© MURAKAMI
Brooklyn Museum
April 5–July 13, 2008
Before we look at Murakami, it's worth revisiting the last big thing at the Brooklyn Museum -- 1999's "Sensation," the show that famously offended Rudy Giuliani's sensibilities by way of Chris Offili's elephant dung-adorned Virgin Mary. Less remembered but more odious to art circles was the museum's decision to exhibit works owned and unofficially curated by a single collector -- British advertising mogul and Brooklyn Museum donor Charles Saatchi. The net effect was boosting the market value of the works; and sure enough, Mr. Saatchi sold many of the works at auction within a couple years.
This all goes to show that the Brooklyn Museum and its director Arnold Lehman are more than comfortable with creative curatorial strategies that are fast and loose with the rules, ready to jump in the sack with anyone that's paying.
This time the act is consummated not behind closed doors, but out in the open, smack in the middle of the new Takashi Murakami retrospective. I'm referring of course to the special Louis Vuitton store, an actual luxury retail outlet set up deep inside the non-profit museum. This isn't some easy-to-ignore shack tucked away in one corner, but a room-size space that the visitor is made to walk through. Inside is dark-wood flooring, dramatic lighting and a staff of five salespeople -- attired in all white and eager to assist with your purchases. And people are buying everything from $300 key chains to $2,200 purses. Shopping bags are evident throughout the exhibit.
It's safe to say that that for many, the bag purchase was the highlight of the show. He's a crossover hit -- many know Murakami through his handbag designs. I'm sure you've seen them. Wildly popular, the bags combine the brand's conservative logo-bedecked look with the artist's cutesy imagery.
The L.A. MoCA, where the Murakami show originated, got a lot of flack for the Vuitton store, but critical opinion here seems a bit blasé. And why not? For one we're used to retail in museums; for years the special exhibition stores, themed merchandise and retail outposts have been upping our tolerance for commercial crap. The museum public buys it, and it funds exhibitions. Win-win. And for Murakami, isn't commercialism a major theme? He is the CEO of KaiKai Kiki LLC, a multinational enterprise dedicated to pumping out toys, calendars, figurines, t-shirts, etc., not to mention artworks. This industriousness is simply a 21st Century update on Warhol's Factory, the argument goes. His art is about the commercial enterprise, blurring the boundaries between high and low culture and paying dividends to boot. I understand all these points, but to me they're all justifications and rationalizations. Seductive as the store is, it's still wrong.
Also wrong were the Museum's decision at the show's gala party to honor bulldozer developer Bruce Ratner and to invite Louis Vuitton to create a faux knockoff handbag bazaar. In Marie Antoinette style, VIP guests were invited to pretend they were a poor plebian purchasing an imitation purse while paying 100 times the cost. And, get this, a portion of sales was donated to maybe the least-deserving charity ever -- the Federal Enforcement Homeland Security Foundation.
Now onto the art.
Murakami aims to please. His stated aim is to create art that makes the brain go blank, and at that he's quite successful. His work is eye candy for all ages. Bright colors and cute cartoon characters -- millions of smiley flowers! -- tickle our inner 4-year-old. Transforming naked robot anime sculptures stimulate our inner 14-year-old. Less successfully, for our adult minds, there are occasional allusions to classical Japanese scroll painting and Hiroshima/Nagasaki.
For my money, he's best at the adolescent stuff. The impressive life-size transformer babes ("Second Mission Project Ko2 Advanced System," 1999-2007) rightly get the first and largest room in the exhibition. As a backdrop, the walls are covered with cosmic space imagery laced with a shooting white substance that, if you're familiar with Murakami's iconography, you know is semen. Intergalactic semen. In the sculpture "My Lonesome Cowboy" (1998), it's a semen lasso that emanates from the penis of a smiling shock-haired manga manchild. The figure faces "Hiropon" (1997), a giant-breasted woman-girl skipping rope with an arc of breast milk. It's a brilliant apotheosis of the Japanese cartoon aesthetic.
It's the Murakami iconography that I find most interesting about his work. His oeuvre seems to be a kind of world-unto-itself of recurring characters -- instead of the Marvel Universe, it's Murakami Universe. Beginning in the 1990s with the creation of Mickey Mouse-like character called DOB comes a coterie of cuteness -- anthropoid mushrooms, flowers, clouds and more. This process is reflected in a kind of violent dynamism and (radioactive?) mutability that seems to birth new creatures and worlds. We see DOB stretched, transformed, vomiting and dying. Works like the two large "Tan Tan Bo" canvases seem to show art at war with itself -- cute and not cute, sick and full of life, a recognizable character and something wholly new. For this, I give him credit.
