Takashi Murakami

At the beginning of June we were in Chicago celebrating- family birthdays, a new job, a new business opportunity, and summer.  There is a lot of discord in America these days.  Conversation across the country among friends and family is rife with controversy and misgivings.  You couldn’t prove it by us during that trip.

We stayed in a good old (new to us) hotel with a rooftop bar, the Rafaelo, saw the kids, met up with friends, and laughed a lot.  It was good to get away after a long time going nowhere.

Close to the hotel was the Museum of Contemporary Art.  They had an exhibition by a crazy and famous Japanese artist named Takashi Murakami, a person about whom my wife and I knew little.  Both my son and daughter told us about him.  We had visited our daughter in Japan when she taught English there and developed a special feeling for the country and its art.  If we saw his stuff on that trip we don’t remember.  His big and outlandish art overwhelmed the small museum behind the Water Tower.  My son and I saw Jeff Koons’ amazing stuff at the MCA  years ago.  He’s the guy who makes metal look like pillows and balloons, does take offs on pop idols like Michael Jackson, and creates complex 3-D erotic dioramas.

Even though I was then on crutches, Murakami was too good to miss.  Our friends dropped us off there after lunch in Fulton Market.  I traded my crutches for a complimentary wheelchair and we took our time through the exhibit. 

Takashi Murakami has devoted his life to art.  He trained at the Tokyo University of the Arts with an eye on working in animation and manga, Japanese comics.  In the end however he earned a Ph.D. in Nihonga, the traditional art of Japanese painting.  It didn’t take long for him to become dissatisfied with tradition.  The world was changing fast and Japan, in his mind, changed much too slowly.  

Takashi Murakami is a star of the modern art world.  He’s an international big deal.  I vaguely knew he devised cartoon like pop figures, worked with Kanye West, Pharrel Williams, and Louis Vuitton,  doing crossover work into commercial media.  But he is anything but one dimensional.  Murakami’s art, like all good work, changes over time. 

Writing about visual artists is a fairly pointless exercise.  It’s like newspaper music reviews, trying to find words to describe sound.  If you want to understand music you have listen to it.  If you want to understand visual art, specifically Takashi Murakami’s art, you have to see it. 

That being said, let me give this a try.

Takashi Murakami believed contemporary Japanese art had for too long done little more than adapt to Western trends.  His early work reflected sharp criticism and satire of his modern island nation’s society.  He was one of the first to develop his own pop icon, Mr. DoB, a sort of alter ego which appears in his work over and over.

  

He sought to break down the barrier between high and low culture and its respective art, the divide between art galleries and commercial design, and created art that defied categorization. Like this  plastic sculpture, Cosmos Ball.

Murakami’s art is noted for its use of color.  It incorporates motifs that could be described as cute, psychedelic, or satirical.  Among his best known and often used elements are smiling flowers, mushrooms, skull, Buddhist iconic characters, and devotees of obsessive interests, known in Japan as ‘otaku.”.

In 2000, Murakami published his “Superflat” theory for an exhibition he curated for the Museum of Contemporary Art.Los Angeles.   He contends there is a legacy of flat, two dimensional imagery from Japanese manga and anime which differs from the west in its emphasis on surface and use of flat panes of color.  It is also a comment on how post war Japanese society which has flattened, creating little difference between high and low social classes and their art.  For Murakami this meant packaging elements of his expensive high art works as merchandise, plush toys and t shirts, making them available at more affordable prices.

It all paid off for Murakami.  He created a production workshop, the Hiropon Factory, to work on a larger scale and create a diverse array of media.  There he works with art students and apprentices, creating pencil designs which are enlarged digitally, approving colors, putting to work an army of artists creating huge canvases and massive sculptures. 

His first retrospective traveled from LA to Brooklyn, then from Frankfurt to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao Spain.  In 2008, Murakami was named one of Time magazine’s “100 most Influential people”,  the only visual artist included.  He was the third artist ever to exhibit at the Palace of Versailles. 

In 2012, Murakami opened an exhibit in Doha, Qatar titled Murakami Ego, showing old works alongside new art.  Among the new art was a 100 meter long wall painting dedicated to the suffering of the Japanese people after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, its second devastating nuclear incident after the twin US inflicted bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It features varied individual depictions of arhats, or Buddhist saints.  Arhats are perfected persons who traditionally began as monks.  Their spiritual journey is complete.   They will not be reborn through reincarnation, for they have overcome sensuous desire and ill will, achieving nirvana.

Murakami was profoundly affected by the Fukushima incident, and created the exhibit and his arhats to bring comfort to Japan.  In doing so he came full circle, back to his traditional training, his Buddhist roots, his spiritual home of sorts. 

No pictures of the arhats folks.  You have to go the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago to see them properly.  They have soulful eyes, each different from the other, each reaching out to the viewer.  You will find one that touches you.

And there you go.  The exhibit is open till September 24^th.   It’s titled “THE OCTOPUS EATS IT’S OWN LEG.”  That’s an old Japanese folk tale now disproven.  It was believed the octopus in times of severe hardship or distress eats its own leg, gains nourishment, and recovers to grow another.  Marine biologists now know that an octopus will eat its own leg, but only when afflicted by a disease that eventually kills them.

Murakami, like Japanese culture and our own modern western world, is outrageous and complex.  I rolled through the exhibit in awe, blown away by the power that can be generated by a visual artist through color, design, and collaboration aimed at insight into the kinds of lives we live today.

Note: This was difficult to write.  I’m unfamiliar with the subject, had to do research, and found it difficult to find words that represented what I was thinking.  But then it was also done alone.

Whereas Takashi Murakami, like Dale Chihuly, the famous one eyed glassblower, creates art with others in a hub of activity, their productions something of a party, a celebration of art and expression, writers write alone and in silence.  You read their words and stories alone and in silence.  How can collaboration come to prose and poetry?  I’d love to find a way.  If it could work, I would build a bigger shack.  But I have my doubts.