JAPANIMA; THE WEST SIDE STORY

by Tim Sowden

Have you ever wondered why this age should have made a fetish out of supermodels? The phrase is misleading, for what it is exactly that they model is obscured by tabloid hype and the pulp journalese of glossy magazines. Still the gossamer thin ideal of beauty they have foisted upon the world has come to mean something far more significant than any hackneyed male wank-fantasy. They are cast within a wider ambit of desire, one that transgresses cultural boundaries and cuts across issues of gender. Such is her inflated significance that the supermodel, before whose seductive gaze the cultural identity of the East humbly bows and wanes, has assumed a pivotal role in the global rules of attraction. Hence the centrepiece of this exhibition - a work which speaks of the sort of cultural deference a supermodel can inspire. The painting straddles the point at which East meets West in a complex web of attraction where, yes, even Japanese schoolgirls fall under the spell of unattainable physical perfection. The image is in fact a snap shot from Ewen Coates' own recent experience of Japan. And it deals with an issue that works its way into much of his art: the role of personal desire in a culture of mediated concupiscence.

But this exhibition isn't only about media sylphs with haughty, if vapid, expressions and impossibly long legs, however seductive this sort of personified kitsch may be. Nor is it strictly about cultural miscegenation. Rather it grapples with a generalised notion of desire, or more specifically, desire such as it can be vicariously expressed in culture. Enter this exhibition and you confront a thicket of symbology where everything means something else and the most unlikely objects engage in a dialogue of covetousness. To wit, the Crayfish who vainly asks of us to be admired or, more encouraging still, eaten. Or the yawning succubus, inspired by Hieronymous Bosch, emerging from a pit of sump oil, herself countenancing an older version of male sexuality, born of brawn and physical combat, in the figure of St George. In Jungian terms, and the artist admits to a penchant for Jung, the anima is here pitted against the animus. These are the souls of males and females respectively which are in turn are female and male respectively. Or something.

But it's futile to draw too literal a conclusion about the metaphorical quality of these objects. They have been marshalled together by the artist and, for his sins, it is the artist who is at the centre of this particular discourse of desire. What we can say is that desire can be at once excruciatingly personal and universally significant. For the most part we're invited to be voyeurs in this exhibition as the artist empties out his wardrobe and allows us a glimpse of the soiled laundry of his own fetishized id. As for the rest, well, whole populations have contributed to the rise of the supermodel. So in this particular Ewen Coates is really no different to the rest of us. Or Japanese schoolgirls for that matter.