Theory of Cuteness series, part 1 of several
If you think long and hard about it, "cuteness" starts to get complicated and more than a little disturbing.
What do we find cute? Babies and children, small animals, rounded objects, cartoons, sweetly arranged desserts, and miniatures, among similar things. What these have in common is a certain powerlessness, a kind of infirmity or helpless diminutive quality that highlights a gulf in power between viewers/consumers (agent, acting) and viewed/consumed (object, acted upon). Cuteness is not merely an aesthetic, as we would assume, but the aestheticized awareness and expression of power.
Intriguingly, sometimes "cute" bites back.
Sianne Ngai’s The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde draws attention to a mirroring quality of cuteness: its potential to reflect back upon its audience that which the audience sees in cuteness itself. One example Ngai cites is cuteness’s tendency to “infantilize the language of its infantilizer” (827). In a similar but more chilling vein, cuteness can also contain a “latent threat” (833). This is because, as Ngai continues, “if things can be personified, persons can be made things” (833). The conversion of people (agent, acting) into things (object, acted upon) is frightening in that it dares to posit the following: what if we agents, who derive pleasure from observing the powerlessness of cute objects (“imposed-upon”), are forced to become powerless ourselves? What if we become the thing upon which we impose?
This is terrifyingly but aptly exemplified in a piece by a master of the intersection of cute and grotesque, surrealist artist Mark Ryden:
"The Grinder" (#95), by Mark Ryden, from "The Gay Nineties" collection. Oil on canvas. 2010.
In “The Grinder,” we see a cute-grotesque little girl seated at a café-like arrangement on a terrace. She has a classically cute oversized head and eyes, and an outfit that refers back to the early twentieth century. She looks soft, vulnerable and even “tender.” Softness and tenderness, Ngai tells us, are marks of the “malleable,” “usable,” and indeed, vulnerable — and they signal a cutification of food resulting from its “deformation” and “transformation” into an easily chewable form (831).
But the girl in Ryden’s picture is not only tender-looking herself, she and her buddy (a rather eerily out-of-place Abraham Lincoln figure) are tenderizing something else as well: a human heart, rendered hyper-real (complete with muscular striations) in contrast to the cartoonish distortion of the girl. What’s more, they appear to be mashing up that heart for consumption — they are, after all, at a table set with dinnerware. This is not the tenderness or imposed “hurt” of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons; this is the total destruction and implied cannibalization (in a proper, polite environment, no less) of a recognizable organ with deep cultural significance. If they were merely grinding up elbows, the painting would not be quite so powerful.
Typically, large-headed, glassy-eyed girls in retro dresses look like dolls: literally things to be toyed with, things rendered objects under our control (this idea is borrowed from Jacques Lacan and Susan Stewart). Seen here on her lunch with Lincoln, it becomes horrifyingly clear that this girl is instead toying with us. She is a partaker in the consumption of a heart whose incongruously realistic appearance flags us in the audience, not surreal figures like her, as its source. Before, we may have imposed upon the girl a kind of aggression in finding her classically cute. However, with the ground heart before her, that aggression and injury is redirected to the viewer. We are ourselves thingified, so to speak, as passive and helpless objects of her violence. And we are terrified even as we are charmed.