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Pop Culture
Aug 14, 2023, 06:28AM

You Said It, Not Me

A 2023 BOMB Magazine interview with writer/conceptual artist Sophia Giovannitti vs. a 2001 Index Magazine interview with painter Yoshitomo Nara.

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Sophia Giovannitti: It’s horrible to admit what you want because then you might not get it, and everyone will know.

Yoshitomo Nara: They disappeared when I became more independent of my past and took up the challenge of living in the present.

Giovannitti: There’s definitely a melancholic edge.

Nara: But nowadays I’m listening to a lot of Eminem.

Giovannitti: Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

•••

Nara: Dusseldorf in 1988.

Giovannitti: You said it, not me.

Nara: That may be right. I’m repressing my desire to explode—almost to a sadistic degree.

Giovannitti: I’m not exactly sure how to describe it, because it’s in its prototypical stage—but I’ve just started performing it, and I can say that the experience feels like I am speaking to hostages, partly because the space is tiny and I’m performing it to very few people at a time.

Nara: So the white space of the comic strip becomes a kind of graffiti wall.

•••

Giovannitti: Scorpions are so scary to me, and frogs are so cute.

Nara: They’re in-between figures, neither male nor female. They’re pure evil.

Giovannitti: Or citizenship. Or tax breaks.

Nara: Children’s picture books and graffiti.

Giovannitti: What do you believe these forms to be worth?

Discussion

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