Superflat Vinyl

In the introduction to his designer toy art book I Am Plastic, Paul Budnitz tells the story of a customer in his Kidrobot store who found one of Pete Fowler's Monstrooper toys appealing:

"That's really very nice...what's it from?" I explained to her that the toy wasn't "from" anything at all. The big, red camouflage-clad monster with a Cyclops-eyeball mace is a character that Pete invented as a toy, nothing else and with no other purpose. ...The woman just couldn't understand that and said, "Well if it's not from something, why would I want it?"...After she stomped away one of my co-workers looked at me and said, "Thank God it's a limited edition." [9]

The irony here is that the Monstrooper figures are indeed "from" something. A visit to Fowler's Monsterism Island site will confirm that Fowler's creatures come from an elaborate world of his own creation, developed through toys, his website, and a comic serialized in Vice magazine. The world is idiosyncratic, and edgy enough to exclude children, and so it does distance itself from mass market toy and cartoon characters in the way Budnitz wants it to do. But it is a world. And the fact that Fowler's creatures are from this world makes them more interesting than most of the toys in Budnitz's book.

In making his self-conscious bid for the artistic legitimacy of designer toys, Budnitz is a follower on the trail blazed by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami with his superflat art. In his paintings, sculptures, and, yes, toys, Murakami establishes the visual conventions of characters like his Mr. DOB in order to explode them. The shapes by which we recognize this slightly threatening version of Mickey Mouse (and his emotions) become mere abstractions as Murakami melts all visual and character depth into a hallucinatory play of line and color across the flat surface of the canvas.

Murakami's work is striking and original, but the influence of Murakami on designer toys is so pervasive that they have assumed a certain sameness. The tension between shape and surface has become a standard gesture: in the be@rbrick toys or Kidrobot's own Kidrobot series, for example, different figures are created by taking the same teddy bear or hiphop-styled robot mold and painting it with different decorations, many of which (american flag, floral pattern) have no relation to the underlying shape. After seeing this visual joke on page after page of "I Am Plastic," superflatness starts to fall a little more flat than one would like.

A tip for Mr. Budnitz: if you find yourself explaining "this is art," you've already lost the cultural capital game. Better to stay closer to your pop-cultural sources of delight, as Mr. Fowler does. If this leads you to express nostalgia, for Peter Max and Sid and Marty Krofft productions in Fowler's case, so be it. If it leads you to fall in love with your characters and their world, even better.