1. MARIKO MORI VS RENÉE COX
APPROACHING THE USE OF THE BODY IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART FROM A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE, CRITICALLY EXAMINE WORKS BY TWO ARTISTS FROM DIFFERENT REGIONS, AROUND THE SAME PERIOD (FOR INSTANCE AN ARTIST FROM LATIN AMERICA AND AN ARTIST FROM EASTERN EUROPE), USING AT LEAST ONE WORK BY EACH AS A CASE STUDY.
prosthetic   
Photo: David Sims

2. Comparison: Background both artists investigate the in-between and emergence, challenging notions of cultural identity and changing perspectives
MARIKO MORI
Born in Tokyo, Japan in 1967
Works primarily with photography, sculpture and digital art
Mori often uses her own body
Mori embodies technology and spirituality (or science and Buddhism) within her practice, identifying with both as a way of transcending, and transforming, consciousness and the self
Her work blurs boundaries and exists in-between
RENEE COX
Born in Colgate, Jamaica in 1960 later settling in Scarsdale, New York.
Her work concerns social issues, cultural stereotypes and female empowerment.
Works primarily with photography.
Has provoked conversations at the intersections of cultural works, activism, gender and African studies.
The fusion of fiction and reality in some works reflects her attempt to adapt to contrasting elements of contemporary Japanese culture
Jamaican born artist Renee Cox, later settling in America with her family.
Her work focuses on the social issues within an American culture for black women discussing the cultural stereotypes projected onto females.
She primarily uses photography, allowing herself to be used as a way of representing an ‘honest being’, stating she “has nothing to hide”. Cox uses her own body as a way of representing her own criticisms of society and way to empower woman.
She describes a common resistance towards her work due to her being “black and female”. Her work has provoked conversations at the intersections of cultural works, activism, gender and African studies.

3. Culture backgrounds: differences and similarities
Creates new, positive visual representations of African-Americans
From the beginning her works have shown a deep concern for social issues.
Renee Cox questions society and the roles it gives black women.
“I believe that images of women in the media are distorted and women are imprisoned by those unrealistic representations of the female body. This distortion crosses all ethnic lines and devalues all women. I am interested in taking the stereotypical representations of women and turning them upside down, for their empowerment.” –Renee Cox ("Brooklyn Museum: Renee Cox", 2017)
Jonathon Wallis explains how Mori echoes the consumerist culture of Japan (which is influenced by America)
Explores hybridity and blurring boundaries in relation to post-bubble Japan influenced by satire and Manga.
Elisabetta Porcu suggests that Mori is influenced by sophisticated technology, pop culture, science-fiction and traditional Japanese culture (including Buddhism).
Mori’s early photographs reflect trends in Japanese popular culture, especially that of adolescent Japanese girls known as Shojo culture.
In traditional Japanese culture, women follow three submissions:
When young, she submits to her father.
When married, she submits to her husband.
When old, she submits to her sons.
Within Shojo culture, young girls have been known to prostitute themselves in order to afford new technologies and to participate in the consumerist American culture which has influenced Japan, because they do not wish to ask their parents for money.
Through incorporating her own body within most of her pieces, Cox creates new, positive visual representations of African-Americans celebrating and exploring ideas of culture and womanhood, using her body as her representation of social critique
From the beginning her works have shown a deep concern for social issues, aiming ultimately to deconstruct stereotypes of society and to rebuild them in new supportive ways.
Uses her own body to celebrate black womanhood and criticise racial and political stereotypes, Renee Cox questions society and the roles it gives black women.
This is perfectly discussed in her artist statement where she highlights the unrealistic representations of the female body across ethnic lines.

4. Between actual/virtual
Between performance/photograph
Between absence/presence
Between tradition and modernity
Insertion of digital media, transcending time, between fiction and reality linking to the influence of science fiction, where Jenny Wolmark suggests that 8: ‘The cyborg metaphor opens up possibilities for imagining embodiment differently, since the cyborg is both a product of and an instrument for the erosion of the borders between self and other, human and machine.’ SF also exists between times of past, present and future, as past SF becomes true in the present.
Mori wore the garb of a prototypical Japanese female office worker and mechanically served tea to businessmen who passed her on the street: performing for the man, and dressed as an alien/cyborg between machine and human, to demonstrate alienation but also how SF has previously projected fears and anxiety onto the artificial woman (tension between rationality and irrationality). Also a cyborg is a hybrid, therefore Mori uses this character to explore and challenge the boundaries which have been put upon her whilst embodying elements of cosplay. The cyborg/alien characters she becomes within her works seems to mock othering and difference as she stands out in relation to her surroundings, paradoxically both connected and disconnected.
Because she has digitally inserted herself into the image, there is tension between absence/presence of the artist, linking to the idea of the absence and presence of women within society, within the boardrooms. How she is still and passive as men move and travel past her.
Traditional culture of tea meets the busy hub of contemporary culture. Tea Ceremony has been interpreted as a representation of the Buddhist mappo, which is a period of decline before the arrival of the future Buddha.
Mori’s work is relevant to most cultures as she explores gender roles and the roles of a person in relation to different societies, including the self in-between cultures as hybridity develops.
Case study analysis: mariko mori: tea ceremony I (1994), II (1995) and III (1995)

5. CASE STUDY ANALYSIS: RENÉE COX: HOTT-EN-TOT, CA. 1993–94
Between visible/invisible
Between real/fiction
Between performance/photograph
Globalised approach
As we’ve seen, Mori creates an aesthetic vocabulary pointing forward to and backwards, exploring alienation and suppression of women in a male dominated culture. Cox similarly explores this theme within her work; highlighting past stereotypes of black woman and the more contemporary forward thinking idea of female self-acceptance.
Cox’s performs hyper-visibility through the use of her own body within her work. This subversive method asserts her individual power, as she dares to present herself many ways. Cox also challenges the stereotypical declarations of black women by white media, she uses her body to ’construct new models of operation’ that uses herself as imagery that is a true representation of the own lives, ideologies.
KATIE-
HOTT-EN-TOT.
In her piece ‘HOT-EN-TOTT’, cox’s inspiration comes from the “extraordinarily shocking histories” of human exhibition. Posing as Khoisan (koy-san) woman Saartje Baartman, who spent her life objectified and exhibited as a curiosity in a freak show under the name of ‘Hotentott Venus’ as her appearance didn’t conform to that of western society.
Cox covers her breasts and buttocks with oversized prosthetics found for sale in fancy dress stores, and stares intensely at the spectator. In doing so, Cox directly involves the onlooker to face the sexist and racist history of what happened to Baartman, reasserting her gaze within society. The piece discusses the power of the ‘objectifying gaze’ and aims to rebuild it in a modern ideal.
In the recreation of Baartmans body, Cox becomes a symbol of the black female form that has been suppressed and objectified, challenging past perceptions/representations of black women in history.
As you can see, by hypersexualising her female attributes, an emphasis is drawn to the staged nature of theses body parts. However whilst still being able to see her own figure beneath, cox shows her body to be working within a set of cultural stereotypes.
CASE STUDY ANALYSIS: RENÉE COX: HOTT-EN-TOT, CA. 1993–94

6. How they each focus on the body: similarities
Both use their own body to convey how different cultures have segregated and alienated the female form, how gender is a construction of society, in the attempt to liberate the oppressed female form
They both perform with their body
Both works exist between photography and performance
Both link strongly to Cindy Sherman’s work Untitled Film Stills ( )
Both relied on physical transformation to investigate gender and ethnic construction
They investigate the relationship between subject/object, and as outsiders of both resident culture and ‘original’ culture they feel alienated – in short they suffer from an identity crisis.

7. How they each focus on the body: differences
Their bodies perform in different ways due to the differences within their cultural influences
Their bodies perform in different ways because their bodies/gender have had different frames applied.
Mori hypothetically merges robotics and biotechnology with the human body, whereas Cox uses her nude body
Despite both artists using their bodies differently within their works, they both discuss similar arguments.
Cox’s photographs usually insert black bodies into white-dominated, traditional imagery. In comparison, Mori uses photography as a way of juxtaposing imagery
Cox often adorns stereotypical female identities, like Cindy Sherman, whereas Mori assimilates the role of the alien, or cyborg.
Where Mori’s work aims to highlight the issue of the gender inequalities within her Japanese culture, cox’s work discusses less about Jamaican culture specifically and more about black women and women in general.
Differences arise as Mori uses multimedia, performance and instillation as her primary medium in an attempt to become ‘other’; redesigning the human body through the merging of robotics and biotechnology to physically become the work of art. Whereas Cox utilises photography and film, staging herself in various ways that deconstruct existing stereotypes, whilst maintaining her personal identity

8. QUESTION
Addressing the issue of gender globally, do you consider the way the female body is used within the pieces discussed a success?

9. Bibliography
Jonathon Wallis, The Paradox of Mariko Mori’s Women in Post-Bubble Japan: Office Ladies, Schoolgirls, and Video-Vixens, Women’s Art Journal, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring – Summer, 2008) pp
Elisabetta Porcu, Pure Land Buddhism in Modern Japanese Culture, (2008) pp
Gwyneth Shanks, Visualizing the Now, Third Text, (2014) 29:4-5, pp
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Self-Stylization and Performativity in the Work of Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama and Mariko Mori, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, (2010) 27:4, pp
Achille Bontio, Olivia Danilo Eccher [eds.], Appearance: Markio Mori, Yasumasa Morimura, Luigi Ontaril, Andres Serrano, Pierre Giles and Tony Oursler, (2000) pp. 32 – 45
Allison Holland, Mariko Mori and the Art of Global Connectedness, in Intersections: Gender and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific (Issue 23, November 2009)
technonolgy/
Mariko Mori - 27 Artworks, Bio & Shows on Artsy. (2017). Artsy.net. Retrieved from
Brooklyn Museum: Renee Cox. (2017). Brooklynmuseum.org. Retrieved from
Reasserting Her Image: The Photographs of Renée Cox. (2017). prezi.com. Retrieved from
Renee Cox pt2 INFORMATION - PEOPLE- Black Atlantic - University of Liverpool. (2017). Liverpool.ac.uk. Retrieved from atlantic/information/renee_cox_pt2/
Video of the Week: After Hot-En-Tot: Two conversations with Artist Renée Cox. (2017). Black Atlantic Resource Debate. Retrieved from two-conversations-with-artist-renee-cox/
Renee Cox. (2017). Renee Cox. Retrieved from
Fleetwood, Nicole R., Troubling Vision. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011.
"Saartjie Baartman: The Hottentot Venus Who Aroused The Victorians" Blog. Flashbak.