In 2008 I was lucky enough to see
"© Murakami," a significant retrospective of Japanese artist Takashi Murakami's work, at the Brooklyn Museum (the show had opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which organized it). The exhibit was very much of that moment in time, visualizing and addressing the symptoms and aesthetics of mid- to late-2000s capitalism, right before the housing market was about to collapse the global economy. So when the
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago announced "Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg," which opened last week, my first question was how that artwork would appear now, a decade later, after Obama's election, the recession, Kimye, drones, advances in smartphone technology, Trump's election, et cetera.
The MCA's approach to this question is shrewd: it has bookended the moment in time. "The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg" contains some of the same pieces that appeared in "© Murakami," but they make up a little less than half of the exhibit. One room is dedicated to some of Murakami's earliest paintings, which hardly ever appear in major exhibitions of his work, and the rest is devoted to what Murakami has produced since 2008, some of which was made specifically for "The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg" and none of which has been seen in the United States before. "The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg" is just as revelatory and insightful as "© Murakami," the former saying as much about our own present moment as the latter did in its era.
"© Murakami" arrived when the artist was arguably at the peak of his fame. Part of this celebrity was due to his association with Kanye West—Murakami had created the cover for the 2007 album
Graduation as well as the iconic "Kanye bear" that's featured on the cover. Another factor was Murakami's work for Louis Vuitton, especially the "Multicolore Monogram" design, a rainbow-on-white pattern that became a trademark of luxury wear during the mid-2000s. Murakami's collaborations with West and Louis Vuitton manifested aesthetic and cultural trends of the mid-2000s: bright colors, gaudy accessories, and a nonsensical kind of conviviality. Despite the Iraq war, Afghanistan, the fallout from 9/11, and an impending financial disaster, the mood in the United States was weirdly upbeat, even celebratory.
Graduation is remembered now as West's brightest and most jubilant album, full of zapping major-key synths and lyrics that were more self-assured and optimistic than on any of West's albums before or since.
If you were really attuned to the times, however—
Children of Men,
The Wire, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Burial,
M.I.A., Roberto Bolaño—things seemed very grim. Part of what made "© Murakami" such a timely and brilliant show was the wink of irony that infused every piece (after all, the title of the exhibition has a copyright tag in it). The most memorable portion of "© Murakami" was a fully operational Louis Vuitton shop that was located in the museum. The store resembled a Louis Vuitton outpost in Beverly Hills or Manhattan and had a staff that worked temporarily for the shop—they weren't artist's assistants or Brooklyn Museum employees. Was this a tongue-in-cheek commentary on contemporary capitalism, or a blatant act of commerce masquerading as "fine art"?
To Murakami, there really isn't all that much of a difference. He's most famous for pioneering Superflat, a Japanese art movement predicated on the idea that the boundaries that separate artistic and commercial production have been flattened. Murakami has said in many places that he sees no distinction between something like
Flower Ball 2, a circular acrylic work that resembles a ball of cartoon daisies with open-mouthed smiley faces at the center of each flower, and a mass-produced key chain of one of those daisies. But the morbid humor of some of his artworks and his deep knowledge of art history mean that Murakami's lack of differentiation between art and commerce is just as much of a punch line as a theory, a grand joke on the art world. How else to look at
My Lonesome Cowboy, a statue that was part of "© Murakami"? It's an eight-foot-tall naked male manga character with spiky blonde hair, holding his ejaculating erect penis with one hand and with the other wrangling the ejaculate like a lasso. In 2008,
Sotheby's sold it for $15.1 million.
Visitors to "The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg" who also viewed "© Murakami" will recognize the multiple artworks featuring Mr. Dob, a cartoon mouse that was the subject of many of Murakami's pieces during the 90s and early 2000s. A maniacal take on Mickey Mouse, Mr. Dob appears in simpler form in early works such as ZuZaZaZaZaZa (1994), a five-foot-tall painting in which he is depicted leaping in midair against a red backdrop, a stream of white liquid trailing beneath him. But by 2002's Tan Tan Bo Puking—aka Gero Tan, Mr. Dob is a grotesque monstrosity, painted onto four nearly 12-foot-tall panels and filled with fluorescent whorls and stains, looking like Godzilla seen through the eyes of someone who just ingested an unhealthy amount of psilocybin mushrooms.
- Takashi Murakami, Tan Tan Bo Puking—aka Gero Tan, 2002
- COURTESY MCA CHICAGO
Most of the pieces from this time period are heavily informed by manga, which Murakami acknowledges as a major influence, along with
otaku, a term commonly associated with diehard anime fandom. Murakami in fact first wanted to be an animator, but the manga elements of his work belie his impressive art- history background. He attended the Tokyo University of the Arts and received a PhD in Nihonga, a traditional style of Japanese painting that's created with specific techniques and materials. But Murakami was more excited about contemporary art, especially
Anselm Kiefer, the German neo-Expressionist painter who often uses substances other than paint in his pieces.
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"Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg"
