photograph provided\nby Autograph, London)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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In short, the connection I am drawing between Hosoe and Fani-Kayode is not about repetition or mimicry as such: Fani-Kayode apparently cited Hosoe, but both synthesized elements of their own cultural inheritance with Surrealist tactics, simultaneously bypassing and repurposing the transatlantic interwar avant-garde. Indeed, both artists\u2019 books call to mind Hal Foster\u2019s contention that Surrealist practices \u201cintuit the uncanny discoveries of psychoanalysis,” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

sometimes to resist them, sometimes to work through them, sometimes even to exploit them: i.e. to use the uncanniness of the return of the repressed, the compulsion to repeat, the immanence of death for disruptive purposes\u2014to produce out of this psychic ambivalence a provocative ambiguity in artistic practice and cultural politics alike.27<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Thematically, much of Fani-Kayode\u2019s work in the 1980s and much of Hosoe\u2019s from the 1960s work to blur self and other, the object and the subject, waking life and the fantastic, to limn death and desire in legibly Surrealist ways but operating from different geographic centers, responding to different traumas, wherein the \u201cpostwar\u201d or the \u201cpostcolonial\u201d were figments of a naive, Eurocentric imagination.28<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Spirit Photography <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both Fani-Kayode and Hosoe were aware of European Surrealist precedents. As early as 1953, Japanese avant-garde photographers referenced the work of Man Ray in debates about the future of the medium, marking a period of sustained exchange with post-Surrealist modes of abstraction in Paris and New York.29<\/a><\/sup> Hosoe was attuned to literary modes in particular but hewed to the creative (rather than documentary) potential that the Japanese artists had gleaned from the movement\u2014he later noted that whether Barakei <\/em>was surreal or not, it was his experiment in \u201cthe transience of vision over the conventional way of expression.\u201d30<\/a><\/sup> In turn, Fani-Kayode\u2019s citations and inversions of the work of artists such as Man Ray and Brassa\u00ef and techniques such as automatic writing or solarization are well documented. He likely came into contact with these earlier moments in Euro-American photography by way of landmark exhibitions at London\u2019s Hayward Gallery, such as the omnibus Dada and Surrealism Reviewed <\/em>in 1978 and the photography-centered Amour Fou <\/em>in 1986.31<\/a><\/sup> The catalog for the latter was a key site in which Rosalind Krauss distilled her ongoing \u201crecuperation\u201d of the genre (and its theorization by way of Georges Bataille) for a wide audience.32<\/a><\/sup> As Sandra Zalman has argued, however, such a recentering arrived at an inopportune time: whether one believes that European Surrealism was a vital force within modernism or a subver-sive avant-garde working at its edges, by 1986 many of its currents were subsumed into a broader Euro-American postmodernism <\/em>that blunted its transgressive force.33<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Two-page
Paul \u00c9luard, Le Monde au temps des Surr\u00e9alistes<\/em>, 1929, from Vari\u00e9t\u00e9s<\/em>, Belgium (artwork in the public domain; photograph\nprovided by the National Gallery of Australia,\nCanberra\/Bridgeman Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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In the main, the postmodern is an interpretive frame primarily interested in the linguistic\u2014the symbolic\u2014rather than the more somatic, metaphysical, or apotropaic concerns on which Surrealism was often predicated. A corollary, then, is that even as Surrealism returned in curatorial and critical discourse in the late twentieth century, the terms were typically retrospective and partial. On one hand, this meant that even massive exhibitions at the Hayward featured a roster almost exclusively composed of white, European men, its \u201cglobal\u201d ambit a version of Paul \u00c9luard\u2019s Surrealist map of the world, which expanded not so much the subjects in play but the range of their objects of fascination.34<\/a><\/sup> On the other hand, routed as Fani-Kayode and Hosoe were through very Eastern Asian and Global Southern peripheries newly centered in that map, their work can be seen less as belatedly building on a European precedent but drawing parallel conclusions from the same source material. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not to say that artists from Japan or the African diaspora did not share techniques or compositional strategies with European avant-gardes. For instance, both Tomatsu and Hosoe adapted techniques later charted in the Amour Fou <\/em>show, their photographs echoing the preoccupations of Bataille and his several journals: occult textures, the recurrence of bestial and insectoid forms, the corpus distorted, automatized, or decapitated.35<\/a><\/sup> Moreover, it is diffcult to view the recurrence of the cropped torso and arachnid arms in Man and Woman <\/em>and not also see the repetition of similar gestures in the hands of Brassa\u00ef and his phallic nudes of 1931\u201334.36<\/a><\/sup> In both cases, the seemingly mimetic function of the camera is revealed to be a destabilizing one, upending closures of sex and gender and inviting wider interpretation through the lens of castration and metonymy (or later by way of the desublimatory ambivalence of the \u201cpart object\u201d).37<\/a><\/sup>. Similarly, even before Fani-Kayode\u2019s death, his work was conjoined with Mapplethorpe\u2019s, contrasting their deployments and elisions in the Freudian terrain of fetishism. But if Fani-Kayode and Hosoe (as well as Tomatsu and Mishima) can be understood as operating in relation such interwar precursors, that relation can only be understood beyond the terms of mere citation, enmeshed instead in a more multicentric and dialogic approach, exemplified by the haunting, polysemous tableaux Barakei <\/em>(Ordeal by Roses<\/em>) #16 <\/em>and White Bouquet <\/em>(1987). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Montage
Hosoe Eikoh, Ordeal by Roses #16<\/em>, 1961, gelatin silver print (artwork \u00a9 1961 Eikoh Hosoe; photograph provided by amanaTIGP)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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An analogy can be found in the writing of Yoshihara Jir\u014d and the Gutai Art Association, which by 1952 had harvested elements of the early Bretonian program, especially its use of the manifesto\/periodical format and a reliance on automatism as a world-altering force. Nonetheless, Yoshihara was careful to distinguish the association\u2019s work from European precedent. Although he notes symmetries in the foregrounding of the unconscious and, too, in the formal approaches of 1950s-era Art Informel, he cautioned that their context and meaning should not be conflated. Instead, he outlined a Gutai emphasis on materiality itself, often precisely in terms of exorcism\u2014of chasing away a moribund history of the French avant-garde. In its place, when \u201cmatter remains intact and exposes its characteristics, it starts telling a story and even cries out. To make the fullest use of matter is to make use of the spirit. . . . Art is a site where creation occurs.\u201d38<\/a><\/sup>  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A similar sense of \u201cspirit\u201d imminent in photographic practice was crucial to Hosoe\u2019s and Fani-Kayode\u2019s processes, and it is why they resist easy categorization along the lines of the conventional modernism\/postmodernism mode of historicization. In short, neither photographer adapted Surrealist strategies uncritically, and they did not take the sort of work celebrated by writers such as Krauss or Dawn Ades in the 1980s at face value. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Man
Rotimi Fani-Kayode, White Bouquet<\/em> (1987), silver gelatin print (artwork \u00a9 Autograph, London; photograph provided by Autograph,\nLondon)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Hosoe was immersed in complex debates around tradition and progress in postoccupation Japan; Fani-Kayode looked to Europe with an eye toward subversion and play, adapting them to the spiritual techniques to which his family was heir, a reductive version of which occupied Surrealist journals from afar fifty years earlier. Such triangulation was avowedly part of his practice. As curator Mark Sealy has argued, what<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fani-Kayode was attempting to communicate was of no concern to the then current European photographic trends. . . . The ethereal world was as important to Kayode as the tangible world. In his work he is inviting us to play with him in the gray zones between black and white, gay and straight, acceptance and taboo. This work was the beginning of a constructed twilight cross-cultural zone, a kind of Never Never land where “reality” is a stranger.39<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Sealy\u2019s emphasis on the imminence of two kinds of worlds to be excavated by the camera\u2014the ethereal and the tangible\u2014is as important as his observation that Fani-Kayode saw his task as creating provisional zones that did not yet exist. This is where Hosoe\u2019s methods likely proved essential for Fani-Kayode, even at a cultural and temporal remove. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fani-Kayode seemed to want something more than to litigate cultural meaning through the surface-level effects of symbolic appropriation. He sought out a version of photography that unveiled or initiated instances of spiritual communion, perhaps akin to the \u201cmounting\u201d of initiate by deities documented by, for example, Maya Deren and Ito Teiji\u2019s film Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti<\/em>, released in 1985 (though filmed more than thirty years earlier). As he bluntly stated, \u201c[my] reality is not the same as that which is often presented in Western photographs. . . . I try to bring out the spiritual dimensions of my pictures so that concepts of \u2018reality\u2019 become ambiguous and open to interpretation. This requires what Yoruba priests and artists call a \u2018technique of ecstasy.\u2019\u201d He continues, noting his desire to create new types of images that \u201cundermine conventional perceptions and which may reveal hidden worlds.\u201d40<\/a><\/sup> This was not metaphor or euphemism. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whereas Fani-Kayode was the scion of a family who were keepers of sacred divination practice, Hosoe, born outside of Hiroshima in 1933 to a Buddhist priest, was himself raised in a spiritually infused environment. By 1960 he developed a synthesis of Japanese and European approaches to the medium, coalescing in the collaboration with Mishima, providing the latter with a chrysalis for a new self and the ground wherein it might be realized.41<\/a><\/sup> Such an approach would have resonated like a beacon for Fani-Kayode and Hirst two decades on. Their stylistic catholicism was to an extent a matter of survival in a social and art world landscape that had little room for them. As they wrote in 1989: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At other times, in other places, and with other means, people have approached the mysterious aspects of life with respect. Using their imagination and their practical skills they have developed systems of communication between the spheres of their understanding and the forces which are beyond it. They have not been able to avoid great public and private calamities but they have been able to prepare themselves in certain ways, spiritual and material, for the unexpected.42<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

These words, it bears reiterating, were written at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and that stanza ends with the reminder that one \u201ccan never rely entirely on the kindness of strangers,\u201d for example, the National Health Service, pharmaceutical companies, or multinational corporations that controlled the research and development of potentially lifesaving treatments. If the Black Male\/White Male <\/em>portfolio explored the terrain of desire and the uncanny in the affective register of the gothic, the Yoruban \u201ctechnique of ecstasy\u201d was increasingly rephrased in the works of 1988\u201389 as a process of cultivating \u201cecstatic antibodies\u201d as a talismanic altar against sickness. For that, Fani-Kayode and Hirst would need a spiritually infused approach to the medium that went beyond the realm of stylistic rehearsal or semiotic appropriation. Hosoe\u2019s project with Mishima was precisely that model. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Beyond the Frame <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Color
Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Nothing to Lose XIII<\/em> (Bodies of Experience) (1989), c-print (artwork\n\u00a9 Autograph, London; photograph provided by\nAutograph, London)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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This essay began with a cascade of linked images\u2014a woman with a daisy, Mishima with a rose, Fani-Kayode with a tulip\u2014and went on to suggest thematic and tactical resonances between European Surrealist photography in the 1930s and artists\u2019 books produced in 1963 and 1987. Indeed, Barakei<\/em>, with its use of solarization, multiple exposure, and axial rotations, fits the bill. So, too, does it square with abiding Surrealist engagements with the haunted house and the game of chance.43<\/a><\/sup> For the shoot, Hosoe and his assistant Moriyama Daid\u014d joined Mishima at his house, inviting the Nobel Prize\u2013winning author to use objects from his own space to create a self-portrait. The results were visceral, charged with a sense of foreboding, electrified by Mishima\u2019s narcissistic-erotic energy. It is often commented that the project reads as highly theatrical, bordering on the dreamlike.44<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Barakei <\/em>is performative in the extreme, the images are not conventionally directorial.45<\/a><\/sup> That is, there is little artifice here but instead something stranger\u2014the sense that one has stumbled across an arcane ritual. Indeed, Hosoe remembers the six months as \u201ca crazy scene,\u201d in which he and Moriyama goaded Mishima to ever greater extremes of intensity\u2014the first 35mm photograph shot from above, with Mishima driving a wooden hammer into his own temple. Hosoe \u201cwanted to break the ordinary concept of the object or subject.\u201d He told Mishima the goal was nothing less than to photograph life and death itself.46<\/a><\/sup> Certainly, invocations of life and death abound: from the fragility of the namesake roses therein to the recurrence of Renaissance painting as backdrop, such as Sandro Botticelli\u2019s Birth of Venus <\/em>(1485) (in, for example, Barakei <\/em>[Ordeal by Roses<\/em>] #19<\/em>) or Titian\u2019s Venus of Urbino <\/em>in Barakei <\/em>(Ordeal by Roses<\/em><\/em>) #16<\/em>, \u201csandwiched\u201d into the exposures.47<\/a><\/sup> Bodies are fragmented and contorted like so many doll parts, uncanny exquisite corpses; in #33 <\/em>Mishima seems to lie at rest, leaf on torso, thorny rose stem alighting on his jugular vein. In another, double exposure is used to suggest a face, ringed by hair but damaged beyond recognition. Crucially, Hosoe cautions readers that the series was not meant to presage Mishima\u2019s death but rather to engage the author in \u201csubjective documentary.\u201d48<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the symbolism here is at times macabre, it can also be seen as creatively regenerative, and Mishima\u2019s body appears again and again as a kind of physical altar. Barakei <\/em>(Ordeal by Roses<\/em><\/em>) #38<\/em>, stages its subject in deep trance\u2014perhaps headed for interment\u2014but it also festoons him with floral life, as one would sites of pilgrimage and veneration, like a saintly cabinet. An accompanying photograph (#18<\/em>) catches Mishima\u2019s lower body, loins obscured by a precarious black cloth, reflected in a mirror resting atop a nude woman\u2019s partial form. A candle burns in the center, axially connecting to Mishima\u2019s own groin, its sacred flame a metonymic substitute for a \u201ccastrated\u201d body. It is worth making two points at this juncture. First, the majority of Fani-Kayode\u2019s color series, for example, Nothing to Lose <\/em>from 1989, pose his sitters in precisely this manner\u2014rendering the body as bearer of flowers and fruit, their juices (for him, always an ambiguous blend of bodily or gustatory secretions, of wine, milk, honey, or divine water) running across muscled torsos. An earlier, hand-tinted work, Sonponnoi <\/em>(1987), frames a seated figure, headless, bearing a lighted cluster of candles, occluding and sacralizing his phallus. This body is spotted like a pox sufferer and has become an altar itself.49<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, Barakei <\/em>opened still another door for Fani-Kayode. For Mishima, photography was more than document, more than index\u2014it had something like its own subjectivity, the capacity to act as witness, one necessary to initiate the ritual and provide testimony (shogensei<\/em>).50<\/a><\/sup> According to art historian Ignacio Adriasola, Hosoe\u2019s camera served, for Mishima, as a \u201cmachine\u201d for incantation: \u201cthe world I was taken to by the sorcery of his lens was abnormal, twisted, ridiculous, grotesque, savage, pansexual; however, in this world one could also hear the murmuring of a clear, cool stream the undercurrent from within the unseen side of a gutter.\u201d51<\/a><\/sup> Mishima describes his time with Hosoe and Moriyama in much the same way as Taylor, the model who sat for Fani-Kayode and Hirst\u2019s Golden Phallus <\/em>series in 1989, recounts his own. Similarly, Mishima recalled that his own spirit and mind became \u201credundant\u201d in front of the camera, giving way to a state of \u201cexhilaration\u201d52<\/a><\/sup>\u2014a little death of the self, a ritual ordeal, akin perhaps to Fani-Kayode\u2019s \u201ctechnique of ecstasy.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Radiation Ruling the Nation <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fani-Kayode\u2014artist, activist, exile\u2014wrote precious little about his work, largely leaving that task to Hirst, the editor and novelist, as early as 1987. While the art historical case connecting Fani-Kayode and Hosoe is plausible in terms of visual affinity, it is also worth reiterating here that Hirst mentions only Mishima by name, which raises some important questions. Specifically, in their individual careers and in collaboration, Hosoe the photographer and Mishima the writer responded directly to the twin traumas that haunted postwar Japanese life and the so-called economic miracle that defined it. The one was the legacy of the nuclear blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which created a psychic rupture between life before and after \u201cday zero\u201d and spread the invisible poison of radiation, which lurked on a molecular level in the Japanese body politic for generations.53<\/a><\/sup> The other was the memory of American occupation and its subsequent investment in a boom economy that provided material security at the expense of traditional cultural identity. Some aspects of this trauma played out in popular culture\u2014for example, in films such as Godzilla <\/em>(1954).54<\/a><\/sup> Given its sustained engagement with questions of memory and trauma, Surrealist-derived practice, of course, would be an obvious path for artists in the 1950s and beyond. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hosoe and Mishima responded to these challenges in distinct ways, though often using similar imagery. In one potent composition, Mishima is framed at the ground level, bound in coils of rubber tubing amid the dizzying expanse of his atrium. Fani-Kayode employed a similar material in his Abiku <\/em>series of 1989. Its title is a reference to his given name, \u201cRotimi,\u201d which translates to \u201cstay with me\u201d\u2014a name which refers to the abiku<\/em>, children believed by the Yoruba to be predestined to die before adolescence. In these works, rubber tubing thus takes on both umbilical and deathly connotations. Death seems to have stalked both Mishima and Fani-Kayode from an early age, and both sought through art to either transcend it or arrest its ineluctable wasting process.55<\/a><\/sup> Yet, where Fani-Kayode avowedly defined himself in opposition to the Nazi regime and the parallels he saw in the homophobia of his era, Mishima took a different tack. During those final years, his politics crystalized in the form of neofascistic nostalgia, which posited an Americanized Japan, delinked from its martial past, as a castrated society. Such \u201clack\u201d for him could be compensated with a rightward lurch and, on the somatic level, a fascina-tion with a honed masculine form.56<\/a><\/sup> Such phallocentrism cannot be couched merely in terms of Mishima\u2019s apparent homosexuality: as J. Keith Vincent has shown, Mishima\u2019s queerness was still debated in Japan decades later, and his first \u201cgay\u201d novel, Confessions of a Mask <\/em>(1949), seemed to corroborate a regressive narrative of homosexuality as a developmental stage on the road to heteronormativity. Barakei<\/em>, here with its scenes of near-nude men and women, there with its merging of two men in jockstraps, presents an ambivalent narrative of desire.57<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Man
Hosoe Eikoh, Ordeal by Roses #18 (1961), gelatin silver print (artwork \u00a9 1961 Eikoh Hosoe; photograph provided by amanaTIGP)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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\"Man
Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Sonponnoi<\/em> (1987) (artwork \u00a9 Autograph, London; photograph provided by Autograph, London)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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\"Man
Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Abiku series (1989), hand-tinted monotype and silver gelatin print (artwork \u00a9 Autograph, London; photograph\nprovided by Autograph, London)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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By contrast, Fani-Kayode viewed himself in cosmopolitan and antifascist terms in the one essay attributed to him.58<\/a><\/sup> So, too, did he seek out earlier models of liberation-era visual culture to make overtly \u201cgay photography.\u201d And while Mishima\u2019s 1951 Forbidden Colors <\/em>did finally do the apparently autobiographical work of sketching the gay Tokyo underground, Mishima\u2019s later paramilitary machismo seems at odds with Fani-Kayode\u2019s ambivalent play of genre and careful labor of satirizing, deflecting, or deflating phallocentrism, especially in the register of fetishism and castration anxiety.59<\/a><\/sup> For all that, there must have been some value for the photographer, seeing non-Eurocentric examples of colonial and postcolonial queerness mediated through creative practice. As Sealy has argued, Fani-Kayode was alienated in many ways from the city and the dominant culture where he found himself\u2014he was deeply conscious of the \u201csubtle forms of postcolonial racism that are endemic to Eurocentric institutions.\u201d60<\/a><\/sup> Importantly, in 1980s England, \u201cBlackness\u201d itself was a discourse that comprised Asian as well as Black Atlantic identities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

From this perspective, Fani-Kayode would likely have been drawn to forms of Surrealism that emerged from a non-European vantage. For their part, Hosoe\u2019s and the VIVO collective\u2019s projects of the 1950s were wary of the postwar order, eschewing formalism in favor of dissonant avant-garde strategies. T\u014dmatsu, for instance, turned in the early 1960s to multiexposure montages of found objects, landscape, and popular culture that produced jarring skeins of photographic abstraction, even as Hosoe composed Barakei<\/em>.61<\/a><\/sup> The more straightforward works by both artists plumbed broad humanistic depths, with unsettling results: T\u014dmatsu\u2019s \u201csandwich men\u201d examined Kabuki performers (men in feminine masquerade) in Tokyo; and both pursued the wreckage of the atomic blast, in the form of distorted still life, or the bodies of the hibakusha <\/em>(survivors), their keloid scars and glassine corneas, and genetic complications passed to the next generation. Hosoe returned repeatedly to Hiroshima, including for a 1985 collaboration with psy- chologist Betty Jean Lifton that surveyed the imprint of devastation on the corpus and the landscape. She argues therein that \u201cthe legendary place that you seek is not located on a map. It is a state of mind.\u201d62<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Man
Hosoe Eikoh, Ordeal by Roses #6<\/em> (1961), gelatin silver print (artwork \u00a9 1961 Eikoh Hosoe; photography\nprovided by amanaTIGP)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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That state of mind\u2014the lingering trauma of the blast, the wariness of living in an age of mutually assured destruction, stalked by invisible cancers\u2014underscored a national consciousness in 1960s Japan but also a global consciousness until at least 1989. The 1980s was a decade marked by nuclear brinksmanship and a growing antinuclear movement in the West. Such disorientation lent itself generally to photographic registers sensitive to imprints of the body, the play of chance of operations, or the decomposition of visual order.63<\/a><\/sup> In the Japanese context, as Miryam Sas has shown, the experimentalism of the 1960s across visual and performance arts actually built on a robust foundation in place by the 1920s and 1930s, and elaborated after the war in the ankoku but\u00f4 <\/em>(dance of darkness) or Butoh. As Sas notes, Butoh shared with Surrealism an \u201canti-philosophical, anti-conceptual search for a terrifying limit-moment, a breakdown of symbolic systems.\u201d64<\/a><\/sup> Significantly, Hosoe was explicitly inspired to make Man and Woman <\/em>after seeing a Butoh performance by Hijikata Tatsumi, who served as one of the subjects in the series. Hosoe described the process not as mere documentation of performance but as a dance of its own sort, a new hybrid form of drawing energy into the world.65<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Third Way <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Fani-Kayode and Hirst looked to Hosoe from the horizon of the mid- 1980s, symmetries abounded. Like Hosoe, they lived in a society driven by a cult of consumerist corporatism; they worked under threat of nuclear holocaust; and they feared an insidious, little-understood scourge. The latter was not the persistence of cellular mutation run amok but a virus that also left carcinomas on the flesh, that waited in the body and cut men down in their prime. As filmmaker Derek Jarman once remarked, to be queer in those years meant to be living in the midst of plague.66<\/a><\/sup> Death was only a matter of time. By way of their artist\u2019s book, Hosoe and Mishima suggested a \u201cthird way\u201d of adapting Surrealism, for a generation in the 1980s primed to return to its traumatic preoccupations.67<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If Fani-Kayode enjoyed the benefit of hindsight in looking back over the horizon of the midcentury, he also shared a method with Hosoe. Their Surrealism was not a semiotic rehearsal of the so-called original avant-garde at the moment of its institutional recuperation. Nor was it a simple elision, returning to more familiar precedents in Japanese theater or Yoruban cosmology. No revivalists, they each mediated earlier tactics through their collaborative, performative studio practices and, effectively, in relation to each other. Both, nonetheless, insisted on art\u2019s capacity to encounter a haunted life, to transform the world by cultivating creative energy. If earlier articulations of Surrealism insisted on ruptures with academicism in favor of the freedom of the libidinal, Hosoe\u2019s and Fani-Kayode\u2019s simultaneously explored and resisted the specter of thanatos overpowering eros. They did so by arraying recognizably photographic strategies drawn from a rich geographic and temporal sediment. Reaching to Surrealism\u2019s gothic inheritance, they took death as a given, seeking renewal in an apotropaic art that was less postmodern than premodernist\u2014a return to that which had been long repressed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hosoe collaborated with dancers time and again, inspired by artists working in a parallel mode, reconfiguring traditional Japanese expression for the post-1946 landscape. Fani-Kayode, too, relied on gender-ambivalent forms of masquerade that blurred the lines between self and other, this world and the next. These respective collaborations opened on to a different kind of shared project, between artists working thousands of miles apart, both responding in their way to original sins of the twentieth century, from fascism to colonialism, and the long shadows that earlier violence cast into the future, across generations. It is by now taken for granted that Surrealism played out across a global stage. But who were the protagonists of the story, and whose psychic map have we long foregrounded? The above has taken seriously Ming Tiampo\u2019s wariness of \u201cexpanding the canon by inserting voices from outside the West into a western narrative.\u201d68<\/a><\/sup> Instead, it reorients the transgressive force shorthanded as \u201csurreal\u201d and gives credence to the experiences of the long-overlooked artists who forged unexpected linkages, channeling that force to reckon with a specter of death that suffused the twentieth century. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The sizes of the images of Rotimi Fani-Kayode\u2019s works reproduced in this text are variable, and were printed at different scales at different times, both during the artist\u2019s life as well as when the photographs were printed posthumously. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ian Bourland<\/strong><\/a> is assistant professor of global contemporary art history at Georgetown University and contributing editor of frieze<\/em>. He is the author of Bloodflowers: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Photography, and the 1980s <\/em>(Duke University Press, 2019) and Massive Attack\u2019s Blue Lines <\/em>in the 33 1\/3 <\/em>series (Bloomsbury, 2019). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  1. Fani-Kayode received initial scholarly attention in this journal, in Steven Nelson, \u201cTransgressive Transcendence in the Photographs of Rotimi Fani-Kayode,\u201d Art Journal <\/em>64, no. 1 (2005): 4\u201319. See also Kobena Mercer, \u201cMortal Coil: Eros and Diaspora in the Photographs of Rotimi Fani-Kayode,\u201d in Over Exposed: Essays on Contemporary Photography<\/em>, ed. Carol Squiers (New York: New Press, 1999), 183\u2013210; and Evan Moffitt, \u201cRotimi Fani-Kayode\u2019s Ecstatic Antibodies,\u201d Transition: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora <\/em>118 (2015): 74\u201386. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  2. Robert Cozzolino, \u201cIntroduction: America is Haunted,\u201d Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art<\/em>, ed. Cozzolino (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 9\u201322. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  3. Robert Taylor, \u201cA Eulogy for Rotimi Fani-Kayode,\u201d Body Politic <\/em>(unpublished, ca. early 1990s), unpaginated. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  4. Robert Taylor, correspondence with the author, August 2017. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  5. W. Ian Bourland, Bloodflowers: Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Photography, and the 1980s <\/em>(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  6. This was initially articulated in Andr\u00e9 Breton\u2019s \u201cManifesto of Surrealism\u201d (Manifeste du surr\u00e9alisme<\/em>, 1924) and especially his Mad Love<\/em>, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 1988). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  7. See Brent Hayes Edwards, \u201cThe Ethnics of Surrealism,\u201d Transition: The Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora <\/em>78 (1998): 84\u2013135; Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination <\/em>(Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 157\u201372; and Samantha No\u00ebl, Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism <\/em>(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  8. Unless specified by the artist, Japanese names appear here with surname first, then given name. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  9. One might consider this a corollary history to an ongoing history of global affinities\/appropriations of imagined aspects of Japanese and East Asian culture (e.g., japonisme). See Samantha Kavky, \u201cMax Ernst in Arizona: Myth, Mimesis, and the Hysterical Landscape,\u201d RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics <\/em>57\u201358 (Spring\u2013Autumn 2010): 209\u201328; Saloni Mathur, \u201cA Retake of Sher-Gil\u2019s Self-Portrait as Tahitian<\/em>,\u201d Critical Inquiry <\/em>37, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 515\u201344; and Katharine Conley, \u201cValue and Hidden Cost in Andr\u00e9 Breton\u2019s Surrealist Collection,\u201d South Central Review <\/em>32, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 8\u201322. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  10. Kobena Mercer, \u201cFlowback\u2014How Africa Is Redefining Today\u2019s Diaspora,\u201d James A. Porter Distinguished Lecture, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington, DC, April 16, 2021. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  11. Eikoh Hosoe, quoted in Yseult Chehada, \u201cEikoh Hosoe on Barakei,\u201d video recording, Aperture Foundation, May 5, 2010. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  12. Quoted in Bourland, Bloodflowers<\/em>, 237 ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  13. John Szarkowski and Shoji Yamagishi, eds., New Japanese Photography <\/em>(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1974). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  14. See Miryam Sas, \u201cThe Provoke Era: New Languages of Japanese Photography,\u201d in Sas, Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return <\/em>(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 180\u2013200; and Harry Harootunian, \u201cJapan\u2019s Postwar and After, 1945\u20131989,\u201d in From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan, 1945\u20131989<\/em>, ed. Doryun Chong, Michio Hayashi, Kenji Kajiya, and Fumihiko Sumitomo (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 17\u201321. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  15. Sait\u014d Yoshishige, Tsuruoka Masao, Komai Tetsur\u014d, and Oyamada Jir\u014d, \u201cDepicting \u2018Things\u2019 Not \u2018Ideas\u2019 (1954),\u201d in Chong et al., From Postwar to Postmodern<\/em>, 58\u201363. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  16. T\u014dmatsu Sh\u014dmei, \u201cA Young Photographer\u2019s Statement: I Refute Mr. Natori (1960),\u201d in Chong et al., From Postwar to Postmodern<\/em>, 152. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  17. Yamagishi Shoji in Szarkowski and Yamagishi, New Japanese Photography<\/em>, 11\u201312. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  18. Yoshihara Jir\u014d in particular pursued concordances between East and West by way of a renewed japonisme among abstract painters such as Franz Kline, with whom he collaborated on an issue of the journal Bobukai <\/em>(Ink beauty). See Ming Tiampo, Gutai: Decentering Modernism <\/em>(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 78\u201379. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  19. Peter Yeoh, \u201cThe Sky in Flames: Photographs of T\u014dmatsu Sh\u014dmei,\u201d Impressions <\/em>34 (2013): 96\u2013107. VIVO formed in the wake of the 1957 Tokyo photography exhibition Eyes of Ten<\/em>, seen as a rejoinder to the humanistic tendencies of curators such as Edward Steichen. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  20. Darwin Marable, \u201cEikoh Hosoe: An Interview,\u201d History of Photography <\/em>24, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 86. See also Chinghsin Wu, Parallel Modernism: Koga Harue and Avant-Garde Art in Modern Japan <\/em>(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  21. Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Black Male\/White Male<\/em>, with an introduction by Alex Hirst (London: Gay Men\u2019s Press, 1988). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  22. Alex Hirst, \u201cIntroduction,\u201d in Fani-Kayode, Black Male\/White Male<\/em>, unpaginated. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  23. See Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User\u2019s Guide <\/em>(New York: Zone Books, 1997). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  24. Chthonic refers to the underworld in various modes. As Bois and Krauss note, the insectoid (as a key motif of the chthonic) exemplifies one register of their account of informe<\/em>. In the case of Hosoe, in one photograph from Man and Woman<\/em>, the actual tentacles of an octopus appear like an offering, its suckers contorting in the blackened background, while the masklike upper third of a woman\u2019s face looks outward, mere inches away. Of course, in the modern Japanese context in which Hosoe made this image, the sexual resonance of this composition would be clear: interspecies erotica featuring cephalopods was, in the nineteenth century and beyond, a recurrent tableau (e.g., in the visual culture of the \u201cfloating world\u201d by, among others, Katsushika Hokusai). Such work has thrived as a distinct subgenre in the aftermath of censorship proximal to the American occupation (1945\u201352). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  25. One scene from Man and Woman <\/em>shows two figures seated and bending forward in the lower half of the frame, their heads not visible, the picture notable for its high gloss and deep shadows. This is an instance of Surrealist defamiliarization of the upper torso as well as a pose that Fani- Kayode appears to restage in his Maternal Milk <\/em>(1988), in which a thin stream of fluid drips onto the subject\u2019s folded back. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  26. Especially in terms of class, with respect to the political and spiritual elitism to which he was heir back in Nigeria and the relative poverty in which he lived during his years of exile in England. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  27. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty <\/em>(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 17. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  28. See T. J. Demos, Return to the Postcolony: Specters of Colonialism in Contemporary Art <\/em>(Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013); and Hannah Feldman, From a Nation Torn: Decolonizing Art and Representation in France, 1945\u20131962 <\/em>(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  29. See, for example, \u201cKindai Shashin no mondai,\u201d Camera <\/em>46 (October 1953): 65\u201373. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  30. Quoted in Marable, \u201cEikoh Hosoe,\u201d 87. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  31. Dawn Ades, ed., Dada and Surrealism Reviewed <\/em>(London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  32. See Rosalind E. Krauss, Jane Livingston, and Dawn Ades, Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism <\/em>(New York: Cross River Press, 1985). The exhibition toured to London from July to September of that year. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  33. Sandra Zalman, Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism <\/em>(London: Ashgate, 2015), 143\u201367. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  34. See Sophie Leclercq, \u201cAs Beautiful as the Fortuitous Meeting of an Aphrodisiac Jacket and a Yup\u2019ik Mask, or Surrealist Primitivism by Analogy,\u201d in Surrealism and Non-Western Art: A Family Resemblance <\/em>(Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2014), 21\u201340. This point is echoed in Elizabeth Cowling, \u201cAn Other Culture,\u201d in Ades, Dada and Surrealism<\/em>, 430\u201369. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  35. On the internationalist ambitions of the Gutai group, see Tiampo, Gutai<\/em>, 75\u201398. The transnational curatorial program launched during those early years of 1955\u201365 would have been broadly influential. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  36. Rosalind Krauss argued that the latter resemble detached phalli in \u201cCorpus Delecti,\u201d October<\/em> (Summer 1985): 31\u201372. An overview can also be found in reproductions of Documents <\/em>in Dawn Ades and Simon Baker, eds., Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS <\/em>(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  37. Mignon Nixon, \u201cPosing the Phallus,\u201d October<\/em> (Spring 2000: 98\u2013127 ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  38. Yoshihara Jir\u014d, \u201cGutai Art Manifesto\u201d reproduction, originally published as \u201cGutai bijutsu sengen,\u201d trans. Reiko Tomii, Geijutsu shincho <\/em>7, no. 12 (December 1956): 202. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  39. Mark Sealy, \u201cA Note from Outside on Rotimi Fani-Kayode,\u201d in Rotimi Fani-Kayode (1955\u20131989)<\/em>, ed. Sealy, exh. cat. (Syracuse, NY: Light Work, 2015), unpaginated. This is a reproduction of an essay from 1995 that also appeared in a small catalog titled Communion<\/em>. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  40. Fani-Kayode, Black Male\/White Male<\/em>, 38. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  41. Hosoe would reprise such a collaboration for 1969\u2019s Kamaitachi<\/em>, in which he and Hijikata Tatsumi collaborated with residents of a farming village to tell the story of a demon that haunted rice fields. Incidentally, the cover of the book features a slain woman in repose amid a field of flowers and leaves\u2014a tableaux Fani-Kayode very nearly reproduced with a Black male sitter in the Communion <\/em>color works of 1989. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  42. From accompanying portfolio text in Arabella Plouviez, ed., Bodies of Experience: Stories about Living with HIV (London: Camerawork\/The Photo Co-op, 1989), unpaginated. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  43. The haunted house is a key component of the Freudian unheimlich <\/em>(uncanny) and a leitmotif within much earlier Surrealist work and (later) elements of the horror genre that rely on the uncanny. See Jane Alison, The Surreal House <\/em>(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  44. See, for example, Jean Dykstra, \u201cBa-Ra-Kei: Ordeal by Roses,\u201d Art on Paper <\/em>7, no. 4 (January\u2013 February 2003): 89. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  45. This is admittedly a passing reference to a vast body of literature but alludes to a mode of color photography of, for example, Gregory Crewdson or Philip-Lorca diCorcia. The phrase \u201cdirectorial mode\u201d anticipates the Pictures generation and was published concurrently with Fani-Kayode\u2019s arrival in the United States in the April 1976 issue of Artforum International<\/em>. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  46. Eikoh Hosoe, quoted in Chehada, \u201cEikoh Hosoe on Barakei.\u201d ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  47. Here exposed onto an exaggerated eye, perhaps a reference to the organ\u2019s grotesque association in the earlier work of, for example, Luis Bu\u00f1uel and Salvador Dali, or Max Ernst. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  48. Marable, \u201cEikoh Hosoe,\u201d 87. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  49. This is beyond the immediate scope of my argument, but suffice it to note that there are many layers of resonances with this work: hand-tinting as means of overriding mass reproduction; the invocation of a Yoruban plague deity; the iconology of disease; the hagiography of Saints Roch and Sebastian, and so on. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  50. On the haptic and affective in recent photography, see Elspeth H. Brown and Thy Puy, \u201cIntroduction,\u201d in Feeling Photography<\/em>, ed. Brown and Puy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 1\u201325, esp. 8\u201317. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  51. Ignacio Adriasola, \u201cMelancholy Sites: The Affective Politics of Marginality in Post-Anpo Japan (1960\u20131970)\u201d (PhD diss., Duke University, 2011), 139, quoted in Bourland, Bloodflowers<\/em>, 240. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  52. Mishima Yukio, quoted in \u201cSchool of the Flesh: Erotic Pictures of Yukio Mishima\u2014In Pictures,\u201d Guardian<\/em>, November 3, 2016, unpaginated. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  53. It would be reductive to overly correlate the fallout of World War II with the heterogeneous Japanese avant-garde of the era, but documenting that very \u201cfallout\u201d was a lifelong project for Hosoe. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  54. Kerry Brougher, \u201cRadiation Made Visible,\u201d in Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950<\/em>, ed. Brougher, Russell Ferguson, and Dario Gamboni (New York: DelMonico Books, 2013), 12\u2013103. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  55. For a lengthy discussion of Mishima\u2019s childhood encounters with death and its lingering impact, see Robert Jay Lifton, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life <\/em>(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 262\u201380. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  56. See Ignacio Adriasola, \u201cModernity and its Doubles: Uncanny Spaces of Postwar Japan,\u201d October <\/em>151 (Winter 2015): 108\u201327. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  57. J. Keith Vincent, Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction <\/em>(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 175\u201398. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  58. One segment of \u201cTraces of Ecstasy\u201d speaks to the legacy of Nazism specifically and the conservative forces in England working to suppress so-called difference in its myriad forms. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  59. There is much to be said about the final years of Mishima\u2019s life and political program. Beyond Ignacio Adriasola\u2019s PhD dissertation cited above, see Kara Reilly, \u201cMishima\u2019s Balcony Performance: Hypermasculinity, Masochism, and Reactionary Vanguardism,\u201d in Vanguard Performance Beyond Left and Right<\/em>, ed. Kimberly Jannarone (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 94\u2013121. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  60. Sealy, \u201cNote from Outside on Rotimi Fani-Kayode,\u201d unpaginated. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  61. See, for example, the Nippon <\/em>(1967) and Oh Shinjuku! <\/em>(1969) series, both partially on display at the 1974 MoMA exhibition. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  62. Betty Jean Lifton and Eikoh Hosoe, A Place Called Hiroshima <\/em>(Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1985), 7. This volume updates an earlier iteration of the Hosoe and Lifton collaboration, Return to Hiroshima <\/em>(New York: Atheneum, 1970). ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  63. Consider another spectral trace: the indexing of vaporized bodies as shadows on city walls, in the aftermath of Hiroshima. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  64. Mishima produced his own theatrical projects in the form of the Noh tradition. See Miryam Sas, \u201cHands, Lines, Acts: Butoh and Surrealism,\u201d Qui Parle <\/em>13, no. 2 (Spring\u2013Summer 2003): 20. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  65. Eikoh Hosoe, quoted in Yseult Chehada, \u201cEikoh Hosoe on Man and Woman,\u201d video recording, Aperture Foundation, May 5, 2010; see also Carole Naggar, \u201cThe Costume of the Soul: Eisoh Hokoe\u2019s Photographs of Butoh Dancer Kazuo Ohno,\u201d Aperture <\/em>165 (Winter 2001): 54\u201364. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  66. Derek Jarman, quoted in Derek <\/em>(2008), dir. Isaac Julien. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  67. This is widely discussed in the work of, for example, Abigail Solomon-Godeau and Douglas Crimp. See the latter\u2019s \u201cThe Photographic Activity of Postmodernism,\u201d October <\/em>15 (Winter 1980): 91\u2013101. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li>
  68. Ming Tiampo, \u201cOriginality, Universality, and Other Modernist Myths,\u201d in Art and Globalization<\/em>, ed. James Elkins, Zhivka Valiavicharska, and Alice Kim (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2010), 169. ↩<\/a><\/span><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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