Green Design

I felt a little bad about posting those disrespectful pictures of Bert the other day and I wanted to share a postmodern use of a Sesame Street character that actually brings joy to the world and still tugs at the old conceptual heartstrings. This is the opposite of cynical; it is actually using design and our global visual culture as a tool for positive change and environmental conservation.

These illustrated garbage bags are being distributed free of charge at select outdoor events and to schools and volunteer cleanup groups throughout Japan. Produced by the Tokyo-based design firm MAQ Inc., the bags feature a design of Oscar the Grouch that was illustrated by Lily Franky in collaboration with Sesame Street. They are part of an environmental awareness campaign aimed at children and are just one small example of how art and design can be used to make the world a better place.

Ahhh, Karma cleansed.

Sesame Street Urban Myths

I was watching some Sesame Street on PBS with my son and I was a little surprised at how many of the segments remain unchanged from when I was a preschooler. With the small exception of the completely digital background that accompanies the ‘Elmo’s World’ segment that now routinely ends the show, nearly all the segments seem to have been produced in the seventies or eighties and were almost instantly familiar. Some of these are just charmingly full of nostalgia and also showcase some stunningly well-done, watercolor animation. My all time favorite came on just yesterday and I decided I needed to share it here:

 

I suppose the reason Sesame Street’s consistency surprised me is that through my teens and college years I was led to believe (without ever confirming it for myself) that Sesame Street had succumbed to a great deal of pressure to change due to the new climate of diversity and political correctness. Of course these changes seemed all the more believable because of their ridiculousness… Cookie Monster developing diabetes, Bert and Ernie coming out as homosexuals, and even having Ernie die from Aids as a lesson in the importance of safe sexual practice.

In truth, it seems that Cookie Monster often extols the virtues of fruits and vegetables but still loves a good cookie and that Bert and Ernie remain alive and just good friends despite their opposing personalities. In looking for the source of these rumors, I found a few contemporary ones that actually happen to be true. The most surprising being that Bert appears on some posters used in rallies supporting Osama Bin Laden. The truth behind this bit of truly humorous trivia serves as an example of our global interconnection as a visual culture, and that our instantaneous access to images often reveals incongruous and humorous misinterpretations.


The original image of Bert with Osama was created by a satirical site called Bert is Evil. The crux of the site is that, as a running joke, they paste Bert into images of infamy (i.e. JFK’s assassination, consulting with Hitler, etc.). The truly humorous part of the story is that someone in Bangladesh picked up this image from a web search and used it on collage style posters meant to celebrate the world’s most famous terrorist. Subsequently images of the rallies, using these posters of terror, were picked up by Reuters and the Associated Press and were widely circulated. Sesame Street is shown in over 120 countries and I like to think that the presence of the globally well-known and lovable Muppet, seen over Osama’s left shoulder, works to undermine the messages of hate and fear that these posters were originally meant to spread.

I also have to ask myself, why Bert? Is it because he seems to be the only Muppet that goes out of his way to seem grown up? Do we instinctually pick on entities fighting against their prescribed nature? Or do we simply need to critique those sweet and well-meaning memories of our youth in order to bolster our own sense of cynical adulthood. Sesame Street is not the only target, but these two bits of particularly satirical artwork from the Internet exhibit titled, “Illegal Art,” demonstrate that it ranks right up there with Disney as a singular cultural expression of our youthful innocence.

Diana Thorneycroft
"Man with Large Nose"
Graphite on paper, 2002

Wally Wood
"Disneyland Memorial Orgy"
Poster, 1967

To end on an upbeat note, I thought I’d also include one of my favorite musical sessions from Sesame Street. It’s hard not to overturn chuckling cynicism for joy when hearing Stevie Wonder in his prime. By the way the fabulous singers backing the pinball animation are none other than The Pointer Sisters.

Beast Eats West

Relations between America and Japan have been tested by our shared history; Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima…Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai. Even as recently as the 1980’s the American media went out of their way to portray the economic threat of the Japanese corporate structure as being made up of dangerously repressed businessmen reduced to reading pornographic comics on their suspiciously efficient mass transit. But now our associations with Japan are very different. In the visual arena, it would be hard to argue that any country has impacted our post-modern, consumerist visual-junk culture more.

The success and broad acceptance of the work by Japanese ex-illustrator Takashi Murakami in today’s Museums and finest art galleries bellies a fascination with the connections between Japanese culture and our own. In his show “Mushrooms” he slyly hints at our troubling history and, at the same time, is able to turn it in to a humorous, whimsical, and slightly unsettling cartoon dreamscape.

This new spirit of acceptance and cooperation is especially found among young illustrators, to whom the problematic past of internment camps and dehumanizing propaganda is but a chapter in a textbook they don’t particularly enjoy remembering. I’ve chosen the work of three young American artists/illustrators who I think epitomize the changing relationship, tinged with a gooey, bubble-tea admiration of two-way pop culture but also seeking to humanize the cold, round edged efficiency of Japanese design with the hand done awkwardness of American individualism. It should go without saying that all their sites are well worth a visit.

Chicago born Ken Taya’s Nihon Town illustration for his Enfu blog takes the mash-up of Japanese and American visuals literally, click the image to see it larger and see how many cross cultural mutations you can spot… You’ll be busy for a while. Even Shepard Fairey’s Obey Giant isn't safe, it is crossed with Giant Baba to create Oubei Baba.

http://enfu.com

Brooklyn based Saimon Chow was a classmate of mine in undergrad and has gone on to influence nearly all aspects of visual culture. One of my favorites is this clay-mation piece he did with his brother Albert for a show in Hong Kong celebrating the 30th anniversary of Hello Kitty… This chacter is also riffed on in Taya’s illustration as Hello Miffy. I’ve also included a silkscreen print I traded him for back at school and I hope he doesn’t mind it seeing the light of day, it certainly shows that he was very aware of his mish-mash influences early on. Click on the images for the video or a closer look.

http://www.saimanchow.com

The Los Angeles based illustration team KozynDan have a history of creating truly unusual visual collaborations of their own. My favorites are their panoramics which paint a postmodern landscape in 360 degrees. Click the image to see it larger. Click here to see it in virtual 3-D. http://www.kozyndan.com

My personal observations of this cross-ocean visual dynamism come from seeing my art students get more and more enraptured by Anime, starting with second graders eschewing Garfield for Pokemon back in the mid nineties to current college students using Kirosaywa stills to inspire their video game concept art. Similarly American bookstores stock their shelves with roughly 80% more Japanese comics (Manga) than their American counterparts (sorry Spiderman).

My first awareness of this cross-cultural potential came when my sixth grade class voted to watch ‘Transformers the Movie’ instead of ‘The Care Bears Movie II’ (a rare victory over the cutiefied girls). This 1986 animated feature was simply the capitalist punctuation on a very successful toy line and animated TV show at the end of its second season. The film boasted a blended crew of largely American writers and character designers and Japanese storyboard artists and animators. The Transformers TV shows in Japan and America were always separate and very, very different (as were the toy-lines), but for the feature film all the elements came together. As a child I understood its power immediately, and nothing permeated my psyche more than a John Wayne accent accompanying the fluid machismo of 80-foot, cell-shaded robots destroying each other as gracefully as a bullet train ballet. It was of course scored with a truly memorable hair metal soundtrack…all this and there is still no Blu-ray release.

The movie was meant to introduce a new line of more modern-looking toys, but after my generation of sixth-graders saw the film we simply couldn’t stomach returning to the creative limitations of the TV show, or its token plastic spawn, and the trend precipitously subsided (only to be eventually revived by computer graphics in the mid-nineties and by Michael Bay in recent live action.)