∴Was I Provoked?∴

I visited a photo exhibition in Seoul recently with the heady title of Parole on the Road. Parole in the F. de Suassurian sense¹. It was a street photography group exhibition featuring 20 artists from Korea and Japan. Among them was the eccentric Tatsuo Suzuki who gave a hard to follow but endearing speech to a crowd of cameras that happened to be attached to people. The exhibition was very much in the Provoke style, mostly hard black and white, dreary scenes of urban failure and glum women whose hair tangles their faces like roots torn from the soil.

Tatsuo Suzuki

There’s a tension for me between the intentions of Provoke and the images the movement inspired. In issue 1 (of 3) of the magazine, the Provoke Manifesto was declared:

Today when words have lost their material base – in other words, their reality – and seem suspended in mid-air, a photographer's eye can capture fragments of reality that cannot be expressed in language as it is. He can submit those images as documents to be considered alongside language and ideology. This is why, brash as it may seem, Provoke has the subtitle ‘provocative documents of thought’.

In reaction to the leftist ideals of art held by student-run organizations and the Japan Communist Party itself, which in turn were both reacting to the Japanese political establishment, many artists sought to work outside established frameworks of what was considered artistically ‘acceptable’. Grain and glower ensued.

Daido Moriyama

One of Provoke’s founders, Kōji Taki, wrote that it was an "attempt to dismantle the semantic environment" with the purpose "of trying to change reality". This is the simple version as I understand it:

Produce non-narrative imagery that transcends language in order to inspire thoughts and ideas.²

Maybe it’s that the artwork I saw is distanced from it’s historical context, or maybe it’s that being a group exhibition there are bound to be highs and lows in the quality, but in response to much of it I mostly felt numb. It left me wondering, ‘Was I provoked?’

This one’s mine

I think the short answer is sort of. I didn’t feel coaxed into a new way of thinking or like the images were a catalyst for fresh ideas. There probably was a time when they would have been, but familiarity with the style has diminished its effect on me. I did walk out of the exhibition asking myself though, if these images don’t goad, what would?

Driving home with my Dutch friend we got talking about movies, and I can’t remember how we landed on it but I asked him my favorite conversation killer:

Have you seen Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives?

The answer, every time I’ve ever asked this, has been “No.” I saw it at a film festival in Durban in my early 20s. I’ve watched it 2 or 3 times since that first viewing, and every time I find parts of it powerfully boring. I also find parts of it deeply sublime.

I bring up this film now to say this: very few works of art have ever left me feeling quite so in the company of a new way of thinking, a new sort of experience that exceeded the limits of my vocabulary. The film’s audacity lies not in the maximization of bold strokes, but in it’s quiet contravention of the language of film. Watching it told me this: there is something to know here which I don’t.

Uncle Boomee succeeds where Provoke, at least for me, doesn’t: it transcends language and almost compels thinking that is unfamiliar to me.

Have you seen Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives?

Cheers,

Chris

1. Basically the manner in which language is used: speech.

2. This is my best amalgam of the various aspects of Provoke. There are other parts to it, like the emphasis on atmosphere and the fragmentary quality of realism. But the above gets at the core of it I think. If you don’t think so, please let me know. I’m happy to have my thinking on this updated.