石岡瑛子展: Dangerousness and Creativity

The designer probably never knows who she is but she never fails to act on what she wants to become.

While being highly critical during her Parco years with provocative captions and untraditional models and outfitting, as well as being politically active with her efforts to introduce the pro-Nazi photographer, Leni Riefenstahl, into Japan, the designer became extremely mainstream in the later half of her file with designs that serve nothing but the market and popular taste.

If a designer is different from an artist in that the artist creates things, whereas the design simply assemblage and combine things that have already existed, I think I would like to be a designer rather than an artist. Probably so does her.

- discover and introduce the sublime/ugly/unseen to the public (during the exhibition, the designer repeated voice of きたない is one of the most memorable)
- all the project: the purpose is deliver a message to the public that somehow shock the conscious. A good designer should not be submissive or flattering to its audience or buyer. (but this seems only possible during the designer early career, and only possible under the environment where the buyers crave for such unconventional sparks and social changes)

i have to say that i am not so much inspired by her later works, either in their Eurocentric aesthetics or in the designer blind acceptance of all offers as long as they bring about fame (or in the words of the exhibition description writer, the designer expands her fields).

However, in the end, there are things i can learn from the designer a lot,
1) get a practical skill
(i am highly impressed by his professional proofreading skills as a designer. as it is always the case, what distinguishes the professional and amateur is not the final copy, but the comment on the proof copy)
2) think of a message that let the world agape
3) act on your plans until it is done

If during the time of the designer, the dangerous, unconventional, sublime, unseen, unspeakable is the black wildness and the combination of white model and traditional eastern costume, the equivalent in the present age is probably exotic, crimes, terrorism and the combination of the privileged normal group in the costume of the marginalized.

Do we still have the courage and ability to act to introduce what is not welcomed to the society.