Toshio Saeki – Renrui (1972)

Apparently, this is a work within a genre known in Japan as ero guro nansensu–a literal translation of the English phrase “erotic grotesque nonsense”.

A lot of it gets lumped in with hentai and the term has become synonymous with gore.

There’s an article over at Vice’s The Creators Project and honestly I’m head over heels for all the references in that article (which includes the above).

It strikes me that ero guro provides a sort of broad overview of how pornography might be a subject for artistic contemplation–since true ero guro seems rooted in a sort of code switching where political and cultural realities are rendered as viscerally extreme metaphors.

I read the above as a sort of meditation on grief. The narrative elements suggest that the woman ostensibly masturbating in the foreground has lost her husband–who is picture and perhaps also peaking out from the hot tub in the background.

There’s a ritualistic element to the way the people in the background are staged. And the meaning seems to me to be illustrating a correlation between the publicness of loss, grief and grieving compared with the private-ness of masturbation. Except where what is done privately to get by is suddenly performed public and judged by others.

It’s compelling and matches very closely to my own experience of grief and grieving. And that’s the thing with all the stuff in the aforementioned vice article: it resonates with me in a way with which I am not entirely comfortable.