miso + ghostpatrol ABC documentary

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Takashi Murakami: the world of the Superflat

Takeshi Murakami’s paintings and sculptures are colourful, lovable and accessible in their references to popular culture. Murakami not only challenges the line between high art and popular culture, in both a similar and dissimilar vein to Andy Warhol, but also questions the lines drawn between East and West, past and present.

To confine oneself to appreciating the easily accessible aspects of his works such as the cute and lovable appearance of Panda would be to skim the surface of a complex ocean of meaning.

So let’s dive into the deep end and explore Murakami’s theory of the Superflat and how it is applied to his art.

In the context of art, the Superflat conjures up thoughts of Andy Warhol and his famous line ‘If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface…There’s nothing behind it.’

In contrast to this Warholian idea of ‘flatness,’ Murakami has explained at great length the theory and practice of the Superflat.

The practice of the Superflat encompasses a variety of meanings used in different combinations by Murakami.

In broad terms it refers to the way graphic design, pop culture and fine arts are flattened in Japan. It also refers to the two-dimensional nature of Japanese graphic art and animation, and the shallowness of consumer culture.

To be more specific, the Superflat refers to any of the following: traditional Japanese painting’s anticipation of the flatness inherent in Western modernism; art historian Nobu Tsuji’s book The Lineage of Eccentricity; the horizontally organised nature of Japanese culture; the flat-screen world of digital imaging; and the flattening of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the nuclear strikes of 1945.
The Superflat identifies those aspects of Japanese art that are different from Western art. What is inherently Japanese, according to Murakami, is the feeling of flatness.

The influence of traditional Japanese art on modern artists has been evident since the very beginning. French Impressionist Claude Monet developed a strong interest in Japanese prints, the influence of which is apparent in his works.

Perhaps one of the most explicit examples of this influence can be seen in Monet’s Terrace at St. Adresse.

The qualities of Japanese prints which lend themselves to modernist art and are evident in Terrace at St. Adresse, include lack of perspective and shadows, the reduction of form and the use of flat, broad areas of colour.

The simplistic, wavy lines used in Japanese prints to depict the ocean have also been adopted by Monet in Terrace at St. Adresse to capture the impression of water’s movement.

The feeling of flatness inherent in Japanese art is also reflected in the organisation of their culture in general, for example in the horizontality of Japanese architectural designs.

Another aspect of the Superflat which needs some explanation is Nobu Tsuji’s 1970 book The Lineage of Eccentricity. Tsuji is the first to point out the “eccentric” streak of playful, fantastic and decorative qualities shared by some of Japan’s most famous historical painters, including Sansetsu Kano, Ito Jakuchu and Kuniyoshi Utagawa.

Tsuji also made a link between these artists and manga. By noticing both Manga’s and the “eccentric” artists’ creation of surface images that make the viewer aware of the planarity of the image, Murakami grasped Tsuji’s point and incorporated it into his theory of the Superflat.

In Time Bokan Pink (Mushroom Bomb Pink) the influence of Japanese anime on
Murakami is clear. The image of the skull-shaped mushroom cloud is from the popular
series Time Bokan.

Each episode of Time Bokan ended with the demise of a villain, often symbolised by a
skull-shaped mushroom cloud.

This imagery in combination with Murakami’s happy, bright, trademark flowers reflects Japanese post-war culture and the way it often light heartedly references horrific moments of its history in forms such as anime.

The theory of the Superflat reflects Murakami’s art in quite a profound way. From the name ‘Superflat’ we would expect a simplistic meaning wouldn’t we? Yet the term refers to a multiplicity of meanings combined in a variety of ways.

The same effect is at work in Murakami’s paintings and sculptures. On the surface many of his works seem like characters from an anime series or a figurine to be collected, it is true this is one aspect of what they are, but underneath the exterior lies a web of meanings.

In these works lay Murakami’s world of the Superflat.


To read more about Takashi Murakami see:

© Murakami (Museum of Contemporary Art publication)

http://english.kaikaikiki.co.jp/artists/list/C4/
http://www.moca.org/murakami/
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fa20071025a2.html
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1573943,00.html
http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/drohojowska-philp/drohojowska-philp1-18-01.asp

Takashi Murakami

Watch Art Safari - Takashi Murakami - Toying with Art in Educational  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Watch SUPERFLAT MONOGRAM FOR LOUIS VUITTON(TAKASHI MURAKAMI MAMORU HOSODA 2003) in Entertainment  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com
Keep your eyes peeled, I will write a piece on Murakami this week ^_^

Dadang Christanto

Imants Tillers: a labyrinth of meaning

A famously enigmatic artist, Imants Tillers creates art that is like a rubiks cube demanding to be solved. The conundrum at the heart of his art is the presence and absence of self.

Concerns about origins and originality, and the interactions of self and other are concepts that send a pulse through his works and power his long-term strategy of appropriating and re-working images.

Though Tillers draws on images which are not his own, there are definitive personal aspects residing in the works that cause instant recognition of the artist, for example, the specificity of his visual, intellectual and intuitive choices, his canvasboard system and layered surfaces.

Furthermore, through his appropriation Tillers’ creates unexpected juxtapositions which form new realities and echo his own experience.

The sense of Tillers’ presence being erased by his use of images derived from other sources, coupled with his evident presence in his artistic process, reflects his concern with the presence and absence of self, whilst revealing a complex interweaving of subjectivity and objectivity.

Though large in scale, his works are developed through a rather intimate process of working on small individual panels which are subsequently put together to make up the larger work.

This idea of ‘one and many’ relates to Tillers’ view of the artist’s life as solitary, but the world inhabited within his work as an archive full of vast ideas and imagery.

The process of applying one panel after another to make up the entirety of his work on the wall reveals interactions between intimacy and expanse, movement and stillness, permanence and impermanence. These ideas can be traced back to environmental and earth art, performance art, minimalism, and conceptual art of the 1970s.

In the 1980s Tillers’ developed a response to Terry Smith’s comment, in ‘The provincialism problem,’ that the most an Australian artist can aspire to in an international context is to be considered second-rate.

In works such as The Nine Shots, 1982, Tillers fuses the emerging style of Aboriginal art with neo-expressionist art. It could be said that in this work we are looking neither at the original nor the copy, but the distance between them. In this respect Tillers identifies that it is in the difference between Europe and Australia that the originality of Australian art lay.

Imants Tillers has earned a place as one of Australia’s most esteemed, thought-provoking and engaging contemporary artists.

‘Imants Tillers and Dadang Christanto Dual Worlds: Views of the Landscape’ is at Jan Manton Art gallery 4 November-23 December.