six • Playing with Kitty: Serious Art in Surprising Places

Chapter Six

playinG witH Kitty

Serious Art in Surprising Places

While the avant-garde is conventionally imagined as sharp and pointy, as hard- or cutting-edge, cute objects have no edge to speak of, usually being soft, round, and deeply associated with the infantile and the feminine.

—Sianne Ngai (2005:814)

[Sentimental] imagery unthinkable in serious, high-brow, cuttingedge visual art for most of the twentieth-century has emerged as an important concern of the early twenty-first century.

—Nick Carpasso (2005:5)

One aspect of Hello Kitty–led pink globalization that many observers might find surprising is the degree to which Sanrio’s icon has pervaded the edgy fringes of art worlds outside of Japan, as well as to a limited degree in Japan. Some of these forays have been promoted, if not prompted, by Sanrio as it engages in its own public imaging through associations with selected artists. Others have been instigated by artists themselves, and can be seen within the purview of what Nick Carpasso, the curator of the Pretty Sweet: The Sentimental Image in Contemporary Art exhibit, identifies as an emerging trend in serious art worlds, as quoted above (see also figure 6.1). In both cases, Hello Kitty acts as an object of aesthetic regard, both to pull the work of art in particular directions and to be pulled into the context of art exhibition spaces globally. Sanrio’s cat, in other words, is never a neutral figure, but always an active, affecting presence (Armstrong 1971). As the company

6.1. Cover of the Pretty Sweet: The Sentimental Image in Contemporary Art catalogue, by the artist Amy Podmore (2005). Exhibition organized by deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Mass.

would like to make clear through its emphasis on design and designers (see the discussion of Yamaguchi Yūko in chapter 2), Hello Kitty may be regarded as worthy of rubbing shoulders with artists occupying the edges of sometimes subversive, sometimes transgressive, often playful, youth-oriented art worlds.

Mixing Hello Kitty into edgy art worlds returns us to the subject of kitsch, discussed in the introduction. I examine ways in which artists who choose Hello Kitty play with kitsch itself. To Tomas Kulka’s axiom, “Kitsch never ventures into avant-garde,” Hello Kitty–infused art suggests the opposite: “Avant-garde may sometimes venture into kitsch” (Kulka 1988:23). The playfulness of these art worlds brings to

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mind the Pop Art movement, beginning in the 1950s and reaching culmination in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, one can easily imagine a fictive Andy Warhol–esque screen print series of Hello Kitty in different color combinations, incorporating this pop icon much as he did others, such as Campbell’s soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley. The language of kitsch of the Pop Art movement played with irony and parody. As well as employing some similar strategies of irony and parody, the language of Hello Kitty in the art worlds I discuss here includes more straightforward appropriations of sentimentality for its own sake. In this way, its relationship with kitsch becomes more fraught than that seen previously. Pink globalization, after all, embraces pinkness itself with its many ambiguities (see the introduction). This chapter focuses on the complexity of that rosy tint in its aesthetic play.

What does it mean for cuteness to become art? In this, I paraphrase a question raised in an entirely different context— “What does it mean for pornography to become art?”—addressed during the obscenity trials of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the 1950s (Sherif 2009:64). The defense of Lawrence’s novel as explicit sexuality (“pornography”) in art lies in critic Edmund Wilson’s statement: “To have subdued all this material to the uses of a supremely finished and disciplined work of art is a feat which has hardly been equalled in the literature of our time” (quoted in Sherif 2009:64). According to Wilson, art may be defined by technique and artistry, involving discipline, virtuosity, and mastery of materials—rather than by semantic content. By this, a work of art must be judged not so much on what it expresses (e.g., sex, cuteness) as on how it expresses it. If we then turn from Lady Chatterley’s pornography question to that of Hello Kitty “cuteness in art,” one might similarly ask not so much about the appropriateness of the material as about its expert handling by artists.

Yet cuteness remains suspect as a subject of high aesthetic accomplishment. I argue that the difference between pornography and cuteness lies in what Euro-Americans consider the appropriateness of childish matters in the hands of adults. Whereas sex and sexuality may be bona fide subjects of art, particularly as a concern of adults, cuteness ties too closely to infantilization, children (especially girls), and sentimentality. Cuteness suggests superficiality, entertainment, and a lack of seriousness of purpose. In short, we return to the swirling question of kitsch and its implicit critique in Euro-American societies, despite historic interventions such as the Pop Art movement.

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In this chapter I examine Hello Kitty in serious art worlds primarily outside Japan.1 I analyze Sanrio as an unofficial “patron of the arts” through exhibits and publications of art for the thirtieth (2004–5) and thirty-fifth (2009–10) anniversaries of Hello Kitty.2 I ask, Why art and specifically what kinds of art? Why has Sanrio taken it upon itself to include Hello Kitty art as part of its corporate purview? And finally, I discuss more specific appropriations by particular artists, who have used Hello Kitty in their art without Sanrio’s prodding. I focus on three artists, in part for their contrasting uses of Hello Kitty, as well as their accessibility through published interviews or personal contacts: the American male sculptor Tom Sachs, the Japanese American female artist Leika Akiyama, and the American female painter Leslie Holt. To an extent, these artists could have been grouped together with others I discuss throughout the book—Angela Choi, Yumi Umiumare, Jaime Scholnick, and Denise Uyehara (all in chapter 4)—however, I have chosen to group these artists separately as they pay tribute to Hello Kitty through their art. Rather than a formal analysis of their artwork per se (for which I am ill equipped), I raise the question, Why Hello Kitty? That is, what do these artists apparently find in Hello Kitty that generates her inclusion in their creative expression? How does Sanrio’s cat fit into the corpus of their work? And what kinds of extended global meanings do their works of art lend to Sanrio’s cat? Like the expressions of critique discussed in chapter 4, and acts of subversion discussed in chapter 5, these works of art may go well beyond Sanrio’s original intentions, but in doing so the surprise of their work reconfigures the symbolic space of the cat as a denizen of the edge.

Artists as Corporate Celebrants: Sanrio and Its Anniversary Strategies

Since the thirtieth anniversary of Hello Kitty in 2004–5, and continuing to the thirty-fifth anniversary in 2009–10, Sanrio has taken to celebrating corporate milestones with art. In particular, the group of artists contacted to create Kitty art and the resultant traveling exhibit and book, Kitty Ex. Perfect Guide Book (2004), stand as startling testimony to creative corporate strategy, resulting in new extensions of pink globalization and its meanings. Sanrio describes the collaboration as follows: “Our main concept for the show is to exhibit collaborated artworks created by very talented artists who play an active part in dif-

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ferent fields such as painting, graphic design, photography, music and more, to recreate fresh and new works that best expresses their creativity. We also asked many famous fashion brands including Nike htm, Loree Rodkin, and so forth, to participate and collaborate with us to create exclusive ‘hello kitty’ products in order to spread this celebration all over Japan.”3 Thus, Sanrio juxtaposed two interrelated types of collaborations—artists and brands—in a carefully constructed marketing opportunity that situates Hello Kitty within fields of cutting-edge, capitalist creativity. The question remains, however, Who to invite to the party? Tohmatsu Kazuo, manager of public relations for Sanrio, explains the process in an e-mail interview:

We [Sanrio] were approached by Hollywood Digital Entertainment Corporation (dhe, a Japanese firm) who presented us with a collaboration proposal for a Hello Kitty 30th Anniversary event. In the end they became a license of this project. Together with dhe, we drew up a list of leading artists and brands who were fans of Kitty, and also sought the advice of art coordinators with a deep knowledge of the art world. Some artists were contacted by us directly and some were provided through art coordinators. The exact information [of how many artists were contacted or declined] hasn’t been kept, but we remember that there were only two or so [who declined]. We paid the production costs of the artwork. They were instructed to express Hello Kitty freely, according to their own impression of her, however they were told that any sexual or violent portrayal would not be acceptable. [Sanrio retained the rights to censor the artwork.] We made our reasons for rejecting the artwork clear, and the corrections were carried out pretty much as we requested. (Personal communication, October 1, 2010)

What we see, then, are the results of selected artists who accepted Sanrio’s invitation, as well as produced their works under the possibilities of corporate censorship.

So who made the final cut? Notably, participants with a strong youth orientation: street (graffiti) artists (e.g., Shepard Fairey), fashion designers (e.g., As Four, Jean-Charles De Castelbajac, Jeremy Scott, Jess Holzworth), media artists (e.g., Hachiya Kazuhiko and PetWORKS), digital artists (e.g., Ukawa Naohiro), manga artists (e.g., Tanaka Katsuki), deejay-musicians (e.g., tyg-M Tycoon Graphics Miyoshi Yuichi), and film directors (e.g., Takagi Masakatsu).4 Rather than more conser-

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vative, established mainstream artists (who may have declined anyway), Sanrio opted for designers who tend to occupy the fringes of the art world, often known for the edginess of their work. Some might even be considered subversive artists (see chapter 5), especially in their roots in antimainstream movements such as street art. Although a few may have already engaged Hello Kitty in their art (e.g., Tom Sachs), most did not prior to this collaboration. There are celebrity artists (i.e., people whose names are known perhaps more than their art), such as Sean Lennon, a son of John Lennon, and Malcolm McLaren, the former manager of the Sex Pistols. Of the sixty-four artists (including collectives), thirty-one are from Japan, twenty-six from the United States, three from France, two from England, and one each from Canada and South Korea.5

With such an eclectic mix, the resultant works display a wide range, at least within the edgy tone set by Sanrio’s selection. The American fashion designer Jeremy Scott sculpted an armless nude with Hello Kitty head entitled Hello De Milo. The Japanese artist Hibino Katsuhiko painted small flat river rocks white with Hello Kitty faces, strewn against a background of red. They became multishaped Kitty heads in a work entitled Kitty Stone. The American artists Rajan Mehta and Daniel Jackson, known as Surface to Air, designed a Hello Kitty crop circle executed by the British specialists Circlemakers in a wheat field in Wiltshire, England entitled “Landed.”6 The Japanese art and film director Nagi Noda created a series of oversized, multicolored panda bears surrounding Hello Kitty, who has herself become half panda, in a work entitled Hanpanda (Half-panda). The French-born American street artist and painter W. K. Interact created an installation entitled Kitty Kit Spy depicting Hello Kitty on a worktable, in the process of being taken apart and rigged up as a spy. The Japanese nail artist Eriko Kurosaki designed a series of Hello Kitty nails in red-and-white-checkerboard, daisies, and, of course, the cat’s head, entitled kitty ex. x erikonail*.

From the largest (crop circle) to the smallest (nails) works, the artists took Hello Kitty as an invitation to play. In fact, it is the creative playfulness that often startles the viewer. Sometimes that playfulness results from the unexpected juxtaposition of forms: for example, placing Hello Kitty’s head atop the classical Greek figure of Venus De Milo (Hello De Milo, by Jeremy Scott). The jump in time periods (from Venus De Milo, ca. 130–100 bc, to Hello Kitty, 1974–present) and forms (classical Greek to commercial Japan) acts as the creative language of the work. These formal aspects engage within the context of the artist’s overall body of

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work: the fashion designer Jeremy Scott is known for his playful intersections with pop culture, as the creator of tongue-in-cheek attire for the pop singers Britney Spears and Lady Gaga, and even for Miss Piggy (the character from The Muppet Show), as well as for his incorporation of pop icons, such as Mickey Mouse. Within the context of Scott’s other works, his appropriation of Hello Kitty comes as an extension of his aesthetic. For other artists, however, this foray into a Hello Kitty world seems surprisingly out of character. For example, W. K. Interact, known for his dark, edgy, urban, sometimes tortuous visions that have spanned entire city walls, seems far removed from Kitty. But his work Kitty Kit Spy turns Sanrio’s cat literally into an intricate piece of undercover surveillance as part of spyware. Sometimes the artist plays with natural materials, in effect “Kitty-ing” them: for example, taking river rocks and turning them into Kitty heads (Kitty Stone, by Katsuhiko Hibino). Sometimes the playfulness erupts in the form of size, scale, and medium: for example, Hello Kitty’s face alone may not cause much of a stir, but when enacted through fields of wheat creating a crop circle Kitty image two hundred feet in diameter, the resultant work becomes newsworthy (Landed, by Surface to Air).

Five years later, Sanrio engaged in another collaboration with artists, although this second foray took place under different contexts and with different results. Whereas the thirtieth anniversary exhibit stemmed from Tokyo headquarters and gained broad coverage as a traveling exhibit within Japan, this thirty-fifth anniversary event was initiated by a fan and vendor of Hello Kitty, Jamie Rivadeneira, who worked together with Sanrio’s staff in South San Francisco. Together they staged a single-sited exhibition entitled Three Apples: An Exhibition Celebrating 35 Years of Hello Kitty at Royal/T in Culver City (near Los Angeles) from October to November 2009, which featured the work of seventy-nine artists,7 none of whom had exhibited in the earlier Kitty Ex. show. The resulting event included a Kitty art show, a retrospective of Kitty products, Kitty goods for sale, and a Kitty café. Art here did not act as a standalone; it acted in conjunction with a plethora of goods. Whereas Kitty Ex. drew upon the fringes of the youth-oriented global art world, Three Apples drew upon a more commercial, less edgy, spectrum of artists, hand-picked by the curator Rivadeneira from her Los Angeles–based coterie of friends and associates whom she knew to be Hello Kitty fans. (I provide further details on the process of organizing the exhibit below.)

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From Sanrio’s point of view, these exhibits—and particularly Kitty Ex.—work in a number of ways. First of all, a traveling exhibit and catalogue of cutting-edge art inspired by Hello Kitty raise the public profile of Sanrio, doing so in a way that sets the company and its cat apart from more run-of-the-mill toys or figures. Second, the work of these artists lays testament to the fact that Hello Kitty has become a celebrity in her own right, confirmed as an icon of pop culture worthy of play. (This is also the message of the celebrity of the Sanrio designer Yamaguchi Yūko, discussed in chapter 2.) Hello Kitty is such an icon that she can generate her own subgenre of art.8 Third, the selection of artists—particularly for the Kitty Ex. show—asserts and confirms Hello Kitty’s status as “cool,” hip, edgy, and global—by contagion. Hello Kitty becomes a member of the youth-oriented “in crowd” of graffiti artists, deejays, and street fashionistas, not so much by her own doing, but by association and even incorporation into their creative work. Kitty Ex. gives Hello Kitty her “street credentials.” Three Apples amplifies Hello Kitty’s commercial credentials.

At the same time, Sanrio ensures that Hello Kitty has it both (or multiple) ways—as an edgy artistic figure and a much-beloved object of children’s commercial culture, and the many points in between. The company adopts these forays into the art world as an additive strategy, not as a replacement for what already exists. Therefore, pencil cases, lunch boxes, and erasers coexist with crop circles and painted rocks, as well as the in-between spaces of cell phone straps, designer wallets, and Swarovski crystal necklaces in a shared space defined by Hello Kitty. These inhabitants of the shared space do not necessarily cross paths, or even know about one another, except for their tethering through the mouthless cat. The strategic brilliance of Kitty Ex. and Three Apples rests in their affirmation of the voracious adaptability of Hello Kitty. The particular configuration of mouthlessness and design versatility combine with Sanrio’s own restlessness in seeking new venues, images, and markets. Anniversary celebrations such as these presents themselves as tremendous marketing opportunities, placing Hello Kitty in the limelight in new ways, seen through new eyes, and potentially generating new fandom—including the artists, their followers, and other onlookers. Kitty Ex. and Three Apples act as playful, creative brand extensions.

Does the edge recede as a purely commercial product begs to be let in? Where does subversion lie within the context of artists incorporating (or being asked to incorporate) a figure that acts as trademark or

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logo into their work? These matters are of little concern to Sanrio, of course, but of relevance to the subject of pink globalization. Although this kind of blurring of boundaries between art and commercial realms may not be new, it is an increasingly significant part of twenty-first century global aesthetic realms (discussed further in chapter 7).

Interview: Sanrio’s Dave Marchi’s Gamble with Three Apples In the interview I conducted on March 25, 2010, Marchi details some of the gamble of putting together the Three Apples exhibit (see chapter 2). Explaining that the artists were not paid, Marchi insists that the purpose of the show rested in celebration of Hello Kitty’s longevity and the pleasure of fans. Internalizing the watchful eye of Sanrio headquarters in Tokyo, Marchi understood well the fragility of his and other organizers’ position exactly as brand extenders. In this he relied most on the very fandom of the people (including artists) involved in this project, trusting in the safety net of their judgment and restraint. The tipping point lay in occupying the edge (“going crazy”), while remaining within the confines of the brand. In fact, this is exactly the balancing act of Sanrio’s aesthetic endeavors, pushing the envelope of the brand, here through art. The fact that Marchi and his coworkers (and Rivadeneira) worked long, unpaid hours—combined with Sanrio profiting handsomely from the event—only fueled the belief in the specialness of the occasion. In this, both tireless work and consumer frenzy arise from passion—for the cat, her message, and the playful, but carefully tended possibilities of art mixed with commerce.

D. M.: Jamie Rivadeneira basically became the curator, who was responsible for contacting all the artists who were gonna participate. We just wanted to make sure that it wasn’t like a paid thing. We wanted to get artists who liked Hello Kitty for whatever reason. At first, we said, “OK, since it’s the thirty-fifth anniversary, we’ll get thirty-five artists.” And after that, she [Rivadeneira] sent word out with all her cool artist friends, and it just grew and grew and grew and grew. I can’t remember what the final number was, because some were added and some dropped out, but it was over a hundred works of art that she—god bless her—all curated.

C. Y.: Now, how did it work with the artists? I mean did you commission them?

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D. M.: No, we did not wanna do it that way, because we didn’t want to say, “We’re paying you to make a Hello Kitty work of art.” We wanted it to come from them because they like Hello Kitty, and they wanted to participate in this in some way. So Jamie was able to do that. It was also nice because she was one step removed from Sanrio, the corporate entity. We didn’t wanna be like a Disney saying, “Create this work of art, but you can’t do this and you can’t do this,” but of course, we also didn’t want them to do anything overtly sexual and violent, and so it was kind of a fine line between being the curators who are gonna say, “Don’t do anything wrong with our brand or we’re not gonna include you, but also we want you to express your enjoyment or love for Hello Kitty in your own unique way.” So we allowed her [Rivadeneira] to do all that. And she basically said, “Hi artist, do you wanna participate in this fun, crazy show? Do you like Hello Kitty? If you do, let me know.” And they came back with either sketches or ideas of what they wanted to do, and she went with it.

C. Y.: So Sanrio had nothing to say to the artists themselves?

D. M.: No, ultimately we didn’t, and ultimately we decided if something was so unacceptable for whatever reason, we just wouldn’t include it in the show, but we didn’t wanna say, “Don’t do this. Don’t do that.”

C. Y.: But you did have the right to refuse.

D. M.: We had the right to refuse, yes, and—

C. Y.: And did you exert that?

D. M.: We didn’t, actually.

C. Y.: So you never had to?

D. M.: And part of the reason was we made sure that people participating were fans of Hello Kitty, and we assumed and kind of gambled, if you were a fan of Hello Kitty, you’re not going to do anything too terrible, like—we don’t wanna show her with her head cut off, or anything superviolent, and we kind of . . . put that on Jamie the curator to say, “OK, when you’re contacting the artists, just make sure you know that they’re

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fans, and ultimately, if it’s unacceptable in some way, they’re not gonna show it, but feel free to go crazy; especially because we had not commissioned them, it didn’t . . . put them under pressure to do anything that would be acceptable to us, but in the back of their minds, I’m assuming they were saying “OK, if I’m creating something and it’s gonna be part of this show, and if I show her being impaled or stabbed or something unacceptable, it most likely won’t be in, so if I had the idea to do that, I probably shouldn’t if I wanna be part of this. . . .”

C. Y.: So there is a kind of self-censorship that’s going on amongst the artists.

D. M.: Yeah, but also, I think, the majority of them probably wouldn’t wanna do something because they do genuinely enjoy Hello Kitty and wanted to celebrate her in that way. But it’s not for every Hello Kitty fan. I mean I would’ve brought my niece there and walked her through it, but there were certain things that were a little racy, and to be honest, the powers that be were a bit nervous when we went ahead with this, and bless them, they said, “OK, you can do this. But there is a potential that it could blow up and it could not be right, and if that happens, we’re not gonna be very happy and you’ll never get the opportunity to do this again,” and we kind of took a gamble and wondered, “Gosh. Is there gonna be anything that compromises the brand or is it gonna paint us in a bad light or is it gonna offend anyone?”

C. Y.: And those powers that be, are they Tokyo or are they L.A. [overseas headquarters]?

D. M.: Tokyo. Ultimately Tokyo, but we went through it with the president of Sanrio Global Consumer Product in L.A., and she accepted the challenge and said, “We’ll go forward with this.” And I talked to our coo [chief operating officer], Ray [Hatoyama], who also gave his guidance and input, but ultimately he said, “OK, do it and go with your instincts, but if anything blows up or if anything’s bad, it’s not gonna be a good thing,” So we did gamble a little bit on that.

C. Y.: Just a question: For the artists who did works for the Three Apples, if they sell that work, does Sanrio get some of that? Or how does that work?

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D. M.: The actual pieces of art—when they were sold, the revenue was split between the artists and the curator, and we took a small royalty because we had to. We were asked from our parent company that if this is happening and something’s being sold, we do need to receive a small royalty, so we did receive a very, very small royalty, but we donated the majority of that to charity. We didn’t want to make this a consumer event that was gonna bring in lots of money. We . . . the people who did it—we wanted to do it just because we thought it was cool, and we wanted to do it for the fans. The core is just making it fun for the fans.

Artist Profile: Tom Sachs The sculptor Tom Sachs (b. 1966) is probably the most prominent artist actively and personally engaged in works that incorporate Hello Kitty (see cover). Notably, he was one of the Kitty Ex. artists, with his Mudai [no title] installation, a series of how-to-draw-Hello-Kitty panels in primarily red, white, and black.9 Sachs’s art is bold and very public, particularly in the way in which he and his works have a knack for gaining media attention. He revels in a reputation as a bad boy, a transgressive artist who uses Hello Kitty and other pop icons to incite, enrage, shock, and ultimately engage.

One of his earliest works involving Hello Kitty came about in 1994–95, when he designed a window for the Christmas display of the legendary trendsetting Barneys New York department store in Manhattan. Sachs entitled the result Hello Kitty Nativity. In it Sanrio’s cat replaced the Baby Jesus; a likeness of the pop celebrity Madonna replaced the Virgin Mary, had six breasts, and wore a Chanel outfit and Air Jordan shoes; the American irreverent cartoon character Bart Simpson replaced the three wise men; and a McDonald’s logo hung atop the stable. Sachs comments on the exhibit and the extreme controversy it generated:

I think the most interesting and terrifying situation was the reaction to my Hello Kitty nativity scene, which was part of a holiday window display at Barneys in 1994. It was meant to be auctioned off to benefit the Little Red Schoolhouse [children’s early education charity organization]. I was pretty much unknown at that point. . . . The Catholic League said it defamed Christianity. They organized a protest, hate mail, and a whole radio campaign until Barneys agreed to remove the piece. I received a series of death threats and a hundred-fifty hate

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mail letters. It was pretty scary. I was making a commentary on the commercialism of Christmas, and all of a sudden I was like this enemy of the state. . . . I’m interested in these transgressive themes, not for their shock value, but as a way to look at societal boundaries. It’s those kinds of explorations that result in situations like the Barneys window. (Halley 2001)

That “situation like the Barneys window” placed Sachs and Hello Kitty directly in the headlines, generating controversy and media spotlight.

As Sachs has continued to use pop icons to critique consumerism and commodity fetishism, Hello Kitty resurfaces in prominent ways in his work. In 2009, Sachs created his now infamous Bronze Collection, featuring two 10-foot-high white bronze casts of foam-core sculpted figures of Hello Kitty and Miffy (the white rabbit drawn by Dick Bruna, a Dutch artist, for a series of children’s picture books) and a twenty-one-foot-tall bronze Hello Kitty rising behind the fountains.10 These sculptures were shown at Lever House on Park Avenue in New York City (the installation of which is shown as the cover of this book), the Baldwin Gallery in Aspen, Colorado, and the Palais de Chaillot in the Trocadéro area of Paris across the River Seine from the Eiffel Tower. The two huge cartoon figures functioned as fountains, with tears flowing from their eyes— Crying Hello Kitty. Meanwhile, Sachs comments on the even larger Hello Kitty statue: “This windup Hello Kitty is an expression of how automated my life can feel sometimes. Maybe that’s why she’s the biggest one in the show and looks like she’s about to fall over” (Sheets 2008). In fact, Sachs’s looming white fountain of weeping Hello Kitty with the Eiffel Tower in the background could easily be considered iconic of pink globalization itself: Sanrio’s cat grown to huge proportions, filling an urban landscape, reconfigured by a notorious American bad-boy artist, set against the backdrop of one of the most famous sites of the world, Paris’s Eiffel Tower. It is exactly the meeting of icons—Hello Kitty, Eiffel Tower, even Tom Sachs himself—that serves as the fitting site of antiKitty public rant, as discussed in chapter 4.

Sachs discusses sculpting Hello Kitty in bronze:

For me to do a model of “Hello Kitty,” which is this merchandising icon that exists only as a merchandising and licensed character. To then redo that in a “fine” material like bronze, I think is really to the point. It’s recontextualizing, shifting it back to a high level and making it really, really clear. . . . It is sculpture, because it’s talked about,

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sold, and shown as such. But to me it’s really bricolage, which is the French term for do-it-yourself repair. Bricolage comes from a culture that repairs rather than replaces—American culture just replaces.11

Here, as elsewhere, Sachs is intent upon politicizing his works and the society from which it springs.

Sachs’s website describes his art as “sampling capitalist culture, remixing, dubbing and spitting it back out again, so that the results are transformed and transforming.”12 This is exactly the process that Hello Kitty undergoes in Sachs’s creative hands. She is the Hello Kitty remix, “transformed and transforming,” whether ensconced at the Trocadéro overlooking the Eiffel Tower, or tucked into the nativity scene of a display window at Barneys. Sachs acts as the art-world trickster, the pop culture provocateur who uses Hello Kitty (and Miffy and Madonna and McDonald’s) as but one of many in his bag of resources for transgressive expression. As he explains in the September 2009 issue of Wired magazine, “Hello Kitty is an icon that doesn’t stand for anything at all. Hello Kitty never has been, and never will be, anything. She’s pure license; you can even get a Hello Kitty car! The branding thing is completely out of control, but it started as nothing and maintains its nothingness” (Wired 2001). In Sachs’s hands, Hello Kitty—the “icon that doesn’t stand for anything at all”—becomes big and bad.

Artist Profile: Leika Akiyama That sense of bad-boy transgressiveness that shapes Sachs’s Hello Kitty–infused work transforms into playfulness, even a visual sense of magical realism, in the hands of a longtime Hello Kitty fan and Japanese-born American small-scale sculptor, Leika Akiyama (b. 1965). Although Akiyama was never invited to be a part of either Kitty Ex. or Three Apples, Hello Kitty shapes her work in compelling ways. In fact, Akiyama’s work may be seen within the context of a minor new, emerging Hello Kitty–linked locus for pink globalization and Japanese CuteCool in the field of serious art in the United States. A 2005 exhibit at the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts, of which Akiyama was a part, was entitled Pretty Sweet: The Sentimental Image in Contemporary Art (see figure 6.1). The curator, Nick Carpasso, whose quote begins this chapter, writes: “Painters, sculptors, and even art-and-technology/new media artists now employ the rich visual language of sentimental imagery for a wide variety of aesthetic, intel-

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lectual, and political purposes. . . . The components of this emotional spectrum . . . include love, happiness, delight, comfort, innocence, vulnerability, serenity, security, sympathy, nostalgia, bittersweet melancholy, and pleasure” (2005:5). In fact, Carpasso paints the emotional terrain of kawaii. The exhibit featured thirty-three artists from the Boston area, each of whom regard sentimentality as serious, aesthetic business, but in different ways. The website for the exhibit explains:

Contemporary artists approach the sentimental for three primary reasons: to celebrate the positive emotional spectrum, to evoke memory and nostalgia, and to ironically attack sentimentality as an inauthentic and damaging simplification of the human condition. Running throughout these categories is a deep ambivalence about the sentimental image, which parallels American society’s love-hate relationship with this material. On the one hand, the sentimental has been ruthlessly cast out of serious intellectual discourse since the early nineteenth century (most vehemently by Modernism), but on the other, the most successful artist working today is Thomas Kinkade,13 a painter of treacly landscapes whose art empire is traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The embrace of sentimental imagery may well be the most radical and avant-garde stance possible for a contemporary artist to take.14

That “radical and avant-garde stance” thus draws a fine but critical line between embracing the sentimental as raw materials for creative expression and “treacly” Kinkade-style sentimentality.

Akiyama does not necessarily share America’s “love-hate relationship” with the sentimental or with kawaii. Rather, she enthusiastically embraces things kawaii, including Hello Kitty, in her own whimsical but profound manner (figure 6.2). In fact, Akiyama attributes this combination of whimsy and profundity to Hello Kitty herself. The catalogue to the deCordova exhibit provides this introduction to Akiyama:

The artist has said that, “ever since I was a child growing up in Tokyo, I have wanted to live in a Hello Kitty universe.” Out of this fantasy sprang her own personal universe—a world of riotous installations overpopulated by silly and strange bunnies and plastic doll heads, neon feather boas, psychedelic fabrics, shiny plastic toys, glitter, jewels, and other cheap and tacky objects that relate to Japanese youth culture, kitsch, and kawaii (the culture of “cute”). . . .

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6.2. Hello Kitty Shinto Shrine by Leika Akiyama (2006).

Although Akiyama recognizes the attractive/repulsive effect of her work, she considers her found objects beautiful, and adores their color, texture, and character which she believes can create happiness. Her electric celebrations of cheap excess are elevated to the status of shrines honoring the artist’s personal devotion to her totem of tacky symbols. (Novina 2005:20)

Hello Kitty—whether literally or referentially—acts as one of the “tacky symbols” re-creating the emotional and aesthetic universe of Akiyama’s childhood.

Akiyama herself proclaims, “Hello Kitty is my sacred icon” (personal communication, February 28, 2005). Although only some of her work actually utilizes Hello Kitty, a strong sense of kawaii animates all of her images. She explains, “Hello Kitty informs my work in such a fundamental way. It is her world that I want to re-create and inhabit. It is shiny, full of rainbows, and it is so atmospherically dense” (personal communication, February 28, 2005). What separates Akiyama’s approach to Hello Kitty–laden sentiment from a more “treacly” treatment is exactly what

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she calls “atmospheric density.” As an example of Kitty-centered atmospheric density, Akiyama’s large, mixed-media installation measuring six square feet entitled Hello Kitty Shinto Shrine (2006) shows a bright pink (Sanrio color) floral-and-bauble background inlaid with various heads, including that of Hello Kitty, each surrounded by a circle of pink feathers. She writes:

In this work I am continuing on my series titled “Bubbles Bubblicious: A Collection of Dreamy Zen Mandala.” For this show I have created a large size Hello Kitty Mandala surrounded by smaller Bunny/Doll Head Mandalas to pay tribute to my Icon Hello Kitty or Kitty-chan as she is referred to in Japan. . . . I worship mass-produced objects and toy characters such as . . . Hello Kitty . . . and I try to put them into Mandalas, a symbol of my personal mythology and universe. By creating a context within which to surround these mass-produced often discarded or trivialized objects I am creating an entrée into my own mystical world in which they can realize their uniqueness and their “isness of things.” (Akiyama 2006)

Akiyama thus uses Hello Kitty as an intimate personal expression, bringing her childhood into adulthood play, creating an intricately embroidered world of shiny objects, fluffy frills, and pastel colors that creates its own density through detailed whimsy. Even when large in size, this is a world of feminine miniatures that places Hello Kitty at the center of its “isness.” In Akiyama’s hands, Hello Kitty becomes a whimsical-yet-profound object of artistic worship.

Artist Profile: Leslie Holt The bold transgressiveness of Tom Sachs’s art contrasts with the intimate spaces of Akiyama’s Hello Kitty–infused work, which contrasts with the tongue-in-cheek Hello Kitty art of the American painter Leslie Holt (b. 1969). In May 2008, Holt opened a show entitled Hello Masterpiece in St. Louis, Missouri. The exhibit’s title references the almost two hundred pieces she painted that copy some of Western art’s most well-known masterpieces, to which Holt adds a Hello Kitty figure—all in miniature form, postcard sized. For example, Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus includes Hello Kitty on the clamshell; Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory includes Hello Kitty, whose own clock is not melting like all the others (figure 6.3); Pablo Picasso’s Guernica includes Hello Kitty tumbling amidst the jumble of figures. Holt explains: “She’s [Kitty] a

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6.3. Hello Dali by Leslie Holt (2007).

girly-girl but also adventurous and capable and strong. . . . I joke about her being a feminist icon as well as a commercial whore because she’s everywhere. . . . She’s . . . part of this reclamation of girliness that’s going on now—that you can be girly and not be weak” (Keaggy 2008). In this, Holt echoes the appropriations of punk feminists (chapter 5).

Since then, she has continued to add to the Hello Masterpiece collection, incorporating works based on masterpieces by a wide range of artists and styles, including Byzantine mosaics, Venus of Willendorf (Paleolithic female figure), Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio, Leonardo Da Vinci, Johannes Vermeer, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, Vincent Van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Piet Mondrian, Keith Haring, Roy Lichtenstein, Rene Magritte, Jackson Pollock, Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keefe, Mary Cassatt, Andy Warhol, and even Shepard Fairey. In short, there is a hardly an artist well known to students of an introductory survey course of Western art that Holt does not take on as part of her purview. Part of what startles viewers of her exhibit is the audacity of the artist matched by the audacity of Hello Kitty’s placement—both quelled by the miniature size of the works.

Holt’s artist statement in 2009 explains further her incorporation of Hello Kitty into well-established works of art:

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In my most recent “Hello Masterpiece (art appreciation)” series, I juxtapose the character, Hello Kitty, with famous images from art history. The paintings are postcard size, similar to those found in a museum gift shop. The famous paintings become pop culture icons akin to Hello Kitty, and the paintings’ appeal as take home sized objects reinforces their context as commodities in a market. In these paintings Hello Kitty is often taking a tour through art history and dressing up to “match” elements of the famous painting. Hello Kitty becomes a toy version of Cindy Sherman [photographer known for depicting herself in different costumes], capable of changing identities by transforming her outer appearance. However, her “toyness” and her obvious overlay on the image disrupt any illusion that she actually fits in the scene of the artwork.

In other images from this series, Hello Kitty is pointing toward social or political issues, such as war, genocide, or gender identity. I rely on her to charm the viewer into looking, but her innocent, playful appeal contrasts with the serious adult subject matter. With this contrast of adult and childlike content and these “high” and “low” cultural icons, I hope to elicit laughter and irony.15

Holt’s use of Hello Kitty works on several levels. First of all, Hello Kitty as icon quasi-matches the iconicity of these famous painting. Both are popular commodities, although from different realms. Holt’s juxtaposition serves to connect those realms. Second, Hello Kitty acts as a chameleon, changing costumes to suit the particular frame. In this, Holt mimics the work of Sanrio, which constantly creates new iterations and contexts of their cat. Hello Masterpiece parallels Sanrio’s gotōchi series in which Hello Kitty embodies the famous souvenirs of many regions (chapter 1). Third, Hello Kitty, in spite of her flexibility, retains her highly recognizable identity as Sanrio creation. Holt’s juxtaposition does not truly move Hello Kitty “up”; rather, Kitty’s presence in the sanctified halls of museums and color-plate pages of art history books provides a jolt of laughter and irony. In Holt’s hands, being “Hello Kittied” means being “punked.”

Kitty Extensions: Emergent Gallery Meanings

Undoubtedly, Hello Kitty—as product, as logo, as design—is artistic expression. Hello Kitty is not born, but made, repeatedly in myriad products and contexts, each instance the result of an aesthetically in-

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formed design practice. Sanrio reinforces the processes of her creation by spotlighting her designer, Yamaguchi Yūko, to the point at which Yamaguchi herself has become a celebrity: as discussed in chapter 2, she is “Kitty Mama.” But that celebrity rests in the underlying belief that far from industrial production on a mass scale, Hello Kitty is an artisanal product from which Yamaguchi’s hand rests never far.

The imprint of artistic expression, therefore, pervades the figure of Hello Kitty, even before other artists lay their hands upon her. However, when they do—or when they are prompted to do so by Sanrio’s celebratory events—the results push the envelope of Hello Kitty in ways one can only assume that Sanrio accepts and perhaps even encourages. In the hands of particular artists, she can be big and bad, whimsy and profundity; she can punk. The trick for Sanrio is to engage in this kind of play with and at the edge—taunting blurred boundaries, coaxing and teasing transgression—while maintaining the brand loyalty of its primary constituents. Although the company itself engages in some of this boundary play through its very products (see chapter 5), the gamble rests more on those artists they engage to play. The artists participating in Kitty Ex. and Three Apples coalesce into a youthful (or youth-oriented) age range, generally white or Asian, occupying fringe art worlds. By selecting these bedfellows for Hello Kitty, Sanrio asserts a particular edgy domain as the targeted brand extension.

This extension works in important and clever ways, first by imparting the status, legitimacy, and ultimate cool of youthful, edgy art world. Second, however, and no less importantly, Sanrio’s extension into artistic fields incorporates critique within its fold. Thus the divide between Hello Kitty critics (chapter 4) and Hello Kitty artists (this chapter) is not so clearly drawn. By inviting its potential critics in, Sanrio performs the neat trick of extending their welcome: not necessarily quelling their voices, Sanrio includes them within its corporate expression. Thus to the question of Why art?, and, more specifically, Why this art?, I suggest that art extends the cultural capital of Sanrio, as well as the expressive regime from which Hello Kitty might occupy a more unassailable position. This is a corporate version of having one’s cake and eating it, too. By inviting these artists in, Sanrio asserts that Hello Kitty may be as cool, or even cooler than, her critics.

What do artists themselves get from these forays into the kitschy sentimental sphere of the cat? It may be difficult to generalize, since the range of artists incorporating Hello Kitty is wide within the fringe posi-

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tion. For those artists invited by Sanrio, they gain broader exposure and support: artists have always needed patrons, and Sanrio acts as a willing one. Sanrio-corralled artists get to participate with fellow creators in a “cool” party. On a more substantive level, however, artists may engage with Hello Kitty as a serious invitation to play. The play that Hello Kitty engenders may be characterized by its multiple facets, speaking different languages—sentimentality, irony, parody—at the same time. This lays the groundwork for what Akiyama calls “atmospheric density.” The complex play accepts the “commercial whoredom” of Sanrio’s cat, expressed by Holt, as well as the “nothingness” of her blank slate, expressed by Sachs. These artists see both rich possibilities in her flexibility, as well as strongly coded messages of “being Kittied.” Artists, critics, and subversive appropriators alike tend to agree on what Hello Kitty means: cuteness, sweetness, innocence. The fence lies in how art frames those meanings and the manipulations of play that surround it.

What does it suggest for cuteness—especially in its capitalist form— to become art? Can Hello Kitty become the (commercial) whore with the heart of gold? Juxtaposing cuteness, art, and capitalism invites obvious critique, playing exactly into the hands of early twentieth-century Frankfurt School critics, such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Yet I suggest that this combination may exist most fruitfully through aestheticized play, fusing art with some of the most radical creative endeavors to embrace the forbidden subject of cuteness. As Carpasso argues, the time may be right for this emergent field of the sentimental in art that can encompass cynicism and sweetness, sophistication and innocence, adult and child, without losing sight of either. If the subject of sweetness has made modernists uncomfortable in the past, then the “heart of gold” of Kitty’s whoredom lies in legitimizing the sentimental as the purview of mature, creative expression, and even the avant-garde. For Sanrio, these extended meanings may translate into extended markets, but they also suggest extended lives, emotions, and interactions. Although Hello Kitty may be “pure license,” as Sachs suggests, she gives artists, consumers, and even critics, license to play with some enduring aspects of what makes us human—that is, sentimentality, sweetness, and the softer side of things. Beyond the simplistic fodder of kitsch, this view embraces the kitschy realm of Japanese Cute and invites us to take a second and third, and even fourth, look over the edge into the many possibilities of such radical vulnerability.

One artist who has taken many looks at Hello Kitty and the surfeit of

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kitschiness that surrounds her is Japanese megastar Murakami Takashi, a key instigator of that complex of the 2000s known as the Superflat movement and the related Cool Japan governmental program. I turn to these topics in the last chapter, which concludes our discussion of pink globalization, reframing Hello Kitty within these projects and discussing the possibilities and limitations of doing so.

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