ART REVIEW Takashi Murakami at Blum and Poe Gallery, Los Angeles

PAINTINGS

 

Murakami's exhibit is overwhelming, dense with caricatures aligned in front of  teeming landscapes. I puzzled out the references to past Chinese and Japanese art by finally remembering that the Buddha in Japan is often represented humorously.  

The beautiful old screen above gives me an idea about how Murakami designed his own large canvas, pictured below.  Perhaps the blue tree is the Bodhi Tree, with various seekers who have endured various trials in search of nirvana resting beneath it.  I wish they didn't remind me of Mad Magazine drawings, though they are very amusing and creepy.  

100 Arhats, 118 1/8x 393 11/16,  10 panels, 2013

Or perhaps their sources are contemporary anime, with which I admit a lack of familiarity.  Murakami's brain must seethe with plenty. 

Red Demon and Blue Demon with 48 Arhats, 118 1/8 x 196 7/8, 5 panels, 2013

detail

I think this looks like Mother Teresa - though I don't recognize any of the other images.  I really didn't feel I had time to try, either. I decided that Murakami's view of the world is kind,comical and truthful: he sees a ship of fools trying to perfect ourselves. 

 SCULPTURE: 

Arhat temple in China

Arhats are "perfected beings" who have achieved nirvana,and pre-date Buddha. Some Buddhists believe that arhats are near perfection but still capable of fallibility - like some people I know.

Arhat temples filled with golden statues of them are common in China, I learned. Perhaps  these representations were inspiration for Murakami's gold and silver arhat sculptures that preside over the paintings.  

Flame of Desire - Gold, 2013,  475cm

Murakami's arhat is a vanitas arhat, the skull nestled in golden flames.  Do they destroy or create, or both, as Shiva's dance suggest? The arhat sculptures shift the paintings away from their humorous purity and create transcendent presence and meaning in the gallery. 

Another room has several of Murakami's signature daisy motif and skulls in horror-vacuii all-over paintings of laughing mouths and grimacing skulls.  They intrude and blare, images obese with superficial attraction.

There is no judgment here, just opposition of joy and death.

Murakami and his dog lie peacefully side by side peacefully atop a bed or his tomb in the last room.

I do love this cartoony painting of Murakami and his dog, growing his own Bodhi Tree from his head under which he and Pom may rest and dream, and the expression of bemused wisdom on his round little face.

References that I found in earlier works Murakami made to a nihilistic, escapist post-war Japanese world view seem to be now balanced to acceptance of life's pain and an arrival at a Zen moment-to-moment perspective. There's real warmth, truth, and then grit in the artist's magnanimity.

"...A lightning rod between different cultural valencies [sic - valences?]  (high/low, ancient/modern, oriental/occidental), Murakami has stated that the artist is someone who understands the borders between worlds and who makes an effort to know them." - Gagosian Gallery HongKong website " , from " Flowers and Skulls", Murakami's November 2012 exhibition.

The gallery photos are mine; one is allowed to photograph, unlike many museums. Historical photos are web-sourced.

ART: James Turrell, to seek the light,

To seek light is one of the most primal behaviors of all organisms. How moving to see a field of sunflower heads pivot to parallel the their faces to the sun's face across the sunlit day time. They know. They do not turn from true light, and their wisdom is that of eternal verities. 

Light and Word are closely related in the elegant first gospel of John, one of the most clear and profound explanations of grace ever written: "...in Him was life", but it could so easily be conflated to read "in Him was Light",..."the true Light that lighteth every man." 

We love light, cheap and substantive daily commerce with the Eternal: sunrises, moonshine pathways on the water, rainbows, the first evening star.

 No wonder artists, as foolish as moths, have tried to capture light, seeking to make their works reflective and resplendent as the impossibly splendid world around them.  

Notre Dame de Paris

Until cinematography and modern film, that achievement for me was Claude Monet's. His paintings still remain enigmatically perfect, glowing, fresh, as close to light capture as memory could wish.   

Grainstacks at the End of Summer, Evening Effect

1891

Terence Malick, Days of Heaven film still

Then there is the issue of abstract purity of light, a Biblical fantasy, a seeking of the birth experience, I think, the promise of the long life given to the newborn child. With modern projection technology, artists could seek to make this.

A few weeks ago I was in Houston, meditating on light at the Rothko Chapel and in James Turrell's tunnel at at the Museum of Fine Arts.  Then Belize and the diffused deep lapis tones of The Blue Hole. Now there is James Turrell at LACMA, with selected artworks (I wanted more) and careful how-he-built-them documentation.

Afrum (White) 1966 (personal photo)

 A dark room, and the corner has a suspended glowing geometrical presence.

Juke Green (projection) (personal photo)

I found my steps slowing tentatively as I moved into each space. My vision, not to be trusted to verify the volume, yielded to a doubting Thomas hand gesture, thrust into the light field. Even then, the form remained undefined, truly mysterious.

Raemar Pink White, 1969 (web photo)

This room was delightful to be in; I actually felt happier. The pink glow spilled into the hallway, beckoning.

Other pieces yielded pleasantly disorienting, exploratory somatic pleasures of entering dark rooms, shifting subtle colors of opalescent sheen and deep sapphire. A room of small holograms thrust geometric color shapes out from the picture plane, fascinating as the mind kept saying, impossible, there's nothing there; but remained dependably re-appearing exquisite color ghosts.

Turrell designs skyscape architectural spaces within which a perceptual color experience awaits. Dozens have been built across the world. The pristine white models of them set me yearning to enter each of them.

In July I have a reservation to view Light Reignfall, an  perceptual cell color experience. One lies down and is trundled into a 50's looking gadgety personal observatory, rather like an MRI for the soul, or a reverse sensory deprivation chamber.

perceptual cell structure Light Reinfall

Roden Crater, a 400,000 year-old extinct volcano in Arizona, will be Turrell's lasting celebration of the 1960's vision of personal liberation.  Within the geological structure he has built various cells and apertures for viewing that frame perceptual experiences of the sky and light.

   

I was about to get in the car and start driving until I learned that it's not finished.  

The exhibit includes scale models, architectural and design drawings, and these are lavish in detail, revealing the technical scope of Turrell's oeuvre.  

On June 21 a Turrell Guggenheim exhibit opens, which will probably be spectacular.  He will transform the singular volumes of the museum interior with light.  

rendering

What I wished: that I could be alone and meditate during a cycle of an artwork. LACMA had a controlled member admission schedule to admit only a few each time, which made for an open, flowing experience. 

I also wished for a walk-through tunnel like Houston MFA has. A lighted tunnel traverse is a powerful metaphor for life's journey, and was a memory of a lifetime for me.

Houston Museum of Fine Arts  (personal photo)

Besides the metaphors of light to insight, growth, and grace that come to mind, another powerful idea is return to the center, the womb, and interiority.  This light is not the light of nature and outdoors, it is within.

It is also subtly disturbing; the colors have no warmth.  Even orange and yellow seem cool. The seductive experience is honest artifice.  It seems airless, cold, like being in a beautiful refrigerator, or like hearing the strange vibrations of electronic music. One senses the presence of the machine.

The act of looking at light engages somatic and sensory perception in a unique way that returns one to oneself, engaged with observing and dissolving boundaries. 

Turrell is not grave, as is the Rothko Chapel, which led to somber introspection. The reaction engenders wonder which prompts spontaneous exchanges of delight and discovery between viewers, and left me marveling and full of wonder, light of spirit because light had been shone to me.

PAINTING: Sublime American Landscapes, William Troost Richards

Another focused web-searching discovery:  an 19th century painter that to my mind, makes the most beautiful coastline paintings I've ever seen.  Technically superior mastery of luminous effects of light in air and water.  And a pure vision of the iconic strife and union of ocean and land and its powerful symbolism. Lyric painted poetry.

Bright Light

Coast of Cornwall

Moonlight

Moye Point Channel Islands

The Bird Stack

ART: Semantic Categories of Form for Abstract Painting

...from Pepe Karmel, Artnews, April 2013

I found this useful for interpreting shapes and forms I view in abstract painting, yielding some meanings. Karmel's idea is that abstraction is derived from figurative images, a familiar idea, but it's the classification that's intriguing me.

He also states that abstraction is "how we think of the future", challenging the stereotype of romantic dystopias and asserting that global transformational events are improving the lives of everyone, the rising tide for all our vessels.  He discusses Peter Halley's idea that early abstraction celebrated utopian socialism, which failed post-war, and became a symbol of alienation. Current abstraction creates "...visual allegories of social change that carry us beyond the old capitalism-socialism divide."

Here are his categories. I have looked up most of the artists he references under each category and find I mostly don't agree with him in the case of the painters.

1.  COSMOLOGIES

Marcel Duchamp, Network of Stoppages 

Alexander Calder, Untitled, 1937

Jackson Pollock, The Big Dipper, 1947

Chris Martin, Untitled, 2005

Guillermo Kuitca - Pepe Karmel might put this artwork and the Duchamp above in his SIGNS category, but I think it has to do with distance,time, and space that cosmological imagery infers.

2. LANDSCAPE
These are the artworks I love, because of their beauty of surface, and the transcendent meanings that are so easily available.  

Mary Heilmann, Capistrano, 1994

Mary Heilmann, False Sense of Well-Being

Thomas Nozkowski

Audra Weaser, Poet's Crossing

Pat Steir, Waterfall

3.  ANATOMY/BIOMORPHISM - I recognize this category but I responded to the examples so tepidly I shall leave it for another day.

4. FABRICS - sourced by globalism, the Pattern and Decoration Movement, and psychological needs for repetition, horror vacuii response, celebratory cultural/ethnic identity, with Geometric/biomorphic forms. 

Sean Scully

Valerie Jaudon, Archive, 2012

5. ARCHITECTURE

Andrew Spence Red, Pink, and White

 David Novros 

Guillermo Kuitca, Devotional benches, confessional booths, mercy seats, and altars

Sarah Morris, no title

Helmut Federle, Motor City, 1980

6. SIGNS/MAPS/ALPHABETS

Carlos Fonseca, drawings

Gu Wenda, installation at SFMOMA

Stephen Westfall

Tatsuo Miyajima

Terry Winters

Wosene Worke Kosrof

Guillermo Kuitca