The Art of the Body

The world was neon, and it buzzed with the electric current of change.

This was the overwhelming affect that washed over Yurika as she sat in the audience and witnessed the performance art of Atsuko Tanaka. Atsuko's artwork, "Electric Dress," was taking the modern art community of Japan by storm. She waded about the stage wearing a dress (if you could call it that) made out of a hundred light bulbs--at once a glowing celebration and a searing condemnation of capitalism in the new Japan. It was all there in her performance: the brilliance of Tokyo at night, the fear of an unknown future, the giddy freedoms and grotesque contradictions of the world after the war.

Of course, a significant part of Yurika was furious that she hadn't thought of the idea herself. In her own art practice, she had been attempting to come up with a good creative concept for inserting the body into the work of art. But ideas never seemed to come to her as readily as they did to Atsuko, and it infuriated Yurika. And how goddamn cute Atsuko looked in that ridiculous dress! She exuded such smug innocence as she glided across the stage. It made Yurika want to throw up.

It was all in the scandal, Yurika thought as she walked back to her apartment after the performance had finished. In this media addled world, that's what makes you get noticed. She wanted to find a way to cause a bigger scandal than the Electric Dress. And unlike Atsuko, Yurika did not put so high a value on her own dignity; she was willing to do whatever it took.

She told all this to Taka that night in bed. "I want to do something big," she said. "I want to show all of them what a woman artist can do."

He was lying on top of her, his cock inside of her, moving his pelvis up and down rhythmically and breathing heavily. "Yeah, baby," he said, "you show them."

"I'm not afraid to cause a scandal," she mused, "I think--" She stopped speaking abruptly as Taka stuffed a sock in her mouth. He flipped her over onto her stomach and fucked her from behind, pinning her down pulling her hair. For a moment, Yurika's preoccupation with creating a scandalous new artwork was forgotten as she lost herself in the immediate release of a good fuck.

"That's a fuckin' work of art right there," Taka opined, slapping her ass and getting up to throw away the condom after he had finished.

Yurika said nothing. Taka had meant the comment as a joke, but there was, she thought, a kernel of possibility that lay hidden within it. Art was, after all, not a physical object but a means of interpretation. Every modern artist worth her salt knew that. Sex was art, or rather it could be art when examined through a very particular frame of reference. Could Yurika use this frame of reference?

Over the next few weeks, Yurika developed and perfected an idea for an artistic performance that was at once conceptually nuanced and utterly scandalous. The conceptual basis was this: the female body had long been observed through the male gaze as a sex object. In the age of mass media, this process of objectification became even more crass, as women's bodies were plastered on billboards and advertisements. But what happens when the object you are watching watches you back? Yurika wanted to stage an interaction that subtly reversed this gaze, perhaps even without the knowledge of its participants.

Yurika sent out invitations to a select group of fellow artists from the Gutai art collective in which she was involved. She told them only that the performance she was planning would be interactive, and that it was not for the faint of heart. The responses she received were enthusiastic but curious. The final guest list included four men and one woman, Atsuko Tanaka. After a week of work, all the preparations were in place.

***

Taka was Yurika's enthusiastic co-conspirator, and he had learned his lines well. When the first guest arrived at Yurika's performance, Taka let him into the apartment and showed him quite courteously to the spare room where Yurika had set everything up. The guest was a small, soft-spoken man named Itoko, and when he saw the contents of the room, he gave a visible start. The walls of the room were covered in mirrors, and in the center of the room, bathed in soft pink light and reflected into infinity on all sides, was the body of a woman. She was tied to a metal frame by wires from household appliances, and she was almost, although not entirely, naked. Segments of her body were covered in plastic sequins--a patch on her arm, another on her stomach, another on her thigh. Her head was completely covered in the stuff, glittering and otherworldly in the light.

Itoko took a tentative step toward the strange body and examined the head. He could see that Yurika's head had been wrapped in plastic wrap with only a hole below her nose for her to breathe, and that someone had plastered a thousand sequins to the wrap. Yurika's head did not look like a human head at all: void of its capacity to see, speak, or express, it looked like a head on a plastic mannequin.

What Itoko did not see, which Taka had done a masterful job only a few minutes earlier to conceal, was the tiny holes in front of Yurika's eyes. These allowed Yurika to observe everything that went on, but they gave off the appearance of blindness to an unknowing onlooker.

"Wine?" Taka offered jovially. He had a sly grin on his face, and he made a point of not mentioning the elephant in the room, the naked body of the woman before them.

"S-sure," blustered Itoko, trying to figure out what to say. Yurika watched through her secret eye holes as he attempted unsuccessfully to pull his gaze away from her body. Itoko took a hearty swig of wine as the doorbell rang once more.

The next guests to arrive were Tamiko and Yoshio, two brothers who thought much of themselves because they'd spent two years in New York. Unlike Itoko, they seemed to know exactly what to say. "A biting indictment of the commodification of the female body under capitalism," Tamiko pronounced. "It is the fetishization of the commodity incarnate, as Marx might observe..." He dropped the name, "Marx," just a bit too casually. Anyone familiar with Tamiko knew that he had read all 1000 pages of Das Kapital in the original German. It was not something he seemed willing to let his acquaintances forget.

"You don't think it's a bit vulgar?" Itoko offered. He took another swig of his wine and mopped his brow nervously.

"Capitalism is vulgar," Tamiko retorted tritely. "Art merely imitates the world, doesn't it?"

"True," his brother concurred. "Talk about the alienation of the worker from the commodity! When the commodity is the body itself, we become alienated from ourselves."

"Very wise," Tamiko responded, and the brothers gave each other self-congratulatory pats on the back for the astuteness of their interpretation.

"Wine?" Taka offered. His smirk had turned into a broad grin. He was evidently quite amused by the guests' varying reactions to the absurdity of the situation. He poured the brothers glasses of rice wine and kept his opinions to himself. Yurika had made it very clear that she did not want Taka to initiate anything, not to mention her or touch her: whatever happened to her, she wanted it to happen organically.

A final ring of the doorbell brought the last two guests: Atsuko and an artist she was dating named Jiro. Jiro was a tall man with a thin, authoritative smile. He smiled in a knowing way when he saw the spectacle before him, but he did not comment. He merely lit a cigarette and walked 360 degrees around Yurika, taking in every inch of the display.

Through the holes in her face covering, Yurika watched Atsuko. Ever the flashy dresser, Atsuko had come dressed in a fashionable hot pink cocktail dress, her hair pinned up underneath a matching pillbox hat. Yurika noticed that Atsuko's nails had recently been painted a matching shade of pink, and she wondered if Atsuko had painted them expressly for the occasion of this performance. What was she trying to prove to Yurika? Women did not wear nail polish for men, after all--they wore it for other women.

The brothers continued to pontificate about the various merits and downfalls of the performance from a Marxist perspective. Itoko continued to mop his brow nervously, and Jiro took another drag of his cigarette and contemplated the work in silence. It was Atsuko whose eyes, gleaming with anticipation, landed on the objects that lay, a bit too conspicuously to be coincidental, on the small table in the corner of the room. Yurika watched as Atsuko made her way casually to the table and sifted through its contents. Atop the table was a pile of multicolored clothespins. Yurika could tell by the gleam in her eyes that Atsuko understood their purpose, and that she was intent on exploiting it.

And so it was Atsuko, not any of the male guests, who first dared to lay a finger on Yurika's body. While the rest of the guests kept a comfortable distance, looking on, Atsuko strode up to Yurika, clothespin in hand, and clamped it decisively around her nipple.

"Jesus, Atsuko, what are you up to?" Jiro let out a sharp guffaw.

"If she didn't want us to use them, she wouldn't have kept them on the table, Atsuko reasoned. "Listen, she likes it!" They all heard the low moan escape from Yurika's lips, muffled underneath the plastic wrap.

Yurika did like it. The clamp gave her a rousing pain, like scratching an itch, and she felt a tingling, throbbing pleasure emanating throughout her breast. She drew in a deep breath and then a sharp gasp as Atsuko clamped another clothespin around her other nipple.

"Oh come on," Atsuko told the men, "she's practically begging for it. Anyone else want to try?"

Tamiko was the next guest who ventured to plant a clothespin on Yurika's body, but not without a detailed explanation why. "It is an experiment in the darker urges of human nature," he said. "To what lengths will man go to feel himself in power? How does power...corrupt?" As he said the word "corrupt," he fastened two more clothespins, one in each hand, to Yurika's breasts. Yoshio joined suit, picking up two more clothespins and pinning them on Yurika's stomach. Atsuko attached five more to Yurika's breasts, then Jiro began pinning a handful of clothespins to the soft skin between her thighs.

Yurika began to feel waves of pain wash over her, and she drew in deep, labored breaths to cope with it. She gave herself to the giddy depths of powerlessness, feeling with each clamp that she was being drawn further and further into her body and the immediacy of the moment. Tamiko was partially right--this performance was an experiment in the human capacity for sadism. But it was also an experiment in the very human desire for powerlessness. Yurika knew firsthand that pleasure in one's own pain could be just as intoxicating as pleasure in other people's pain. Although the audience did not know it, Yurika could signal Taka at any time by tapping her foot and tell him to end the activities. She submitted to the pain the others gave her actively, by choice.

There were twenty five clothespins on the table, and after five minutes, every one of them had found a place on Yurika's body. They littered her breasts, fell in a line down her stomach, and populated her inner thighs. Jiro, smiling mischievously, had attached one singular clothespin to Yurika's clitoris. The guests stepped back to admire their work, observing Yurika's shuddering, listening to her labored breath and small whimpers. They seemed not quite sure what to do next.

Atsuko again took the lead. She walked up to Yurika and, with her dainty hand with its perfect pink nails, pulled one of the clothespins that was on Yurika's nipple just slightly toward her. The effect was immediate. The clothespin tightened as she pulled it toward her, pinching Yurika and sending a jab of burning pain through her breast. As Yurika whined in protest, Atsuko pulled the clothespin on her other nipple so that it pinched in the same way as the first. Yurika whimpered, and Atsuko smiled at her triumphantly. She leaned forward and planted a light kiss atop the place where Yurika's lips would be if they had not been covered in plastic. Then she whispered, "Be careful what you wish for," and walked back to join the others in the group.

This was a test of Yurika's endurance like nothing else before, and her muffled cries and whimpers made it abundantly apparent to her audience the agony she was in. If any of them took pity on her, however, they did not act on it. They simply observed Yurika's predicament with expressions of aloof removal, as if each were consciously trying to remind himself the ways in which one ought to observe a work of art.

To Yurika's surprise, it was the small, shy Itoko who, mopping his brow, finally stepped up to relieve her of the torture. With a swift motion, he removed the two clothespins that pinched Yurika's nipples and pocketed them. He gave her neck a tender but furtive caress and looked around somewhat sheepishly at the other guests. "I didn't like seeing her in pain," he said, as if in excuse.

"How do you like seeing her?" asked Jiro.

Itoko considered this. "I...I'm not sure..."

"Yes you are," interjected Atsuko. "You don't have to pretend that you haven't been standing here this whole time thinking about what you want to do to her. We all have. It's human nature." Atsuko lit a cigarette with a smug, knowing expression. "For instance, I know Jiro here is a dick-in-the-ass kind of man, and I bet he's been thinking about sticking his thing up in Yurika all night."

"I do have very particular tastes," said Jiro good naturedly.

Atsuko continued "Yoshio wants to fuck her pussy, he's that kind of man. And Tamiko's probably been thinking all night about giving her a good spanking..."

Tamiko cleared his throat. "Well, as Freud would say..." he began, then trailed off, seeming unable to call up the proper theoretical argument for the situation.

Atsuko grinned triumphantly. Clearly, she had seen into each man's desires quite incisively, and she seemed to delight in the effect that her reading of the men had had on them. She turned on Itoko, staring down her next victim with gleaming eyes. "You are a sensitive man, aren't you Itoko? You like to make a lady feel good? I think I know what you've been thinking about all night..." Atsuko made a "v" shape around her mouth with her perfectly manicured fingers and mimed oral sex with her tongue. The motion brought chuckles from the group.

Itoko's face reddened. "I...how did you know?"

In answer, Atsuko merely smiled and took another drag of her cigarette. There was a pause. Each man in the room seemed to be debating inwardly whether or not to act upon his desires that Atsuko had so crassly laid bare. Yurika stood where she was, her heart racing in anticipation, willing one of the guests to be so bold.

Finally, Atsuko got impatient. "Come on, we all know what this is, we don't need to pretend to be all aloof. It's an orgy. Plain and simple. Free pussy! Right here!" Atsuko slapped Yurika's genitals, and Yurika yelped in pain. "Come and get it!"

Taka interjected. "If you're going to fuck her, please take a condom, I have them right here." It was the first time all night that he had mentioned Yurika; indeed, he had been lurking in the corner of the room observing everything and had barely spoken at all. He looked at the guests amiably and offered them the bag of condoms.

This indication from Taka that sex was not only allowed but encouraged was final tip that Tamiko needed to muster up his courage. "Fuck it," he said at last. He grabbed two condoms from Taka's bag, handed one to his brother, and strode up to where Yurika stood tethered. Then he began slapping her hard on the behind, eliciting sharp wails and cries from Yurika. "How enticing this commodity is," he grunted. "I'll fetishize the fuck out of you."

"In the end, we're all guilty of being commodity fetishists, aren't we?" Yoshio concurred, and he stepped up to Yurika and began to fuck her.

What ensued could very well have been interpreted to be an experimental work of performance art, but one thing it was, undeniably, was an orgy. Yoshio fucked Yurika until he was finished, then Tamiko took a turn. All the while, Atsuko hovered around her, pulling on the clothespins to loosen and tighten them, seeming to delight in the gradients of pain she could give Yurika and take away from her with only a few small adjustments. Yurika's cries of pain mingled with moans of pleasure, becoming indistinguishable from one another.

To Yurika, the overwhelming sensation of the entire activity was joy. A giddy, throbbing empathy coursed through her, tickled by the pleasure each person extracted from her body in their own way. It made her feel expansive, larger than life, as if she could dissolve into the bodies of the people around her.

She felt Taka's familiar hands around her as he entered her and began to ride her. "You didn't think I'd let everyone else have all the fun, did you?" He whispered, holding her neck in his hands. From behind, she felt someone's fingers--Jiro's?--enter her back cavity, teasing and stretching her. "Breathe," Taka reminded Yurika, as Jiro slid himself into her. Yurika thought it was a good thing that Taka had reminded her, because it took effort to draw breaths in and out as she felt the two men inside her, taking their fill of her trembling body.

Out of the corner of her eye, Yurika could see that Atsuko had spread her legs wide and allowed Itoko to pleasure her with his tongue. Oh, the hedonism! Yurika almost laughed to herself. This was modernity--perverse, boundaryless, absurd. And Yurika loved it. She loved every inch of this gaping, gasping world.

***

The next day, Yurika woke up sore and bruised in the bed next to Taka. She stretched, examining the marks around her wrists where she'd been tied and the little bruises along her torso where the guests the night before had pinned the clothespins.

She walked into the kitchen to make herself a pot of tea, but she had just had time to put the kettle on the stove when there was a knock at the door. She walked to the door to answer it and found to her surprise that Atsuko was standing in the doorway, wearing a lime green morning dress and a fresh face of makeup. Yurika ran a hand through her unbrushed hair. "Atsuko? Did you leave something here last night?"

"No. I...I wondered if you wanted breakfast. I made soup." Atsuko handed Yurika a tupperware container full of miso soup. Yurika narrowed her eyes. "I think you and I have more in common than I thought," Atsuko explained quickly. "Can't we be friends?"

Yurika sighed. "Come on in." She ladled the soup into bowls and brought them to the table in the living room, where they both drank. Yurika drank in silence, unsure what to say to her unexpected guest.

"Men, right?" Atsuko commented, breaking the silence.

"Men," Yurika concurred. There was another pause.

"So..." Atsuko began, "were Tamiko and Yoshio right? Was your 'artwork' last night really about capitalism?"

"Of course," Yurika said. "Everything's about capitalism. I think what Tamiko doesn't get is that I live in a different capitalism than he does."

"How so?" Atsuko leaned forward, interested. Yurika felt more than a bit flattered. Here was the great Atsuko Tanaka, sitting in Yurika's living room asking for her opinions about her artwork! If Yurika had had something to prove to Atsuko, it seemed as if she had proven it.

"Well," she began, "when Tamiko thinks about commodity fetishism, he thinks about how he treats commodities. How he buys clothes, houses, women. You and I both know that as women, we not only buy commodities: we are commodities. Try as he might, Tamiko can't really understand how that feels."