| Artist: | Yasumasa Morimura |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title: | Portrait: Marilyn Monroe | |
| Date: | 1990 | |
| Nationality: | Japanese | |
| Context: | Refiguring the Subject | |
| Movement: | ||
| Materials: | digitized photograph | |
| Subject: Morimura playing the part of Marilyn Monroe in a classic shot from "The Seven Year Itch." In reworking the Western feminine ideal with an Asian male playing the part of the sex goddess, Morimura addresses issues of race, gender, and nationality; multiplies the self thereby unfixing identity in terms of a core self; transculturalism; hybrid identities; cloning; Cyborg alternative realities. Style: dresses and styles himself for the part. Applies digital computer-scanning techniques that enable him to merge 2 or more images of himself in the same picture; image cloning. Context: late 20th c. age of global capital, information, and image downloading; questions essentialism, the "natural" categories of East (Oriental) and West (Occidental) and the "natural" categories of masculine and feminine; explores a hybrid space in between dying binaries, one that thrives on disjunctions rather than fixed states Morimura as cultural critic; cross-dressing at its most radical; shows that fixed identity is an obsolete concept; also critiques Japan's culture of Western appropriation and commodification; revisionist art history; the gender switch recalls the tradition of Kabuki theater in which male actors take on the female roles. | ||
