Across the Morphic Fields:
The Art of Mariko Mori
by Paul D. Miller
I came into the world after Buddha
I leave the world before Miroku
Between the Buddha of the beginning
And the Buddha of the end
I am born, I do not die
- Ungo Kiyo,
1659
I speak to you of the past and its shadows. Beneath
the proscenium arches of the satellites, on a planet put in parentheses
by man made objects in the sky, images move, information rustles. Left
right, left right. Up down, up down. All around this strange sphere information
moves in invisible waves carried by electromagnetic pulses. A vast population
of phantasmal meanings echo silently through the iron, steel, and concrete
corridors of the global village to create a bewildering maze of meanings,
a place where past and future slide by each other at terrifying speed.
Ghosts? Ciphers? Were they real? Was the information real? The images:
were they all like solid holograms, absolutely convincing even to themselves
but created entirely within the fractured terrain of the urban present?
But what was "real?" Would we know it if we saw it? Problems arise. Meaning
migrates, moves, transforms. It never stays the same. Next corner next
intersection. Switch. As if we were blind, the street corner emits a series
of beeps to tell us its okay to walk. But this time we arrive not inside
a dream as much as we witness a series of tableaux that seem too real
to be mere fantasies - even though they have to be. If all our memories,
our backgrounds, are as false as all the rest, then just who are we? What
are we? A shorthand description of the mime play between narrative engines
of desire and technology? The urban landscape, sphinx-like, looks back
at us, daring us to plumb its secrets. It, however, is not neutral territory.
Meanwhile the world encapsulated in its womblike environment, swathed
in currents of noise and signals, spins complacently on its orbit through
the cosmos.
If you look at the work of Mariko Mori, you'll notice a couple of things
straight off. Her photographs, "narrative" briefs of a curriculum vitae
of contemporary Japan, take us immediately into a realm of sci-fi high
fashion. An incursion into the deeper reality of the world of our ordinary
experiences, Mori's photography renders her world a seductive zone of
artifice - the surface beneath the surfaces, the place where myths come
from. Mori is a Japanese woman conditioned and informed by the distinct
mores of her homeland. Mori acts as a filter, a prism lens for the changing
cultural landscape not only of Japan, but also of its place in the electronicized
world culture in which it actively participates. Her explorations into
the "everyday" of her immediate surroundings - her performance and photography
in public spaces, her portrayal of the theatrical side effects of sci-fi
clothing - spell out a strange disjunction of time and place. Are we watching
a popular sci-fi show on a channel nobody knows about? Are we seeing fashion
from two or three years in the future? (This is a long time as fashion
goes.) Mori presents us with a world in which an aura of surrealism pervades
everyday life: cause and effect change place; memory and illusion change
the shape of the present moment; the most ordinary thoughts and actions
result in the most unexpected revelations and events. In short, her work
reveals a two-way conditioning between the imagination and its environment.
She takes us on a journey that, in her own way, shows the illusions and
exclusions created by that "mutuality." This disjunction, this dynamic
engagement between the surreal and the real puts reality in a kind of
wasteland between perception and identity, magic and meaning. Can you
engage the informational rain? Can a single person interface the mythologies
of cultural acceleration, the velocity of dreams? Instead you try to blank
out the universe and just drift. You realize that regardless of whether
the dream has superseded reality, there is no escape from the beautiful
but desolate landscape you have summoned with your own vivid imagination.
Mori's photography reveals to us a landscape drenched in kanji, the Japanese
written alphabet; a semiotic terrain of language reduced to its basic
components of glyph structures and the calligraphic renditions of myriad
street signs, all interspersed amongst Tokyo's Western-suited commercial
culture. Are these still life portraits science fiction? Or are they attempts
to render the speed with which the imagination creates new vistas for
exploration, new modes to view the present real world? The apotheosis
of urban futurism, almost like a vision straight from Philip K. Dick,
Mori's work takes us into a place surprisingly similar to Blad Runner,
the movie adapted from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Much of her work reminds me of a Blade Runner film set reversed, involuted
and squeezed out of a tube to land on the neon-lit expanses of contemporary
Tokyo, and photographed. Captured for posterity. Mori is sending us a
message from an imaginary future, but the message carries its own code
base, its own logic system. How do we decode it?
Santo is Japanese for "large metropolis," and this is Mori's prime source
for ideas. From themigration of Buddhism and Chinese culture to Japan
between the third and 8th centuries A.D., through the arrival of Christian
missionaries, to the intense urbanization of Edo-period Japan, there has
been an almost continuous evolution in Japanese culture that has its parallels
in the Shinto religion with its air and land spirits, the Kami. But where
the Kami usually reflected local needs and aspirations and combined them
with the regional tastes of the worshippers, Buddhism in Japan brought
with it an almost cosmopolitan flair for paradox: develop the "spirit"
but shut out the world. At the same time, one is expected to somehow still
convey a sense of engagement. The two religions have existed side by side,
and have, as religions tend to do, borrowed a bit here and there from
each other while maintaining their integrity. This was Japan's historic
mode of dealing with diversity until Admiral Perry came along, and today,
this kind of insular mentality remains - albeit, with modifications. Mori's
art takes on the futuristic landscapes of contemporary urban Japan, and
in the end, like the Kami, she becomes a syncretic archetypal figure able
to engage the mythologies of her environment and flow with the currents
of culture. She is the product of the cross-pollinization of many cultures,
at home in anyplace in the global village, yet still rooted in the traditions
of modern Japan.
In Empty Dream Mori once again takes us to a narrative terrain of paradox.
To me, it represents the psychic residua of an enquiry into the relationship
of empathy, form and space - how desire warps and folds them all together.
Empty Dream puts us on an artificial shore, replete with simulated waves
and sun. The ocean never looked so good. While the Surrealists were inspired
by Lautremont's well known phrase "beautiful like the chance meeting of
an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table S," today, this
same phrase characterizes life in the late 20th century. From advertising
to the packaging of commodities, the mutation and consolidation of multiple
narratives into hypercommodified dream-fueled dramas of psychogenic, psychotropic
representation flows into contemporary life. Inscription and reinscriptionS
a dervish dance between the "real" and its myriad representations. Okay?
So next thing we know, we are able to look nonchalantly at a mermaid on
a beach and not blink an eye. We look and see a cyborg checking the time
on a crowded train in Tokyo, and it's no surprise. Mori's blend of sci-fi
pop themes and fashion reminds me of Walter Benjamin's concerns with John
Heartfield, the early 20th century Dada collagist, who critiqued Germany's
martial compression with his "picture poem" collages of German militarists
combined with animals to create hybrid, fearsome creatures who evoked
feelings of terror in the viewer . But Japan had its input in the area
of visual and electronic collage, in some cases outstripping by far what
has gone on in the West. This is what Mori tells us in her own way.
She gives us a planar-perspective picture of post everything Japan: Mori
dressed as chic cyborg checking its input systems on the subway in crowded
Tokyo; Mori as cybernetic sprite offering advice and succor to passerby
in the business districts; Mori as a Japanese update on Lautremont's infamous
mating of a shark and a human being from his Les Chants de maldoror. A
concrete sensual symbol, she exists in a landscape defined by the former
terrain of the fine arts as whose task is to reveal or expose the illusory
character of cultural perspective. Boo! She is word become flesh, flesh
become illusion, illusion become timecode. The atmospheric shimmer of
the subtle displacement of life by art suffuses her work. Mori draws analogies
between what is articulated in fiction, language, and visuality, and points
to a tug of war between her identity as a Japanese woman and her entrance
into a milieu of global culture and electronic, urban multiplicity. These
are short stories, excerpts from a roman-*-clef where the clues have been
scattered throughout real-time, a mirage of science fiction themes that
would make Philip K. Dick smile. A situationist position of camera studies
replacing activity, her imagery acts as a excercises in self portraiture
to replace an engagement with the "objective" world of modernist art.
Mori as virtual subject or a narrative that never was, a phenomenological
locale that situates the human and the technological as codependent and
mutually defining.
She takes the viewer on an odyssey that traces the "postmodern" subject
to a new kind of self-recognition. In the end, though, she arrives at
new frontiers. I look at her as a cybernetic update or, at any rate, a
remix, of the Buddhist myth of the Bodhisvatta, who upon attaining transcendent
awareness of the spiritual unity of the material, spiritual, and technological
worlds refuses to become one with the great meta-program, and serves humanity
instead, providing a propitious launching point for further inquiries
into the relationship of electronic technology and culture.
"I've seen things you people wouldn't dream of," the last replicant in
Blade Runner tells us before he says, "time to die .." He let's go of
a white dove that sails into a clear blue sky, momentarily freed of the
humid smog that mars the heavens throughout the movie. You look at Mori's
pictures and see displaced time. Minimum plausible alteration. You look
out into the world and feel displaced time. Containment versus flow. Migration
versus stagnation. At this point in the information economy, is there
any difference? Was there ever? It has been said by some people who would
try to describe our present image saturated world that the text of the
natural has been displaced by its human interpretations . Then what? For
that matter, what if we flip that equation, adjust the variables so that
the whole deal, the whole movement of values, is reduced to some zero
sum game? X equals Y equals Z equals X. Then what? Let's say that human
beings are an extension of nature. Let's say, like Mchluhan and his gang,
the things that human beings make are an extension of themselves . Let's
say that there is no barrier between the natural and the artificial, but
that they are obverse sides of the same coin, a currency, I might add,
that has been flipped, for better or worse, by human hands. So tell me,
then what?
Urban identity in flux, personality crises - the tides of culture move
silently. Japanese sci-fi themes, like the comic strips that eventually
turned into Marvel Comics, developed into a tapestry of mythic forces
that would have made Marvel universe creator Jack Kirby happy. Mori offers
us a strata of cross referenced super heroes born in a fractal stew, a
meta continuity that leaves the smooth, linear, soothing logical world
far behind. Is she creating characters for her own comic strip, a new
kind of manga (a Japanese serial comic strip that never ends, but evolves
over and over)? Is she a sequence of icons, gaps, and discontinuous relationships?
Like the seismic drift of our little globe that show it's all, one way
or another, linked beneath the surface of the water, Mori offers us a
tale of surfaces while subtly detailing a loss of corporeality, a flight
into metropolitan zones of imaginary flux. We move across a surface that's
oceanic, but definitely not an ocean. The only way to know for sure is
to dive in and see for ourselves. Condensations? Discontinuous arrangements?
The structure becomes its own dynamic system, a place where rules are
broken and contradictory realities are juxtaposed. Move into the frame,
ladies and gents, and the picture slides right by into the mix. Mori's
wordless images remind me of cartoons where the dialog, like a thought
balloon in one of those narratives that used to be two dimensional glyphs
on paper until they took over and became reality, just isn't necessary.
We already know all the words. Life as a comic strip isn't so bad is it?
You just have to look in every direction at once. Like the non-linear
comic strips they remind me of so much, Mori's micro narratives posit
the multiple endings, the freeze frame expansions, the stop-gap, save-the-hero-at-the-end-of-the-story-by-changing-the-whole-plot
type of narrative that never really finishes. Permutations arise. Complications
abound. The story just goes on and on. Maybe that's what her body capsule
pieces are all about. But on another level, the body capsule acts as a
way of preserving the body against the ravages of time: it is Mori's update
on the tradition of the jisei or farewell poem to life. But for Mori,
the act of death doesn't spell an end to life. Death, like the Buddhist
enso circular figure that symbolizes eternal recurrence, is a continuous
transformation of self. The body capsule prolongs, contains, acts as a
seed. On this level, life and death are nothing but illusions of the imagination.
The spark of life rests in the mind.
Mori's art leads us ro a reconceptualized version of simultaneous dispersed
space, a place all now, gone tomorrow; a place we all carry in our heads
as we move out onto the fractal geometries of the electronic, information
laden urban landscape. Street curves, kanji drenched signs, neon lit expanses
of concrete and steel - this picture lacks only real time flow. So what.
Mori has other plans. Like Haruhiko Shono's Inside Out With Gadget, Toni
Dove's Virtual Reality art, Cindy Sherman's inquiries into self-representation,
or Osamu Tezuka's androgynous Astro Boy (or "Tetsuwan Atomu," as the Japanese
call him), Mori creates her worlds and couldn't give a damn whether or
not they fit exactly into whatever cultural paradigm is reigning at the
moment. This is what gives her art the kind of immediacy that the manga
possess. This is what gives her art the same kind of longevity. Today
fashion, graphic design, raves, sci-fi scenarios of futures past - all
of these things point to a place where the late 20th century finds itself
at a crossroads. Turbulence, narrative dissonance - flow. The informational
rain of cultural velocity is a paroxysm, a kind of zero point entropy
- a crystalline surface of zonal aberration, a kind of magnetic susceptibility
to cultural drift.
Narrative engines? In Mori's work, single stories became connected to
one another through cross over plots, shared characters, locations and
themes. The linearity of their plotlines is sacrificed to interconnectivity:
a comic universe that takes on the qualities of a chaotic system, a new
(but basically incridibly old) self-similarity, an emergent antipolarizing
theme. She takes us through strange loops to a place where dualities are
false, and accelerated evolution is the driving force of a nature supplanted
by the information economy. What then? Is her work a kind of samizdat,
an underground magazine whose contents focus on narratives encoded with
the flotsam and jetsam of outsider culture, or manga, that contain pop
culture answers to societal problems? Recycling the components of the
body - it's sinewy muscle, its textual body - has become an underlying
premise of a large majority of sci-fi since the 1980's. Will the body
go? Will we all move into the conceptualized bodiless space of the electromagnetic
now? Hariko Murakami's The Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World?
Maybe. William Gibson's Johnny Mnemonic? Forget it. Frankenstein? Maybe.
The Mechanical Bride of E.T.A. Hoffman? Maybe. The artificial androids
of Karel Capek's R.U.R? Definitely maybe. In the end though, Mori's work
acts as a kind of visual cue leading us into the sensuous fractal spaces
of language itself. It is a time line that meanders, refusing to follow
a straight path. Each style leads to a different set of vocabularies,
techniques and influences - a new set of teleological possibilities. After
all, she has style. Mori's work directs us to realms of experience in
this "new" information economy while coyly reminding us that there is
nothing new under the sun.
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