© Stacy L Smith 2013
So I have been pondering throughout the week who and what I was going to write about. This morning I made the decision to just flip through an Art Forum Magazine that I have been carrying with me for the past week and just look at art until something caught my notice. There in the first ten pages I came across an intriguing character by Takashi Murakami.
It didn't occur to me until I googled his work, that I have seen quite a bit of his work before and in fact, I saw it on a street corner shop when I was in New York City a couple of years ago. Like Shepherd Fairy's 'Andre the Giant' print with the words "OBEY," Murakami's work has infiltrated our capitalist society with his self-termed style "Superflat" and can be found on shoes, stickers, limited edition Louis Vuitton hand bags, album covers, and as small inflatables to be purchased and displayed or "toyed" with. Even DeadMau5 (pronounced 'Dead Mouse') blatantly copied the artist work for their cover art.
It didn't occur to me until I googled his work, that I have seen quite a bit of his work before and in fact, I saw it on a street corner shop when I was in New York City a couple of years ago. Like Shepherd Fairy's 'Andre the Giant' print with the words "OBEY," Murakami's work has infiltrated our capitalist society with his self-termed style "Superflat" and can be found on shoes, stickers, limited edition Louis Vuitton hand bags, album covers, and as small inflatables to be purchased and displayed or "toyed" with. Even DeadMau5 (pronounced 'Dead Mouse') blatantly copied the artist work for their cover art.
Like many of today's most prominent artists, such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hurst, Murakami has a factory studio that employs other artists to finish his work for him. It's the same idea that Andy Warhol had, and many artists before him, the means of which is to produce a product within a certain deadline. Murakami is essentially the designer, and has his paid 'minions' carry his vision to the final product. His factory is more akin to that of Jeff Koons as opposed to Warhol though, as he produces both work that is affordable to the average person in the form of small collectables, like Koon's "Balloon Dog" piggy banks that I found at the Modern Museum in Dallas, and to the elite collector as evidence by his sale of a 30 foot Sculpture to a Christie's patron for a cool 1.5 million dollars.
The subject matter is essentially low culture. Drawing from underground and alternative notions of anime and manga, at one time Murakami felt that this culture would come to represent Japanese art and become a culture entirely of its own. He could not have known how much Cosplay and dressing up as your favorite anime character would become an essential part of the Comic-con festival culture. In essence, what he wanted became a reality that many Americans and Japanese play a part of on a regular basis.
There seems to be a trend in contemporary sculpture when compared to the works of Ron Mueck, whose realism is so highly defined and the scales are so fantastically extreme in either the super-large or small, but Murakami keeps his "Superflat" style as his principle identifier with the exception of his super-large self-portrait sculpture as seen below.
The subject matter is essentially low culture. Drawing from underground and alternative notions of anime and manga, at one time Murakami felt that this culture would come to represent Japanese art and become a culture entirely of its own. He could not have known how much Cosplay and dressing up as your favorite anime character would become an essential part of the Comic-con festival culture. In essence, what he wanted became a reality that many Americans and Japanese play a part of on a regular basis.
There seems to be a trend in contemporary sculpture when compared to the works of Ron Mueck, whose realism is so highly defined and the scales are so fantastically extreme in either the super-large or small, but Murakami keeps his "Superflat" style as his principle identifier with the exception of his super-large self-portrait sculpture as seen below.
His paintings combine the traditional Japanese conventions for applying balance and curvature to the two-dimensional flat surface. When I look at the work below I can see the influence of hundreds of years of landscapes and print making with a touch of Roy Lichtensteins notice of 'benday's dots that one would find in the halftone prints of a newspaper. Murakami pulls from all of his experience of art history, bringing in what I would consider to be a glorious mixture of Eastern and Western ideas.
The heightened color in the work below is just one of the many reasons why I'm attracted to his work. Those candy-coated colors pop to the eye and draw me in in a way that corresponds with my own philosophy of painting. I am a fan of color displacement and using bright vibrant colors in an arbitrary fashion. Perhaps it has more to do with design than aesthetics, but even with his use of these colors and patterns, the work still seems analogous to me, each color relating to the next. The use of patterns is also one that goes back to Eastern imagery. True, he's using eyes and camouflage, but the play of the two create an abstract painting with representational imagery, and like, Chuck Close, to me, the combination of the two is simply mesmerizing.
Of all of Murakami's work, I find the crazed Disney=esque mouse one of the most interesting. It's a common motif throughout his work. What does that say about our society? Was Murakami trying to relate the simulacra of the Disney experience in Japan to the ravages of that corporation on his society's culture? Is the background supposed to resemble an acid wash on one's commercially purchased jeans, or is it simply because it's a cool effect? Yes, I know, I have a tendency to over-analyse things, but it helps me work out what I like and what I don't, and perhaps even why...
Until next time, keep creating art!
~SS
Until next time, keep creating art!
~SS