Most conceptual art is lacking in emotion but this is not the case with Murakami. The suppressed anger, vicious comeback, and intense empathy are inescapable. I know I feel humiliated sitting in a child’s plastic chair, eating a poison Big Mac under the ubiquitous yellow happy face sign, but one look at the twisted rage of DOB with its vicious teeth and I feel better. DOB, Murakami’s alter ego, looking sort of like Mickey Mouse and hating it, is the dark side of cuteness, his ugly reaction to consumerism. Starting as an innocent child-like logo, DOB has grown into the monster in Tan Tan Bo Puking, vomiting with such excruciating force that one fears whatever made him so sick.
If I feel humiliated in Macdonald’s, imagine how Japan felt after the bomb, and then allowing themselves to be conquered again by American’s consumer culture – not a fair trade, when you remember that, without the flatness of Japanese woodblocks, the West would still be drowning in perspective, without Impressionism as we know it.
It is with grim sadness that I watch aggressive infantile DOB victoriously surfing Japan’s ancient scroll waters across the worn beauty of the painting 727. The idea of Hokusai Katsushika’s Famous wave imprisoned in a minimalist abstract painting called Milk or reduced to the sperm of a space cowboy in Lonesome Cowboy is humiliating. But the sadness becomes crushing when I meet the half robot half human, Inochi, a boy trapped in immaculate machine parts, his growth halted, and his sexuality stunted. Because Murakami seems to be talking to the Japanese victim, not US culprit, there is a terrible tenderness that accompanies the anguish I am helplessly watching, as if through a soundproof window.
However, with the Valkyrie-like Ko of Second Mission Project Ko, lust takes over and I want to buy the female sex symbol that morphs into a plane. I stand in awe of this modern reconstruction of Icarus, while my boyfriend smirks, “Honey, that’s as beautiful as my sports car. As long as I can fit my dick in her cargo hole, it’s an improvement.” Against my will, I am won over by the simple cuteness of the animation, Kaikai & Kiki – Googoo Gaga, how easy it is to be the victim of manipulation.
I don’t think Murakami cares about taking revenge on the American mouse. Instead, he has built a store, sort of like a petting zoo, where everyone can see the Americans being publicly forced to buy ugly objects, because as “art” they will increase in value. The store sits off to the side like a joke, a giant mousetrap stuffed with Louis Vitton cheese.
The piece that does upset me and dominates the show is the giant silver Oval Buddha. One feels suppressed by this Janus god with one face of cuteness the other of terror. The doomed struggle of good and evil is a Western theme, which now sits on Buddha’s throne replacing the compatibility of Ying and Yang. I fear this baby god that is squashing the elephant trying to support it. The painting of the Japanese folk hero, who cut off his eyelids so he couldn’t sleep, now reads as the westernization of Japanese eyes so they can’t shut out the TV. In the room of “Pink on Jellyfish Eyes”, the wallpaper whispers, is too much cuteness a paranoid thing? In the painting, Kawaii! Vacances d’ete, the spring sky is so blue and the flowers are so happy everyone overlooks the ones that are crying. In my mind I know it is too late to escape but that’s not true – there’s always harikiri, or what we call, the dirt nap.
Artillery Magazine Vol 2 no. 3 January 2008