Takashi Murukami
Et in Arcadia
ergo
Murukami on exhibition at the Pedder Building.
Pedder St,
Hong Kong (January, 2013). A key (and perhaps the
most intelligent and talented) exemplar of the important trend of (neo) pop art,
predominantly occurring in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, but also in China and
other countries of the region, Murukami rides the new wave of popular culture
(this time of eastern rather than western origin) as it enters ‘high art’ or
art culture through the portal of graphic art and its influence on design in
advertising, popular iconology and fashion. Perhaps most importantly extending
the legacy of the design styles associated with the Manga cartoon into the
world of the gallery system and art market (as well as drawing on prior
traditions of Japanese art). Stylization is the key (first the simplification
of the image to cartoon or logo status, and then the addition of complexity,
with repetition-variation, as with Minimalism). Repetition, as well as
providing the means of interior decoration, industrial style for mass
reproduction - but now designed on a computer (see the backgrounds of the more
complex images), now appears as the means of organization of the topic or
presiding icon (with variation to be sure); just as in original wave of ‘Pop
Art’ (Warhol, Rosenquist, etc) which also used mass cultural reference points.
This use of popular cultural content includes both ‘found’ images and
imitations of styles of image design; a mimetic response that includes
reflection on serious issues through the medium of popular imagery, of the
popular imaginary. Otherwise put; a continuance of the tradition of pastiche or
appropriation, where the form, content and means of expression of an image is
made ironic, self-aware, if you like, and yoked to larger, even meta-physical
concerns. Formal antecedents whilst including Pop Art itself, features the 70s
and 80s uses of post-Pop, post-Abstract Expressionist texture; the effect of
collage and manipulation of multiple textures, producing a similar effect of
textual jouissance - an overwhelming
or chaotic joy based upon colour and texture. A riot of contrasts working
together to produce a plural, variegated, even exorbitant manifold. Such
textures may be found in the collage-like paintings of Bernard Cohen and the
Frank Stella.
Yet if the means of expression owe much to the playfulness of
popular culture, the content is religious and insists on the question of
mortality. In this respect resembling the role of the ‘Day of the Dead’ in
Catholic cultures (most notably that of Mexico), and, historically, the
image genre of the ‘Dance of the Dead’, from European feudal or medieval
culture. The fusion of the death’s head motif, the skull, memento mori and other skeletal images – with other mythological
elements (in the figurative works), offers an up-to-date means of dealing with
death… with its place in modern culture. Much depends upon the reader and the
questions they are prepared to ask… either way ‘death’ arrives at, or is
returned to, the metaphysical level, after being used for popular entertainment
in the genres of popular culture (cartoon and other screen violence including
the video and computer games). As with Pop Art before it, such an art
reinforces the sense of a mass-produced culture as an aspect of life in a mass
society; the innumerable presence of beings, of points of experience… and of
the accretion of skulls as representing their terminus. Et in Arcadia
Ergo.
Memento mori… In
the ‘Flower and Skulls’ sequence, the juxtaposition (and its means of
presentation) is, of course, deeply ironic: both elements are held in tension,
modifying or calling into question the direct meaning of the other, with the
means of presentation further undermining, or resituating the meanings
associated with these images. Yet ‘Flowers and Skulls’ also refers to the
contrast of birth and death (Spring and Winter), a comment on the beginning and
end of human life and its place in our imaginations; which contrast can also be
read as the succession of death and renewal, that is the human imagination’s
ritualised understanding of mortality in the context of the succession of
generations and the continuance of life. So Winter is followed by Spring – now
we are indeed back in the traditional folk understanding of the seasons as an
allegory of human reproduction. …Or memento
merry.
If we can see Murukami’s art works as part of the latest of one of
such waves (popular cultural, technological)… then it is also the precursor of
many more such to come… Other elements of the popular appropriation of
communication technology already included in art practice have been
mobile-phone photo-shots… material from web sites, ‘blogs’ and twitter excerpts
and the (often live) recordings or transmissions of participatory
works-in-progress or ‘happening’ type events (their documentation). All the
above, it is perhaps needless of point out, are linked to the evolution of
modern communications technology and its fusion with mass society, with a mass
market. The penetration of ‘com-tech’ into everyday life is, as with the spread
of technology in general, a largely quantitative affair, permitting speed, the
making or doing or sending of more, more quickly – whether the impact on
people’s life-style in general is cumulatively qualitative, or again just
quantitative, allowing us to squeeze more into less time, is a matter for
debate. Initially occurring as a means of spreading information, as a means of
recording information and experience, so rendering such material, in turn,
re-spreadable as information… and re-presentable (given the right
institutional… or attitudinal, frame) as Art.
Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2013