Takashi Murakami: Mr Superflat in Palazzo Grassi, Venice

Palazzo Grassi, Venice

Some time ago I wrote about Makoto Aida’s Harakiri Schoolgirls. The great modern Japanese masters appeared in front of me again, in the face of Takashi Murakami. During a recent trip toVenice, I visited Palazzo Grassi’s exhibition “The World belongs to you” where I saw Takashi Murakami’s  masterpiece 727-272 (The Emergence of God at the Reversal of Fate). Takashi Murakami is indeed one of the modern Japanese Masters.

Takashi Murakami

“Blurring the traditional lines between art, commerce, pop, and subcultural concerns, the range of Murakami’s creative pursuits are seemingly boundless. In addition to producing some of the most iconic paintings and sculptures of the past two decades, his “business-art” activities span from designing a full gamut of consumer merchandise (either for his own Kaikai Kiki label or for fashion houses such as Louis Vuitton and Comme des Garçons) to running a gallery that promotes young Japanese artists to hosting a weekly radio talk show in Tokyo—to name just a few of the many preoccupations that keep him working on a legendarily nonstop clock.” (Source: Interview Magazine)

Takashi Murakami and Francois Pinault

Quoting from the Exhibition’s web site:

“(The work, especially commissioned for the space it occupies today in the Palazzo) draws on traditional sources ranging from Buddhist images, Zen painting, and 18th c. Edo-period compositional techniques that inspired Murakami to coin the phrase “superflat” to characterize the tendency throughout Japanese art history to eliminate threedimensional depth by arranging subjects non-hierarchically on a solid background. Murakami modernizes these traditions by combining them with contemporary Japanese popular culture, in the form of anime and manga (comic books), for instance in the central figure, Mr. Dob, Murakami’s own alter-ego depicted with a typically manga-style face. Mr. Dob’s figure contrasts with that of the legendary Chinese emperor Shennong, the deity of agriculture and medicine, who lived around 2700 BCE. This work illustrates how Murakami deftly links the traditional with the contemporary, Western with Japanese, high art and mass culture”

Front panel - Mr Dob

“The starting-point for this pictorial narrative is the central figure of “Mr Dob”; a sort of alter ego of Murakami himself, this character is depicted with a typically manga-style face, a sly smile and three eyes that seem to look far into the distance. The narrative starts on the right, with the flow of color, comparable to that one finds in Warhol’s Oxidation paintings, bringing us to the second figure of the work. This is an old wise man inspired by the legendary Chinese emperor Shennong, who lived around 2700 BC.”

Front panel - Emperor Shennong

“Considered the deity of Agriculture, his name actually means “heavenly peasant” – Shennong would invent the plough and teach his people how to cultivate wheat and cereal crops. He is also celebrated as a deity of Medicine: according to legend, he would test hundreds of herbs to evaluate their curative properties; if of beneficial properties, the herb was said to light up his stomach – which was transparent – if harmful, it would blacken it. This is the role in which Murakami depicts Shennong, with a blade of grass in his mouth.”

Front panel

The work from the spectator’s view comprises three panels, forming an open rectangle. The front panel has Mr Dong and the Emperor.

Murakami must not be taken lightly because people call him “pop”, or because he likes “manga”, or because he has the tendency to be also in the fashion business.

Front Panel - Upper Left side - detail

As you can see in this detail of the front panel, he knows his painting and he creates some staggering compositions within compositions.

Left and Central Panels

The left panel has among other things, a stunning swirl, and some ideograms.

Left panel detail - swirl

The swirl, making direct reference to a tempest, appears often in Japanese art.

A painting by Shoga Shohauku

As to the ideograms, I have no clue about what they are, but I will find out.

Left panel detail - ideograms

Moving to the right panel, we are faced with a hollow mountain of skulls on top of which is a manga tiger.

Right and Central Panel

It should be clear by now that we are not talking about a single painting here, but a mix of paintings all coming together in the three panels.

Right Panel detail - skulls

In addition to the multiplicity of themes of this “collage”, one must also notice the changing texture of the paint and the colors, and the ruptures, or discontinuities that mark the shift from one to another.

Bruce Wallace of the Los Angeles Times, notes:

“Murakami’s art speaks to the sensibilities of the generation born in the 1960s, those who grew up with the reverberations of World War II’s disaster pulsing through the culture. They were raised on a media diet of anime and manga, with their anti-technology, antiwar story lines and themes. And they came of age in an era when Japan could throw up little more than Marxist jargon in resistance to the deluge of imported American culture.”

Right Panel detail - Tiger

“Surface is everything to Murakami—it’s all there is. I don’t know if you’re allowed to say this, but like a lot of contemporary Japanese artists Murakami is a craftmaster-whiz of flawless visual effects. He draws on traditional Japanese themes like flatness, pattern, and ornamentation. His kaleidoscopic paintings of Hokusai-like waves, his Lichtensteinian splashes, and DOB, his big-headed Mickey Mouse–like creature, are so immaculate you will think a machine made them.” (Jerry Saltz, Village Voice, 1999)

Alain Resnais' and Marguerite Duras' "Hiroshima Mon Amour"

‘I remember Hiroshima’
‘You remember nothing’

“You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.”

” I saw everything. Everything.”

It has been quite a while that I wanted to write about Alain Resnais’ movie “Hiroshima Mon Amour”.

Alain Resnais

I get to do it today, 66 years after the bomb drop that marked the history of the world.

On the surface, it is a love affair with the city of Hiroshima and her people providing the background.

A French actress doing a film in Hiroshima meets a Japanese architect and they have sex. As time goes by, “He” asks “Her” to stay in Hiroshima forever. There are elements of “falling in love” “She” denies. In the process, “She” brings forward a painful memory that has marked her life. Her love affair with a German soldier during the war. He was killed the day before the liberation of France, and she has been marked by this relationship, both literally and metaphorically.

She appears to be mourning forever. Is she able to love?

How can she love when she does not admit that she is full of memories of her first love?

She has never told anyone about the German soldier, only the Japanese man.

The traditional reading of the film ascerts that the woman had forgotten and/or repressed the memory of her German lover until she met the Japanese man, who made her remember him. I beg to differ. In my view the woman is full of memories of her German lover, and until she met the Japanese man in Hiroshima she was not admitting it. Repressing a memory does not equate forgetting.

The sense of breakthrough that comes in Hiroshima is that the woman is able to reminisce and talk about the German, and all the horror that followed his death.The issue has never been forgetting. The issue was the continuous mourning and draining of psychological energy, was the open gaping wound in her existence, that made her until Hiroshima unble to admit and talk about what had happened to her.

Only by talking about it she has been able to start playing with the idea of loving again, which is metaphorically the same as staying in Hiroshima and not going back home to her husband.

But this is not an easy game. The inner conflict is strong. She wants to stay, she wants to love, she wants to frame her memory of the German soldier in the reality of her Japanese lover, but she cannot do it.

The time frame of the movie is varied.

In current time, it covers 24 hours.

In past time, it covers more 20 years.

This variance also applies ot the location.

The current location of the movie is Hiroshima, in Japan.

The past location is Nevers in France.

At the end of the movie, the woman gives the man the name “Hi-ro-shi-ma” and the man names the woman “Ne-vers”.

Julia Kristeva has written an essay “The Malady of Grief: Duras”, published in her collection “Black Sun”.

According to Kristeva, Duras’ story is about the meeting of two disasters:

“Nevers here, Hiroshima there. However intense it may be in its unnameable silence, love is henceforth in suspence, pulverized, atomized. To love from her point of view, is to love a dead person.The body of her new lover merges with the corpse of her first love, which she had covered with her own body, a day and a night, and whose blood she savored…. But the very dynamic Japanese engineer is also marked by death because he necessarily bears the moral scars of the atomic death of which his countrymen were the first victims.”

Marguerite Duras

Dumas comments in her scenario for the movie: “All one can do is to speak of the impossibility of speaking of Hiroshima. The knowledge of Hiroshima is something that must be set down, a priori, as being an exemplary delusionof the mind”.



Harakiri School Girls: by Makoto Aida

“It is spirit, not painting” Makoto Aida says in the closing frame of Japan Society’s video for the exhibition “Bye Bye Kitty” in New York. (the link to the video is at the end of this post).

Today I want to present Makoto Aida’s work “Harakiri School Girls”. This is a composition that recurs in the artist’s activity. It first appeared in 1999, when the artist wanted to create a poster for his first solo exhibition. What attracted me to the painting is the 2002 print on film with acrylic, which you can see immediately below.

Harakiri School Girls, 2002

I am a fan of manga, the Japanese comics. So I was immediately attracted to the  picture, as it looks like manga in a way, but when you open the door and get in it is something totally different. I am also fascinated by the bright neon lights in Tokyo’s streets, the advertising billboards, the extremely crowded and chaotic urban scenes. I could find elements of all these in the picture.  So I present to you all three versions I could find, the original 1999, the “flashy” 2002, and the more etherial 2006, along with some commentaries.

Makoto Aida

“Harakiri School Girls combines the fetishistic fashions and nubile bodies of fantasy schoolgirls with the time-honored samurai practice of ritual suicide.”

(Source: Japan Society’s “Bye Bye Kitty“)

“Hara-kiri Schoolgirls” is typical of the images by Japanese multimedia artist Makoto Aida, who has created numerous series portraying mutilated young women as consumer goods. This image is intentionally shocking: according to the artist, it combines beauty and violence in order to challenge deeply rooted ideas about Japanese beauty and bring to light elements of the grotesque.

(Source: Jewish Museum, Berlin, Made in Japan)

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi - The Foxfires

“Several of the artists borrow from archaic Japanese pictorial conventions, only to skewer them with a contemporary nihilist sensibility. Makoto Aida’s brightly colored “Harakiri School Girls” emulates the style and violent subject matter of the 19th-century artist Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, but the atrocious acts pictured — ritual suicides, beheadings and disembowelings — are performed by pretty, uniformed schoolgirls, a possible reference to a culture that has lost its bearings.”

(Source: Artkabinet, Elisabeth Kirsch)

Harakiri School Girls, Poster, 1999

“During the late nineties, as gal culture was running rampant, Aida became intrigued. “I think those kogals in the 1990s were originals,” he says. “Historically and even globally, they were unique, and I sought a way to portray them.” Inspiration came from a group of high school girls squatting on the ground in Shibuya. “The scene reminded me of besieged warriors who have decided to commit mass suicide.” Out of this, Aida created Harakiri School Girls, originally as a poster to advertise his first solo exhibit in 1999, and later as a painting for the Singapore Biennale 2006.

Book Cover: "Japanese Schoolgirls Inferno"

Laced with dark humor, the work shows a group of uniform-clad schoolgirls plunging samurai swords into their stomachs, disemboweling themselves, and slicing off their own heads. The flash of a blade creates a rainbow in the blood spurting from a girl’s neck. A stream of blood flows past a curious kitten, karaoke flyers, and discarded tissues, into a drain. The work is gruesomely cute. “Harakiri School Girls is an allegory for the distorted mentality of Japanese youth at the time and the atmosphere of Japanese society,” Aida explains. “After the Bubble Economy collapsed, I felt that an air of pessimism was spreading through Japan like a virus.” Everything might have looked cute and happy, but underneath that veneer seethed dejection and darkness. During the nineties, the number of suicides increased year by year, and according to Aida, Japanese patriotism withered away. These schoolgirls, in their loose socks and school uniforms, symbolize the entire country, killing itself.”

(Source: Japanese Schoolgirl Confidential, by Brian Ashcraft and Shoko Ueda )

Thesis Abstract
The Schoolgirl Body in Pieces: The Manga Portraiture of Makoto Aida

Manga has been an established form of popular expression in the Japanese visual field for centuries. During the postwar era, manga reflected a cultural shift in the identity of the national body, as a formerly cohesive imperial nation fell into fragments in the wake of defeat and control by American military forces. Framed by this shift, the manga renditions of brutalized and sexualized Japanese schoolgirls by the contemporary Japanese artist Makoto Aida convey elements of a nation’s fractured identity still shaped by it’s postwar temperament and global positioning. Certain moments of Japan’s present-day manifestations of postwar trauma find revitalized visual expression when inscribed upon the bodies of these girls, revealing the psychic role of the body in postwar and present-day Japan and how national memories of the past are constructed through bodily tropes. Aida’s appropriation of these bodies also reveals the engagement of the wound with historical memory, and the unstable constructions of female sexuality and identity that linger in contemporary Japan.

Harakiri School Girls, 2006

The narrative of the male fantasy in which a young girl is desired, attacked, stimulated, and brought to ecstasy has been present in Japan since the 1970s, persisting as a major trope within manga and anime. Graphic depictions of sexualized young girls play a major role in contemporary Japanese visual culture and because of this, “she” has become a highly readable and visible format from which to instigate social criticism and expression. I would like to suggest that the immediate and cursory misogyny that is visible in Aida’s depictions of young girls borrows from these pornographic genres as a subversive gesture that re-appropriates this bodily narrative vessel for social commentary. An examination of Aida’s imagery unveils the social forces shaping the artist’s source material, the implied spectators and their habits of bodily consumption.

Poster for the movie "Uniform Sabaigaru", where innocent schoolgirls hack zombies into bloody chunks

I will discuss two of Aida’s manga works in which the young girls are presented with varying degrees of agency and submission when confronted with their brutalization. With Harakiri Schoolgirls (2006), the girls are depicted in a more individualized and essentialized manner. Here, a bevy of vibrant, uniformed Japanese schoolgirls commit stylized acts of self-inflicted suicide (harakiri) and decapitation. Of Aida’s schoolgirl imagery, this piece is unique in that the girls retain a certain control over the fatal violence. The second series, The Edible Artificial Girls, Mimi-chan (2001) is an example of Aida’s work in which the girls are presented en masse and in pieces as the main ingredient in an array of delicious Japanese dishes. Mimi-chan works as Aida’s hyper-realized riff on the dominant characterization of Japanese girls as the ultimate material consumers and the problematic consumability of these bodies. A portrayal connected to the ideological commodification of the female body that was conceived during the postwar era.

(Source: Maya Kimura’s Thesis Abstract)

Toru Takemitsu – Japanese Composer

Near the end of the Second World War, soldiers and civilians on the Japanese home front constructed networks of underground bases in anticipation of an invasion that never came. In one of those dugout fortresses, in the mountains west of Tokyo, the future composer Toru Takemitsu was stationed in 1944; he was all of fourteen years old. Although no music aside from patriotic songs was allowed, one day a kindhearted officer ushered the children-soldiers into a back room and played some records for them, using a windup phonograph with a handmade bamboo needle. One disk had Lucienne Boyer singing “Parlez-Moi d’Amour.” Takemitsu listened, he later said, in a state of “enormous shock.” After so much sunless, soulless labor, that winsome chanson opened a world of possibility in his mind. Ever after, he honored the moment as the birth of his musical consciousness. (from Alex Ross’ article on Takemitsu in the “New Yorker”).


Widely considered modern Japan’s greatest composer in the classical music tradition, Toru Takemitsu (1930–1996) merged Japanese and Western instruments and techniques in his music. He has had synthesised his personal style from elements of Debussy, Messiaen and Berg.

In the foreword to a selection of Takemitsu’s writings in English, conductor Seiji Ozawa writes: “I am very proud of my friend Toru Takemitsu. He is the first Japanese composer to write for a world audience and achieve international recognition.” (Source: Wikipedia.)

Self-taught musician and composer Toru Takemitsu embraced the leading edge of Japanese new wave music, a style that blended western classical music with traditional Japanese instruments and songs.

One of his best works is “Requiem for Strings Orchestra, composed in 1957. In the video that follows, Seiji Ozawa  conducts the New Japan Philharmonic (1990).

Another major composition of Takemitsu’s is “November Steps”, commissioned by Leonard Bernstein to celebrate New York Philharmonic’s 125th anniversary. Seiji Ozawa  conducts the New Japan Philharmonic (1990).

Takemitsu loved movies. And this is proven by the scores he has written for more than 100 films!

As a composer, he made no distinction between his movie scores and his compositions for the concert hall. “It is all music,” he would say, “… and probably my music will be heard by millions more moviegoers than by concert audiences.” He often used a film score as a sort of sketch-pad for a major orchestral commission that he might be working on at the same time; musical innovations or challenging themes that might be used experimentally in a film score often reappeared in a major orchestral composition a year or two later. Takemitsu had an uncanny instinct for film music, and his intuitive understanding of how music worked in the minds of filmgoers helped him know how his sounds might best reinforce the visual language of the filmmakers. Great Japanese film directors, recognizing how effectively Takemitsu’s music supported their films (even when they themselves did not fully understand how film music works), relied constantly on him and returned repeatedly to him for music for their movies.

Toru Takemitsu Tribute: The JapanNYC Festival celebration of this composer’s contribution to film featured, from left, Kazumi Watanabe, Tomohiro Yahiro, Daisuke Suzuki and Coba (December 2010)

Source: Peter Grilli on the Film Music of Tōru Takemitsu

Toru Takemitsu Soundtrack Documentary – Part 1/6

Butoh Dance: "Not thinking, only soul"

As a tribute to Japan, which is in the middle of a huge disaster, today I present butoh dance.

Butoh loosely translated means stomp dance, or earth dance.

Bu = dance, toh = stomp

Kazuo Ohno

Its founders were a young rebellious modern dancer named Tatsumi Hijikata (1928 -1986), and his partner Kazuo Ohno (1906 – 2010).

“The best thing someone can say to me is that while watching my performance they began to cry. It is not important to understand what I am doing; perhaps it is better if they don’t understand, but just respond to the dance.” -Kazuo Ohno


As Don McLeod observes, Hijikata believed that by distorting the body, and by moving slowly on bent legs he could get away from the traditional idea of the beautiful body, and return to a more organic natural beauty. The beauty of an old woman bent against a sharp wind, as she struggles home with a basket of rice on her back. Or the beauty of a lone child splashing about in a mud puddle – this was the natural movement Hijikata wanted to explore. Hijikata grew up in the harsh climate of Northern Japan in an area known as Tohoku. The grown-ups he watched worked long hours in the rice fields, and as a result, their bodies were often bent and twisted from the ravages of the physical labor.

These were the bodies that resonated with Hijikata. Not the “perfect” upright bodies of western dance, or the consciously controlled movements of Noh and Kabuki. He sought a truthful, ritualistic and primal earthdance. One that allowed the performer to make discoveries as she/he created/was created by the dance.

If you like the dance you saw in the clip above, you can investigate further in the page of Greylodge podcasting.

In the Guardian’s obituary to Kazuo Ohno, Antony Hegarty notes:

“In 1938, Ohno had been drafted into the Japanese army as an intelligence officer. He spent nine years in China and New Guinea, and was held for two years as a prisoner of war. Ohno presented his first solo performance, Jellyfish Dance, in Tokyo in 1949. The performance was thought to be a meditation on the burials at sea that he had observed on board a vessel bearing captives to be repatriated to Japan. The young artist Tatsumi Hijikata was hypnotised by Ohno’s performance that night, and their destinies became entwined. With Ohno as his muse, Hijikata spent the next several years developing Ankoku Butoh-ha – “the dance of utter darkness”.

Using memories of maternal love and the archetype of the divine child as the basis for much of his tender expression, Ohno frequently reduced his audience to tears. Traversing the stage in a hypnotic reverie, he would gesture skyward with his long, curling hands. He was a masterful and exacting improviser, and performed in schools, gardens and hospitals, as well as avant-garde institutions around the world.”

Ohno’s stage career lasted more than five decades after an unusually late start: His first performance was in 1949 when he was 43. His most acclaimed work was a 1977 homage to noted flamenco dancer Antonia Merc called Admiring La Argentina – he was inspired to begin his own dance training after seeing a Merc performance in Tokyo in 1929.

 

Ohno’s other best-known works are My Mother (1981), a solo honouring his mother and their relationship, and The Dead Sea(1985), which, as its title suggests, is a meditation on death and spirituality. Two other significant works, Flowers-Birds-Wind-Moon (1990) and Water Lilies (1987), were inspired by Ohno’s travels to Italy.

Sankai Juku is a Tokyo-based butoh group. Back in October they performed in Chicago Ushio Amagatsu’s signature work Hibiki: Resonance from Far Away. Here is an excerpt of a review:

“…. and the experience was unsettling, maddening, hypnotic and beautiful. I realize that’s a wide range of descriptors, but it’s true. The ghost-white, bald male dancers weaved around a stage dusted in fine sand, while shallow glass bowls resembling giant contact lenses collected water dripping slowly from urns above. An eclectic score — flipping from simple, repetitive piano cords and wind chimes to distressing electronic landscapes — set the eerie and unsettling tone. We were transported from birth, to life, to death, and ultimately: rebirth.”

I owe the discovery of butoh to “Cherry Blossoms”, a film by Doris Dorrie. Try to see it, it is worth it!

In the movie the butoh dance is set in the context of the blossoming cherries. A homeless street performer induces a middle aged German man to the meaning of butoh.