August 22, 2004

My daughter just had her fifth birthday party, and that means one thing: huge mountains of plastic crap. Not only are there all the presents that people gave her--Little Ponies and Barbies and many other varieties of sparkly pink objects--but also the boxes and bags and paper all that stuff came in, plus all the little trinkets we gave to the kids who came to the party, and all the plastic and paper that stuff came in.
     But some of the labels for all that cheap junk, especially the Japanese ones, are stunningly beautiful and interesting when you look at them closely. Some smart person once said that in Japan everything is art except for the art. And it's true: Go into a contemporary art gallery in Kyoto or Tokyo, and what you will see is even more nonsensical and pretentious than the kind of thing you see in this country (if you can even imagine that). But the packages, the magazines, the advertisements--that is where you will find a wonderland of ingenuity and fancy.
     The above label, for a clear plastic toy car manufactured in China, is a pop art landscape for toddlers. It's like, Look at car! Look at car go! It go fast! It drive by water! The image has an off-kilter quality you don't see in American commercial art. The space between the road and the water is radically flattened out like a painting by Manet, the sea indicated with almost comically abbreviated forms. The colors are coordinated, at least sort of, but have an eye-popping, reckless quality. And everything in Japan is this beautiful, or at least all the garbage is.
     Speaking of Japanese garbage, here's something my mother-in-law made out of glossy advertising inserts, folding them intricately into each other. It's for holding hot cookware, and is also a fantastic, slinky bit of sculpture.

--click for larger view--