Takashi Murakami
MOCA, Los Angeles, USA
Takashi Murakami’s retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles is in many ways reminiscent of Henri Levin’s 1959 screen adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel A Journey to the Center of the Earth. In both, an explorer embarks on an impossible journey of entering the surface of something that is known to have no core, encountering on his way fantastic worlds of mushrooms, bizarre beings, dangers and booby traps.
Ranging from the early 1990s to the present, the works on show provide an ample overview of the Japanese artist’s production. Divided into five sections, each one introduces the visitor to increasingly stranger characters of Murakami’s fantastic army. Every section covers a different aspect of Murakami’s production, spanning from his larger-than-life erotic figurines, related to Manga and Anime culture, to paintings, sketches, recent video work and giant conglomerate sculptures. Certain signature characters, like DOB, the hybrid between Mickey Mouse and Sonic the Hedgehog, appear multiple times, ‘branding’ individual paintings and sculptures as part of a larger collective effort. Various mushroom and flower accumulations can be discovered repeatedly, all produced by his studio, the international corporation Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. It is the KaiKai Kiki factory that also produces his merchandising line that is also on view in the show.
The exhibition aims for sensual overload. Repetitive shapes and cute, candy coloured figures from the paintings are reproduced by the wallpaper in certain rooms, blurring the line between artwork and exhibition space. The cuteness of his cartoon figures is fleeting, though; in paintings like the multi-panel Tan Tan Bo Puking - a.k.a. Gero Tan (2002), the protagonist is spewing bodily fluids out of his orifices. Suspended in a bright blue, computer-game sky, the exploding figure smiles grotesquely at the viewer. One gets the sickening feeling of overdosing on too much Halloween candy – bubblegum abjection in no need of visceral realism.
In his ‘PO+KU Surrealism’ series Murakami blends various elements of Pop and Surrealist art with elements from traditional Japanese painting and Otaku fan culture. In works like PO + KU Surrealism (Green) the clearly defined form of DOB has ceased to exist and has instead merged into an all-encompassing shapeless condition. Through an arrangement in a non-hierarchical flat manner Murakami is achieving what he calls his superflat style. Murakami struggles hard to stay on the surface yet, intentionally or not, his works manage to hit where it hurts the most, right in the oversaturated belly of consumer fulfillment, a wound that he simultaneously creates and soothes.
At the end of the visit, the viewer is not left behind without evidence of this adventure. One gets spat out of the Murakami’s wonderland not through a volcano, but through a fully operational Louis Vuitton boutique. And if the Vuitton bag exceeds the budget the true Murakami experience can yet be attained through a shopping splurge in the Murakami-equipped museum store. Without a clear boundary between them, exhibition visit and shopping blend together to a borderless state of full satisfaction or, as Murakami likes to call it an ‘ongoing study in meaninglessness.’
Anna Gritz
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