Cyborgs, avatars, laa-laa and Po: the work of Mariko Mori

Afterimage, March-April, 1999 by Rachel Schreiber

Occasionally an artist emerges whose rise to prominence is so meteoric that there is immediate doubt regarding the seriousness of the artist's work. Thirty-two-year-old Mariko Mori had four major solo exhibitions in 1998: at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; the Serpentine Gallery, London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Mariko Mori, a catalog accompanying these exhibitions, includes essays by curators from these four venues.(1) Mori worked as a fashion model and fashion designer in Tokyo before studying art in London and New York City and maintains studios in both New York and Tokyo. She is from a wealthy Japanese family and her work is slick, created using the newest technologies and obviously expensive to produce. She has garnered an enormous amount of attention, with reviews and articles in various publications from Artforum and Art News to Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. However, most of the writing about her in these publications runs less than 250 words and is no more critical of the work itself than this paragraph.

One of Mori's early works, Birth of a Star (1995), is a prediction of her own imminent fame. It is as if Mori is saying, "this is what I will become." Mori appears in this self-portrait, as in all of her works, in a costume of her own design. She is outfitted in a vinyl, schoolgirl-like short plaid skirt and her legs have the smooth plastic surface quality of a blow-up doll. She is wearing oversized headphones and holding some kind of remote control device. The work is a life-size Duratrans print (whereby the photograph is mounted on a lightbox and illuminated from behind) that emanates eerie, technopop music. Around her float brightly colored balloons. Her playful gesture coupled with her curious activity question the relationship of young girls and popular culture, fashion and the art world.

The first time I saw The Birth of a Star I thought of Donna Haraway's cyborg as described in her seminal essay "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century."(2) Haraway's essay is truly a manifesto: it is a declaration of her desire for women to begin to take responsible pleasure in the mixing of boundaries between human and machine, human and animal, natural and artificial. Haraway defines the cyborg

as a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.(3)

Mori blurs the line between science fiction and contemporary notions of femininity as represented in popular culture, particularly Japanese pop culture. Her gaze is somehow vacant while coquettish as she peers at the viewer through her icy blue contact lenses. Her playful stance indicates her sense of fun in her own participation in this culture and yet her own agency does not seem to be completely present. Her attitude is simple, uncomplicated and vacuous, much like the teletubbies.

For the uninitiated, Teletubbies is a BBC-produced children's television program. Its innovation is its target market - it is the first television program created specifically for toddlers. At the outset of each show, viewers enter Teletubbyland and are introduced to the four main characters: Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po. They speak in a kind of mumbled English baby language, although Po also speaks Cantonese. Each teletubby is a different pastel color and has a distinguishing antenna-like shape above its head. The most remarkable feature of the tele-tubbies is the television monitor each has in its belly. Occasionally, the monitor comes on and we watch, along with the tubbies, a "come and see" episode that involves live action video of a real-life child engaged in an activity such as rollerblading, ice skating or horseback riding.

Teletubbyland is a surreal landscape, where large bunnies hop around amiably and flowers voice their delight or dismay. In the center of the ever-present sun is the face of an infant, always smiling, squealing in glee. The landscape consists of gently rolling hills and patches of flowers. The color palette of the landscape tends toward pastels outside and more primary colors in the interior of their underground home, where the teletubbies might go to make tubby custard or to play with a vacuum cleaner named Noo-noo. Perhaps it is no more impossible than other drawn cartoon landscapes, but the computer-generated environment creates a supernatural quality that is eerie and otherworldly.

There is something fascinating about the way that Teletubbies molds science fiction into such a benign, safe haven for toddlers. From its computer animation to the idea of biological television implants, Teletubbies is high-tech all the way. The tubbies themselves are perhaps the youngest cyborgs in circulation and their life is filled with technology. One of the most intriguing aspects of the show is the voice trumpet, a large transmitter that can tell the tubbies stories or act as narrator for the episode. In the words of the official BBC website, "the voice trumpet represents the many 'technological' devices that are a natural part of a child's life."(my emphasis).(4) This admission that technology is at the foundation of our lives ("a natural part") is shocking to some parents who find the show problematic.(5) When might we renounce our moral conviction that natural things are superior to those technological? Or, more aptly, when might we be able to desist the constant comparison? Mori's work bypasses these outmoded oppositions.