Takashi Murakami

To walk into the Takashi Murakami show at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in LA is to enter a hallucinogenic mash-up of Pop and traditional references that obliterate the already blurry line between art and commerce. Murakami’s world is populated by paintings and sculptures of smiling flowers, mushrooms with eyes and all manner of creatures done in a whole palette of shiny candy colors. It’s also available for purchase. There is a gallery of 500 mass produced goods in the “Kaikai Kiki Merchandise Display Room”, a Louis Vitton store complete with cash registers, and a line to get in to the MOCA store. Even if you don’t want to take a little piece of Murakami’s work home you have to appreciate his industry. There is a video viewing room where you can sit on a smiling flower patterned carpet and watch a Kanye West video, the first part of an animated KaiKai & Kiki film (you have to return to the exhibit two more times to see the complete film), and a sample of an upcoming live action project. Outside the room is a monitor showing a looping series of short videos done in the form of commercials advertising Inochi (life) staring a young futuristic humanoid amongst Japanese school children. What makes the exhibit more than just a crass commentary on consumerism and the commoditization of art is the breadth of Murakami’s references. While his chosen vocabulary is that of the contemporary Japanese anime/manga/otaku culture he references Buddhism and traditional Japanese art.

It seems like a lot of art today is about spectacle and the Murakami show certainly falls into that category. But it is that quality and the questions that it raises about art and commerce that make it worth seeing.

For information online about the show check out www.moca.org/murakami/

Still Life with Dead Animal

On a recent trip to NYC I went to the Met to see the show of Dutch paintings from “The Age of Rembrandt”. First of all, it’s been a long time since I’ve been to the Met and I’d forgotten how huge the place is. It also now includes a new gallery for modern (since 1960) photography, but I was really there to see the paintings.

Falconer’s Bag, 1695, Jan Weenix from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Last spring I saw Vermeer’s Kitchen Maid at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and it knocked me out. I know, I know, Vermeer is one of those artists whose work is so well known that it’s easy to feel blasé about the whole thing, but seeing that particular painting in person (even more so than the Girl with a Pearl Earring at the Mauritshuis in the Hague) was a memorable experience. So I was looking forward to seeing the five Vermeers that the Met has as well as any still life that might be there. On the whole the show was quite good, though I was disappointed that there were only a limited number of still lifes among the many portraits and landscapes and the Vermeers weren’t quite up to the Kitchen Maid. Maybe my expectations were too high. Anyway, that sets the context for the work of another artist I saw later that day.

While thumbing through a copy of Photograph at a gallery in Chelsea I came across a photograph that reminded me of the Dutch still lifes, but instead of the usual rabbit or game bird this image contained a wallaby. Needless to say I was intrigued, so I made a point of seeing the images in person.

Wallaby with Tarpaulin, 2006, Marian Drew

The artist’s name is Marian Drew and she finds these subjects by the side of the road in her native Australia. The gallery notes say that, opposed to the bounty portrayed in traditional still lifes, her images are a commentary on human wastefulness and disregard for wild animals. I don’t know that I get the wasteful aspect of it because the images themselves are generally quite minimal, seldom is the table overflowing. I do however see roadkill a comment on the intersection of the wild and the developed, the often disastrous consequences of that intersection, habitat loss, etc. Despite the somewhat gruesome subject matter there are some wonderful images.

Wombat with Watermelon, 2005, Marian Drew

That said, seeing the images in person there was something I hadn’t noticed in the smaller image in the gallery guide. In many of the images there was a halo around the objects on the table. A kind of spotlight effect that I found distracting. I feel her best images are the ones where this effect isn’t as strongly evident. Later I learned from the gallerist that the effect was due to the fact that Drew photographs these images in complete darkness and illuminates the objects with a “torch”. She doesn’t know herself exactly how the lighting is going to turn out until she sees the image. Personally, I would rather have the images lit with a more natural light. I don’t know that her method adds anything to her intended meaning. It would be interesting to know the reasoning behind shooting the images in this way.

The intersection of man and animal (and being in NYC) got me thinking about Alessandra Sanguinetti’s from On the Sixth Day. I saw some of those images at the ICP show Ecotopia last year and finally got around to buying her book at Dashwood Books (an excellent shop with a very strong section of Japanese photography) the same day I went to see the Drew show. One of the images from the series is also a still life, though much more naturalistic than either Drew’s work or the Dutch paintings.

Still Life from On the Sixth Day, Alessandra Sanguinetti

Beyond the visual difference there is also a considerable difference in the image’s meaning. Rather than the wastefulness and disregard for the natural world portrayed in Drew’s images Sanguinetti was photographing subsistence farmers in Argentina who are intimately linked with their surroundings.

For anyone who hasn’t seen On the Sixth Day, I highly recommend it. It is a visual tour de force and will definitely make you think about the origin of the piece of meat on your plate.

New Europeans

Men in tank tops or shirtless, close ups of hands, cigarettes, a girl who was sold into sex slavery at fourteen, Coca-Cola signs, kids playing harmonicas, the various languages and writing of the subjects, shop workers, a child on a straw mat on the dirt covered with flies. These are some of the things that make up New Europeans at Stephen Wirtz gallery, an ongoing project by Magnum photographer Jim Goldberg. The work is a window into the lives of immigrants and refugees in Greece and the Ukraine, but the issues involved are not unique to these two places, war, displacement, migration, racism, human traffic, torture, etc.

The multiplicity of stories and subjects is mirrored in their portrayal. There are images in both color and black and white, some tack sharp and others blurred. There are Polaroids, contact prints, large gallery prints, even a book dummy taped to a table. Some images are matted, some have mat between the image and frame, some images bleed to the frame, almost all the images are framed in black, but there is at least one case where there is an image pinned to the wall unframed.

Untitled, 2007, from New Europeans, Jim Goldberg

For me, the most powerful images in the show are a series of Polaroids on which Goldberg has had the subject write. Some write only their name, others write part of their story. In some cases the stories are translated and written on the back of another Polaroid that is placed in the frame next to the portrait. The portraits range from a straight on confident gaze to the mere suggestion of a face floating in blackness, but they are unified by the application of the touch of pen to image and the subjects willingness to share their stories. This inclusion of the subject’s voice is something Goldberg has been doing since his earliest work, Rich and Poor and his ability to get people to open up about their lives is astounding.

My first real exposure to Jim Goldberg’s work (that I can recall) was this past summer when he came to talk to a class I was taking. As part of his presentation he showed various stages of his book, Raised by Wolves. He had a couple of Xerox dummies as well as a couple of dummies made from taped together 4×6 machine prints of the potential page layouts. I thought they were fabulous, both as objects and as a way of working. The form seemed to fit really well with the subject matter. Unfortunately, some of the tactile immediacy was lost in the actual printed version of the book. I understand that it was a necessary step to reach a larger audience, but I can’t help feeling that the final piece was too polished. I feel the same way about parts of the New Europeans show.

For example, there is a group of dozens of small photos taped together that in itself is great, but then the whole thing is put behind glass in a huge frame that must be ten to twelve feet wide. Again, I think I understand why it is done, but it distracted me from the images. There are also some large gallery prints that gave me pause. There is a feeling of intimacy in viewing the smaller images and reading the stories of the subjects. Even the smaller images without text have a personal quality to them. I feel like I’m looking through someone’s shoe box full of photographs. It is this feeling of intimacy that I associate with Goldberg’s work, the need to get up close and examine it, that I don’t get from the larger gallery images. As compelling as those images may be, they feel a bit out of place.

There are, however, places where the method of display added to the viewing experience. On one wall there is a grid of images, five rows of seventeen. The images are black-framed black and white contact prints with extra black around the images so the predominant feeling is a black grid on a white wall. The images themselves are mostly portraits and there are two white gaps in the grid where there are no images. This absence adds a poignancy that would not be there if the grid were complete.

On the whole a very compelling show. It will be interesting to see where it goes and what form it will take when it is shown in Paris in the spring of 2009.