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Plumbing the Depths of Superflatness
Art Journal, Fall, 2001 by Michael Darling
"Superflat" is the brainchild of the Japanese contemporary artist Takashi Murakami, a concept that has spawned a book, a traveling exhibition, and even an art movement, according to one Los Angeles art critic. [1] The term has even passed into more general parlance, recently making it past the proofreaders at the New Yorker and bolstering student presentations in architecture school critiques. [2] Yet in spite of its almost self-deprecating etymology, "Superflat" is far from unnuanced or superficial and has cracked open the discourse about contemporary Japanese culture and society. Its reverberations are now starting to be felt in Western cultural circles. Like a Japanese transformer toy, it has the capacity to move and bend to engage a wide range of issues: from proposing formal historical connections between classic Japanese art and the anime cartoons of today to a Pop Art-like cross-contamination of high and low to a social critique of contemporary mores and motivations. As such, "Superflat" requires exami nation from a number of different angles in order to be fully appreciated and understood, and the best place to start is with Murakami himself.
Murakami has emerged as one of the most important artists currently working in Japan, exhibiting internationally and creating an increasingly ambitious range of work. From massive paintings on canvas to finely crafted figurative sculptures, giant inflatable balloons, and a panoply of more readily consumable objects such as keychains, mousepads, and T-shirts, Murakami and his Tokyo-based Hiropon Factory blur distinctions between fine and commercial art. This nexus is of special concern to the artist, as his products not only straddle the markets for high-end gallery art and mail-order trinkets, but the themes they take up in his art often confound traditional value judgments. His Pop strategy for mixing references to canonical art-historical figures or subjects with consumer sources is analogous to the work of Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein in the early 196os, and the name Murakami has given to his atelier--Hiropon Factory--makes direct allusion to Warhol's own Factory. Like earlier American Pop artists, Mur akami has also taken the most base and overexposed elements of popular culture--in his case, animated and still cartoon characters and styles--and brought them into the realm of fine art. In Japan, this kind of cultural slumming has been looked down on by the critical establishment, while in the West it is recognized as a time-honored artistic strategy. Murakami holds a Ph.D. in traditional Japanese painting or nihon-ga, and his studied interest in popular culture and Western contemporary art provides him with a rich and unusual background on which to draw. Contributing further to the controversial nature of his endeavor (at least in Japan) is his embrace of otaku culture--the Japanese version of computer geeks who retreat into the fantasy realm of cartoons for entertainment and even sexual fulfillment. This subculture is viewed pejoratively by mainstream Japanese society, in part because of its seeming unproductivity, but also because of the Miyazaki incident, a notorious mass murder committed in 1989 by a s elf-proclaimed otaku that further tarnished the image of the otoku lifestyle. The sociologist Sharon Kinsella has written that the opponents of Japanese comic-book or manga culture have described it as "a vulgar or low-class media which undermines education, public morality, and national intelligence." [3] At the same time, she also notes that "Left-wing intellectuals and class-conscious workers and students have simultaneously regarded manga as a progressive social medium which flouts repressive social taboos." [4] She went on to write that "An additional attraction of manga in the eyes of many intellectuals is the fact that it is an authentic, home-grown, modern Japanese culture with its roots in Japanese social experience, rather than being an American or European political or cultural import. " [5]
Likewise, Murakami sees the cultural products of the anime and manga industries as some of Japan's most valuable and innovative contributions, and doubtless also appreciates their aforementioned subversive powers. He has attempted to upgrade their status by comparing them to the work of famous Edo-period artists such as Hokusai, who also worked in a commercial realm but are now regarded as iconic art-bistorical figures. Artistically, Murakami is interested in the formal connections between the new an the old--stylization, pictorial flatness, allover composition--finding numerous examples of these elements among the graphic designers, animators, and cartoonists working in Japan today. The formal quality of flatness, from its historical sources to its contemporary manifestations, forms one facet of Murakami's theory of Superflatness. In the book Super Flat (2000), he juxtaposes animation stills from Galaxy Express 999 (1979), by the influential Yoshinori Kanada, with one of Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji prints (1831), or MTV animations by Koji Morimoto with Ito Jakuchu's eighteenth-century work Peonies. Murakami's own work has also bridged these genres and generations. Milk (1998) and Cream (1998), enormous multipart canvases depicting stylized splatters of fluid, recall Hokusai and Kanada, as well as Roy Lichtenstein and, by extension, Jackson Pollock. Deeply referential to the nth degree, these works dizzyingly balance East and West, new and old, reality and representation, purity and carnality in an extremely sophisticated way.
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