letter
from paris : : matthew
rose
made
in japan: killer cuteness
japanese pop art invades paris
Yoshimoto Nara
"Missing
in Action", 1999, Acrylic on cotton, 70 x 50 inches, Courtesy Mariane Boesky
Gallery
I discovered
Japanese Pop art some years ago when a friend's son mailed me a small book of
Japanese postage stamps featuring manga (cartoons) of young girls, boys and a
pair of kooky monsters that were then (and now) the rage of the island nation.
Personifying innocence, fear, rage, astonishment and the brighter shades in between,
these postage stamps with their flat renditions of childhood were both a small
sample of the manga world, and the logical extension of their influence on culture:
export and conquer.
The
emergence of a distinct Japanese brand of pop art is a significant development
for the global art scene. Two exhibits in Paris this summer show that the wave
begun a dozen years ago has yet to crest, although a cynical view would argue
that once any sort of movement -art, fashion, food - hits Paris, it's already
crashed. It's worth debating, and in the meantime, it is worth seeing the latest
surge of the Japanese neo-pop phenomenon in Paris recently - after you've wandered
through the Mondrian show at the Musée d'Orsay and checked out French post-modernist
Daniel Buren's Le musée qui n'existait pas.
Yoshimoto
Nara
"Your Dog" fiberglass, Tompkins Square Park, NYC,
Courtesy Mariane Boesky Gallery Nara Prints, produced specially for the exhibit
"Who snatched the babies?"
Yoshitomo
Nara's "Who snatched the babies?" at Maison Levanneur in Chatou offers one edge
of this Asian sword. His sometimes bitter, sometimes angry, sometimes nutty version
of Japanese Pop Art is, at the very least, full of blood, and commercially successful.
The exhibit, sprawled across four floors in the CNEAI (Centre Nationale l'estampe
et de l'art imprimé) about 20 minutes outside of Paris, serves as a mini retrospective
for the sometimes brooding Japanese pop artist.
In
the center of Paris, at the Foundation Cartier, Takashi Murakami's "Kawaii! Vacances
d'été" (kawaii translates to "cute"), and his curated "Coloriage," a survey of
19 Japanese artists working in the neo-pop, anime and manga styles, crystallizes
the Japanese fascination with childhood cuteness, and its explosion on the world
stage.
View of the
installation of the exhibition Takashi Murakami
Kaikai Kiki Takashi Murakami's
assistant are installing for the first time the character of Kitagawa-kun
© Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, 2002 © Takashi Murakami, 2002 / All
Rights Reserved
Nara's
main characters, a set of perky little girls who sometimes smoke, sneer, oftentimes
threaten but are almost always little girls, with the exception of a sad looking
mutt, fight for a place in our collective consciousness. "Dob," Murakami's alter
ego, launched in 1993, seems a sci-fi version of Mickey Mouse, and seeks the same
sort of fame. Dob's universe seems pleasant enough in spite of the frequent presence
of monsters. By contrast, DOB is flatter emotionally and spatially than Nara's
little girls. In fact, Murakami proposes a world where everything is flat, colorful,
obliquely happy and pleasant. And one can understand this strategy: After the
bombing of Japan in World War 2, a second bombardment, that of American culture,
was as thorough as anything tossed at Hiroshima.
Both
artists (and about a hundred working in and around the same artery), share a history
in anime and manga, and have their feet in the Otaku, a comic book and computer-obsessed
"sub culture" (as the Japanese refer to it), with its own fashion, tv, publishing
and technology industry. It makes plenty of sense that Nara's and Murakami's images,
characters and styles are consumed like sushi rolls in Japan and probably coming
to a store near you. (In the Fondation Cartier book/gift shop, you can score a
DOB mouse pad for 23€ , a DOB stuffed doll for 38€ , flower stickers for 2,50€,
and a pencil with DOB or flower motifs for 1,50€).
the
Japanese world is flat
Last
year Murakami played a major role in taking his Warhol-inspired Japanese Factory
across the US in his Superflat exhibit, a travelling ensemble of some 19 Japanese
artists working in this melange of high and low culture the Japanese have made
their own. The works are big on outline and bright colors; these cartoon crazy
artists have robustly repudiated pictorial depth. "Superflat," the term coined
by Murakami, described by one writer from the Henry Art Gallery, University of
Washington, is nothing less than a manifesto.
Murakami's "DOB"
character
"The
term superflat … describes the simplified and increasingly two-dimensional forms
that have become the staple of a hip, new visual language employed by a generation
of young Japanese artists. Whereas the tendency toward superflatness can be traced
to the simplified aesthetic of contemporary pop culture and the Japanese cartoon
culture of manga and anime, Murakami suggests a direct line of historical descent
from the stylistic conventions of 17th, 18th and 19th-century Japanese prints,
among other historical sources. Superflat evokes other flattening or elisions,
such as the blurring of existing borders between established genres and between
mass and high culture." http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2001/11/14/29362.html
Smart aleck or
sad, or frightened or overly happy kids with large doleful eyes and oftentimes
snarling teeth populate Murakami's expansive canvases. Produced via a computer-generated
paint-by-number system, his team of workers (he has two--one in NY and one in
Japan) mount scaffolds and ladders clad in plastic aprons, usually barefoot, and
take regular cigarette breaks. Such was the case at the opening in June. A dozen
young Japanese painted out the enormous Tan Tan Bo Puking a.k.a. Gero Tan, 2002,
under the glare of halogen lights, while the Parisians strolled through the gallery.
A bit of performance art to be sure, and the wink and nod to Warhol is conscious.
Like Andy's Cow and Mao shows at the Leo Castelli Gallery in the 1970s, Takashi,
too, pasted wallpaper prints in a floor to ceiling circus of eyes and flowers.
In the large garden behind the Fondation Cartier the festivities continued as
a Japanese duo sang happy pop songs with a guitar and a harmonica... songs like
"Hu-mour," (the lyrics consist of the word "humor" sung 1000 times), besides a
gigantic flower patterned balloon, on top of which sat a variation of Murakami's
DOB character.
The
vast proto-happy childhood wasteland Murakami has produced is accompanied by a
somewhat historical show the Japanese star curate, called, appropriately enough,
Coloriage (French for coloring book). Coloriage surveys the roots of the anime
world of the last 100 years, although the emphasis is on contemporary artists
(the youngest, Rei Sato, was born in 1984), and serves as a variation on his Superflat
show.
Murakami's
canvases and sculptures are essentially machine-made, meticulously so, first by
computer design, then by teams of painters working in plastic aprons as if producing
a car; a video shows how its all done. One can see traditional Japanese art of
the Edo period seeping out of these works; the animated quality of the most any
object in the paintings dialogs with the woodblock and color-rich prints we'd
immediately recognize as Japanese flatness. Traditional composition is mated with
American lustfulness, printing and the desire to achieve mythic proportions. Murakami's
Super Nova (1999) must measure 30 feet across and 10 feet high, and qualifies,
in its billboard vitality as a sign on the road to Happy Hell. It features a forest
of mushrooms with thousands of eyes beaming from the heads and stalks in a colorful
- and super flat - universe.
"A
few years ago I created another character called Oval," explained Murakami in
a recent interview. "This was in response to a request from Issey Miyake, who
wanted me to take Humpty Dumpty as my model. And so, by combining Humpty Dumpty
with "something" Japanese, I too was trying to create a universal character. That's
how Oval came into existence. I thought of Buddhist sculpture where statues often
come in threes: in the center Buddha with two acolytes, who became Kaikai and
Kiki. With these three characters, Oval, Kaikai and Kiki - I wanted, I think to
create my own gods of art."
Indeed
character as god, or talisman, or marketing device is evident in most of the work
in these galleries. Murakami's exhibit on the upper floor is punctuated with fibre
glass sculptures: slightly dangerous but brightly-colored Disneyland mushrooms
grouped in a patch in the main gallery, and others like large objects from a toy
store display sprinkled about. In another gallery, a little boy, Kitagawa-kun,
2002 (who could be but is not necessarily Japanese), stands nearly one meter high,
about the size of a real child.
The piece that was hurriedly painted during the opening - Tan Tan Bo Puking a.k.a.
Gero Tan, promotes the same flat world, although it is far more complex and intimates
something of a nightmare. In the lower right hand corner, standing on the tail
of one of Murakami's beasts, is DOB as helmeted space boy, squeaking out in a
speech blurb a text in Japanese that a fellow gallery-goer translated for me:
"Am I going to be OK?" Financially, I should say, yes. And I'm certain Mr. DOB
will survive another few thousand paintings.
"Puking"
ak.a.Gero
Tan, 2002 Acrylic on canvas mounted on board 360 x 720 x 6,7 cm © Takashi Murakami,
2002 / All Rights Reserved Courtesy Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery
Go
to part 2
Matthew
Rose is an artist and a writer living and working in Paris. He has recently finished
his novel, Plan B. His e-mail is: mistahrose@yahoo.com.
Additional Resources
Fondation Cartier Paris http://www.fondation.cartier.fr/
Centre national de l'estampe et de l'art imprimé Chatou, France http://www.cneai.com/info.html
Murakami Page with Mail Order Links: http://www.kaikaikiki.co.jp/
http://www.demon.co.uk/momus/thought280600.html
Essays
on Superflat and Otaku Culture
http://www.t3.rim.or.jp/~hazuma/en/texts/superflat_en1.html
http://www.t3.rim.or.jp/~hazuma/en/index.html
affiliates
