Love Phantom

LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!

Rapunzel eagerly awaits her prince from her tower top singing “Someday My Prince Will Come”. Her hair is extremely long and can reach far away outside of the tower. She starts to spin and rewind her locks in order to catch her unseen prince. As the spinning movement proceeds, Rapunzel becomes highly emotional. Eventually she loses sight of her initial aspiration and transforms into a mere yarn-ball-like, cocoon-like black mass. Meanwhile, the world outside of the tower is ruined by Rapunzel’s rampaging hair. The chaos created is as if some apocalyptic natural disaster has taken place.

In this video and performance, Takata wears a wig in the fashion of an ancient Japanese hairstyle and transforms himself into the character of Susano-o, a Shinto god who appears in the Japanese creation myth. The erection between his legs, is in the form of a Japan-shaped penis. The artist believed that the Japanese archipelago looked like male genitalia standing erect towards the Pacific Ocean. From this idea, he assembled his mythological image of creation and destruction.

In this video, half-naked models do the “love exercise”, one at a time. Many small doll faces are glued to their bodies. The doll faces are both male and female, their lips puckered as if they are about to kiss. There appears a yellow cupid, controlled by the videographer (Takata). He gives instructions such as “Make this one and this one kiss!” to the models, and they need to contort their bodies in order to make the two chosen faces kiss. For some identified “couples” however, the task is impossible no matter how hard the models struggle. Ignoring their agony, the cupid whimsically continues to make unreasonable requests.

Frida Kahlo, Aung San Suu Kyi, Madonna, Elizabeth I, Judith. The heads of “strong women” from history are being stacked like a totem pole in this video. The artist appearing in a goddess-like form places the heads on the top of the pole, trying to balance them so that the tower does not collapse. From somewhere a divine voice calls the next name, and the artist kicks up to place the next woman’s head on the pole. The divine voice is actually the artist’s mother’s voice that has been digitally altered. This work was based on the artist’s own family background in which he was raised by a doting, feminist mother. In the personal myth that he creates, he attempts to visualize a unity with his strong mother’s image.

One night, two enchanted birds fly in through the window of a sleeping adolescent boy. Perching upon his ear, these magical creatures recount fantastic and peculiar folk tales into the teenager’s mind, as if speaking directly into his dreams. Relating an erotic fable of an Arabian princess who escapes her palace to spend lurid evenings with common men, the birds entice the young man toward his own desire. Their elaborate narrative, which unfolds with ambiguous shifts in genders and protagonists, escalates in intensity until it is suddenly interrupted, just before it reaches the best part of the story.