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Guy Yedwab

Writing The Essay

Child's Play

Naaaaaaaaa nanananana nanaa na KATAMARI DAMACY.

I can tell already that this essay will never do justice to 2001, Liz Larner's temporary art

piece sitting in the Doris Freedman Plaza. I know this because I can't sing the Katamari Damacy

theme song at whoever is reading this.

Katamari Damacy is a video game designed by Keita Takahashi and released in 2004.

Whereas most American video games are senseless violent hack-and-slash wonders of brutality,

Katamari Damacy appeals to the child in each of us. The point of the game is to take a small clod

and make it into a big clod by rolling up objects that are smaller than your clod. The name of the

game translates into “clod spirit” (with spirit being used in the same sense as “team spirit” or

“school spirit”).

Liz Larner's piece, 2001, looks like a very pretty clod. It's a mostly spherical shape

composed of cubes and spheres mixed together. It's about the size of an adult, reflective, and

colored with a special green-blue plastic paint which means it shines different colors and

different shades in different lights. If you can imagine a blue-green iridescent dust bunny

roughly a hot dog stand in diameter, you're probably getting close to seeing 2001. And it looks

compellingly, to me at least, like a katamari (clod) from the game. So whenever I see it, I want to

sing the incredibly catchy theme song to the game.

Another result of this probably accidental connection is that Liz Larner's piece does not

seem to belong to its environment at all. Doris L. Friedman's plaza is a tiny rectangular strip of

sidewalk that leads in to Central Park which, without the sign, probably wouldn't occur to me to
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be a plaza at all. Across the street is the real Plaza, Grand Army Plaza, where a real statue of

General Sherman stands regally on a six foot pedestal. In comparison, 2001 looks plopped down

in the middle of nowhere.

Miwon Kwon describes different forms and modes of public art in her essay “Sittings of

Public Art: Integration versus Intervention” and introduces the common term 'plop art' to refer to

public art that looks as though it has been just plopped down, the same way that this reference to

Kwon's essay looks plopped down in this essay. But 2001 also looks like it has been simply

plopped down; it looks like Kwon's perfect piece of plop art. It is not raised on a platform or

separated from Doris Freedman's Plaza at all—it is merely separated from the world by a small

white barrier which is so light that a child has already knocked it over before I have gotten there.

Since it is mostly round, it looks like it will roll away if a wind comes—or if someone like me

comes by and gives it a strong push.

I don't really give it a strong push, because the adult I've become doesn't seem to think it's

appropriate. In a way, I'm afraid that it really will move if I give it a shove. It might roll into

traffic, and cabs will slam into it, shattering the cars and crushing the people inside.

Something must be wrong with me—everything I'm thinking about right now reminds me

of toys or games. The image of crashing cabs in traffic reminds me of a toy car I used to have—it

was a large model about the size of my head of a regular car, but it was the “Crash Dummies

Car.” You could smash the front, and it would collapse inwards and make the steering wheel hit

the crash-dummy driver, and he would fly into pieces. As a kid, I loved to smash up this car

repeatedly and watch the pieces fly everywhere—and then put it back together.

It's almost tempting, then, to push 2001 into traffic. But the difference between being a

child and being an adult isn't in action, it's in consequences. I, as an adult, know that if I pushed
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2001 into traffic, not only would I not be able to put the cars back together (a tragedy rivaling

Humpty Dumpty), but I might kill someone. That's something you don't think about, really, in

video games or when destroying crash dummies.

2001 seems like a children's toy in the middle of an adult world. This isn't a playground—

children don't run around unattended (there's a road nearby, for God's sake!) and even this

appealing-looking toy has been roped off by a white barrier. It looks like some sort of adult

intrusion into a child's world. Ngugi wa Thiong'o wrote an essay on how art serves as power: he

breaks it into performances of power by the government, and performances of power by the

artist. Here, I can't help but think that the white barrier is one of Ngugi's “performances of

power”--not by government, but by the adult.

Across the street is a work of art which is far more 'adult.' It's General Sherman in Grand

Army Plaza that I mentioned, a monument to an adult (General Sherman) and an angel (a symbol

of death and the afterlife) leading his way into battle. But suddenly, after having been looking at

2001, I realize that General Sherman in this statue looks exactly like a little blue army man that I

used to play with in my Civil War Playset. In fact, I think I had the little blue General Sherman,

and I think he looked just like General Sherman (only without the guiding angel).

There is a rife history attached to General Sherman, tapping not only into the Civil War

but really tapping into the post-Civil war world and the incredible price which Atlanta had to

pay, along with all the other cities in the deep South which General Sherman burned to the

ground in order to make the South feel that “war is hell,” as Sherman famously said. Still, for

kids, war isn't hell: war is playground entertainment. They love to imagine little battles with little

figurines, love to imagine gruesome carnage on the hills. That's why I loved to smash my crash-

dummy's car over and over and over again.

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Maybe that's why parents are preferring Katamari Damacy over games like Grand Theft

Auto—a game which has very disturbing images of the lack of consequences attached to the

crime. Maybe that's why parents like to take their children to the Central Park Zoo, where there

are animals and no tricky moral questions to answer. It's a lot easier to say, “That's a polar bear,”

than to say, “That's a famous general who is a war hero to some and war criminal to others,

really, depending on where you go and whether or not you're Native American because he did

some terrible things to them but we like to think of him as a hero because he helped the slaves.”

Parents don't like confusing their children, and children don't like to be confused.

That's why 2001 sticks out like a sore thumb between the shops, the stores, Central Park,

and General Sherman. It is incredibly simple. At least, on the surface, it's incredibly simple. If

you don't look too closely at it, it is actually a very simple object, and it might almost be an

integrationalist piece (to borrow Kwon's term) except that nothing around it is simple in the

slightest. The colors, although changing, are very simple in their beauty; the shapes, although

compounded with one another, are the simplest shapes in geometry. Across the street is the

ornate eroded golden statue of General Sherman, and who really has the time to sort through all

the lines, all of the curves, all of the symbolism and the historical context and the intellectual

mess that is General Sherman.

That's why this essay is giving me a hard time. Because I've spent all this time

investigating this art object, and I've come up with a damn lot of ideas. I spent a while looking at

it through Ngugi's lens, as a performance of the artist in the face of performances by the

government (General Sherman) or performances by the corporation (the nearby Apple Store,

which glimmers like a glass cathedral to the glory of Apple inc.). I spent a long time thinking

about it through the lens of Andre Aciman's essay “Shadow Cities”, where he looks at his part of
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New York (Strauss Park) through the lens of cultural histories; I spent days looking for cultural

histories myself. I looked at the juxtaposition between different elements of time present: the 19 th

Century General Sherman and the 21st Century 2001, the 19th Century Plaza Hotel and its new

21st Century identity, or the 18th century carriages and the 20th century taxi cabs. I even

considered doing a research report on the difference between the commissioning process behind

General Sherman and the privatized Public Art Fund which Doris Freedman started and had

commissioned 2001.

That certainly would answer a lot of questions about what the art is, and what it would

mean to the art critic who came to do some historical analysis. That's the identity I first took

when I came to see 2001 and inspect its space: that of the essayist and the student and the art

critic, trying to find or impose meaning over 2001 based on it, its surroundings, the essays I've

read, or the papers I've written in response.

But this is New York City. I could bet that almost every single person who walks by 2001

has never heard of Andre Aciman, never mind read his essay “Shadow Cities” or compared the

streams of his thoughts to Rebecca Solnit's modern day “flaneur”-style reflections in her essay

on Las Vegas (“Las Vegas, or The Quickest Distance Between Two Points”). What is missing

from these academic modes of thought and their sophisticated investigations is a consideration of

who will be looking at the art, and what the core of their reaction will be. This is where Solnit's

other flaneur essay “The Shape of a Walk” launched me off, in the way that she examined the

people walking with her through the areas she enjoys walking.

This is also why I really wish that this essay could be paired with the theme music of

Katamari Damacy. Because the public which passes by 2001 is, mostly, children. Each time I

was there, I was passed by groups of children off to see the Central Park Zoo, which was
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featured in a pair of lovable children's movies this summer. None of them know about the

“performance of power” or the situation in Kenya which led Ngugi to formulate his essays on the

subject, but they might know about Katamari Damacy.

This is not my first time using Katamari Damacy in an essay. I once used it to explain the

theories of William James in his book Pragmatism to a friend of mine who was too busy to read

the book himself. William James, an educator, gave a series of speeches on educational

psychology and philosophy entitled Pragmatism (which became the book I was analyzing). He

began by tearing aside the academic talk which had been surrounding philosophy, saying

“Philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is more or less dumb

sense of what life honestly and deeply means” (James 1). He then proceeds to outline what he

believes the process of human thought and understanding to be.

For him, we begin life with an instinctual set of beliefs, and as we live and experience

and discuss, we learn to believe other theories and ideas which are proven true by experience and

circumstance. Each new idea builds on the ideas and experiences we already have. That is the act

of learning, and the act of teaching is merely providing information and experiences, as well as

sharing the previously discovered beliefs and intentions of other generations.

For me, this is like the katamari in Katamari Damacy. You roll your ideas around, and

everything you run into that you can assimilate becomes part of your understanding. That is why

the children passing by 2001 have such a simple view of it, and the adults who pass by will have

a much more academic complicated view of it. The thirty or forty years of experience with which

an adult is gifted is thrown into association with 2001, and thus form complex associations with

the ideas, the aesthetics, the space, and other elements.

This is what mental development is. When I mentioned my 'katamari' metaphor of human
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understanding to my brother, he directed me towards several neurobiological studies about

human learning. He referenced a study entitled “Learning-induced multiple synapse formation in

rat cerebellar cortex” by Kara D. Federmeiera, Jeffrey A. Kleimc and William T. Greenough

(who, as you might be able to tell, have very complicated views on certain subjects due to their

own vast experiences and expertise). In this study, Kara, Jeffery, and William saw that when rats

were taught things, their neurons formed extra synapses between neurons—in effect, they created

new connections between brain cells. This is why, my brother told me, adults learn far more than

children learn, but create very few brain cells. In retrospect, that is why I connected William

James to Katamari Damacy and he connected it to the study of neurobiology: our histories of

experiences influenced the way we considered things.

Children are tasked with learning the basics; adults are tasked with forming connections

and deepening understandings. Someone once told me that after college, you start to realize that

every single person you meet is just like a bunch of people you knew once, and the trick is

simply to figure out how they are combined. That someone probably felt that way because he had

reached a point in mental development when he could accurately point out the connections

between people he meets, people he had met previously in life, and other people he had seen in

fiction. That's how he, and other people, learn.

But there is a downside to all of these complexities and associations. I am a very forgetful

sort, and often lose track of the beginnings of my sentences by the time I reach the end. It's the

same with essays. What began, say, as a discussion of a piece of art (2001) which reminded me

of a game (Katamari Damacy), I have ended up freely associating to a choice philosopher

(William James) and neurobiology (synapse development). For me, the difficulty is that if

intelligence is the linking of different associations, how do you know if you have associated too
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widely? How far from a subject can you stray before you are off subject?

That is why I threw aside all the essays, all of the complicated intellectual viewpoints I

had amassed, and looked at 2001 with the eyes of children. That was one of my favorite stages of

thinking about 2001, in fact. There's something delectable in being able to describe something as

'shiny' rather than 'an integrationalist performance of artistic power.' But no matter how much I

try to focus on 2001 itself, I find myself linking it to everything around it—whether to General

Sherman across the plaza, or to William James and Katamari Damacy in my mind. And not just

because the music is stuck in my head.

Part of this effect has to do with the fact that 2001 is reflective. This is a small aesthetic

detail, but somehow, every time I look into 2001 in a literal sense, I find myself looking back out

at the world around 2001 in a literal sense. That's the sort of thing I noticed when I looked at

2001 through the eyes of a child, because children love looking at reflections—especially 'funny'

reflections, such as the warped surface of 2001. It reminded me of the way that Brian Doyle, in

his essay “Yes,” wound up examining English and Gaelic through the wondrous explorations of

his children as they murmured, screeched, yelled, and enjoyed language themselves.

As Brian Doyle discovered, and as I have discovered in this essay, even the attempt to toy

playfully and “unseriously” in my mind with an idea (rather than through the adult-structured

streams of intellectualized thought) has yielded a broad range of new and interesting thoughts. In

fact, the advantage of this playful style of exploration is that I can tell instantly which ideas are

actually important. Sometimes, having approached something intellectually, I find myself

creating a new idea and then saying, “Well, so what?” If I, as the creator, don't even know the

importance or joy in a new piece of knowledge, then all I will do is pass on the tedium of the

new idea to the next person. But hopefully, by leading the reader through the joy of my discovery
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as well as the logic of my thought, I can share not only the thought but it's importance.

Society today has saddled us with an incredible intellectual burden. There is an incredible

amount of pressure to appear “smart” or “mature.” We try to avoid sounding stupid or sounding

like we don't know what we're talking about. We certainly don't like to go around playing with

noises or looking into shiny objects. But just as at the core of our understandings are our

instincts, and at the core of our katamari is the original clod, at the core of our adults selves is our

aptly named inner child. Sometimes, we try to look for ways to indulge our inner child while

pretending not to be inner children: some people get drunk so they can be stupid and play

around, some people spend lots of money on sophisticated toys (but only toys that they can be

proud of), and some people watch big men wrestle with the same enjoyment that they had when

they rough-housed with the kids on the block.

That is why 2001 sticks out on the streetcorner. It looks like a children's toy, a video game

clod. It looks like it shouldn't even have a title, or a white barrier. It looks as though a kid has

been imagining it. How different, then, it is from the General Sherman and the Grand Army

Plaza. To return to Kwon, it is interventionalist because it is so child-like in its existence, and

cannot simply “fade” into the adult world of the streets of New York. The synapses of my

experience which it triggers are childhood memories. And the theme song to Katamari Damacy.
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Naaaaaaaaa nanana nana na naa na KATAMARI DAMACY.

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Works Cited

Aciman, Andre. “Shadow Cities.” Writing The Essay: Art In The World/The World Through

Art. Ed. Darlene A. Forrest. New York: McGraw Hill Learning Solutions, 2006. 423-435.

Federmeiera, Kara D. et al. “Learning-induced multiple synapse formation in rat cerebellar

cortex.” Neuroscience Letters. Volume 332, Issue 3(2002 Nov 8): 180-184.

James, William. Pragmatism. New York: Barnes And Noble Books, 2003.

Kwon, Miwon “Sittings of Public Art: Integration versus Intervention.” Writing The Essay: Art

In The World/The World Through Art. Ed. Darlene A. Forrest. New York: McGraw Hill

Learning Solutions, 2006. 475-509.

Solnit, Rebecca. “Las Vegas, or The Longest Distance Between Two Points.” “The Shape of a

Walk.” Writing The Essay: Art In The World/The World Through Art. Ed. Darlene A.

Forrest. New York: McGraw Hill Learning Solutions, 2006. 569-593.

wa Thiong'o, Ngugi “Enactments of Power: The Politics of Performance Space.” Writing The

Essay: Art In The World/The World Through Art. Ed. Darlene A. Forrest. New York:

McGraw Hill Learning Solutions, 2006. 525-557

Yedwab, Tom. Personal interview. 24 February 2007.