Jeremy Wade
“there is no end to more”
@ Japan Society through December 5, 2009
© Hiroki Otsuka
In Jeremy Wade’s brilliant mash-up send-up of Japanese manga and kawaii (cute) culture, a voiceover describes colorful and bizarre scenes and behaviors as a single live performer channels them on a stage enclosed by three connected white screens.
Dressed in a blue Star Trek shirt and white trunks with whales on them, the charismatic and perfectly silly Jared Gradinger tiptoes, flexes, pumps his fist, moves like a robot, and otherwise makes believe with his body, evoking the childish and innocent, heroic and fantastic, and sexual and violent worlds of these popular art forms. Descriptions of surfing on rainbows and riding on robot friends, talking horses, and mad angry monkeys in turbans meld into a continuous outrageous narrative, as puffy white clouds moving across the screens change to a dark, gray mass, followed by rain , and later snow.
Interrupting this flow are game show episodes where rainbows streak across the screen space and Gradinger stands at a podium shaped like a dog house asking questions of the audience—while crude /cute animated photo cut-outs of cats and dogs and people with googly eyes and moving mouths dance across the screen, zooming in and out. What is diversity? What is government? Behind all the cuteness, “there is no end to more” exposes an underlying darkness, and suggests a vast consumerist conspiracy. During some of these sequences, video and still images stitched together stretch and flow behind Gradindger, each screen flashing and streaming competing images—faces, places, products, and poop.
Like the rest of the elements in the work, the black and white animations by Brooklyn-based Japanese manga artist/illustrator Hiroki Otsuka are beautiful and disturbing, cute and creepy. There is a ghost, a bear, and a “melty bear,” which crosses the screen at one point tossing arms and legs behind itself to mark its path.
Jared Gradinger. Photo: Veith Michel
When Gradinger interacts with the crudely drawn ghost named Boo Hoo, it is touchingly reminiscent of the original live-with-animated classic Gertie the Dinosaur, and fascinating how predictably the audience relates. Later, in a delightfully dark sequence of just animation, Boo breaks three cute frozen characters, vacuums them up, and then melts a doe-eyed toilet bowl with a blow dryer; maybe not so cute after all.
At three intervals, an authoritative male voice levels admonitions against consumerism at the audience, while a static IKEA advert that’s too large to even fit on all three screens glares accusatorily out at the viewers. Recalling scenes from the manga classic “Ghost in the Shell,” it does not lift the veil of consumption and delusion to reveal the underlying grotesque, so much as tear it away after leading us to the precipice.
“there is no end to more” features aforementioned video by Veith Michel, a perfectly compatible score by Brendan Dougherty, with set by Katja Mitte and Henning Ströh, and text co-written by Wade and Marcos Rosales.
