Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Patricia Piccinini: The Breathing Room

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Patricia Piccinini: The Breathing Room

by John McGee

"The work's about panic," Patricia Piccinini says about her gallery-sized installation, The Breathing Room. She created it in 2000, a time of uncertainty, she says, when "things around the world...were out of control, and panic seemed the only rational response to it." 

Patricia Piccinini, Subset Blue (from 
the "Protein Lattice" series), 1997, 
C-print, 80cm x 80cm
(Images courtesy the artist)

This blend of logic and instinct takes a visceral form inside The Breathing Room, where expanding and contracting flesh pulses across three large rear-projection screens. Rising and falling in rhythm with the rumbling of transducer-enhanced breathing sounds, the computer-generated close-ups of flesh are surprisingly lifelike. 

But what kind of life is it—human? animal? The left side is growing a five o'clock shadow. A few small, pinkish-yellow bruises mar the brown skin folds on the right. Three flesh valves open and shut in the smooth undulations of the middle screen. These suffocating surfaces seem physically disconnected, but the synchronized breathing crescendos suggest a short program of sci-fi porno films at a mini drive-in movie theater. 

These ambiguous forms, "very sensual...familiar but alien," touch on Piccinini's exploration of "what we consider natural and what we consider artificial." She says she's often trying to "make a real experience out of artificial forms." 

The artist has shown extensively in international exhibitions (including the Berlin Biennial and Kwangju Biennale), and in several shows in Tokyo over the last five years—at the ICC, Spiral, Akihabara TV (Command N)—but this is her first large-scale solo exhibition here. And with pieces from four major bodies of work, it is impressive.

Piccinini sees the questions of moral responsibility raised by Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" and its nameless monster reverberating in the moral, social and aesthetic mire of contemporary society's biotech revolutions. 

Patricia Piccinini, Waiting for Jennifer 
(from the "SO2" series), 2000, C-print, 
80cm x 80cm

Two series, "SO2" and "Protein Lattice," further probe the issues. Rodent claws chatter as an odd creature runs in and out of frame on wall-mounted video monitors. Part platypus, part giant salamander, SO2 (or Synthetic Organism 2), is an artist-designed, CG-modeled creature. It's also captured in large photos like snapshots of someone's pet-hanging out in the passenger seat of a car and running through a parking lot where skateboarders practice. Piccinini says, "it's kinda cute, but at the same time it has that sort of monstrous feel about it...[it] seems vulnerable so you want to look after it." 

In "Protein Lattice," Piccinini used real models and a fashion photographer to construct an image of a commercial photo shoot "that went really, really wrong." A beautiful nude woman reclines on a floor surrounded by dozens of mice, each with a full-size human ear growing on its back. In another photo, a different model holds her hand to her shoulder in a classic perfume pose. Only there's no bottle, just the same freakish mouse. Piccinini sees the mice, the result of a real 1996 experiment, and the models as "kind of the same...they are both valued for what they contain." 

The final work, a video piece called Lustre, "looks at the idea of consumerism and what makes it so interesting and attractive to us" by slowly panning, Kenneth Anger-style, across what looks like a glossy blue, smooth automotive surface, entrancing as it corrodes then miraculously heals itself. 

Piccinini, who designs the projects but leaves much of the fabrication to husband Peter, describes her work as propositional, situations for the viewer to respond to. But she never flinches from ambiguity, saying, "I don't know what's right and wrong. I just know that I want it, but I know its bad, and that's what my work is trying to do..."

This exhibition was held Aug-Sep 2001 at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Ebisu, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

©2006-2008 John McGee. All Rights Reserved. No part of this site may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission.