ARTISTS

In this minute-long sketch, Fuyuhiko Takata turns a common schoolboy prank into a device for exploring the ambiguous lines between homosocial play and same-sex attraction. Love Phantom opens on a young man in a school uniform seemingly dozing on a train. Suddenly, a tentacle-like protrusion begins to grow from his chest, straining against his shirt as it extends outward. Then another schoolboy with his own tentacle (in both cases, actually artfully concealed arms and hands) enters the frame and the two are drawn together, blissful smiles spreading across the boys’ faces as their fantasy creatures take on lives of their own. The work is characteristic of Takata’s videos, which often employ grotesque yet humorous performances to subvert the normative structures regulating our everyday interactions and self-images.