Mariko Mori
To call Mori’s art, however she produces it, superficial, excessive, cliched, or solipsistic is too easy. She might be a poseur hiding behind a beautiful but completely false facade, like a second-rate singing sensation hiding behind buff, lip-synching models the way Milli Vanilli did. But in fact Mori manipulates the elements of late-20th-century culture–empty-headed media stars, virtual reality, and dehumanizing techno capitalism–to create highly critical, beautiful art. Like Cindy Sherman in her “Untitled Film Stills” and Carrie Mae Weems in her narrative photography, Mori uses self-portraiture and stereotypical images and themes to explode stereotypes, creating new meanings.
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Using her experience in the fashion world, Mori often appears in bizarre, futuristic clothing of her own design. But often this “star” is barely recognizable. In a recurring motif of her early photography, Mori appears as a strange visitor from the technological future, trying in vain to make contact with ordinary late-20th-century humans. Play With Me (1994), the enormous glass-panel photography piece for which she first became known, shows the artist in front of a Tokyo Sega parlor in shiny plastic attire and a silvery green wig: she looks like the characters in Nintendo games and anime, or “Japanimation”–indeed, she closely resembles the cartoon characters on the Sega advertising signs behind her. But in her guise as a messenger from the video-game future, the artist seems sad and puzzled by the fact that none of the Tokyo passersby takes any notice of her.
Mori’s video-audio installation Link of the Moon (1996) depicts the artist not only visually but aurally–it’s accompanied by her own a cappella singing of a song she wrote herself. Shown in a circular room on a number of wall-mounted monitors, the video–called “Miko No Inori”–shows smooth close-ups of Mori wearing the most otherworldly dress in any of her creations, dancing with a crystal ball in a train station. Her singing is pumped in from unseen speakers; the only sounds from the video itself are the train station’s arrival and departure bells. These fit perfectly into the a cappella music, however, helping to blur the viewer’s sense of where the reality of the train station ends and the near hallucinatory crystal dance begins–where Mori herself begins and ends in her own work. The video is so completely mesmerizing that I watched it loop three times, leaving only when someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked politely if he could have a turn.
The second piece in Nirvana, an incredible three-dimensional video extension of one of the glass-panel works, aims to help wake us to this reality by using elemental images, three-dimensional computer animation, music, and even wind to create a new kind of meditation. Viewers entering the darkened room put on a pair of 3-D glasses, setting up the expectation of something hokey, like the 3-D movies that used mutant-octopus tentacles or streamers flapping in the wind to show off their effects. Here we see the jesters from the previous room and Mori again in her majestic garb. The jesters dance for a bit to piped-in music, then small, simple objects like colored spheres slowly move from the screen to just before your eyes and dwell there. For a moment these objects become all that exists for you, like the visual “mantras” that Tibetan monks use in meditation. Just before the video ends, an electronically cued burst of wind breaks your concentration and you return from your trance to reality.
