In 2008 I was lucky enough to see “© Murakami,” a significant retrospective of Japanese artist Takashi Murakami’s work, at the Brooklyn Museum (the show had opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, which organized it). The exhibit was very much of that moment in time, visualizing and addressing the symptoms and aesthetics of mid- to late-2000s capitalism, right before the housing market was about to collapse the global economy. So when the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago announced “Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg,” which opened last week, my first question was how that artwork would appear now, a decade later, after Obama’s election, the recession, Kimye, drones, advances in smartphone technology, Trump’s election, et cetera.
To Murakami, there really isn’t all that much of a difference. He’s most famous for pioneering Superflat, a Japanese art movement predicated on the idea that the boundaries that separate artistic and commercial production have been flattened. Murakami has said in many places that he sees no distinction between something like Flower Ball 2, a circular acrylic work that resembles a ball of cartoon daisies with open-mouthed smiley faces at the center of each flower, and a mass-produced key chain of one of those daisies. But the morbid humor of some of his artworks and his deep knowledge of art history mean that Murakami’s lack of differentiation between art and commerce is just as much of a punch line as a theory, a grand joke on the art world. How else to look at My Lonesome Cowboy, a statue that was part of “© Murakami”? It’s an eight-foot-tall naked male manga character with spiky blonde hair, holding his ejaculating erect penis with one hand and with the other wrangling the ejaculate like a lasso. In 2008, Sotheby’s sold it for $15.1 million.
The sections of “The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg” that showcase Murakami’s efforts from the past decade signal that his commentary is bleak. Instead of Mr. Dob there’s Embodiment of “A” and Embodiment of “Um” (both 2014), 14-foot-tall statues of hellish demons, one red and one blue, holding humongous clubs, standing on top of multicolored daises that look like the game Simon. In place of cute cartoon characters there’s 100 Arhats (2013)—ten nearly ten-foot-tall panels depicting hideous, deformed, geriatric human beings and mutants with crooked noses, festering sores, and drooping faces and limbs. The figures in 100 Arhats reappear in Isle of the Dead (2014); both paintings reference the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the resultant Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. But these monstrous beings aren’t meant to represent people who’ve been disfigured by catastrophe—”arhats” are legendary Buddhist monks who aided the sick.
Another way of viewing “The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg” is that each one of us is the octopus, consuming information and then using it to maintain our own creative survival. Murakami indicated as much during his artist talk. At one moment Darling brought onstage Marc Ecko, the creator of the Ecko clothing line and Complex Media. Ecko discussed Complexcon, his convention for “creatives,” and how Murakami had influenced his work, and how art and fashion could help save the world. Basically, he said a bunch of bullshit. Someone in the audience asked Ecko the most obvious question: Aren’t fashion and goods just commerce, not art?
Through 9/24: Tue 10 AM-8 PM, Wed-Sun 10 AM-5 PM Museum of Contemporary Art 220 E. Chicago 312-280-2660mcachicago.org $12, $7 students and seniors, free kids 12 and under and members of the military, free for Illinois residents on Tuesdays
