So I've been reading this article called "The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde" by Sianne Ngai.
Jim Brittingham brought it up, I absolutely did not come up with that on my own.
I've recently been struggling with the question of whether or not my soft-sculptures, or more honestly, what I call my "plushies"of gears and pipes and wires and other representations of machinery and infrastructure, should or should not be "cute", and if that's even a bad thing.
I don't want to be Kitschy. No one wants to be known in art school for making "kitschy" objects. I'm not even sure how I ended up in this place, really. I used to make really ugly paintings, paintings that people really liked because they were raw and less personal.
But i didn't want to anymore. I didn't want to paint lines and abstract marks on a canvas anymore, and as a result I've resorted to making graphic drawings of patterns and such on post-it notes, then on a big paper, and now I'm making... stuffed animals?
So it was very refreshing for me to read an article that dealt with "cuteness", things that are "soft, round, and deeply associated with the infantile and the feminine", things that lack defined edges, are smallish, blobby, malleable, capable of being handled, compact, simple, pliant...
All of these are words I picked out immediately and related to.
So, bad?
No.
Takashi Murakami with his DOB paintings deal with the play between kawaii and kowaii. Kawaii meaning cute, and Kowaii meaning scary. I keep talking about being scared of my plushies... maybe I'm not really scared of them, I'm more scared of the ideas that they represent, but I know "scary" is somewhere within the language I want to use. The problem is, I don't think people are really getting that idea at all. Mostly people are only getting "i want to jump into that pile of stuff. It looks so cute". And maybe that's not that bad to me! But somehow "scary" seems essential to the message I want to portray in my project.
I'm trying, now, to incorporate fabrics that are extremely porous and net-like and see through so you can see the materials inside the plush pushing up against the walls and trying to exit. There are zippers to force things together. The scale, it's getting bigger... the colors, bolder, not as... lets say docile and innocent anymore. they are not gendered and are starting to not look like anything at all,
I'd say its getting there. I'm pretty happy I think I'm in a good place. I think the pushing of the definition of cuteness is what I needed. They are moving from simple to complicated, small to large, compact to expansive, helpless to aggressive.
Cute should not necessarily mean precious or safe.
