Ektopia

I stood in front of the mammoth piece of art in NYC’s MOMA back in 2005 for ages. It wasn’t for long enough in my opinion but my wife though I was overdoing it so eventually we moved on. The piece was called 727 (pictured below) and was by an artist called Takashi Murakami. I had witnessed something truly out of the ordinary and I’ve never studied a piece of art in an orthodox gallery setting as much as I did this piece. I try and think back to whether I knew about Murakami before this but my memory fails me. As for as I’m concerned, my love for Murakami’s work started in New York. Fast forward a few years…

Takashi Murakami, Japanese art superstar, recently had an exhibition at the MOCA in Los Angeles. It’s not like his other shows where his latest art is shown but more of a celebration of approximately the last 20 years of his work. As well as showing more than 90 of Murakami’s paintings and installations, a kind of catalogue to accompany the exhibition has also be published.

The catalogue in question, © Murakami, has been published by Rizzoli in the US and is distributed by PGUK over here in the UK. Calling © Murakami a catalogue though is as vast an understatement as you could make. Calling it simply a book is the same. It’s a monster…a tome! Standing at over 32cm tall, over 25cms wide and whopping 4.2cm thick it’ll probably end up taking up more room on a book shelf than the majority of books and it’s jam-packed with Murakami goodness.

Now, seeing as the exhibition is made up from around 90 of Murakami’s pieces you’ll quickly realise that the book isn’t just a photographic document of just the works themselves. If that were the case you would end up with a book with half the amount of pages, even if it had some detail shots of the pieces. Sure, they’re all there in the book but that’s just part of what’s on offer here. © Murakami stands alone as a kind of case study (or a series of case studies) of Murakami’s art…and life I guess. So, all of the art very much revolves around the many essays that have been written by many different people and it makes for a very interesting read. Much of the essay content is quite intellectual. That’s not to say that it’s been over-intellectualised but I will admit to finding some of it to be quite difficult to take in at first. However, I’m 100% sure that it’s not to do with how it’s written but to do with my lack of intelligence! In fact, once I slowed down a little bit and started to read it “properly” it all made a lot more sense and I found it much more rewarding.

Once I got into the essays I found myself trying to work out what it must be like to live in another culture in another time. I’m failing to get to grips with the impact of WWII had been like for the Japanese. More importantly, the generation after the war. Murakami grew up being told by his mother that he was lucky to be alive. Kokura, where the Murakami family lived, had been the US’s initial target for the second atomic bomb but it had been called off due to weather conditions that day. The bomb that was destined for Kokura was delivered to Hiroshima and the rest is history that we already know. However, a little Murakami grew up under the weight of knowing that he may well have never even existed. In the book it justifies Murakami’s use of mushroom clouds but it obviously goes a lot deeper than this. I don’t have the intellect to de-construct it further but the end result is definitely something unique that the Japanese artists of that generation (and the next I guess) have been endowed with because their art is unlike anything that came before and until recently wasn’t seen outside of Japan. It’s now become a huge influence around the world with the popularisation of Manga and Anime, which seems like a modern invention to us. In fact, early anime was hugely influential to the young Takashi and there are many examples cited in this book as being both inspiration and also being work that has been completely reworked or remixed. This is one aspect of Murakami’s work that I wasn’t expecting actually. Take the image below for example. It’s called Time Bokan - Blue and was created in 2001. It’s a remix of a still from a TV series from the mid 1970s known by the same name, Time Bokan. It’s been modernised, outlined, added to (the inverted red mirrored image at the top) and generally just tinkered with. However, it’s unmistakeably the same piece. This single images teaches me two things - first of all, the whole anime thing has been going on for longer than I realised and also that the art world, unlike the music world, are celebrators of the past and are more than happy to enjoy remixing the past and the present. In fact, it’s almost seen here as a eulogy rather than a cheap alternative to the original. I love that.

The book is stacked with beautiful pieces of art. Some I’ve used in this review, others aren’t safe for work due to nudity and some are so cute that they’ve not been used here to save your from screaming out loud in your office when you’re supposed to be working. One piece that is probably borderline is a sculptured triptych called Second Mission Project ko². In this piece (pictured below) a larger than life-size super-cute manga girl morphs in three stages from her upright humanoid figure to an aircraft in flight that’s almost unrecognisable from her former self apart from her flowing hair on the top of the strange craft. As she springs into the air, in the second part of the sculpture, her semi-naked torso swings forward as her arms and legs move toward their positions underneath. It’s exquisite. Perfect in every way. A beautiful Transformer.

As I’ve already said, it’s a monster of a book. I’ve had it for ages and it’s taken me some time to get from cover to cover but it’s been worth ever moment that I’ve spent within it’s pages. There’s so much in this book it’s a struggle to know what to choose to write write about. 90 works doesn’t sound like a huge amount to fill a book but these aren’t just pieces of art. These are something truly special and each demands proper inspection. Even the simple pieces are like that but the more detailed works could be exhausting if you wanted to get everything from them. There are some three-page fold-outs that show the whole of some of his wider and multi-canvas works.

One thing that the book doesn’t dedicate as much pictorial space to as I would have liked is the way in which Murakami has created a universe that anyone can afford to be part of. At the top end are his very expensive paintings and sculptures but there are also toys and key-chains at the lower end and everything between, including Louis Vuitton (one of his prints below) paraphernalia and beautifully printed footballs. You could say that he’s made himself into an artistic version of Tescos or Wall Mart but it’s closer to the truth that he’s just a successful artist that has created a art market that anyone can be a part of.

In other Murakami news - He’s making an animation called Kaikai & Kiki and you can catch a small trailer here. I’m sure you’ll agree that it looks stunning. His characters transfer so well to that 2.5D world as they do in his 3D sculpture work. I can’t wait to see it in full some time soon. In the meantime, there are some production stills from the animation included in this book.

There are a number of videos where Murakami discusses the pieces in the MOCA show. These videos are the perfect accompaniment to this book too. It’s great to hear things about the individual pieces right from the artist himself and to get a more realistic idea of the scale of the art itself.

© Murakami weighs in at 330 massive pages and is available at Rizzoli, PGUK in the UK and all the usual places including AmazonUK.

As a footnote - Check out the photo below. The MOCA show had a huge billboard in town that Revok and Augor painted over. Two days later it was gone and after a little investigating it turned out that it wasn’t the billboard company in the act of getting it off the street but Murakami himself that had requested it to be taken down and sent over to Tokyo to join his private collection. Cool guy.