Okay, let’s get back to that Takashi Murakami show at the Geffen Contemporary in L.A. In an earlier post I mentioned that it had been better than I expected and sketched out some of the essential background on him and his work.
My Lonesome Cowboy, Murakami, 1998 — Image: Marianne Boesky Gallery
So what did I learn at that show? To begin with, that the way he uses pop culture is never one dimensional, though it’s not always particularly original. Consider his large scale sculpture of a naked cartoonish boy shooting a stream of sperm that he swings like a lariat. (In a nod to Warhol Murakami calls it My Lonesome Cowboy.) No doubt it fascinated Murakami’s lonely-boy nerd followers in otaku culture. But to some extent the joke is on them — the rest of us are looking at it as an emblem for the triumph of a fairly pathetic juvenile boy culture in Western capitalism. (And anyway, do the otaku boys know that Lonesome Cowboys is one of Warhol’s soft core gay movies?) But the joke is also on us — juvenile boy culture really has triumped. And to place the whole thing within a longer, complicated tradition of both fine art and mass produced (and export) imagery, Murakami links the silhouette of the sperm stream visually to the hooking forms of the cresting surf in one of Hokusai’s famous 19th-century prints.
That’s a lot of compressed meaning for one masturbating elf-boy. But that boy, or the big breasted girls that Murakami produced around the same time, is also not so different from any other kind of post Pop Art that disorients and unnerves you by enlarging the accustomed scale of a familiar figure, like Jeff Koon’s giant ceramic knick knacks from the ’80s or Charles Ray’s big women or for that matter, to go back to first-generation Pop, a Claes Oldenburg clothespin.
For myself, it’s as a painter that Murakami is more interesting, and not just in work, like 727, that departs from his Superflat idea sufficiently to produce a multi-layered roughened surface that’s supremely beautiful. Murakami associates the surface with both Japanese lacquerware and the speckled Oxidation paintings that Warhol and his friends produced in the late ’70s by urinating on metallic pigment. (And let the record show that in good Conceptual artist form Murakami’s clock-punching, calisthenic-jumping assistants do most of the actual painting. Hey, if I’m recalling correctly, it was Andy’s buddies who did most of the actual pissing.)
727, Murakami, 1996 — The Museum of Modern Art, New York
For starters, for all that it grows out of cartoons and comic books, Murakami’s work is in no way reducible to its pop culture sources. It has a graphic power that reproduction can’t approximate. That’s another way he reminded me of Roy Lichtenstein. Because Lichtenstein’s comic strip paintings were based on reproduced images, you could make the mistake of thinking that you can get all you need to know about a Lichtenstein itself from a reproduction of the painting. In fact, there’s no substitute for the real Lichtenstein, which always turns out to have an optical dazzle no mere comic strip panel can offer. It’s in the gap between your modest expectations of a mass media image and the visual force of a sovereign work of art that Lichtenstein performs some of his neatest tricks. Likewise Murakami.
But more than that, most of the images in Murakami’s paintings aren’t characters who could easily appear in a comic book or cartoon in the first place. They’re intricate grotesques who have morphed far away from their roots. How else do you describe some of the multi-eyed, corkscrewing pictures of his characters Mr. DOB or Tan Tan Bo?
Flower Ball (Kindergarten Days), Murakami, 2002 — Courtesy: Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin
After a while there’s something distinctly and deliberately off putting and even sinister about them. By the time I had passed through a gallery at the Geffen show that held a tondo of hyper-aggressive smiling flowers — a glutinous, metastazing cluster of smiley faces mounted on eye-frying smiling flower wallpaper — I understood better the undercurrent of rage in Murakami’s work.
Tan Tan Bo, Murakami, 2001 — Courtesy: Tomio Koyama Gallery
By that time Murakami started to strike me as having something of that capacity for loathing, an utter disgust with the world, that I think of as quintessentially British. It’s in Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, in the Sex Pistols and Joy Division, in both Amises, Kingsley and Martin, in any number of Lindsay Anderson films like If... and Oh, Lucky Man! — no wonder Stanley Kubrick moved to England — in British playwrights from John Osborne to Trevor Griffiths and in Rupert Everett whenever he sneers.
And of course it’s in Francis Bacon. (Born in Ireland, I know, but of English parents and a Londoner for most of his life.) So I wasn’t surprised when I arrived eventually in a gallery that held a Murakami derived from a Bacon.
Homage to Francis Bacon (Study of Isabel Hawsthorne), Murakami, 2002 — Galerie Emmanuel Perrrotin
It’s a reply to one of several Bacon studies of the woman he once said was his only female lover. (The ones below may or may not have provided Murakami’s model. Or perhaps he worked from several.)
Three Studies of Isabel Hawsthorne, Bacon, 1966
Critics are always looking for Pop artists to maintain a critical distance from the consumer culture they play with. (I’m doing something like that right now with Murakami.) It buys the artist the academic equivalent of street cred. Warhol famously refused to play along. He always professed to love pop culture unreservedly and maybe he did. But one look at his monstrous and bloated Marilyns and Lizs and you could see very well that ambivalence, if not a vein of pure disgust, played a big part in what he was doing, at least in the 60s.
Tan Tan Bo Puking — a.k.a. Gero Tan, Murakami, 2002 — Courtesy: Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin
Not far from the Bacon homage was Murakami’s tour de force, a massive canvas called Tan Tan Bo Puking — a.k.a., Gero Tan. Murakami has spoken about the Tan Tan Bo character as autobiographical, in which case this is a portrait of the artist at the end of his rope. The full force of the nausea that had been building up in the earlier canvases comes out in this one — comes out of his mouth actually, in a giant stream of spew. Given what you’ve seen in every previous gallery, and Murakami’s own writing about pop culture as a coded conveyor of fear and desire, it’s hard not to see this as a final reaction to the surfeit of pop culture he’s been serving up, satirizing and profiting from.
But that painting is just a short distance from the stairway that leads to the show’s infamous Louis-Vuitton boutique. The organizers of the Murakami show have been at pains to explain that the boutique is not an exhibition gift shop in the ordinary sense but an integral part of the show. Interesting, because coming to it not long after marveling at Tan Tan Bo Puking, you can’t help but notice that the same kind of cute pop imagery that Murakami has been gradually connecting in your mind all though this show to anxiety and loathing is being put here to the service of a branding exercise for a luxury goods manufacturer that’s been ultra-profitable for both Louis-Vuitton and for Murakami.
So it’s true — you can have your puke and eat it too.
I think that boutique deserves a post of it’s own. Let’s go there tomorrow.