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Portia Munson’s work, The Garden, is an immersive mixed media installation that, at first glance, appears to be a densely packed, chaotic explosion of feminine colors, textures, and patterns taking the form of a woman’s bedroom. The Garden is filled to the brim with bright, floral-patterned fabrics covering every inch of the space’s walls, floor, and ceiling. Found items are carefully layered on every possible surface. The bed is an altar overflowing with stuffed animals, and chairs are swathed in layers upon layers of old dresses and faded fabrics with busy patterns. Lamps draped in lace and adorned with artificial flowers bring warm, diffused light to the cramped space as hundreds of plastic and silk flowers spill out of every crack and crevice. Most of the objects in The Garden are pink, delicate, and covered in lace or other soft materials. One arrangement of brightly dyed flowers spells out the word “MOM,” making The Garden’s ties to femininity explicit and undeniable.
Many of the found items included in the room appear to be old, cheaply made, and mass-produced, perhaps meant to be used once for a holiday and
then discarded without a second thought. They fill the room with the smell of dust, reminiscent of an old attic full of hoarded feminine waste turned inside out. Munson has saved these objects from their inevitable fates of incinerators and landfills, instead creating a sort of chaotic shrine to femininity and hyperconsumerism.
In her work “The Cuteness of the Avant Garde” and interview with Adam Jasper for Cabinet, Sianne Ngai focuses on the often contradictory power dynamics of the cute aesthetic and cute objects as well as their relationship to capitalism and commodity fetishism. Ngai posits that cuteness exerts its power by “aestheticizing powerlessness” (Jasper and Ngai 2011), specifically in the way cute objects are inherently simple, infantile, feminine, and unthreatening and how they become cuter when they suffer perceived injury or disability. Cuteness calls forth contradictory feelings of “attraction and repulsion, tenderness and aggression, compassion and contempt” (Ngai 2012, 16), leading to the ease by which cuteness can become disgust.
Ngai also directly connects cuteness to capitalism, asserting that it is the dominant aesthetic of commodities produced in a capitalist society. Cute objects often conflate “desire with identification” (Ngai 2012, 48), producing “‘a strange constriction of the gap between consumer and commodity’, a shrinking of distance that… is strongly aligned with the feminine” (Ngai 2012, 48). She also describes cuteness as “scenes of public intimacy” (Ngai 2012, 16) around which people gather and asserts that this intimacy is often present in art. In her work, Ngai gives numerous examples of artists who have utilized the power dynamics of the cute aesthetic and cute objects in their work to draw attention to the overproduction of capitalist societies and advocate for social change.
Portia Munson’s work is, in my opinion, a perfect embodiment of Ngai’s claims. The Garden is explicitly cute and feminine, which should, in theory, make it an inviting, nonthreatening space. It is a scene of public intimacy, begging audiences to gather around its entrance, asking them to attempt to catalog and absorb all of its individual pieces. However, The Garden also repels that very same audience with its musty smell, painfully vivid colors, clashing patterns, and almost uncanny use of artificial flora and fauna. Every object in The Garden is a mass-produced piece of future trash born through the capitalist exploitation of labor and sold as an artificially feminine identity to a hyperconsumerist society.
Similarly to Ngai’s work, Jane Bennett’s “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things” explores the dynamic power of objects to shed light on and propel social change, though Bennett’s work takes a broader scope than Ngai’s and ascribes more power to the objects themselves than Ngai’s argument allows. Using examples from a dead rat found in a gutter to gunpowder residue used as legal evidence, Bennett posits that every object has potential and a sort of agency, a life of its own to live. She argues that “so-called inanimate things have a life, that deep within is an inexplicable vitality or energy, a moment of independence from and resistance to us and other bodies: a kind of thing-power” (Bennett 2010, 18). This thing-power has the potential to make inanimate objects sources of dynamic action. The gunpowder residue, for example, is “a composite of glass, skin cells, glue, words, laws, metals, and human emotions” (Bennett 2010, 9) that became vital to the verdict of a trial for attempted homicide. This supposedly inanimate object became, in Bennett’s words, “the decisive force catalyzing an event” (Bennett 2010, 9).
Bennett also, like Ngai and Munson, connects her argument to American capitalism and materialism. She posits that America’s culture of overconsumption and production “requires buying ever-increasing numbers of products purchased in ever-shorter cycles… The sheer volume of commodities, and the hyperconsumptive necessity of junking them to make room for new ones, conceals the vitality of matter” (Bennet 2010, 5). Though this vitality and thing-power may be concealed in hoards of purchased products, Bennett goes on to argue that “vital materiality can never be thrown ‘away,’ for it continues its activities even as a discarded or unwanted commodity” (Bennett 2010, 6).
Similarly to Ngai’s work, Jane Bennett’s “Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things” explores the dynamic power of objects to shed light on and propel social change, though Bennett’s work takes a broader scope than Ngai’s and ascribes more power to the objects themselves than Ngai’s argument allows. Using examples from a dead rat found in a gutter to gunpowder residue used as legal evidence, Bennett posits that every object has potential and a sort of agency, a life of its own to live. She argues that “so-called inanimate things have a life, that deep within is an inexplicable vitality or energy, a moment of independence from and resistance to us and other bodies: a kind of thing-power” (Bennett 2010, 18). This thing-power has the potential to make inanimate objects sources of dynamic action. The gunpowder residue, for example, is “a composite of glass, skin cells, glue, words, laws, metals, and human emotions” (Bennett 2010, 9) that became vital to the verdict of a trial for attempted homicide. This supposedly inanimate object became, in Bennett’s words, “the decisive force catalyzing an event” (Bennett 2010, 9).
Bennett also, like Ngai and Munson, connects her argument to American capitalism and materialism. She posits that America’s culture of overconsumption and production “requires buying ever-increasing numbers of products purchased in ever-shorter cycles… The sheer volume of commodities, and the hyperconsumptive necessity of junking them to make room for new ones, conceals the vitality of matter” (Bennet 2010, 5). Though this vitality and thing-power may be concealed in hoards of purchased products, Bennett goes on to argue that “vital materiality can never be thrown ‘away,’ for it continues its activities even as a discarded or unwanted commodity” (Bennett 2010, 6).
Munson’s Garden is entirely constructed of objects that have been discarded and would be considered by most as unwanted commodities with little power or agency. However, Munson’s careful collection and meticulous display of these objects has given them new power, or perhaps simply uncovered the vitality and thing-power that Bennett believes was already inherent within the objects. Rather than seeing a ripped stuffed animal, faded dress, or even a dead rat as things to be looked over and ultimately discarded, Bennett and Munson chose instead to recognize the innate potential and power these objects hold, both independently and in concert with their surroundings, to catalyze change and draw attention to issues and ideas they value.
By reading The Garden in conversation with Ngai and Bennett’s works, the connections between power, femininity, hyperconsumerism, and capitalism become clear. The explicitly feminine and “cute” environment of Munson’s Garden is directly connected to the artificiality and mass-produced cheap quality of the items within it. The poor quality and vast quantity of items placed in The Garden are directly connected to the idea of hyperconsumerism and commodity fetishism that propels capitalist societies to continue producing these items, even to the detriment of the people and environment that uphold the society. This capitalist obsession with “cute” commodities and consumption provides a framework through which we can recognize how women are exploited by and contribute to consumerism and how the massive waste generated by this consumption harms the environment and ultimately the people within it.
The conclusion, though, is perhaps more optimistic. Bennett’s work read in conjunction with Ngai and Munson’s asks us to recognize not only the aesthetic power but the innate thing-power this artificial garden of feminine waste holds, and to acknowledge the potential of these objects to catalyze social change and draw attention to the harm their production is causing. It’s not a perfect answer, and none of these women offer any particular, specific solution to the problems they have identified. Understanding the push and pull of aesthetic power dynamics, though, and acknowledging the latent ability of feminine objects regarded as trash to be seen in the light of artistic resistance is a powerful mental shift that the rigid confines of capitalism cannot ever fully contain or discard.
Works Cited:
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (a John Hope Franklin Center Book). Duke University Press Books, 2010.
Works Cited:
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (a John Hope Franklin Center Book). Duke University Press Books, 2010.
Ngai, Sianne. “The Cuteness of the Avant‐Garde.” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 4 (June 2005): 811–47. https://doi.org/10.1086/444516
Ngai, Sianne. “Our Aesthetic Categories: An Interview with Sianne Ngai.” Interview by Adam Jasper. Cabinet, 2011. www.cabinetmagazine.org/
Claire Harmon is a McConnell Scholar in the class of 2023. She studies library science with a concentration in political science at the University of Louisville.