NEW AND CLEAR, NUCLEAR
David E. James | ARTWEEK, September 21, 1985
Art about the bomb tends to find that
collage techniques of juxtaposing violently
different images are the readiest means of
drawing attention to what is so horrendous
that it is virtually unthinkable. Since the
threat of nuclear holocaust is so total,
everything appears intrinsically relevant to
it. Nevertheless, the collages of texts ÐÐ of
languages and of media -Ð that formed the
three performance pieces presented at the
Los Angeles Center for Photographic
Studies in the Imagine There's a
Future festival commemorating the
bombing of Hiroshima jeopardized the precision
of their insights by the limitlessness of their frames of reference.
The first two pieces. Shock Battalion's
The Bombing Begins in 5 Minutes and
Where the He/I is Uitenhague???? by
Christine Choi Ahmed and Cyndi Kahn,
were pleasant but unstrenuous. The
former juxtaposed a pop record, a dub
remastering of Reagan's remark about
bombing Russia. With a blitzkrieg of slides
of Hiroshima and the response to it in the
US press, mixed with contemporary
images from mass culture and the political
process. Some of its connections were
pointed-a skull superimposed over a
shot of Nancy Reagan made a chilling
visual rhyme ÐÐ and its heart was surely in
the right place.
Similarly based on an audio collage ÐÐ a
mix of voices discussing the murder of
twenty black people by the South African
police and its ramifications for Afro-
Americans ÐÐ the next piece presented a
visual counterpoint. in which two women
successively replaced the white paint on
their faces with black and then removed
that to reveal their natural skin colors ÐÐ
the one white and the other black. Given
the commanding presence of poetess
Michelle Clinton, the visual tableau was
striking as a spectacle, though only sentimentally related to the political message of
the tape, which itself was again more a
testimony of the heart than of the head.
Only the last piece had enough wit or
subtlety to raise it out of the numbingly
ovious, and in fact. Ohara's Neither
Garlic nor Beans is one of the most obliquely intelligent and innovative perfomance debuts that l've seen. Speaking
the whole time in Japanese. she began by
serving miso soup to the audience. The
audience's chatty pleasure, combined with
her engaging self-presentation, generated
a relaxed bonhomie that threatened to
swamp the entire piece in confusion. But
the mood changed quickly when the soup
was finished.
Accompanied by an audio tape mixing
disco and gospel music with Buddhist
chants, Ohara alternately gyrated and
meditated while slides flashed a visual text
on the wall behind her. Alternating an
aerial view of Hiroshima with instructions
for making miso soup and references to its
supposed ability to stave off radiation
sickness generated a mordant irony from
the contradictions between taking care of
oneself in a world rushing headlong
toward Armageddon and the ridiculousness of a self-improvement that colludes
politically with the hopelessness of our being able to improve the world.
Ohara's performance culminated in a
tableau in which she pathetically smeared
miso paste on her face while behind her,
the bomb fell. The pellucid image perfectly
summarized her ability to conjure up both
visual anti social drama from" a appeared to be an entirely innocuous
metaphoric matrix. Hers was a subtle and
stimulating play on the difficulties of cross-
cultural communications in which the
political contradictions of everyday life
were made both new and clear.
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