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.
