Molto Murakami
MOCA curator Paul Schimmel explores the link between art and commerce via a retrospective of Takashi Murakami.
Paul Schimmel is a happy man on a roll. The source of his cheeriness? In brief, it goes something like this… This month, Takashi Murakami, the so-called “Warhol of Japan” and founder of the Superflat art movement that challenges consumerism and hierarchies of high and low culture, is opening a major midcareer retrospective—“© Murakami”—at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where Schimmel, mastermind of the exhibition, has reigned as chief curator since the late ’90s. Richest-man-in-France Bernard Arnault’s Paris-based luxury goods conglomerate Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, a.k.a. LVMH, is underwriting the show’s opening night gala (longtime Murakami collector Eileen Harris Norton is serving as the celebration’s honorary chair; and recent Murakami collector and collaborator Kanye West is slated to entertain). The fete also celebrates Louis Vuitton’s creative director, the onetime grunge guru Marc Jacobs, who both instigated Murakami’s collaborations with Vuitton and set the evening’s impish dress code: “Ironic, sometimes dark, somewhat childlike and whimsical.”
Set amid 20,000 square feet of MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary venue, the exhibition encompasses 90-plus Murakami works from 1990 to the present, as well as an embedded and fully operational Louis Vuitton boutique proffering Murakami-branded, limited-edition handbags and accessories. And in the MOCA gift shop (separate from the show), gallery goers can purchase mass-market wares from Kaikai Kiki Co., the artist’s Tokyo headquartered atelier where, in addition to overseeing the careers of half a dozen protégés and curating exhibitions of his own, he has essentially out-Warholed Warhol—producing everything from 727-727—a painting that brought $1.5 million last year at Basel Art Fair—to coffee mugs, mouse pads, key chains, and figurines sold at Japanese 7-Elevens.
“It’s ‘Copyright Murakami,’” says Schimmel, emphasizing the symbol in the exhibition’s name with evident delight. “I’m intrigued by what Murakami means in terms of personal representation on the one hand and corporate representation on the other. It’s the identity of the artist more than any object that’s central to what Takashi is really doing.”
What Murakami has been doing alongside $2,000 multicolored LV monogram handbags and other merchandising feats includes monumental artworks such as Oval Buddha, an 18-foot-tall self portrait, seven years in the making, and Flower Ball (3-D) Kindergarten Days, a 2007 acrylic and silver goldleaf on canvas. “People who have given up find security when they look at art made by a person who is still resisting,” Murakami has said of his work. It’s an equally esoteric and accessible body of art, an exploration of post-war Japanese pop culture’s reflection of the country’s national psyche through riffs on otaku, the subculture obsessed with the childlike characters of manga and anime. Among his sources of inspiration, the artist also cites Steven Spielberg and Bill Gates.
Murakami and Schimmel first met in Tokyo, and the artist’s work first appeared at MOCA in 2000, starting with “Superflat,” a Murakami curated show of his own and Kaikai Kiki artists’ works. “I like the darker side of Takashi,” Schimmel says. “I like the irony of his cheeriness.”
In his MOCA office, a modern albeit higgledy-piggledy space where volumes like High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture and Museum Trusteeship teeter in the bookcase, a tiny Murakami drawing mingles with the family photos on the walls with the words “exhibition,” “audience,” “shop,” and “memory” written in a circle. The sketch inspired the decision to include the Vuitton boutique in the show. “At first, he didn’t want the boutique,” says Schimmel. “I approached Marc Jacobs. I wanted it to be a real boutique, not a didactic experience.”
A self-described old-fashioned modernist, Schimmel is well known for his provocative visions—raw epics rife with complex historical overtones and cultural narratives that question stereotypes. (On his thematic to-do list is California in the ’70s: “It starts with Altamont and ends with Reagan going to the White House.”) And while his latest is a study in relationships between art and commerce, local and global, it’s also about prescience and persistence that dates at least as far back as, say, when the native New Yorker left his first California gig—a nine-year curatorship with what is now the Orange County Museum of Art—to assume his MOCA post.
Schimmel starts planning his debut effort—a blockbuster that probes longstanding myths about the reputed dark underbelly of Los Angeles. He names it “Helter Skelter.”
The year is 1990. Schimmel, then in his mid-30s, is sizing up his new playing field in L.A. It is expansive. On the home front, he and his wife, Yvonne, move with baby Max, the first of their two sons, into a Spanish-style house at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. At the office, Schimmel starts planning his debut effort, a blockbuster that probes longstanding myths about the reputed dark underbelly of Los Angeles. He names it “Helter Skelter.”
Dubbed a “succès de scandale” in the media—for its edge as well as its zeitgeist representation of Charles Manson—the 1992 exhibition features the work of emerging L.A. talents such as Charles Ray, Chris Burden and Mike Kelley, most of whom Schimmel has worked with for years. The art world takes notice. Chic young arts patrons queue by the hundreds.
In Japan, meanwhile, Murakami completes an 11-year Ph.D. in nihonga (a late 19th century fusion of Japanese and European painting styles) at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1993, making initial forays into pop, and marveling over his first-visit-to-New-York epiphany that artists are allowed to have fun. The 28-year-old happens upon the “Helter Skelter” exhibition catalog on a newsstand and flips through it. He decides he wants to do a solo show at MOCA—curated specifically by Schimmel.
“‘Helter Skelter’ was a surprise hit,” says Schimmel of his record Geffen audience to date. “It drew 125,000 people. Takashi saw it as a model for his own ambitions, vis-à-vis having a big international exhibition that remains intensely personal.” The latter seems something of a Schimmel forte.
“Takashi is a workaholic, so he’s a bit envious that I’m a family man and a curator and—of particular importance to him—that I’m very successful at it. Whereas I’m envious of the fact that he puts all the chips on the table every time. He’s fearless. Artists who really believe in themselves are the ones who make great art. They know nothing else than total commitment.” •
C Magazine
By Trish Reynales. All rights reserved.
