And Mushrooms Are Cute Because? or, I <3 Murakami

As mentioned when I posted my photographs of mushrooms, for some reason I have this thing about mushrooms.  But I’m not alone.  For some reason, mushrooms are cute.  If you really think about that, it’s little odd, is it not?  My god they’re a fungus after all.  And yet there is a certain fetishism around mushrooms.  On a culinary level, they are held up as a delicacy – a well deserved fetishisation in my opinion, but really kind of strange if you consider that a true connoisseur would not even wash his mushrooms.  There is also a history of an artistic framing of mushrooms.  They were featured in the work of Baroque Italian and Dutch still life painters.  In the Victorian era there was a whole genre of Victorian Fairy Paintings which prominently feature mushrooms – the favored miniature home of fairies and sprites after all.  Taken out of context, we see this miniature world and its constituent parts as cute and the world of childhood fantasy.  The fantasy piece is critical, because it actually points at a more sinister under-layer and symbolism to the genre.  This world of elves and mushrooms is a part of the innocent world of all that represents childhood in much the same way that Alice in Wonderland is part of it.  This fantasy world is inextricably bound up with the psychedelic and hallucinatory.  Besides their miniature stature, given their potential hallucinatory properties mushrooms are a logical part of this world.  There is a sexual component to the genre as well, since the fairies were often barely clad, impish with a tantalizing combination of innocence and overt sexuality.  Really it’s all beginning to sound frighteningly like child pornography to me — and I think the comparison is not so far off.

The modern rebirth of the fetishised image of mushrooms comes largely out of the artistic culture surrounding anime and manga.  In this context, they are presented as even more personified and cartoonish.  But I think the differences from the Victorian genre are more superficial than they seem at first.  I love my mushroom keychain, the little mushroom earrings I gave my daughter, or the mushrooms depicted on children’s t-shirts a few seasons back.  But to my eye, the very cutest mushrooms are those depicted by one of my absolute favorite contemporary artists — Takashi Murakami.

Figurines from my personal collection

Murakami’s work brilliantly plays with the tropes of anime and manga in a way that draws disconcerting attention to the bizarre sexual fetishism which underlies the genres as a whole.  His works are enchanting, full of exhuberance, fun and whimsy, distracting the viewer from how unbelievably disturbing they actually are.  Murakami’s fantastical world feels a little like this (pretty awesome, huh?):

Murakami exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, 2008

And yet is inhabited by less than friendly figures:

Miss Ko (shown left), from 1997, only scratches the surface of where Murakami goes with the human figure.  In the interest of keeping this site relatively PG-13, I am not including some of his more explicit sculptures.  Suffice to say, 1998′s My Lonesome Cowboy and 1997′s Hiropon are something to behold (and make me question my interest in manga culture), Mr. Big Mushroom from 2011 may be the most explicitly phallic work of art I have ever seen, and the Inochi video which can be found on You Tube is funny, but utterly bizarre.  As disturbing as the works can be at their most extreme, and as beautiful as some of the more innocent objects can be, as a body of work, I think Murakami draws our attention to the tenuous balance between all that we elevate as innocent and pure and the world of fantasy and transgression, worlds that we may imagine we can keep separate, but through the mechanisms of desire, are inextricably intertwined.

Takashi Murakami is represented by the Gagosian Gallery where his work was on exhibit this summer.

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