Mariko Mori: Miko No Inori

Awaken! Know the cosmic wisdom, life’s mystery,
and the efflux of primal energy that has no entity.
Let us transcend language and conception.
Let our flesh melt into the air. Let our spirit be liberated.
Let us be the one with the ultimate truth of our selves
and the whole universe.
Spiritual energy is eternal, no death or birth strikes it.

-excerpt, from Mariko Mori’s statement The Eternal Law (1998)

In Moriko Mori’s Miko No Inori (The Shaman-Girl’s Prayer) (1996), Mori slowly contact juggles a crystal ball, suggesting the grace of a woman performing a traditional Japanese tea service. A beautiful, lithe Japanese woman, Mori wears a white and shiny lycra and plastic costume, evoking an animé-inspired future-angel, or as the translated title claims, a shaman-girl performing a ritual with a talisman. The ritual and the talisman’s function, being alien or from the future or from an alternative spiritual realm, is unfamiliar to us. A clear bubble wraps around her, separating her from and obscuring her background. Within the futuristic architecture of a subway station (a future that already exists today), plain clothes people bustle around her without noticing the foreign visitation. Her eyes, shining blue and white light, emphasize her otherness. A haunting song plays throughout.

Mori’s multimedia work comes to us from a junction of global interconnectedness, for she was born in Tokyo and received an elite education in fashion in Tokyo and art in London and New York. She was a fashion model in the early 1990s before turning to the art world. Her father is an inventor, and her mother is an art historian, specializing in European art. This video marks a transition in her work from conceptual work in which she performed a futuristic visitor to a typical urban day to elaborate multi-media productions in which she stresses a spiritual, rather than futuristic, transcendence. In Miko No Inori, Mori presents herself as a Western fantasy of an Asian girl, addressing head on issues of differance, xenophobia and xenophilia. The kitchy costume recalls 1960s sci-fi flicks, and an anime abreviation of a Geisha, while her face and movements point to a generalized Asian-ness. The lack of specificity, the blurring of pop and traditional references, leaves one feeling uneasy. Her other-worldly shining gaze mesmerizes the viewer. Mori’s statements suggest that the glowing eyes, if they mesmerize, are a persuasion to a worthy cause, but still, there is that uneasiness.

Phonetically, the title, M(or)iko No Ig(n)ori, is a witty ellision, like a make-believe foreign language, or a Westerner’s imitation of an Asian accent. Translation: Don’t Ignore Moriko. The english translation of the title may be a diversion; this phonetic reading relays direct artistic ambition indirectly. It is thrilling and terrifying that the title demands attention for her art and also for her message. A cult leader might lure supporters with a similar insinuating seduction; his feel-good message is a means to a less idealistic and more profitable end. Mori’s work has dissonance in one note. Not only past, present and future existing simultaneously, but also multiple realities. She can be both ambitious and recognize the interconnectedness of all things and the limits of that interconnectedness.

Fame is often conflated with love and the abiding need for it. Artist and provacateur Martin Creed in 2006 answered the question “Why do you do this?” with “I want to be loved.” Creed was responding to the broader sense of the “this” in the question; this was his whole career. In an artist talk that was largely performative and ironic, his response seemed true; it encompassed assumptions about what artists should feel and, beneath the shield of irony, a fierce reason for all actions.

In Mori’s early work Tea Ceremony III (1995), she wears a silver lycra alien costume and also the skirt suit of female executive assistant. Smiling, she holds out a drink to the businessmen walking by. The photograph recalls Cindy Sherman’s Film Stills, in which Sherman was always in costume and in a setting evocative of a still from a movie. The costumes and the sets were characters and situations respectively. The more Sherman Film Stills one looked at, the more these costumes and settings registered as shells; the inner Sherman remained a mystery.

In Andy Warhol’s description of a certain debutante called “Taxi”, one can get an idea of the reason of her appeal to him.

Taxi […] had a poignantly vacant, vulnerable quality that made her a reflection of everybody’s private fantasies. Taxi cold be anything you wanted her to be- a little girl, a woman, intelligent, dumb, rich, poor---anything. She was a wonderful, beautiful blank. The mystique to end all mystiques. ^1.

This description is applicable to allure of Mori’s shells. Unlike Taxi however, Mori wields her mystique with great self-awareness. Mori’s gestures, like those in her statements, are both earnest, in that they speak to a desire for a better world. They are also red herring, diverting us from the (more interesting) question of what enlightenment is and what it looks like. Mori writes, “Spiritual energy is eternal, no death or birth strikes it.” Mori seeks spiritual and artistic immortality. The implication here is that her pursuit of spiritual enlightenment is inseparable from her art.

^1. Warhol, Andy. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again). Orlando, Florida: Harcourt, Inc., 1975: 33.

Mariko Mori was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1967. Mariko Mori has quickly become one of the most innovative and exciting multimedia artists in the world. Her work embraces an astonishing range of media, including photography, video, performance art, and most recently 3-D video technology. She worked as a fashion designer and model in the 1980s and later developed as an artist, first in London at the Chelsea School of Art and than at the Whiney Museum of American Art in New York. Mori has exhibited at Baltic Center for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK, Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris, Deitch Projects, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and Sao Paolo Biennale, Sao Paolo, Brazil. She currently lives and works in New York.

Tyler Emerson-Dorsch is currently partner at Dorsch Gallery in Miami, FL. She has curated and co-curated shows at the gallery and the Frost Museum at FIU, both in Miami. She completed her MA at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in 2008, having written a thesis focusing on video art. In 2007 she assisted Darsie Alexander on the exhibition catalog for Franz West, published by Baltimore Art Museum. She worked at Miami Art Museum and then Fredric Snitzer Gallery in Miami. She has a BA in Art History from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.