Seven Days in the Art World

by Sarah Thornton

  Murakami had pulled the elastic band out of his hair and put it around his wrist while he was talking; his hippie mane now hung down his chest. “At the design stage, I think they do input their ideas,” he said. Murakami’s work starts as a paintbrush drawing on paper, which his assistants then scan into the computer using the live-trace tool of Adobe Illustrator CS2, then they fine-tune the curves and zigzags with different techniques. “I don’t know how to operate Illustrator, but I will say ‘yes, yes, yes, no, no, no’ when I check the work,” he said. Vector art software like Illustrator, which allows the user to stretch, contort, and scale up images without any degradation, has transformed the design industry, but relatively few fine artists use it. Photoshop, which is used by artists such as Jeff Wall and Andreas Gursky, has revolutionized contemporary photography, but the bulk of painting and sculpture production remains doggedly low-tech. At Kaikai Kiki, the artwork’s design goes back and forth between Murakami and his computer-literate assistants until he is satisfied with the picture. By the time the design is sent to the painting studio for execution, there is little room for interpretation, except perhaps in the process of turning digital colors into real-world paint mixes.

  The situation is not quite as straightforward with sculpture, where the transition to an object with actual length, width, and depth requires substantially more intermediate analysis and clarification. For Oval, Murakami’s first metal sculpture, the artist used his regular fiberglass fabricating company, Lucky Wide, to make variously scaled models, then a foundry called Kurotani Bijutsu (bijutsu means “art”) to cast and assemble the piece. Murakami told me that the production of Oval was initially so strained that many sculptors quit, and one even had a stroke. “This piece have the grudge of those sculptors,” he explained. “Oval is haunted with a very dark energy. It is part of its success. Probably you can experience that feeling when you see it.

  “An artist is a necromancer,” said Murakami. Even with the translation support of almost all the bilingual people in the room, the statement was cryptic. A dark wizard? A high priest? Someone who can talk to the dead? Murakami’s work bears witness to his many years as an otaku science-fiction geek and obsessive manga fan. In Japan, these geeks have a reputation for being socially dysfunctional, sexually frustrated young men who live in a fantasy world. As Murakami explained, “We define subculture as a cool culture from abroad, but otaku is an uncool indigenous culture. My mentality came from those animation geeks. I idled my time, imagining that Japan was a Philip K. Dick world.” Murakami absentmindedly put his hair back up in a slightly cock-eyed bun. “An artist is someone who understands the border between this world and that one,” he continued. “Or someone who makes an effort to know it.” Certainly Murakami’s work sits between many universes—art and cartoon, yin and yang, Jekyll and Hyde—but nowadays the artist is by no means an aimless dreamer. “I change my direction or continue in same direction by seeing people’s reaction,” he admitted. “My concentration is how to survive long-term and how to join with the contemporary feeling. To focus on nothing besides profit is, by my values, evil. But I work by trial and error to be popular.”

  I asked Murakami, an avowed Warhol fan, what he did not like about the American pop artist. Murakami frowned and groaned. “I like everything,” he finally offered, a Warholian answer if ever there was one. “Warhol’s genius was his discovery of easy painting,” he continued. “I am jealous of Warhol. I’m always asking my design team, ‘Warhol was able to create such an easy painting life, why our work so complicated?’ But the history knows! My weak point is my oriental background. Eastern flavor is too much presentation. I think it is unfair for me in the contemporary art battlefield, but I have no choice because I am Japanese.”

  When I quoted Warhol’s famous line “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art…Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art,” Murakami laughed and said, “That is a fantasy!”

  In his very early years, Murakami resisted using Warhol’s signature silkscreens in favor of entirely handpainted work, but he relented as a means of broadening his repertoire of styles, playing with repetition and improving his productivity. Now the two artists’ silkscreen techniques diverge greatly. Where a Warhol four-foot flower painting (from 1964) would typically use one screen, Murakami’s meter-in-diameter flower-ball works use nineteen. Moreover, whereas accidents, fades, and spills were accepted, even sought after, by Warhol, the level of meticulous craftsmanship in Murakami’s work is, as one critic put it, “absurdly high.” Murakami closed his eyes. “Absurd? Yes, I think so.” He nodded slowly, with a grimace. “And painful!”

  A studio is supposed to be a site of intense contemplation. Murakami does not have a preferred thinking space or somewhere that he feels is the heart of his studio. “Anywhere, anytime,” he said frankly. “I take a deep breath, send oxygen to my brain, meditate for a few seconds, and get to work. After this meeting, I have to redo my drawing for Kanye West’s new album jacket. No time to worry about where I am.” Murakami was referring to Graduation, the hip-hop artist’s third album, for which he also designed the singles covers and an animated music video. Murakami explained how the collaboration evolved in simple terms: “Kanye was big fan of my big breast sculpture. He learned my work and asked me to make designs.” The “big breast sculpture” is Hiropon, a painted fiberglass work completed in 1997 of a blue-haired girl with gargantuan breasts from which milk gushes in such abundance that the flow encircles her body like a skipping rope. “These past few weeks was really happy me,” continued Murakami, “because I found a good communication style with professional animation people.” Murakami had outsourced the execution of the work. “Deadline is coming soon and production cost is fixed. Kanye’s company people is very serious. A little stressful but I am enjoying.”

  When it comes to sleeping, Murakami is equally indiscriminate about place. The artist has no home per se, just a bedroom only a few yards from his desk here. He also has a sparse bedroom in his New York studio and mattresses in corners at his two Saitama locations. He works long hours seven days a week but naps two or three times a day. Murakami is a nonconformist in many ways, but he is utterly conventional when it comes to his Japanese work ethic, for Kaikai Kiki is typical of the nation’s notoriously demanding corporate culture.

  Murakami’s bedroom didn’t look much like a bedroom at all. At first glance it was hard to find the bed, a navy couch with a foam pillow at one end and some crumpled-up fabric that could have been a pair of boxer shorts at the other. One wall was glass, and although the room couldn’t be seen directly from the communal spaces, it offered little in the way of privacy. On white shelves, a large vintage Hello Kitty, a green blob monster covered in eyes, a soft-porn maid figure, and plastic versions of characters from the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch fought for attention. The DVDs of Hayao Miyazaki—the director of Spirited Away and other critically acclaimed animated features is one of Murakami’s heroes—sat in an orderly row, while a wide range of art books (about colorists like Henri Matisse and masters of deformation like Francis Bacon) was mixed in below. As we parted that day, Murakami told me, “I threw out my general life, so that I can make a concentration for my job. You maybe expecting more romantic story?”

  Of all the studios and live-work spaces I’ve visited, the one that came to mind was that of another ascetic bachelor without a lounge to relax in. When I was doing background research in Los Angeles for the second chapter of this book, I visited Michael Asher at his bungalow apartment on the outskirts of Santa Monica. When he ushered me into what would have been the living room, I found myself in a sea of waist-high black filing cabinets. The walls were white and, with the exception of a few lists and Post-it notes, completely unadorned. The only places to sit were some tattered office chairs that had lost most of their stuffing.

  Although Murakami’s complex, transnational, multistudio setup couldn’t be further away from the Post-Studio, periphery-embrac
ing, anticraft ethos of CalArts, the Japanese artist and the Californian conceptualist share a keen sense of discipline. And even if some aspects of Murakami’s practice hark back to the painting atelier of Peter Paul Rubens while other facets embrace a digitally designed future, his art has an intellectual drive that engages with contemporary conceptual art.

  That night I had supper at a superb hole-in-the-wall sushi restaurant where no one spoke English except the four museum people I was meeting there. Paul Schimmel, Mika Yoshitake, Jeremy Strick (the director of MOCA), and Charles Desmarais (from the Brooklyn Museum) all sat in a row and drank Murakami’s favorite tipple, shochu (Japanese gin) on ice. I sat next to Schimmel and across from our sushi chef, who had two gruesome scars where he’d sliced the knuckles off his left hand. Schimmel is originally from New York, but the jovial fifty-two-year-old has lived in Los Angeles for twenty-six years and had the top curatorial job at MOCA for seventeen. Known for his rigorous and speculative exhibitions, Schimmel supports Murakami with missionary fervor. “Takashi’s masterpieces are unimaginably challenging,” he told me. “He has put gazillions of hours and beyond reasonable intelligence into his works. His intent is to make something for all ages, and you can see it.”

  Schimmel likes to think that curators don’t so much “validate” artists as “illuminate” them. “The mere announcement of a solo exhibition can have an impact on an artist’s market, but sometimes that doesn’t sustain itself until the show is up,” he explained. “The authority of the institution is no guarantee of success. Big institutions can have a negative impact on artists’ careers. Sometimes you see all the work together—boom, boom, boom—and it doesn’t make things better.” Schimmel devoured a portion of golden sea urchin, then knocked back the seaweed broth in which it had been floating. “To really illuminate, you have to put aside institutional prerogatives. You have to bend the will of the museum to accommodate the artist’s vision. MOCA does that. There is no one MOCA way.”

  Schimmel likes to mutate his curatorial style with each exhibition. “The truth is, I hate the word branding,” he told me. “I’m a late-seventies counterculture guy and an old-fashioned art historian, but my eighteen-year-old son is into branding. I understand that it’s deeply meaningful to the younger generation and it’s integral to Takashi’s work…You can’t ignore the elephant in the room.” A plate of something covered in green slime arrived; Schimmel eyed it with open curiosity. “To experience Takashi, you have to experience the commercial elements in his work,” he said, talking with his mouth full. “Collectibles, whether they are luxury goods or merchandise, represent a fulfillment. It completes the intimate circle. Takashi understands that art has to be remembered and memory is tied to what you can take home.”

  Art bloggers will no doubt be appalled by the inclusion of a fully functioning Louis Vuitton boutique within the MOCA show, but it’s Murakami’s version of “institutional critique,” and Schimmel defended it. “It was difficult for a museum to relinquish this sacred ground, but it was absolutely the right thing to do in this instance,” he said. “They’ll be selling a limited line of goods especially produced for the show.” The restaurant was stuffy, and Schimmel wiped the sweat from his brow with his napkin, then looked at me earnestly. “I’ve never found choosing a controversial artist to be anything but the right choice. If there is already absolute consensus, if there is nothing you can do in terms of illumination, why do it?”

  A studio isn’t just a place where artists make art but a platform for negotiation and a stage for performance. The following day I was back at the Motoazabu studio to sit in on meetings between Murakami and the museum folk. In the larger of the two white-walled boardrooms, Murakami sat directly across from Schimmel at a long wooden table lined with twenty black leather chairs. Flanking the artist were two beautiful, bilingual thirty-year-old women: Yuko Sakata, the executive director of his New York operations, and Yoshitake, MOCA’s project coordinator. Sitting on either side of Schimmel were Desmarais and I.

  The first item on the agenda was the exhibition catalogue. Murakami, in his T-shirt and shorts, hair up, started leafing through the glossy page proofs. The first page of the catalogue showed a work from 1991 that appropriated the marketing campaign of Japanese toy manufacturer Tamiya. It read: TAKASHI: FIRST IN QUALITY AROUND THE WORLD. The piece’s form was alien to what would become Murakami’s visual language, but the content was spookily spot on. “It shows chutzpah. That is the trajectory,” said Schimmel as he hovered over the proofs.

  “What you want to look for is everything. Color. Cropping. Tell us,” said Schimmel to Murakami respectfully. “Some reproductions were so bad that we moved them from being a full page to a quarter page. And we’ve still only got fifty percent of the loan forms back.” The curator groaned, then addressed the group. “Takashi has difficult collectors. I met one in Venice who was so pissed off with him that the collector didn’t want to lend his painting to our show.” While artists usually waive payment for reproductions in small catalogues devoted to private collections, Murakami had insisted that this collector pay him a fee to photograph a work that hung on the collector’s living room wall. Schimmel garnered sympathy and eventually convinced the collector to make the loan by saying, “Let me show you our nightmare contracts!”

  Murakami is dedicated to ensuring his rights as an artist and controlling the dissemination of his oeuvre, so MOCA’s “© MURAKAMI” activities are kept in check by four documents, including a copublishing agreement for the catalogue, an imagelicensing agreement for the publicity, and a data treatment memorandum related to the use of super-high-resolution files to make things like merchandise. Unusually, the museum also issued a seven-page letter of agreement outlining a breakdown of responsibilities and stipulating that Murakami had, as Schimmel put it, “final right of approval on all aspects of everything.”

  Murakami turned to the next double-page spread: Time Bokan (1993), a manga-inspired mural of a white mushroom-cloud-cum-skull on a crimson background. Here the artist had clearly found his stylistic stride and personal repertoire of images. Murakami argues in essays and exhibitions that it’s popular cultural forms rather than art which have rehearsed the most traumatic experiences of the Japanese nation and cites as evidence the blinding flashes, B-29-like spaceships, unnaturally fast-growing plant life, and “monsterization” through radiation exposure that pervade Japanese comics and animated films. Earlier Schimmel had told me, “The bomb that landed on Nagasaki was originally destined for the town where Takashi’s mother lived. He grew up being told, ‘If Kokura had not been cloudy that day, you would not be here.’”

  Eighty pages went by in which Murakami circled specks of dust and other tiny flaws with a red ballpoint pen. He wrote vertical lines of Japanese script down the side of the page that said things like “more pink” and “enhance the silver in the gray.” The meeting trundled along until we came to a double-page spread affording four views of a sculpture called Flower Mantango. “This work is a tour de force,” said Schimmel, pressing both hands flat on the table. “It’s an amazing accomplishment—to take lines like that into three dimensions. It’s so complex, and the colors are equal to the armature.” Murakami got up abruptly and walked out of the room. We all looked at each other, perplexed. “Boredom?” joked Schimmel nervously. After a minute Murakami returned with a video camera trained to his eye and asked Schimmel if he could please repeat his praise for the camera. “Ah. Um. What did I say?” said Schimmel. I read back his words from my notes, and he recited his lines for the Kaikai Kiki archive.

  Some twenty pages later, Schimmel pointed to the only photo in the entire catalogue that offered a view of the production process—a shot of a twenty-three-foot Mr. Pointy at the fabricator’s—and asked, “Do you like seeing it in the studio setting or do you think we should silhouette it? It might look better on a white background.” Murakami’s own catalogues tend to explore social contexts, artistic tangents, and historical precedents, whereas Schimmel’s con
centrate on the object itself. Murakami took off his glasses to look at it closely and then said unequivocally, “I like to see the artist’s reality.”

  The catalogue meeting concluded smoothly. Murakami said, “It is much good,” and Schimmel responded with a relieved “Arigato.” Deluxe bento boxes had been placed on the table, and Murakami passed them around. Jeremy Strick had come into the meeting just before we adjourned. Over lunch, he told me that in his job as museum director, “studio visits are more a pleasure than an obligation” and that “it’s a privilege to see incomplete work.”

  When we’d finished eating, we slid down the long table to the location of a dollhouse-sized model of the Geffen Contemporary building, 35,000 square feet of flexible warehouse exhibition space that Schimmel called “the heart and soul of the museum.” In it were miniature versions of ninety artworks as Schimmel planned to show them. “It will have a wonderfest temple quality,” explained the curator. Murakami smiled as he peered into the model. In among the art, you could see the merchandise room and the Louis Vuitton boutique. Schimmel had created a few “completely immersive environments” with the use of Murakami’s flower and jellyfish-eye wallpaper. He’d also recreated Blum & Poe’s 1999 Art Basel booth, which was entirely devoted to Murakami’s work. “We’re remaking historical installations,” said Schimmel. “And gesturing to a commercial art fair from within the museum.”

  The pair had already worked out most of the kinks, so this last inspection by the artist was meant to be little more than a rubber stamp. Murakami put his hand on his cheek, laughed, pointed at a room, and laughed again, but as he studied the installation, a storm slowly brewed in his face. Yoshitake and Sakata looked at each other, then back at Murakami, as they waited for a reaction. Schimmel was uncharacteristically silent. Murakami tugged at his goatee, then reached into the model, picked up the six-inch-high Styrofoam version of Oval, and dropped it into the middle of the largest room in the show. Schimmel took a deep breath. “The exhibition crew sent me with one mission—don’t let him move Oval,” he said. “That’s an expensive move. It probably requires a second crane and headaches all round for the crew.”