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Occasionally an artist emerges whose rise to prominence is so meteoric that there is immediate doubt regarding the seriousness of the artist's work. Thirty-two-year-old Mariko Mori had four major solo exhibitions in 1998: at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; the Serpentine Gallery, London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Mariko Mori, a catalog accompanying these exhibitions, includes essays by curators from these four venues.1 Mori worked as a fashion model and fashion designer in Tokyo before studying art in London and New York City and maintains studios in both New York and Tokyo. She is from a wealthy Japanese family and her work is slick, created using the newest technologies and obviously expensive to produce. She has garnered an enormous amount of attention, with reviews and artides in various publications from Artforum and Art News to Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. However, most of the writing about her in these publications runs less than 250 words and is no more critical of the work itself than this paragraph.
One of Mori's early works, Birth of a Star (1995), is a prediction of her own imminent fame. It is as if Mori is saying, "this is what I will become." Mori appears in this self-portrait, as in all of her works, in a costume of her own design. She is outfitted in a vinyl, schoolgirl-like short plaid skirt and her legs have the smooth plastic surface quality of a blow-up doll. She is wearing oversized headphones and holding some kind of remote control device. The work is a life-size Duratrans print (whereby the photograph is mounted on a lightbox and illuminated from behind) that emanates eerie, technopop music. Around her float brightly colored balloons. Her playful gesture coupled with her curious activity question the relationship of young girls and popular culture, fashion and the art world.
The first time I saw The Birth of a Star I thought of Donna Haraway's cyborg as described in her seminal essay A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century"2 Haraway's essay is truly a manifesto: it is a declaration of her desire for women to begin to take responsible pleasure in the mixing of boundaries between human and...