letter
from paris : : matthew
rose
made
in japan: killer cuteness
japanese pop art invades paris
Continued from part
1
otaku:
painting by numbers
Coloriage is interesting and feels a bit like a trade
show in gadgets… but there is good art here. Beginning with Kiichi Tstaga's little
girls in traditional garb, or as cut out dress up paper works, the artist, who
was born in 1914, is enrolled as a kind of model for the century ahead of him.
The Ninja phenomenon is represented by "Mr." in a wall sized jungle scene with
dangling doll heads. Mr. remains an assistant of Murakami at his Hiropon Factory.
In the handout, we learn that Mr "records TV programs, creating eighteen-hour
sequences of girls' faces presenting the weather forecast, of easy-listening music
shows."
An artist
brand called "Chupa Chappie" is fashioned after a 2-dimensional character conceived
as a girl from a modeling agency. The group, called "groovisions," was conceived
in Kyoto in 1993; they launched the Chappie character around 1997 when they moved
to Tokyo. Chappie is displayed in all sorts of consumer items from mousepads,
note books to pillows, chairs and even shoes - the silhouetted child's head stamped
and cut out of leather serves as "tag," or brand. Interestingly enough, NY East
Village artist and cartoonist, Rodney Allen Greenblatt, has been working in the
Japanese market and is represented by a few boxed items, including a child's rucksack.
One of the youngest
artists in the Coloriage section is Mika Kato, born in 1975. Her large shaped
oil paintings like Peaberry, 2001, Muscat, 1997 and Canaia, 1999 show intense
catlike little girls, their eyes painfully large. Another character product-oriented
work is Tare Panda, created in 1995 by Hikaru Suemasa for San-X, the panda pendant
(it's a stuffed animal), was a major success with high school Japanese girls.
The sleepy and sad panda, according to the handout, also "helps Japanese adults
to relax."
Installation view of "Coloriage"
showing Makoto A ida's cardboard pagoda. Courtesy Foundation Cartier
One
of the oddest but more riveting works in the Coloriage section is the cardboard
pagoda reaching up to the ceiling, its brown cartons (from appliance, beer and
cigarette boxes) are kept together with ribbons and held down by electrical tape.
One thinks immediately of arte povera. The artist who produced the work in situ,
Makoto Aida, is known for his "nihon-ga" style paintings of women with amputated
limbs kept on leashes; he wanders easily among mediums, and his cardboard house
is typical of those he's produced in Japan for the homeless. In addition his enormous
acrylic on acetate disaster scene of a giant girl being ravaged by a dragon in
the middle of a typical Tokyo suburb, The Giant Member Fuji Versus King Gidora,
1993, brings us back to the movie days of Godzilla. The artist also produced an
"Attempted Suicide Machine," 2001, consisting of a baby step up stool and a noose
made out of some kind of baby strap. The handout claims that Aida, who was born
in 1965, "reveals the dark or even shameful side of Japan."
Murakami's
Foundation Cartier exhibit is his first big show in a European art institution,
and his monumental works take multi-part messages to the West: Japan has no culture,
only a subculture; everything foreign in Japan becomes "Japanized," like a flat
SONY tv screen, or a thin streamlined computer; there is no depth, and according
to Murakami, no transcendent values in this art. He doesn't go so far as Warhol
when asked about his work saying that he's all surface, but the idea is squarely
there. Art is in most ways a search for heroism, whether in the subjects portrayed,
or the artist himself. The hero project positions the artist (dead or alive) and
his/her products in icon heaven. The goal: achieve universal stature and immortality.
Murakami clearly wants his characters to rise to the occasion, but do they? Can
mass production produce a hero? Perhaps in this world, yes. And not surprisingly,
the Otaku world is one with a full set of American references.
In
an essay on the phenomenon, and the upsurge of Otaku culture of comic book, computer-obsessed
Japanese, Hiroki Azuma, a Japanese cultural critic writes: "In addition, my point
here is that it is the Otaku culture that reflects most clearly this mixed, hybrid,
bastardized condition; that is, the paradox that we cannot find any Japaneseness
without postwar American pop culture."
nara's
little girls
Yoshitomo Nara has embraced the high and the low in his
own particular style, placing his threatening little girls and sad doggies on
center stage. This artist, born at the end of the 1950s in Japan, splits his time
(since 1988) between Germany and Japan. He describes his earliest years as a "latch
key child." He'd come home alone (with a key) and wander his imagination in his
family's house. Nara later studied art in Germany and has really never left. (Meeting
him Paris, we spoke in German.) Seeing himself as a "voluntary exile," an ex-patriot,
Yoshitomo is nonetheless in the thick of the Otaku milieu. One can tell, with
the full wall of his drawings on envelopes, telephone bills, hotel stationary
at the Chatou exhibit that his obsessions travel with him wherever he goes.
Yoshimoto Nara
" php Ready to Witch", 1999, Acrylic on canvas, 70
3/4 x 90 1/2 inches Courtesy Mariane Boesky Gallery
Nara's
big headed, wide-eyed little girls, rendered on rectangular or rounded concave
canvases are the most effective expressions of his world. Something big hearted.
Larger than life-size and often painted in pastel colors, his kids brandish guns,
knives, puff on cigarettes, get stuck (or just stand) in boxes or zip about in
their space cars. They are almost always alone. Nara's obsession takes flight
in thousands of drawings, many on discarded envelopes or hotel stationary, which
often arrive with a tight little speech blurb that serves as a warning. "I stand
here and make sure of it all," says one. "I don't care a fuck about everything,"
says another with a gun. One CD is entitled "Pyromanic." Most of these kids are
alone; there's no social intercourse. Although the puppies, sometimes produced
large and in fiberglass, like "Your Dog," a public sculpture in NYC's Tompkins
Square Park, are social if still sad. This one creates a watering hole for other
dogs from the tears falling from his eyes.
These
drawings, paintings and sculptures, and a set of prints produced for the exhibit,
have a built-in edgy violence, and seethe a defensive venom. For Nara, innocence
has long been threatened, these kids are not alright and, they will stick it to
you to let you know all about it.
Like
the other artists in the Japanese neo-pop movement, Nara embraces full commercialization
of his output, and the Chatou exhibit includes a wide sample of his store wares:
videos, cds, t-shirts, dolls, books, stickers and a range of gadgets. Personally,
I prefer the hand-worked quality of Nara's snide girls to the fabricated Dobs
of Murakami. They are much more seductive, tactile, and felt. The attraction-repulsion
axis of these works is fully loaded, and aimed at the viewer.
Yoshimoto Nara
Untitled,
gravure au vernis mou, 56 x 76 cm, an edition of 20, numbered and signed, Printed
by Pierre Lallier, atelier Leblanc, édition cneai, 2002. Print produced specially
for the exhibit "Who snatched the babies?"
Packaged
Sadness, Wrapped Guilt Five years ago, my friend Ricardo, whose wife was then
pregnant, handed me a Tamagutchi doll (still in the package) that he'd received
as a gift. "I'm afraid to open it and turn it on." The Tamagotchi, or electronic
pet, needs constant attention once it is activated, and performs as a kind of
substitute child, best friend, and/or baby. A battery operated emotional attachment.
Ignore the Tamagotchi and it dies on you. "There's something very sinister about
it all," my friend observed, handing it to me, relieved to be absolved of the
responsibility….and the guilt.
Is
there something sinister here? Any more than Warhol? Or Schwarzkoggler? With art
one must occasionally ask, is it about the art or the artist? The Otaku are in
the end, story tellers in one form or another; storytellers, one could argue,
found in any identifiable movement. If it is a world view, is it one seen through
the window, or in everything that is? Or just comics? Just a diversion? One can
always speculate that these feisty sneering children, space boys and girls, Pokemon
(little monster) characters multiplied by the millions by Japanese clean room
production lines will be outgrown in a year or two. Most art movements and styles
survive the onslaught of world culture for only a few years, unlike Coca-Cola
which is consumed as a postponement of infinite desire - thus the need (real or
imagined) for another one. And, at the same time, there is indeed a death of innocence,
or the hint of it, reported in many of these works. That death, something like
a child eating an ice cream cone getting run over by an ice cream truck, is what
gives them their "POP!," their emotional thrust, and allows these artists to seize
the zeitgeist.
Yet,
I'm inclined to think that once a big exposition (or two) like Japanese Pop hits
France, the real aesthetic phenomenon has peaked - in spite of the fact that the
images spring like mushrooms wherever shoppers shop. And in this, there is something
sad about it all. "Consume or perish!" seems to be part of the message here. But
maybe that's why eating at McDonald's makes me sad, too. And unfulfilled. Heroes
have to constantly reinvent themselves at the altar of the public, or they die.
Like the Tamagotchi gadget, one is warned: Turn off my light switch and I'll cry…and
then, die…. and make you suffer for 1000 years. No joke: It is a form of guilt
in a package! And you will feel sad…until the next gadget comes along.
Go
to part 1
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
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.
affiliates
