From "Everybody Poops" to "Epileptic"

Mira pulled Taro Gomi’s Everyone Poops off the shelf to accompany her bowl of dry Trix cereal (yes, I am the kind of parent that allows her offspring to eat ridiculously sugared cereal just moments before bedtime) and we settled down for a fully scatological read; I’m trying to figure out whether the book’s straightforward and extremely aesthetically pleasing take on this most basic bodily function reflects a general Japanese cultural sensibility or if it is all Taro Gomi. It’s just difficult for me to imagine a children’s book writer successfully pitching this project to an American publisher ("I smell a Newberry!").

Among the 350 books that Gomi has created is “a really giant coloring and doodling book” entitled Doodles that includes pages like this, which states on the upper left corner "These elephants have a problem. What is it?"
Gomi published Everyone Poops in Japan back in 1977 as Minna Unchi, and come to think of it, the late ‘70s were a free to be you and me time here in the states when it came to cultural production geared toward children, manifest in what was pretty radical educational experimentation -- thinking here about the “team” classes at Maple Ridge Elementary where the curriculum worked to fully integrate 4th, 5th, and 6th grade classes. It seems that the only material trace of things like team classrooms is the fact that now kids’ desks might be grouped together in little pods rather than set up in straight rows, but this material reformulation of the classroom is in and of itself something of note.

Thinking about this in light of a comment by Brad Downey, an artist whose work is featured in Francesca Gavin’s Street Renegades: New Underground Art; the design of the book itself plays with strategies deployed by artists whose materials include wheat paste and spray paint by having the title and author’s name affixed to the cover image on a peel-off orange sticker that is precisely the size of those “Hello, my name is” tags. Downey’s work includes installations like one called Madonna and Child (2004) in which he created s small scale version of a street lamp with a bus stop sign and set it up next to the actual bus stop; he notes that “Construction workers are invisible because they are…working for the city….I feel the same way about street objects and control devices….They are the visual manifestations of the rules or the truth.”

Among the artistic interventions showcased in the collection that caught my eye are Carla Ly’s vinyl stickers that look like plasters (to take the British term and avoid the brand name) that she places on broken sidewalks on dented car bumpers and (image at left) the duo Thundercut who essentially give character to those little figures in crosswalk lightboxes that flash to signal when it is safe to walk.


In a graphic moment because I’ve been slowly rereading David B.’s Epileptic, focusing on the way in which the work represents the process of learning how to see. David B. was raised by art teacher parents in Orleans in the late 60s and early 70s, and Epileptic delineates their attempts to cure the narrator’s brother of his epilepsy. This saga brings the Beauchard family in contact with several countercultural communities, most of which seem to fully replicate the hierarchies and dysfunctions of the society for which they're supposedly providing an alternative.

As the narrator explains the basic tenets of a macrobiotic diet -- an introduction to the family’s disastrous visits to macrobiotic communes – he speaks to macrobiotism’s end goal to balance yin and yang in individuals as a means of creating a more peaceful community, and produces a panel in which he invites the reader to identify the yin and yang elements in the image. Thinking about this invitation for some audience participation as a kind of pedagogical moment in the work that asks us as readers, simply, “what do you see?”