This essay was a winner in the Art of Writing Fall 2024 essay contest. Students in all Fall 2024 Art of Writing courses were invited to submit writings from those courses for the contest. Zara’s essay was written for Professor Miryam Sas’ Fall 2024 Art of Writing seminar “Media and Realism.” In keeping with the Art of Writing ethos of writing as a teachable art, Zara reflects below her essay on how she would approach reworking her piece in the next draft.
“It’s hard to convey in words the laughter we shared afterward, and the intimacy with which laughter can inflect a woman’s body” – Moeko Fujii
Who exactly is she, the girl who sits in front of Nobuyoshi Araki’s camera? There are nearly a hundred different versions of her in Tokyo Love, each page titled by her distinct name, but the photo remains the same girl. The girl whose bright nail polish and trendy fashion made her stand out from her surroundings. The girl who he displaces from the grim realities of the outside world and placed in front of a saturated, pink-hued background. The girl with big eyes full of life, but an expressionless face. The cute girl. He thinks that her cuteness will heal him, so he captures her portrait and believes that by preserving her youth, he remedies pervasive mortality–the death and sickness that haunts him.
As Sianne Ngai explains in “The Cuteness of the Avant Garde,” the aesthetics of cuteness, which centers on vulnerability and helplessness, became a fascination for postwar Japan during the country’s decline of military strength and economic vitality (Ngai 819). With the rise of Kawaii culture, aesthetics of cuteness helped provide restoration to diminishing life in postwar Japan through its soft and small characteristics. Rather than exerting brute force from an already weakened state, one employs cuteness as a fantastical site of rebirth, maintaining an infinite and imagined state of novelty.
As Nobuyoshi Araki captures each girl’s portrait, he entraps her into a fixed world where time is frozen. The girl is imprisoned in her youth as the portrait renders aging as an impossibility for her. In the photograph of Kyoko Takaya, the background resembles a sunset where a soft coral beam cuts in between the purple (Araki, Fig 1). While Kyoko sits in between the background and the camera, the coral ray of light creates a separation between her torso and her legs which fall below the light. In this manner, she is almost ghostlike–the viewer does not see the real Kyoko Takaya, but rather a disembodied version of her that manifests not within the world, but rather, sits outside of it. Araki thus utilizes cuteness to create an illusion of indefinite youth, situating her in a “Neverland” where she never grows up. When Sianne Ngai refers to cuteness as a “minor taste,” and then as a “minor aesthetic concept that is fundamentally about minorness,” she evokes a double entendre (Ngai 813, 816). The dual emphasis on minorness signals cuteness’s origins as a culinary taste concept, where something is bit-size and easy to consume, but also the idea of cuteness that is directly related to minors. In his portion of the photobook, Nobuyoshi Araki, solely focuses on Japanese girls who are under eighteen in comparison to Nan Goldin whose subjects vary in age and gender. His quite literal taste in minor subjects problematizes how he employs cuteness as a violent mode of infantilization where the young girls are fragmented into smaller portions in order to be consumed by the audience.
Araki’s portraits simultaneously center his grief, but metaphorically dismember and kill the visually captured girl. In his portraits of Kaori Fujitomi and Shino Suganuma, Nobuyoshi Araki closes in on the two girls’ faces and rotates his camera 90 degrees, snapping a headshot of them at a sideways angle that enacts a feeling of disorientation (Fig. 2A/2B).
As the spectators cannot help but turn their heads at the girls, their titled head communicates, via body language, a degree of confusion and bewilderment toward the subjects. In effect, the composition of Araki’s photographs, which in different techniques displaces his subjects, characterizes Kaori, Shino, and the other girls in Tokyo Love through their “Otherness.” He others these young girls by having them positioned in unnatural and stiff poses–resembling the figure of a doll. Their doll-like posture is uncanny, and even when the viewer does not see their full body, the tilted headshots produce a resounding eeriness–another element that distances the young girls as Other.
Yet there are short glimpses of relief, possibilities for subversions, when Tokyo Love moves from Nobuyoshi Araki to Nan Goldin. For Goldin, aesthetics of cuteness are not just rooted in Japanese girl culture. If girlhood alongside girly photography is an imagined state of cuteness that elicits a pleasureful fantasy, Goldin produces cuteness in unexpected ways. A girl in a school uniform prays to a J-Pop Idol (Fig 3B). Another young girl loses herself in the mirror (Fig 4). A boy who creates himself in a relatively smaller mirror, touching up his bright red lipstick (Fig 5A). Although Araki’s and Goldin’s works appear alongside each other in the photobook, it is important to note here how their photography differs in form. While Araki exclusively works with portraits, Nan Goldin’s contribution to the book follows the style of documentary photography and photojournalism. Rather than one single shot per subject, she spends pages following the lives of the people she chooses to photograph and capturing them at moments of intimacy. Each title of the photograph tells a line that makes up a larger story. In comparison to Nobuyoshi Araki who encloses his young female subjects to a fixed world and version of themselves, the people who Nan Goldin follows participate in a paradoxical performance of unveiling and masquerading their identity.
She destabilizes the notion of cuteness and girly photography as simply the feminine Other by engaging with queerness as a critical tool for subversion. As Goldin employs cuteness outside heteronormativity and restrictive gender dynamics, she speaks to the part in Gabriella Lukacs’ discussion of girly photography where she pulls from Judith Butler’s theory of drag and performance, asking, “What can we say about the potential of parody to disrupt normative gender roles and forms of sexuality? Is parody able to undermine the power and foreclose the pleasure of the objectifying gaze?” (Lukacs 44).
Placed in opposition to Nobyoshi Araki’s portraits of young girls, Nan Goldin’s works do not only juxtapose Araki’s but satirize them. While Araki forces his subjects into roles reminiscent of baby dolls, Goldin plays with the idea of getting all dolled up through a play with makeup and vanity. Her photographs act as a parody of Araki’s portraits, subverting the hierarchical power dynamic. It is no longer the photographer and spectator committing the grotesque act of inflicting fragmentation upon the subject through doll-like posturing and distorted close-up shots. In Goldin’s photography, the subjects’ makeup does not strive to look natural–instead, they evoke a double face (Fig. 3A/3B, Fig 5A/5B). The makeup operates as a type of masquerade that lends itself to a self-creation where identity is fluid. In addition to its fluidity, Goldin offers a different representation of fragmentation through the motif of mirrors (Fig. 4, Fig. 5A). The mirror symbolizes the disconnection between one’s self-perception and the perception of others. The fact that Nan Goldin chooses to take a picture of her subjects’ reflection signifies the unrepresentability of a static identity, evoking the performance of “girliness” which makes it fleeting and always in flux.
These dualities, and even multiplicities, of her subjects reimagine “minor taste” that Sianne Ngai attributes to cuteness by layering fragments of one’s identity to produce an aesthetic of maximalism. Although Lukacs argues about cuteness as a feminized form of labor, Goldin creates a space in her girly photographs for play to coexist with work. By attributing a maximalist taste to cuteness, Nan Goldin demonstrates how cuteness offers a cathartic relief where one’s vulnerabilities and sentimentalities are heightened. Rather than the gendered notion of girly photography from male critics that girls feel not think, Goldin weaves together a narrative of desires and anxieties that captures the essence of girl culture in order to illuminate the intensity within girly photography.
There is a discrete edge to cuteness that typically goes unnoticed, but Sianne Ngai notes how cuteness originates from acuteness: “The word acute means coming to a sharp edge or point, while acuteness similarly suggests mental alertness, keenness, and quickness.” (Ngai 827). Nan Goldin’s photographs are not as concerned with the visual pleasure of stereotypical cuteness as it is with gleaning an inner (a)cuteness; she reminds us that the idea of “girl” is not only the way one appears but a complex state of interiority. Where she depicts young people praying to the idols and gazing into their reflections, she uses the fantastical notion of cuteness to allude to her subjects’ own dreams. By allowing them to ignore the camera and enter their own imagined world, she evokes a nostalgic experience of pleasure.
Goldin leads the spectator to truly reflect on what it means to dream. Dreams, and the act of watching young people dream, is an intimate experience where we see a person have the magical opportunity to transport into a world of their own, inaccessible to public consumption. It leads us to an exchange that writer Moeko Fujii notes happened between Yurie Nagashima, a woman who became associated with the genre of girly photography, and Nan Goldin. Occurring during a talk between Nobuyoshi Araki and Nan Goldin, Fujii notes in “A World Without Men” that Nagashima asks Goldin about how she develops intimacy with her subject when photographing private moments? Fujii never reveals Goldin’s answer, but we get a hint when Nagashima tells Fujii, “How I adored how she posed with a pink boa, how she enjoyed a cigarette while sitting in a sink. There was always a prickly abandon, a sense that men and their opinions were inessential to her world” (Fujii 105).
Nagashima recounts a vivid memory of a young girl who is seen out in the world and lives within a liberatory site of her own imagination where she is free to be herself and void from the projections of others. In Nagashima’s recounting, the girl’s cuteness does not emerge from the bright pink, frivolous boa but rather the image that she lives in her own minor world–a world meant just for her. This is a cuteness that Goldin brings forth: a cuteness that is not just small, not just minor, but a cuteness that radiates from one’s intimacy with oneself.
The dualities of Araki’s and Goldin’s Tokyo Love: Spring Fever 1994 reveal the tension between commodified cuteness and the cathartic potential of cuteness. Their exploration of cuteness as a mode of healing in the photobook offers a complex understanding of how cuteness figures in girly photography in postwar Japan. As both artists navigate their grief within the sphere of girly photography, Araki employs cuteness to appeal to his own desires while Nan Goldin allows cuteness to be a personal experience of remembrance and hope. As a result, Goldin’s work offers a crucial opposition to Araki’s aesthetic, proposing that cuteness, far from being a mere antidote to pain, is also a means to center and reckon with one’s own vulnerabilities. Therefore, the healing nature of cuteness lies not only in its ability to capture momentary pleasure–cuteness becomes a restorative site to reflect on desire and identity.
Bibliography
Fujii, Moeko. “A World Without Men: The Japanese Photographers Who Dared to be. ‘Girly.’” Aperture no. 239 (Spring 2020): 103-107
Goldin, Nan, and Nobuyoshi Araki. Tokyo Love : Spring Fever 1994 / Nan Goldin, Nobuyoshi Araki. Zurich ; Scalo, 1995. Print.
Lukács, Gabriella. Invisibility by Design: Women and Labor in Japan’s Digital Economy, pp. 30–80. Duke University Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11smgwr.6.
Ngai, Sianne. “The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde.” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 4 (2005): 811–847.
Here Zara reflects on how she would rework her piece:
The essay that I submitted to the Art of Writing program is only a fragment of the longer piece that I wrote for COMLIT 190: Media and Realism. Over a thousand words were left behind in my submission of “Cuteness and Consumption.” Looking back, I wonder if I made the right decision in my textual sacrifices. What was excluded, left on the cutting room floor, were the initial introductory paragraphs to my longer paper. The starting paragraphs which are not included in the excerpt hold my paper’s theoretical background, central questions, and thesis statement. The larger paper begins at the site of the creative and intellectual intersection between Yurie Nagashima, Nan Goldin, and Nobuyoshi Araki in 1993 – a scene that is only briefly mentioned near the excerpt’s conclusion. I regret leaving this beginning scene behind in my submission of my paper because it truly was the driving force behind my paper’s central question. To what extent does girly photography escape the production of young girls in postwar Japan and what is the significance of its popularity, circulation, and appropriation upon different agents?
My decision to start the excerpt with the personified girl figure of “cute” was a stylistic choice. The disorientation of the reader placed within the midst of my paper perhaps resonates with what it means to engage with something minor, a section of a whole. Reflecting upon my argument that poses cuteness as an antidote to grief, I now cannot help but wonder if cuteness is a form of loss and severance through its minor aesthetic. If I could go back and revise my paper, I would define the many variations and distortions of “cute.” I would flesh out the instances where cuteness departs from girliness. I would think more critically about how Nobuyoshi Araki’s role in the discussion offers both relief and discomfort. Most importantly, I would think about the art of the comparative essay as a mode of mediation: how is cuteness mediated between different aesthetics and genres of photography that emerged in postwar Japan?