Bill Randall

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Good to see more people saying what I have (on this blog & in an article in the new TCJ) about Takashi MURAKAMI not being “Japan’s Andy Warhol,” as Mia Fineman does in a slide essay for Slate . Instead, she compares him to Walt Disney, another master marketer. But Japan already has its Disney, Osamu TEZUKA, another example of a tidy comparison that muddies the water.

Tezuka, Disney, and Murakami all have signature characters; they all founded employed other artists in their studios; they all produced animation. Respectively, they’re a humanist, a fantasist, and an otaku evangelist. Murakami’s the odd one out because he’s trying to change the structures of the fine art market, whereas the others somehow created high art in popular media.

Since Murakami should be judged in his context, I propose that he become “No Irony Art Baron Jeff Otakoons.” Besides the faux Engrish and awful pun, it’s more precise, and includes the last Next Andy Warhol in the bargain. If it doesn’t take off, it’s clear evidence that we’ll suffer Next Andy Warhols for another fifty years until the media finally gets another celebrity artist it can use for shorthand. Murakami’s too Japanese, and too otaku, for that to happen now in the West. Maybe soon.

Finally, moving from Warhol to Disney has troubling implications. It relies on an arbitrary wall between high & low culture. Fineman writes, “For those of us who were reared on the idea that art is a special kind of luxury product—more contemplative, denser with meaning, somehow resistant to the status quo—- Murakami’s radical leveling of art and commerce can be pretty unsettling.” While I (and most Cistercians) bristle at the linking of luxury and contemplation, I can’t relate to the split. For those of us reared on the experience and not the idea of these things, there are multivalent works, some trash, some exalted, all on a level field. A lot of the trash commands high prices in the white cube, while some of the lowest forms reward the most contemplation. My reading of Murakami finds little in his work, outside the attempt to build a fine art market in Japan from scratch, not already fully realized in the anime and manga he mines. I think his writings confirm this. To call his work “historically important” without engaging the otaku culture that defines it is to suffer from myopia.

One more thing: can we declare a moratorium on “rictus”? Thanks.

In his review of the (C) Murakami exhibit, Peter Schjeldahl admits at the outset why he dislikes the work on display. Murakami, like the Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang, reminds him of New Yorkers’ “new geo-spiritual fate, as provincials in a world of creative paradigms that no longer entreat our favor.” In other words, it’s not for him.

Murakami assumes viewers know the pop matter from which he carves his objects. For people under a certain age, or from the other side of the planet, the images are familiar. For Schjeldahl, they reveal a “tin eye.” He struggles to find a point of reference, and returns like most Western critics to Warhol, Koons, and Hirst.  The Warhol comparison dovetails perfectly, two Pop artists and their factories.

It is too convenient.  Like his primary inspiration, Shinro OHTAKE, Murakami resembles Warhol only superficially.  He lacks the irony, as well as the distance of a Lichtenstein. Instead, he participates fully in the stuff he draws, seeming as much of an otaku as the people who consume his work along with Nara, Ghibli, and Hello Kitty.  For Murakami, all reveal a baby Japan, the United States’ sidekick, and the subculture responding to that condition.

He articulates these ideas best not in his art, but the book Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture.  It remains the best single-volume introduction to Japanese pop, and shows Murakami’s nuanced criticism.  It may be more important than his art.  I find nothing in his art that does not already exist, with more vitality, in the pop culture he mines.  He has also opened doors for younger artists, so that when the backlash against him finishes, he will still be historically important.

As for Schjeldahl, a critic I admire, he at least admits that “it has to be good for us” New Yorkers to admit they’re not the center of the world.  “Contemporary Art” has largely been a New York thing.  That’s not the best place to see how fragile an institution it is, a few mom-and-pop galleries propped up by a some moneyed collectors.  So when he claims Murakami is “flooding the world with the Murakami brand,” it’s really just 15, maybe 20 big cities.  Besides, there aren’t any centers, just peripheries.

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I have not yet seen (C) Murakami, and so made do reading the book. I have seen several of his works in person, though, in the 2001 My Reality exhibit and here and there in Japan and New York.
(C) Murakami runs through July 13 at the Brooklyn Museum, after its popular opening at LA MOCA.

Finally watching Ozu’s Equinox Flower reminded me that David Bordwell’s Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema has been reissued as a PDF file. Bordwell has the story on his blog, which bizarrely enough has stills from… Equinox Flower. I feel strangely reflexive.

The book is one of the best pieces of criticism, film or otherwise, that I know; download it and see for yourself. It goes for like 500 bucks on eBay, so help destroy the collector’s market.

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As usual, late to the party:

In Washington, D.C. at the Japan Information and Culture Center at the Japanese Embassy. The road from unruly kids’ stuff to Official Culture, it seems, takes less than 53 years.

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GeGeGe no Kitaro just reminded me of an old GeroGeriGeGeGe 7″ I have lying around. I don’t even own an record player. 45 rpm, 11 incomprehensible bursts of noise. Which reminds me of this photo slide show of Osaka noise band Hanatarashi’s most infamous live gig. “The backhoe show.” Did he hotwire it? Where were the cops? In 1986 Tokyo had no foreigners, and so no need for cops.

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And: my Japanese is eroding quickly. Reading Kamimura Kazuo today, I thought Jiro said to Kyoko, “Kyoko! Give me a toilet! Quickly!” Really, he wants a towel.

I’m pretty late to the Chinese rock party– I haven’t even seen Beijing Rocks!– but I like Hang on the Box well enough. Along with thirty or so other bands, they form the bulk of the Mark Harris exhibit at the Weston Gallery in Cincinnati.

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I caught the tail end of the “Weight of the World” show at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning. Maiza Hixson and Ryan Mulligan curated the uneven show, but it has some gems.

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