Roberta Smith writes: Who knew that the first Louis Vuitton boutique in Brooklyn would touch down smack in the middle of the borough's most venerable art institution? But there it is, at the Brooklyn Museum, bright and gleaming and blending smoothly into a sleek, stylish survey of the work of Takashi Murakami. Mr. Murakami, who is frequently called the Japanese Andy Warhol, is an astute manipulator of visual languages, artistic mediums and business models.Photo: Julien Jourdes for The New York Times
When the show made its debut last fall at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the shop was criticized for blurring the already fuzzed line between seemingly functional and nonfunctional luxury goods (i.e., art). But actually it’s an ingenious key to the Pandora’s box of Mr. Murakami’s art and stuffed with questions of art and commerce, high and low, public brand and private expression, mass production and exquisite craft.Photo: Julien Jourdes for The New York Times
Kiki (2000) Mr. Murakami siphons motifs from Disney and Dalí, strategies from Pop Art, and sexual fantasies from Japan’s anime (animation) and manga (comics) subcultures. His cast of variously cute, erotic or grotesque creatures and intense decorative pilings-on range across paintings, sculptures, animations and wallpaper, building at times to a hallucinatory intensity that has more than a touch of darkness.
Photo: Julien Jourdes for The New York Times
From left to right, Kawaii-Vacances (2002), Flower Matango (2001-2006) and Cosmos (1998)
Photo: Julien Jourdes for The New York Times
From left to right, Kawaii-Vacances (2002), Flower Matango (2001-2006) and Cosmos (1998)One example is the riot of manically cheerful flowers created by the combination of wallpaper, paintings and one sculpture in a large gallery. The blooms look like petal-ringed smiley faces, only better — and crazier. The ensemble fulfills almost too completely Mr. Murakami’s stated desire to make art “that makes your mind go blank, that leaves you gaping.”
Photo: Julien Jourdes for The New York Times
“DOB in Strange Forest” (1999)
The exhibition's spine is formed by the demonic mutations of the artist's signatory and most ubiquitous character, Mr. DOB, the Mickey Mouse derivative who is something of a self-portrait. Splitting, multiplying, flashing jagged teeth and shapeshifting almost beyond recognition, Mr. DOB appears here as an enormous inflatable, a sculpture menaced by colorful mushrooms, on some flag-stone-like floor covering and in way too many slick, brittle paintings.
Photo: Julien Jourdes for The New York Times
“Tongari-Kun” (2003-2004)
Photo: Julien Jourdes for The New York Times
“DOB in Strange Forest” (1999)The exhibition's spine is formed by the demonic mutations of the artist's signatory and most ubiquitous character, Mr. DOB, the Mickey Mouse derivative who is something of a self-portrait. Splitting, multiplying, flashing jagged teeth and shapeshifting almost beyond recognition, Mr. DOB appears here as an enormous inflatable, a sculpture menaced by colorful mushrooms, on some flag-stone-like floor covering and in way too many slick, brittle paintings.
Photo: Julien Jourdes for The New York Times
“Tongari-Kun” (2003-2004)Some other experiences balance things out. One is the enchanting 23-foot-tall "Mr. Pointy," a space-alien, 18-armed Buddha on a lotus throne surrounded by four guardians that dominates the museum's lobby. Its sinuous designs and rich colors evoke a fusion of Surrealism, Art Nouveau and Japanese kimonos.
Photo: Julien Jourdes for The New York Times
Even more spellbinding is a new animation dreamed up by Mr. Murakami and his company, Kaikai Kiki. “Planting the Seeds,” an instant classic, stars Kaikai and Kiki, two spirit guides in footy pajamas who are probably descended from Mr. DOB. They travel the world in a living spacecraft that gives new meaning to the term “mother ship.” Extraordinarily beautiful, with a deeply Japanese respect for nature, the tale suggests that there is no such thing as waste through a hilarious emphasis on manure — or as the three-eyed Kiki squeaks at the top of his/her tiny lungs, “Poop??!!”
Photo: Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Comapany
And, finally, in the last two galleries of the exhibition, Mr. Murakami’s painting explodes with a new complexity of color and meaning, matching the intensity of the flower room, but without the mind-blanking repetition. The combination of scale, rich detail and brilliant color and compositional and narrative drama is riveting. In “Tan Tan Bo” (2001) Mr. DOB is reincarnated in a kaleidoscope of color whose mixture of geometric and biomorphic forms is a kind of comic summation of modernist abstraction.
Photo: Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Comapany, courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo
“Tan Tan Bo Puking” (2002) is a Daliesque apocalypse: Mr. DOB in his death throes with globs of brilliant color spilling from his jagged teeth, and strange protrusions, at once foul and gorgeous, erupting all over his enormous head. One culminates in a golden hand that meets another hand in a flash of light. And in the lower right, the Kiki stands among four Shinto staffs dangling with sacred paper that signal the soul crossing to the afterlife.
Photo: Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Comapany, courtesy of Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris and Miami
In the show’s final four paintings, all from the last two years, different Japanese art forms, materials and styles create a great contrapuntal energy. In “727-727,” Mr. DOB’s snarling head bounces on an elegant unfurling wave, against layers of sanded colors that encompass the entire spectrum, and evoke ancient screens and Warhol’s Oxidation paintings as well as atomic radiation.
Photo: Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Comapany, courtesy of Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
"I open wide my eyes but see no scenery. I fix my gaze upon my heart" (2007)
Photo: Julien Jourdes for The New York Times
Even more spellbinding is a new animation dreamed up by Mr. Murakami and his company, Kaikai Kiki. “Planting the Seeds,” an instant classic, stars Kaikai and Kiki, two spirit guides in footy pajamas who are probably descended from Mr. DOB. They travel the world in a living spacecraft that gives new meaning to the term “mother ship.” Extraordinarily beautiful, with a deeply Japanese respect for nature, the tale suggests that there is no such thing as waste through a hilarious emphasis on manure — or as the three-eyed Kiki squeaks at the top of his/her tiny lungs, “Poop??!!”Photo: Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Comapany
And, finally, in the last two galleries of the exhibition, Mr. Murakami’s painting explodes with a new complexity of color and meaning, matching the intensity of the flower room, but without the mind-blanking repetition. The combination of scale, rich detail and brilliant color and compositional and narrative drama is riveting. In “Tan Tan Bo” (2001) Mr. DOB is reincarnated in a kaleidoscope of color whose mixture of geometric and biomorphic forms is a kind of comic summation of modernist abstraction.Photo: Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Comapany, courtesy of Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo
“Tan Tan Bo Puking” (2002) is a Daliesque apocalypse: Mr. DOB in his death throes with globs of brilliant color spilling from his jagged teeth, and strange protrusions, at once foul and gorgeous, erupting all over his enormous head. One culminates in a golden hand that meets another hand in a flash of light. And in the lower right, the Kiki stands among four Shinto staffs dangling with sacred paper that signal the soul crossing to the afterlife.Photo: Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Comapany, courtesy of Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris and Miami
In the show’s final four paintings, all from the last two years, different Japanese art forms, materials and styles create a great contrapuntal energy. In “727-727,” Mr. DOB’s snarling head bounces on an elegant unfurling wave, against layers of sanded colors that encompass the entire spectrum, and evoke ancient screens and Warhol’s Oxidation paintings as well as atomic radiation.Photo: Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Comapany, courtesy of Blum & Poe, Los Angeles
"I open wide my eyes but see no scenery. I fix my gaze upon my heart" (2007) Two large portraits of Daruma, the revered sixth-century Indian monk who introduced Zen Buddhism to China, mimic the calligraphic flair of ink painting (writ very large) but on surfaces of gold, silver and titanium leaf customary for screen painting. One leaves this show feeling that Mr. Murakami has found a new benign Pandora’s box: the richness of traditional Japanese art.
Photo: Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Comapany, courtesy Gagosian Gallery
Photo: Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Comapany, courtesy Gagosian Gallery
