Seven Days in the Art World

by Sarah Thornton

  “I say ‘concern,’ but it is your show,” said Murakami.

  “To be honest,” said Schimmel, “I think it’s the right decision. The scale is right. The themes work.”

  “Paul, you are the chef,” said Murakami with a nod. “I lend my ideas and my pieces, but you cook the exhibition.”

  “I’m going to see what I can do,” replied Schimmel.

  Murakami put his hands together as if in prayer and made a quick but emphatic bow from his seat.

  On the way out of the boardroom, Schimmel told me, “An artist’s confidence in a curator is essential to making a great solo show. Takashi brings a lot of baggage. He runs an organization that is not dissimilar in size and scope to MOCA. There is no infantilizing the artist, no ‘we know best for you.’” Schimmel chuckled. “When it became clear to Takashi that I had joined his staff, the empowerment was unlimited!” Murakami’s generosity in allowing others their creative say would seem to be in inverse proportion to his legal rights. “I’ve actually been surprised that he hasn’t been more particular about the selection of individual works,” added Schimmel. The outer office was quietly busy; the admin staff glanced up as we walked past. “Timing is crucial for monographic exhibitions,” Schimmel continued. “With retrospectives of an artist’s most highly regarded works, as opposed to project-oriented solo shows, you get the sense that there is a moment when suddenly a single artist’s oeuvre can be immensely satisfying.”

  A good retrospective combines familiarity and the unknown. “So a curator needs good access to all the material, and he has to join the artist in taking risks,” explained Schimmel. “Takashi’s ambition bowls me over. He takes everything he’s got and says, ‘Let’s double up.’ That’s what he’s done with Oval.” Schimmel hadn’t yet seen the work. Based on photos, he thought it could be the artist’s most important sculpture to date. “To see an artist’s single greatest achievement at the end of the retrospective—now that is how you want to end it.” We arrived at the elevator, and Schimmel ran a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. “The best solo shows come when an artist and curator are connected and highly invested,” he admitted. “When their reputations depend on it…when they’re both putting their careers at stake.”

  Our taxi finally draws up outside Haneda Airport, a bright and breezy example of modernist architecture. Although it handles only domestic flights, it is one of the five busiest airports in the world. As we line up to check in, I notice that Blum’s and Poe’s passports are smothered with stamps that testify to the constant travel required to keep up with the globalization of their business. The predatory eagle on their navy covers con trasts dramatically with the symbol of national identity that adorns the Japanese passport—the chrysanthemum. Murakami’s flower paintings are often considered the least edgy part of his oeuvre. Apparently Schimmel once called the small flower faces “bonbons,” to which Pinault’s consultant, Philippe Ségalot, replied, “But they are dee-licious, just like chocolate croissants. You can’t help but have one.” However, when one considers that Murakami has taken a national icon and endowed it with a gaping orifice in a culture where a wide-open mouth is considered rude, the image comes across as a little more challenging.

  We get our boarding passes, and as we head to the gate we discuss Murakami’s workspaces. “When I go into a studio, I look at absolutely everything,” says Poe in his lazy California drawl. “Supplemental information is incredibly important. If there is a truth there, it’s not just in the work but in how they work, how they act, who they are. It’s tough with Takashi now because that information is spread out over so many locations, and half of it is on his hard drive.” Once in the departure lounge, the dealers take seats. “The Motoazabu studio sends a message. It says, ‘We’re not some messy workshop. We’re a clean, pristine, professional business.’” Poe pauses, then adds, “Of course, the organization is totally dysfunctional, but that’s not the signifier.”

  Murakami and his entourage of Kaikai Kiki staff arrive. Not far behind them march the four American museum people. The hellos are warm. Blum and Murakami hug, then natter in Japanese. The artist tells me, “It is good to come back to the friendship with Tim.” For the third day running, he’s wearing the green shorts, but he’s upgraded the T-shirt to a short-sleeved shirt and a beige Yamamoto-style linen jacket. Poe gets into a conversation with Schimmel. Yoshitake has a list of things to cover with Sakata. Strick and Desmarais, having gone native, flash their digital cameras with Japanese abandon, while a young man with greasy shoulder-length hair records all the encounters on video for the Kaikai Kiki archives. The flight to Toyama is called; we join a disciplined queue of Japanese salary-men to board the Boeing 777. The All Nippon Airways flight attendants have giant purple bows tied around their necks and mauve makeup. The service has a hyperreal quality, as if they were scripted stewardess-characters in a computer game.

  The seating assignment offers a near-perfect representation of the hierarchies of the art world. Murakami sits by himself in 1A, a window seat in business class. He reads the newspaper, then watches what he calls a “really maniac, totally geek animation” on his Mac. Blum and Poe sit in 2C and 2D. The MOCA people are in economy, row18. Desmarais is nearby, in 19. The six Kaikai Kiki staff members are aligned in row 43. Apparently Murakami, sensitive to the symbolism of the situation, asked Yoshitake to tell him who was the highest-ranking person from MOCA. When told that it was the director of the museum, he asked her whether Jeremy Strick would like his seat. Yoshitake assured the artist that Strick would be fine in economy.

  Out the window, a plane with Pokemon on its tail descends as we ascend over Tokyo’s hazy sprawl, soaring past miles of docks lined with shipping containers, then inland above the clouds on a northwest course, two hundred miles to Toyama. Murakami’s characters often look like they are flying or floating; even his sculptures seem to defy gravity.

  When I was in the offices of Artforum a few months ago, senior editor Scott Rothkopf was working on his essay for the “© MURAKAMI” catalogue. It wasn’t the first time he’d written about Murakami’s work. Four years earlier, during the 2003 Venice Biennale, he’d been struck by the artist’s omnipresence. “Everywhere I looked, there was Murakami,” Rothkopf told me. “Not only did he have two magnetic works in the ‘Painting from Rauschenberg to Murakami’ exhibition at the Museo Correr, but you could see the Murakami handbags through the window of the Louis Vuitton store, and African immigrants were selling copies in the street. Collectors were carrying real ones; tourists carried fake ones. Murakami had taken over the Biennale, almost like a virus. He couldn’t have planned it, but you could see his work flowing through the global art and fashion marketplace. It was as if he’d injected dye into the system.” Rothkopf’s review of the Biennale resulted in an Artforum front cover for Murakami, or at least for the handbags that sported his pirated designs.

  “Takashi’s practice makes Warhol’s look like a lemonade stand or a school play,” declared the young art historian. “Warhol dabbled in businesses more like a bohemian than a tycoon and hatched a brood of ‘superstars,’ but none of them could sustain their status outside his Factory.” Unlike Warhol’s other artistic heirs, who pull the popular into the realm of art, Murakami flips it and reenters popular culture. “I was taught that one of the defining premises of modern art was its antagonism to mass culture,” said Rothkopf. “If I wanted to be accepted more readily by the academic establishment, I could argue that Takashi is working within the system only to subvert it. But this idea of subversive complicity is growing stale, and more importantly, I just don’t believe it’s a viable strategy.” Rothkopf concluded, “What makes Takashi’s art great—and also potentially scary—is his honest and completely canny relationship to commercial culture industries.”

  I’d heard that Murakami referred to his Louis Vuitton work as “my urinal,” so I thought I’d ask his boss on the project for a reaction. Marc Jacobs was in his office at the Paris headquarters of Louis Vuitton when
I caught him on the phone. In our preliminary chat, he was careful to describe Murakami as an artist, not a designer. “It’s not like he sent me a sketch of a handbag or anything,” he explained. “Takashi created the art that we applied to these products. The documents we received were in the format of a canvas. In fact, they looked a lot like the LV paintings that he went on to make.” When I confronted Jacobs with the urinal line, he took an audible puff on his cigarette. Jacobs understands the art world—he collects, he attends the auctions, he visits the Venice Biennale—but the same might not be said for his LV customers. “I’m a big fan of Marcel Duchamp and his ready-mades,” he said coolly. “Changing the context of an object is, in and of itself, art. It sounds like a put-down, but it’s not.” Given that Duchamp’s “urinal” (officially titled Fountain, from 1917) is one of the most influential works of the twentieth century, one might argue that Murakami is in fact glorifying his LV affiliations. Certainly Jacobs was looking forward to seeing the LV boutique installed in MOCA and happy to have Murakami describe it as a ready-made. “It’s not a gift shop—it’s more like performance art,” he told me. “Witnessing what goes on in the boutique in the context of an art exhibition is as much an artwork as the art that went into the bags.”

  Toyama Airport is little more than an airstrip with a handful of gates where all flights come from Tokyo. It’s a short walk through the building to the line of black Crown Super Saloon cars that will take us to the foundry. Standing beside each car is a driver in a blue suit, pilot cap, and white gloves, anxious to open the door lest we leave fingerprints on the polished paintwork. Blum, Poe, and I get in the second car of a convoy so formal that onlookers might assume we are part of an official diplomatic delegation.

  “Oval has been gestating for so long, I can’t quite believe it’s finished,” says Blum with a deep sigh of relief. “It’s been an intense trip.” As we weave through the outskirts of Toyama, a blue-collar town where discount stores have oversized street signs and telephone wires swing from poles, I ask how they go about underwriting fabrication. “We have no contract,” explains Poe. “Everything is an oral agreement. Kaikai Kiki will say, ‘The budget will be x,’ and if you are a dumbshit, then you presell based on that figure. When the budget gets to be x times two or three, you cannot go back to Takashi and try to renegotiate because…well let’s just say you would not want to be in the room for that discussion. So we do not price the piece until it is finished and installed, wherever that may be. We know from experience: never, ever presell the work.”

  The fleet cruises along a flat plain of farmhouses and factories and comes to a halt at the turquoise gate in the chain-link fence that surrounds the foundry. As we get out of the cars, we are hit by the smell of burning. At this moment, as Old World industry meets New World art, no one is quite sure what the protocol should be. The managers of the foundry and the fabricators, Lucky Wide, are on their feet, wondering whom to welcome first. A project director from Kaikai Kiki New York and an exhibition technician from MOCA, who arrived earlier in the week to watch the eight parts of the sculpture being craned into place, don’t so much greet us as wander over to join the party. Ten foundry employees stand in a line with hands behind their backs, not sure where to look, while a reporter from the Toyama newspaper and his photographer stand by, waiting for their story to unfold.

  While Blum and Poe hang back, waiting for Murakami, I notice that Schimmel has wasted no time. I follow the curator into the building and look up at Oval Buddha. The Humpty Dumpty–ish character sits on a tall pedestal in a half-lotus position, one leg up, the other dangling, with a spiral inscribed on his belly. He’s crowned with a supernova explosion of hair, and he’s literally two-faced. In front, he has a goatee much like Murakami’s own and an undulating, half-frowning, half-smiling mouth. In the back of his head is a furious mouth with a double row of sharklike teeth. His back sports a protruding plated backbone. It has to be one of the largest self-portraits ever made, but somehow the gesture doesn’t suggest self-aggrandizement but rather a feeling of absurd enlightenment.

  “Unfuckingbelievable!” says Schimmel, his face wiped clean with surprise. “Fantastic,” he mutters as he notices that the entire structure sits on a squashed elephant. “I think that once Takashi accepted that it was a self-portrait, he was able to take it further. He’s been concealing his identity until now.” Schimmel walks right up to the base of the sculpture and stands under its huge overhanging head. “The improbability,” he says looking up. “So precarious, so emblematic. It could fall over from the weight of ambition. It’s either a disaster waiting to happen or it’s…brilliant.” By now everyone else is walking slowly around the work. “In terms of showstoppers, I got lucky. They’ll be praying to this thing in five hundred years!” he announces. The curator walks over to Murakami, who stands with his hands on his hips, soberly inspecting the changes that have been made since he last saw the work, two weeks ago. “Takashi,” he says, “you’ve taken on the twelfth century. This is breathtaking. We’re going to do our very best to accomplish the best location for it.” The Kaikai Kiki cameraman rushes over, but it is unclear whether he manages to capture the moment.

  I stroll over to Strick, who is looking pensive, and ask him what he is thinking. “What’s the members’ opening going to be like? And the gala? What will be the conversation among artists? How will this change what people think about Murakami?” replies the museum director. “Every sector of the audience is in communication. Reactions are reinforced. At a certain point a consensus is formed. Sometimes it takes a while, but a work like this, which is so powerful and unexpected—it will make an impression very quickly. People will be surprised and talk about it.”

  Yoshitake looks baffled. “I don’t know. Is it sacrilegious?” she wonders aloud. Certainly this bipolar character couldn’t be further away from Zen. “The Buddha is a transcendent being whose serenity is meant to reassure us that everything will be okay in our next lives, but this creature is disturbing.” The PhD student stares at the work, grappling with its connotations. “I think it’s the only truly post-atomic Buddha I’ve seen,” she adds. “Takashi is not an overtly political artist…but it’s interesting that he is making work like this for an American audience at this time.”

  Poe looks satisfied. “We’re gonna make an edition of ten on a domestic scale. That’s the next project. Love that!” he says. “People should be able to live with Oval. The references and meanings are still there.” Blum walks over. The partners stand, feet planted on the ground, arms across their chests, as if they are staking out territory in a tough schoolyard. “It’s as entertaining as fuck. So entertaining that it may get backlash,” says Poe. “I just hope it fits on the plane when it’s crated. At the moment we’ve only got two inches of clearance.”

  The fabricator opens a box of platinum leaf to show the Toyama reporter. It costs three dollars for a 10-centimeter-square sheet. Thinner than flaking skin, it blows into an unusable crinkle in the wind. “The true unveiling will be in L.A. at MOCA,” declares Blum. “The platinum will create a significant change in impact. We’ve never done platinum leafing of this complexity. That’s a big unknown.”

  Murakami walks over and adopts his dealers’ posture. They talk. Afterward the artist makes the rounds, having a word with everyone. When he gets to me, I compliment him on the work’s sublime sense of humor. “I love this tension,” he says as he looks at the group circling around his work. “Not nervous, because I saw it two weeks ago. Already in satisfaction that quality is good. Each part has many stories.”

  In ten years’ time, what will you remember most about today? I ask.

  “Head of factory. Old guy was very quiet. Just watching to our job. But finally he’s smiling,” says Murakami. “Also old fabricator tell me, ‘Thank you so much. You gave us a really good experience.’ And then the young fabricator, Mr. Iijima, the director of the sculpture—for first time, his face has confidence.”

  Murakami looks at his work l
ike a loving parent regarding a child who didn’t come in first. “But for me,” he continues, “my feeling is, ‘Oh my god, it’s so small!’ I say to each fabricator, ‘Hey, next time, scale is double or triple, please.’” Murakami curves his lips, self-consciously mimicking the expression of Oval’s front face. “Do you know the Kamakura Buddha?” he asks. The Great Buddha of Kamakura is a forty-four-foot-high bronze sculpture cast in 1252. Buddhist statues tend to be housed in temples, but the Kamakura’s buildings were washed away by a tsunami in 1495 and since then the Buddha has stood in the open air. “This sculpture is in the mentality of Japanese people,” says the artist. “I’m happy with Oval Buddha but thinking to next change. Not ambition. Really pure feeling. Instinct. Next work must be much bigger. Much complicated. That is my brain.”

  7

  The Biennale

  Noon on Saturday the ninth of June. The Venice Biennale doesn’t open to the public until tomorrow, but it’s already over for the art world. A few guests lounge under white umbrellas while a waiter walks past with a tray of freshly squeezed blood-orange juice. The Cipri ani is one of the most luxurious hotels in the world; a short boat ride from the Piazza San Marco, it offers an escape from the swarms that descend on the city. I’ve just plunged into the hotel’s deserted hundred-foot filtered saltwater pool. After a week of too much art and too many conversations, punctuated by intermittent rain, I relish the prospect of a meditative swim under a cloudless sky. Hindsight is essential to making sense of the contemporary.