Overly Attached Cute - Joanna Grant
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Princeton University Thesis (Advised by Sylvia Lavin and Michael Meredith)
The relationship of kawaii to architecture has not yet been theorized. Stylistically, it can be positioned in relation to a lineage of outsider art such as the rococo, mannerism, the sublime, the picturesque, or even “camp.” For example, rococo art emerged as a response to the baroque, quite literally as embellishment itself but also as an addition to the basis of the baroque architectural canon. Each period of art was followed by a marked period of height, in which the supplemental experiences and audiences were added and addressed. In most cases these periods are characterized by attention to aesthetics and formal language.
The distinction between fine art and outsider art was only recently made within the Japanese language in the past century; a distinction which Takashi Murakami has based his career on. The lack of difference between traditional Japanese paintings and manga and anime has led to Murakami’s famous aesthetic of Superflat, the name stemming from the single plane on which both high and low art resided. Takashi Murakami’s fascination with art began at a young age when he first saw a Modern art exhibition of Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Kazimir Malevich on the twelfth floor of a shopping mall. Since then, his understanding of art is closely linked to the consumption of culture through shopping. The experience of seeing art in a gallery or seeing the display windows of designer store was same, in Murakami’s opinion. This lends an easy understanding of how both he and Yayoi Kusama became designers for Louis Vuitton, merging high and low art with commercialism.
Cute is a representation of the real, but an ideal real. It is the opposite of seriousness but somehow represents the gravity of serious. If an obsession with cuteness is the foil to the overbearing weight of Japanese obligations, then it is, in fact, a method of talking about what is truly significant. If comedy is a means through which serious issues such as racism, classism, and sexism can be discussed in an open environment, then perhaps the “cute” is a means through which issues of aesthetics can be discussed. Just as it is not proper to mention politics at a social function, it is similarly impolite to discuss matters of formalism despite the fact that the discipline of architecture is inherently formal and subject to whimsy. Perhaps cuteness can act as a Trojan horse to talk about impolite matters, exactly in the same way that it responds to the strict cultural codes of Asia.
If certain words such as “postmodernism,” “composition,” “figuration,” “kitsch,” “delight,” and—perhaps the most evil word of them all—“Formalism” are now considered as politically incorrect in the context of architectural theory, then perhaps the inherent cuteness of architecture can allow certain impolite topics to proliferate. Think of the viral quality of cat photos on the Internet. Why has architecture been the slowest to respond to a culture of instantaneous memes, even if only in a representational format? The distance between what is real and what is representational is the most logical place for cuteness to begin to its rapid and giddy infectiousness. Style has long been distanced from the discipline but in the case of lifestyle, it remains popular and current. As Clement Greenberg states, “To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised: ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide. Kitsch, using for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture, welcomes and cultivates this insensibility.”
Could cuteness take on the adorable qualities of stickers and plush toys, regretful of their own capitalism but optimistic for the future of architecture? While the soft sciences have recognized the relationship between cuteness in young children and the caretaker effect in adults, the possibility of the application of cuteness to architecture has not yet been explored. At the moment the great styles of the 20th century are faced with the threat of the wrecking ball, only able to communicate their genius to an audience of architects. The reproduction of the images of architecture as cute buildings is the method through which the general reception of architecture can be altered, perhaps even acting as the biological adaptation for survival.
Kawaii has no interest in representing the functionality of the object, yet it implies meaning but does not have it. It’s pink, it’s cute, it’s imageable, it’s a toilet seat cover. There’s no logic to the application of decoration. The act of covering an image of a building may deface the architect’s intention, but if the affect is associating brutalism with a mental picture of a box full of kittens, the positive association could be heroic. Function is merely the acceptance of an aesthetic of rationality, and therefore itself a formal logic. Form and function has finally filed for a divorce, and now we have toilet seat covers.
