Robert Archambeau, over at Samizdat Blog, is wondering about the intersection(s) of the beautiful, the cute, and the sublime. He gives a rundown of the characteristics of each: the sublime is vast in scale, dark, has gravitas, etc.; the beautiful is "polished" and "delicate"; the cute is small, rounded, vulnerable, nonthreatening. (The first two descriptions draw from Edmund Burke, who apparently didn't address cuteness.)
The beautiful and the sublime are often combined, Archambeau says, as are the beautiful and the cute (see Audrey Tautou). But what about the cute and the sublime? I immediately thought of Murakami (the visual artist, not the writer), whose huge murals can be both silly and menacing (this one doesn't even fit in the column widths).
I also thought of the guinea pig poems (by Aase Berg) I heard Johannes Goransson read at AWP, and which Lara Glenum in the new issue of Action, Yes links to the gurlesque. Glenum quotes Sianne Ngai:
In "The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde," Ngai suggests that violence lurks implicitly in the aesthetic of the Cute. Ngai notes, "The formal attributes associated with cuteness--smallness, compactness, softness, simplicity, and pliancy--call forth specific affects: helplessness, pitifulness, and even despondency [...] In its exaggerated passivity and vulnerability, the cute object is often intended to excite a consumer's sadistic desires for mastery and control as much as his or her desire to cuddle"I have a friend who says when he sees something really cute he just wants to crush it.
What else is both cute and sublime?
10 comments:
Yeah, Murakami, and I also think of creatures like Miyazaki's Totoro -- a giant woodland spirit cute and threatening at the same time (those teeth!)
http://apike.ca/images/anime/totoro/totoro-tree.jpg
There's a lot of cute/sublime in Miyazaki, and Totoro embodies the combo of those two qualities often found in animals (baby lions, or bears...that could turn AWWW to WAAAH! pretty quickly), animals as the often cute representatives of sublime/awe-inspiring nature.
Archambeau asks about sublime humans... I'd say classic femme fatales are good representatives -- Theda Bara, Dietrich, maybe Garbo -- b/c they embody the potentiality of destruction/ruin through love. How all the cinematic interpretations of sublimity & cuteness speak to/contra feminism can be thought out by a better wordsmith...
Weirdly, my word verification is "anima."
What else is cute and sublime?
Me. (shucks)
Interesting how these these categories line up with kinds of relations:
sublime - religion/god
beauty - eros/sex
cute - agape/mother's love, nuture protection (wanting to crush the cute is merely the inverse of this, and has the same evolutionary basis).
Also, check out:
http://www.kawaiinot.com/
i think cute overwhelms sublime. i'm not sure if cute and sublime can really co-exist.
It’s disturbing how happy I am that you posted about this, EG. I love me some taxonomy.
I am about to go on at rather unbecoming length, b/c I think this topic is important. Let me throw some stuff on the table:
1) The effect and appeal of the sublime is mostly visual; the roughness ascribed to it by Burke is an optical roughness, an intersecting of lines. (A mountain is only a mountain from a distance; up close, it’s just, y'know, the ground, w/ a steep-ass grade.) The effect and appeal of the beautiful is also mostly visual; you draw closer to get a better look. The effect and appeal of cuteness, on the other hand, is mostly tactile: you want to pick it up, to touch it.
2) The beautiful is readily embodied; the cute is almost invariably embodied. (If it’s not a living thing, it resembles one.) But the sublime can’t be embodied, at least not satisfactorily: if we describe people as sublime, it’s only to the extent that we suspect they are not quite, or not merely, human. (Not for nothing was Ana’s example Theda Bara known as “The Vamp.”)
3) To rewind Archambeau to his starting point, cuteness always suggests immaturity. This is extremely important -- and should probably be placed in the context of two earlier posts of yours. Cuteness evokes a freshness -- an access to unmediated experience, an apparent innocence of technique -- that seems to be the essence of the “New Childishness” that Ana has identified. More specifically relevant to this discussion: immaturity also always suggests latency of various sorts -- latent sexuality, latent violence (e.g. Ana’s baby lions and bears), latent responsibility and agency in a general sense.
4) There are aspects of cuteness and sublimity that are mutually exclusive (you can’t be both large and small), so combining them will result in some interesting compromises and yield some surprising results -- surprising not b/c we haven’t seen them before, but b/c we have. Viewed through Archambeau’s lens, for instance, Takashi Murakami’s images click pretty easily as psychedelia: prioritizing (to borrow a checklist from Dave Hickey) complexity, pattern, repetition, femininity, curvilinearity, “the fractal, the differential, and the chaotic.” Slightly different cute-sublime combos might zip the tram into other sections of the theme park: into art nouveau or the gothic, for instance.
5) Or into the gurlesque, for that matter. Greenberg comes within inches of adding “grotesque” to the etymology of her coinage, and she’s probably right to stop where she does: one of the goals of the gurlesque seems to be controlling the terms of its own embodiment. The shitty thing about beauty, see, is that it tends to get embodied for the benefit of others: to become, to its own detriment, common visual property. Practitioners of the gurlesque seem to delay or complicate -- and thereby to own -- their own embodiment through strategies that can simultaneously evoke both the disembodied terrors of the sublime and the deferred sexuality of the cute.
6) There’s an even broader application here, too, which returns us to the New Childishness: it’s related to the rejection of the aesthetics of purity that Glenum gets at in her closing swipe at Adorno. In the moment we experience them, all feelings may be equally real -- but when they’re prompted by works of art, they’re also all equally fictional. It seems to me that the big struggle for creative folks -- today, and for a long time before -- is to regain for ourselves and for our audiences a childlike capacity for freshness of experience; this is very often accomplished via a dispensing with received technique and an opening-up to chance and play. Literature has been sort of slow to pick up this particular football; I’m pretty sure its current incarnation originated with performance artists in the 1960s, maybe earlier. You can probably find glimmers in Duchamp.
But that wasn’t your question. Your question was: what else is both cute and sublime?
I’ll nominate Laurie Anderson. Yoko Ono probably qualifies. Karen Kilimnik and Pipilotti Rist, maybe, though I’m not sure they’re scary enough. Henry Darger?
In print, it’s worth checking out “A High Wind in Jamaica.”
Joanna Newsom has been mentioned before in a slightly different context, but again, may not be scary enough. (If she qualifies, I guess Tori Amos does too.) If there’s a musical poster child to be cited here, it’s probably Cocorosie. Did you catch the NYT Magazine piece on them by Fernanda Eberstadt awhile back? “In listening to music by CocoRosie [...] what’s most striking is its Lost Child quality, its air of having been composed by waifs trying to create what the musician Antony [...] described to me as ‘a secret garden inside their own hearts in which to grow.’ [T]his waifishness is an extreme political stance, a way of countering everything from consumer capitalism to the war in Iraq to environmental collapse: if mainstream rock ’n’ rollers play at being perpetual teenagers, the Casady sisters’ ‘secret garden’ is by contrast almost prepubescent, Edenic, a place where the subversively marginal can flourish and be free.”
K. Lorraine Graham posted on a similar subject recently - the cute and the abject:
http://terminalhumming.blogspot.com/2009/02/skull-panda-yo-gabba-gabba.html
There are a set of younger Japanese women artists who work in this dark/abject/cute arena as well...Yumiko Kayukawa and Chiho Aoshima are two of my favorites.
Thanks for adding so much to the discussion, Martin! Great thoughts, and good call on Henry Darger.
It didn't initially occur to me to consider music here. John also cited Tori Amos.
I may have more to say about all this, especially the necessary link between cuteness and immaturity, and why immaturity is "so hot right now," or at least way more embraced and valued by seeming adults than in previous generations? Am I wrong? It's like how when you look at your parents' high school yearbooks, everyone looked about 35 even though I'm pretty sure they were teenage. None of the baby barrettes and knee socks of my HS contemporaries ...
Jeannine, thanks for the link to Lorraine Graham; lots of good stuff there. I'll need to think about the abject in relation to the cute . . . that seems significant . . .
E, you are for sure right about the current hotness of immaturity. (Wait -- that sounded creepier than I meant it to.) Also about the yearbook thing. More tellingly, I'll bet if you were to compare your yearbook to MY yearbook -- which is, I believe, eight years older than yours, or would be if I hadn't had it shredded -- you'd find that mine (Class of '90! Go Mustangs!) resembles your folks' more than yours. This has happened fairly recently.
Partly it's just demographics -- the boomlet aging into interesting selfconsciousness -- but something more is clearly at work. I'll be interested to hear yr thoughts . . .
Relevant to Elisa and Martin's most recent exchange here (on the issue of immaturity) is of course the now somewhat elderly notion of "twee" in popular music: when adult singers try to sound like children when they sing, or the songs concern sometimes even pre-sexual (but not, if you see what I mean) longings.
I have mixed feelings about the whole thing... yes, adulthood involves degrees of conformity and limitation and norms that are truly appalling. But the idea of not growing up is a problem too.
Just as one for instance: so many of the young people in the suburban/rural county where I live who have children while also refusing to grow up. Big problem, if you see what I mean.
A bit of theory-lite before I rush off to teach: I want to say something about abjection. Anytime we're thinking about the sublime, abjection has to be close by, especially when we're talking about notions of "cute", which inevitably I think have to be considered in the context of power, as Sianne's quote points out. Cute's like the sweet version of something already rejected and reviled.
Yo-Yo Ma.
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