The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde

Sianne Ngai

Though the relationship between cuteness and avant-garde poetics is my primary concern in this essay, it is crucial to begin by examining this aesthetic concept in its most prevalent, commercial context.

     To use an everyday, ready-at-hand object as an example of commercially produced cuteness, this small and compact knickknack, a frog-shaped bath sponge (figs. 1a and 1b), shows how much the aesthetic depends on a softness that invites physical touching--or, to use a more provocative verb, fondling. It also demonstrates the centrality of anthropomorphism to cuteness.

Figs. 1a and 1b

Yet while the object has been given a face and exaggerated gaze, what is striking is how stylistically simplified and even unformed its face is, as if cuteness were a sort of primitivism in its own right. Realist verisimilitude and precision are excluded in the making of cute objects, which have simple contours and little or no ornamentation or detail.¹¹The smaller and less formally articulated or more bloblike the object, the cuter it becomes--in part because smallness and blobbishness suggest greater malleability and thus a greater capacity for being handled. The bath sponge makes this especially clear because its purpose is explicitly to be pressed against the body and squished.

     From here it is only a short step to see how the formal properties associated with cuteness -- smallness, compactness, softness, simplicity, and pliancy -- call forth specific affects: helplessness, pitifulness, and even despondency. There is thus a sense in which the minor taste concept of cuteness might be said to get at the process by which all taste concepts are formed and thus at the aesthetic relation all of them capture. For in addition to being a minor aesthetic concept that is fundamentally about minorness (in a way that, for instance, the concept of the glamorous is not), it is crucial to cuteness that its diminutive object has some sort of imposed-upon aspect or mien--that is, that it bears the look of an object not only formed but all too easily de -formed under the pressure of the subject's feeling or attitude towards it. Though a glamorous object must not have this mien at all (in fact, the meta-aspect of looking as if its aspect were subjectively imposed would immediately break the Schein of glamour), the subject's awareness, as she gazes at her little object, that she may be willfully imposing its cuteness upon it, is more likely to augment rather than detract from the aesthetic illusion, calling attention to an unusual degree of synonymy between objectification and cutification.

     We can thus start to see how cuteness might provoke ugly or aggressive feelings, as well as the expected tender or maternal ones. For in its exaggerated passivity and vulnerability, the cute object is as often intended to excite a consumer's sadistic desires for mastery and control as much as his or her desire to cuddle. No one makes this point better than Daniel Harris. Citing the example of Little Mutt, "a teddy bear with a game leg that a British manufacturer has even fitted with an orthopedic boot," Harris writes, "the process of conveying cuteness to the viewer disempowers its objects, forcing them into ridiculous situations and making them appear more ignorant and vulnerable than they really are." Hence things are cutest when "in the middle of a pratfall or a blunder: Winnie the Pooh, with his snout stuck in the hive...Love-a-Lot Bear, in the movie The Care Bears, who stares disconsolately out at us with a paint bucket overturned on his head."¹² As an aestheticization of the small, vulnerable, and helpless, cuteness, not surprisingly, is a taste quality first and foremost aligned with products designed for children.

     The emergence of the manufactured plush toy that Harris invokes as an exemplary cute object, however, can be traced to a newfound awareness of the aggressiveness of children made possible by twentieth-century psychology.¹³ Once children were no longer imagined as miniature adults or as naturally moral or virtuous creatures, manufacturers found new impetus to produce indestructible toys that could survive the violence with which children were increasingly associated. It is interesting to note, however, the surprisingly belated appearance of the plush toy in the history of American toy manufacturing. Though homemade rag dolls had been used to teach domestic skills to girls since the colonial period, in the decades after the Civil War that marked the emergence of the American toy industry proper, commercially manufactured dolls were made almost solely of hard materials, with easily breakable, finely painted bisque heads mounted on bodies made of wood, iron pewter, steel, and even electroplated sheet metal.¹⁴ Like the fully jointed, highly ornate, talking Big Beauty advertised by the American Mechanical Doll Works Company in 1895, most of these dolls were also mechanical or machinelike (fig. 2).

Fig. 2  "The Girl from Paris" (American Mechanical Doll Works Company, 1895)   

  Yet as Miriam Formanek-Brunell argues, the preferences in late nineteenth-century doll design for hard substances, and for capturing the movements of the human body rather than its feel or texture, were less a result of the American toy industry's attempt to adjust to changing conceptions of the modern child than a reflection of a business economy dominated by male entrepreneurs fascinated with technology and the scientific management of production processes -- including Thomas Edison, who had his own factory for the manufacture of phonographic Talking Dolls (see MPH, p. 41). Formanek-Brunell contrasts the scientific management of this toy industry with the "maternal materialism" of female Progressive Era dollmakers such as Martha Chase, who finally reintroduced "softness, portability, durability [and] safety" as values into the American toy market through the mass manufacturing of cloth and stockinet dolls ( MPH, p. 68). Yet while designed explicitly to address new attitudes about children and play (and contributing to a general shift from the representation of adult women to that of babies), the Chase Company dolls still adhered to a standard of realist depiction antithetical to the aspects of cuteness stressed by Harris. Even the more stylistically simplified, "wide-eyed, round-faced, and chubby-cheeked New Kid" popularized in the first decade of the twentieth century by the Campbell Kids and Rose O'Neill's Kewpies had a physical vigor that makes their invention yet another moment in the history of American mass culture where the fullest realization of cuteness seems curiously postponed ( MPH, p. 90). Far from being helpless or dejected, as Formanek-Brunell notes, the Kewpies were depicted as energetic social reformers who rescued children and even educated mothers about the welfare of children, while the Campbell Kids just as tirelessly sold soup. Hence it was not until after the First World War, long after the invention of the Teddy Bear, that "cute" toys, in the strong sense of denoting an aesthetic of accentuated helplessness and vulnerability, began appearing in the U.S. in mass quantities.

     In a sense it should not be surprising that an aesthetic of smallness, helplessness, vulnerability, and deformity might find its prominence checked in the culture industry of a nation so invested in images of its own bigness, virility, health, and strength. Conversely, in post-World War II Japan, an island nation newly conscious of its diminished military and economic power with respect to the United States in particular, the same aesthetic ( kawaii ) had a comparatively accelerated development and impact on the culture as a whole -- not only saturating the Japanese toy market, but industrial design, print culture, advertising, fashion, food, and even the automotive industry. There are historical reasons, in other words, for why an aesthetic organized around a small, helpless, or deformed object that foregrounds the violence in its production as such might seem more ideologically meaningful, and therefore more widely prevalent, in the culture of one nation than in that of the other. In this manner, art critic Noi Sawaragi traces Japan's postwar fascination with kawaii not only to the nation's diminished sense of itself as a global power but to the political image of the emperor in its parliamentary monarchy: "In the last moments of his reign, emperor Hirohito had a feeble, weak image. An old dying man is the weakest of creatures . . . Hirohito was very popular among the people as a cute, old man."¹⁵

     Given what Kanako Shiokawa describes as kawaii 's unprecedented surge in popularity during the rapid expansion of Japan's own culture industry in the 1960s, in particular, it is unsurprising that a self-conscious foregrounding of the violence underpinning the aesthetic runs throughout the work of Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami -- Japanese artists who grew up in the 1960s and began exhibiting in the early 1990s. This body of work allows us to grasp cuteness in one of its most probingly or theoretically worked-out forms.¹⁶ Whether in the form of drawings, paintings, or, more recently, sculptures, Nara's large-eyed children are frequently presented as maimed and wounded, or upset and distressed -- as demonstrated by both the untitled drawing (fig. 3) in which the phrase "Black Eye, Fat Lips, and Opened Wound" captions one of Nara's signature little girls and Slight Fever (2001; fig. 4), one of a series of acrylic paintings mounted on white plastic plates. In its association with food, the dinner plate does more than merely supply a material support for Nara's images of mutilated or injured children.

Fig. 3 Nara, Untitled Drawing (2001)

Fig. 4 Nara, Slight Fever (2001)

Evoking the expression, "You're so cute I could just eat you up, " Nara's use of food-related objects for his interrogation of kawaii becomes extended and exaggerated in Fountain of Life (2001; fig. 5), a sculpture in which seven of what appear to be disembodied dolls' heads are stacked on top of one another in an oversized tea cup with accompanying saucer, with tears/water flowing out of their closed eyes.

Fig. 5 Nara, Fountain of Life (2001)

Underscoring the aggressive desire to master and overpower the cute object that the cute object itself appears to elicit, the tie between cuteness and eating that Nara's work makes explicit finds its consumer culture counterpart in the characters generated by San-X, an edgier and more contemporary incarnation of Sanrio, the company that invented the iconic Hello Kitty. One of San-X's most currently popular figures is Kogepan, who is a slightly burnt and dejected-looking bread bun. Described on San-X's website as "a bread [that] has gone sourpuss for being burned . . . that can't help making negative words like 'You'll dump me anyway,'" Kogepan is not only occasionally depicted with a bite taken out of the top of its head, but even baking miniature versions of itself.¹⁷ Kogepan's obvious state of abjection and simultaneous potential for acts of cruelty to less than fully formed Kogepans suggests that the ultimate index of an object's cuteness may be its edibility. Underscoring this link, an untitled drawing by Nara (2001; fig. 6), in which one of his stylistically simplified children pops out of a package with the label "JAP IN THE BOX," also highlights cuteness's role in the merchandising and packaging of racial difference.

Fig. 6 Nara, Untitled Drawing (2001)
    

There is a double irony here, however, insofar as Nara, like fellow artist and media darling Takashi Murakami, is a master of retail himself.¹⁸ In the tradition of Andy Warhol both artists highlight by continuing to attenuate the already thin line that separates art from commercial merchandise in a market society. Though one can buy Nara dolls, alarm clocks, wristwatches, postcards, ashtrays, T-shirts, and, of course, dinner plates, it is perhaps Murakami who has pushed these bounds furthest, not only by creating both cheap and expensive wares based on his gallery paintings and sculptures (including, in the spring of 2003, a series of Louis Vuitton handbags), but by inventing a character, Mr. DOB, a red-and-blue mouselike figure originally drawn with an exaggeratedly large head and tiny mouth, that Murakami officially copyrighted in the early nineties.¹⁹ Created, in Murakami's own words, in an effort "to investigate the secret of the market survivability...of characters such as Mickey Mouse, Sonic the Hedgehog . . . Hello Kitty and their knock-offs produced in Hong Kong," Mr. DOB is often shown smiling as he is in this painting, DOB with Flowers (1998; fig. 7), situated in a "landscape" composed of anthropomorphized flowers as happy as he is . While things are changed slightly in the installation DOB in the Strange Forest (1999; fig. 8), which places DOB in a sinister or implicitly menacing environment and depicts him as confused or distressed rather than contented, the menacing objects--eye-studded and deformed mushrooms, recalling the mushroom clouds of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki--still arguably remain as cute as both DOB and the smiling flowers that surround him in the earlier painting.

Fig. 7 Murakami, DOB with Flowers (1998)

Fig. 8 Murakami, DOB in the Strange Forest (1999)
    

In And Then and Then and Then and Then and Then (1996-97; fig. 9), however, an acrylic painting roughly nine by eleven feet in size, DOB's cuteness seems questionable or under stress, due in part to the huge proportions of his image and to the fact that he now has bared teeth.

Fig. 9 Murakami, And Then and Then and Then and Then and Then (1996-97)

Suggesting a pun on kawaii 's sonorous proximity to kaoii, which means "scary," the surprisingly menacing look DOB assumes in this image is pushed further in subsequent pieces like GuruGuru (1998), a vinyl chloride helium balloon 106 inches--or nearly nine feet--in diameter, and The Castle of Tin Tin (1998), an acrylic painting nearly eleven by eleven feet (figs. 10 and 11).

Fig. 10 Murakami, GuruGuru

Fig. 11 . Detail of Murakami, The Castle of Tin Tin (1998)

In both, DOB has become virtually all eyes, teeth, and blisters, though the signature "D" and "B" on the character's ears still remain legible. These works blurring the line between kawaii and kaoii are in fact only two of hundreds of permutations, and increasingly distorted, deformational permutations, to which Murakami has subjected the original DOB ever since his debut as a painting in 1993. Hence while cuteness traditionally entails an absolute lack of anything threatening, as Harris emphasizes by noting that objects are cutest when maimed or hobbled, Murakami's stylistic mutilation of DOB calls attention to the violence always implicit in our relation to the cute object while simultaneously making it more menacing to the observer. The more DOB appears to be the object or victim of aggression, the more he appears to be an agent of aggression. Murakami's DOB project suggests that it is possible for cute objects to look helpless and aggressive at the same time. One could in fact argue that this paradoxical doubleness is embedded in the concept of the cute from the start -- as even commercial generators of cuteness such as San-X seem to realize. Kogepan's cuddliness does not seem incompatible or compromised in any way by his potential to use and abuse the more diminutive Kogepans whom he seems to treat either like food or like pets.

     Though it is DOB's visual or pictorial transformation that brings this paradox to the fore, Murakami's character originates not from an image but a word: one derived from a synthesis of dobozite-- a slang term for why? ( doshite ), popularized by a contemporary manga character noted for his "strange accent" and mispronunciation of words (not unlike the "twitterings" of Huxley's Parisian miss)--and oshamanbe, a catchphrase of Japanese comedian Toru Yuri that puns on the name of a town and the sexual connotations of the syllable man.²⁰ Murakami's initial wordplay with dobozite and oshamanbe resulted not in a drawing or visual prototype of the Mr. DOB character but a signboard with the two repeated words circling an oval. This piece, eventually titled DOBOZITE DOBOZITE OSHAMANBE (1993), was made explicitly for an exhibition on the subject of the jargon of commodity culture: "The plan of the exhibition [ Romansu no Yube or "Evening of Romance"] was an inquiry into the custom of putting the emphatic suffix 'Z' and 'X' at the end of [every Japanese commodity] from beer to comic book titles. For example, the beer Asahi Z, or the manga title Dragonball Z. What makes these products so popular? I managed to make something that was under budget, and dwelled on the oddities of the Japanese language at the same time."²¹ DOB, the perfect exemplar of cuteness with all of its violence, is a product of an investigation into the language rather than the imagery of commodity culture. In fact, Murakami elsewhere attributes DOB's origins to his antagonism towards an "anglicized pseudo-letter art" belatedly popularized in Japan by the work of Americans Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger: "DOB was my attempt to crush that art scene I despised."²² With such a quintessentially cute object disclosed as originating in a form of wordplay itself antagonistically pitted against other kinds of "letter art"--and as the references to Holzer and Kruger suggest, an explicitly "engaged" American letter art in particular--we are now ready to shift focus from cuteness's significance in visual culture to its role in language and poetry.

     Since cute derives aphetically, as the OED informs us, from acute , cuteness's etymology strikingly replicates the diminutive logic of the aesthetic it has come to name, since in aphaeresis words lose their initial unstressed syllables to generate shorter versions of themselves: lone derives from alone , til from until . But there is a key difference between cute and these other examples that result in conveniently abbreviated signifiers for the same signified. For while cuteness is an aesthetic of the round and soft that becomes amplified when its objects are depicted as groggy or sleepy,²³ the word acute means coming to a sharp edge or point, while acuteness similarly suggests mental alertness, keenness, and quickness. So cute exemplifies a situation in which making a word smaller, more compact, or more cute results in an uncanny reversal, changing its meaning into its exact opposite. While mirroring the flip-flopping of power relations dramatized in the DOB series, we can find a more ordinary version of this dialectical reversal in the fact that prototypically cute objects--babies, puppies, and so on--often have a deverbalizing effect on the subjects who impose cuteness upon them. In soliciting a response along the lines of a murmur or coo, the cute object shows its ability to infantilize the language of its infantilizer, dissolving syntactic divisions and reducing one's lexicon to onomatopoeia.²⁴ Note, for example, how Stein's admiring and critical reviewers alike seem compelled to approximate her language and, moreover, to savor these acts of bad imitation even when the intent is clearly ridicule: "Babble, baa, baa, Bull";²⁵"her art is the sophisticated development of the child's 'Tiddledy-diddlety-fiddlety-doo.'"²⁶ Much in the same way Huxley seems to relish neologisms like "orgy-porgy" and "bumble-puppy" while attacking what Adorno would call the "culinary" or "lip-smacking" delights of his Brave New World, we find a member of the American literati as refined as H. L. Mencken pushed into saying words like "tosh" when negatively commenting on Stein's "bebble."²⁷ In fact, the process of verbal cutification that the aesthetic experience of cuteness seems to provoke ricochets back on the word cute to engender more diminutive versions of itself: the noun cutie, the adjective cutesy, and even the adjective cutesy-poo, all of which appear in the OED.

     11 See Shiokawa, "Cute But Deadly," p. 97.

     12 Daniel Harris, Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism (New York, 2000), pp. 5-6.

     13 See Antonia Fraser, A History of Toys (London, 1966), p. 224. On the impact of the new child psychology on furniture and industrial design, see Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire (New York, 1986), pp. 67-72.

     14 Miriam Formanek-Brunell, Made to Play House: Dolls and the Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830-1930 (New Haven, Conn., 1993), p. 45; hereafter abbreviated MPH .

     15 As Sawaragi continues, "In one sense this cuteness was neutral, in another, it was controlling. Couldn't one call this 'rule by cuteness' rather than 'rule by power'?" (Noi Sawargi, "Dangerously Cute: Noi Sawagari and Fumio Nanjo Discuss Contemporary Japanese Culture," Flash Art, no. 163 [Mar.-Apr. 1992]: 75). For an etymological history of kawaii from its classical usage in texts such as Murasaki's Tale of Genji to its expansion in the industrial era and late 1960s, in particular, see Shiokawa, "Cute but Deadly."

     16 Given the popularity of these two artists and of kawaii commodity aesthetics in general in the U.S., there is clearly as much to say about the ideology of America's fondness for what it perceives as a distinctively Japanese cuteness as there is about that of Japan's fascination with its own.

     17 For more on Kogepan, see www.san-x.co.jp/pan/nenpyou.html

     18 For instance, the title piece of one of Nara's recent solo shows, "I DON'T MIND IF YOU FORGET ME," consists of plastic box letters that spell out the phrase in English. Each transparent plastic letter is packed with stuffed dolls (over 1,000 in total), copied after his signature children and animals, handmade by 375 Nara fans and sent to him explicitly for use in his installation. See Yoshimoto Nara, I Don't Mind if You Forget Me (exhibition catalogue, Yokohama Museum of Art, 2001).

     19 According to Amanda Cruz, Murakami was inspired to do so in part by the business savvy of American director George Lucas, whose foresight in registering his characters allowed him to finance his own films. As Cruz notes, Murakami's "registered character . . . has become so popular that there are barely altered counterfeits currently circulating due to the fact that Japan's lax copyright laws go unenforced in a society that shuns litigation." See Amanda Cruz, "DOB in the Land of Otaku," in Takashi Murakami: The Meaning of the Nonsense of the Meaning (exhibition catalogue, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, Center for Curatorial Studies Museum, Bard College, 1999), pp. 14-19.

     20 The manga character is Noboru Kawasaki's the Country General. See Takashi Murakami, "Life as a Creator," in Takashi Murakami: Summon Monsters? Open the Door? Heal? Or Die? (exhibition catalogue, Tokyo, The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001), pp. 130-47.

     21 Ibid., pp. 132-33.   

     22 Ibid., p. 132.

     23 See Harris, Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic , p. 7.

     24 In this "softening" effect on the spectator, the cute may recall Edmund Burke's idea of beauty as that which "acts by relaxing the solids of the whole system," producing "an inward sense of melting and languor" (Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Beautiful and Sublime , ed. Adam Philips [Oxford, 1990], pp. 136, 135; hereafter abbreviated S ). There is thus a sense in which beauty is already "cute" (for Burke, at any rate) prior to the actual appearance of the latter aesthetic term. Defined empirically as a quality of objects and by the properties of smallness, softness, smoothness, and "nonangularity" or roundness in particular, beauty is associated with "the idea of weakness and imperfection," as brought out foremost in his discussion of "the beauty of the female sex." As Burke writes, "Women are very sensible of this; for which reason, they learn to lisp, to totter in their walk, to counterfeit weakness and even sickness. In all this, they are guided by nature. Beauty in distress is much the most affecting beauty " ( S , p. 100; my italics). In addition to the "inward sense" it produces of "melting and languor," note Burke's description of beauty's bodily effects on the spectator: "When we have before us such objects as excite love and complacency, the body is affected, so far as I could observe, much in the following manner. The head reclines on one side; the eyelids are more closed than usual" ( S , p. 135). The person affected by beauty in Burke's account ends up having an appearance which we would today call cute. Might we not extrapolate from this to suggest that cuteness is simply the "new" form of beauty (as understood by Burke)? If so, his text provides yet another example of how the encounter with the cute object "cutifies" the subject.

     25 Issac Goldberg, "As a Critic Has a Headache: A Review in Synthetic Form of the Works of Gertrude Stein, Past, Present, and to Come," in The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein, ed. Kirk Curnutt (Westport, Conn., 2000), p. 256.

     26 Henry Seidel Canby, "Cheating at Solitaire," in The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein, p. 81.

     27 H. L. Mencken, "Literary Survey," in The Critical Response to Gertrude Stein, p. 248.