It’s big, bold, audacious, entertaining and at times overwhelming. All those adjectives and more apply to the Cleveland Museum of Art’s sprawling new retrospective exhibition on the art of Takashi Murakami, one of Japan’s leading contemporary artists and a globally popular figure whose work bridges fine art and pop culture.
Relentless is another word that applies to the Murakami experience. Like the aspiring rock stars in the 1984 heavy metal parody film “This is Spinal Tap,’’ Murakami keeps his visual loudspeaker on the highest possible setting, metaphorically speaking.
The joke in the film is that one of the musicians uses an amplifier with a dial that goes to 11, because the number is higher than 10 and therefore supposedly louder. But unlike the hapless Spinal Tap antiheroes, who are mere pikers, Murakami is a virtuoso, and he very much wants you to know it.
The issue is that the experience of the Murakami exhibition may shift, at least for some viewers, from exhilarating to exhausting across the long haul of such a big show. As you proceed, the marginal benefit of seeing more and more of the artist’s work gradually diminishes. What seems astonishing at first can become repetitive. Pace yourself: Murakami’s insistent, high-volume brilliance might wear you down. He keeps it at 11.
Superflat
The show, which runs through Sunday, Sept. 7, costs $30 for an adult non-member ticket. It includes vast expanses of wallpaper designed by the artist, sculptures with the machinelike smoothness of plastic children’s toys, and immense, mural-sized paintings that blend cartoonlike characters, acid-hued colors and a craggy sense of line that echoes traditional Japanese ink-and-brush painting.
Murakami calls his punchy, graphically assertive style “Superflat.’’ Unlike Western artists since the Renaissance, who have treated pictures like windows into illusionistic spaces that recede into imaginary distances, Japanese aesthetics have long emphasized flat shapes, patterns and forms that push forward toward the picture plane with dramatic visual impact.
Murakami’s complex pictorial surfaces embody this quality. They are richly layered, but also finished with a shiny, lacquered smoothness that recalls the exquisite polish of Japanese decorative art.
Superflat also refers to Murakami’s notion of compressing high and low culture, or fine and popular art. For Murakami, it’s all part of reaching the biggest audience possible.
Crossover phenomenon
For those who might not recognize his name, Murakami, who splits his time between Tokyo and New York, bridges the worlds of fashion, entertainment and pop culture. He shows his work in museums but has also collaborated on designs for luxury purveyors such as Louis Vuitton and Issey Miyake, and projects with Kanye West and Kid Cudi.
Born in 1962 and trained in Japan, Murakami moved to New York in 1994, sensing, like the now popular Yayoi Kusama, who moved from Japan to New York in the 1950s, that he had to contend with the global capital of the art world to achieve his potential.
Murakami’s work grew to blend traditional Japanese motifs with additional inspiration from manga and anime comics and multiple influences from Western culture, including the so-called Factory aesthetics of Andy Warhol, plus Disney cartoons, and the wall-power contemporary artists such as Anselm Kiefer and Jeff Koons. Financially and culturally, Murakami is a huge success. Auction prices for his work have reached eight figures.
The basic storyline of the Cleveland show is that Murakami is using his art to process multiple traumas of modern and contemporary life in Japan related to earthquakes and tsunamis, the COVID pandemic, and the cultural and physical fallout of the U.S. nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II. The show also grapples with Japan’s postwar re-emergence as an economic powerhouse in a global environment dominated by the soft power of American culture and commercialism.
Cavalcade of characters
Murakami’s paintings and sculptures portray everything from hypersexualized anime characters and mountains of human skulls to spiritual superheroes including Daoist immortals and Buddhist arhats — saints who have achieved enlightenment but who remain on earth to guide mortals on the path to nirvana.
Murakami saturates his work with ambiguity, maintaining a tension between celebration and satire that keeps you guessing about how he views his subjects. He transforms nuclear mushroom clouds into a sculptural arrangement of cute, toylike mushrooms festooned with eyes that could be meant to ward off evil. Floor-to-ceiling expanses of wallpaper are filled with colorful, childlike flower blossoms that smile satirically as if to drive you crazy with the visual equivalent of an earworm melody you can’t silence.
Murakami’s alter-ego, a cartoonish, sharp-toothed character named Mr. DOB, grins mischievously from numerous paintings like a satirical latter-day Mickey Mouse. A sculpture of a buxom blonde anime-style nurse, which shows her brandishing a syringe and a Christian Bible, is sexy in a provocative, exaggerated way that’s also very creepy.
Centerpiece
The show centers on a 2014 painting measuring 82 feet long that was inspired by the 2011 Tohoku earthquake that triggered the tsunami that engulfed the Fukushima nuclear plant.
The ferociously detailed painting combines the surging flood waters with images of struggling ships, a mountain of black skulls, a pair of giant leaping fish, a strutting phoenix and a convocation of Daoist immortals who appear to hold back the menacing waves. The show’s title, “Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow,’’ is taken from that of the painting.
Originally organized by The Broad museum in Los Angeles, the Cleveland show bowls you over with its scale and ambition. It is likely the Cleveland museum’s single biggest show ever, in terms of square footage of floor and wall space, and its biggest salute to a contemporary artist.
That’s not as high a bar as it may sound. The museum was a much smaller institution until the $320 million expansion and renovation it completed in 2013. What’s clear now is that the museum is more eager than ever to explore the possibilities of its enlarged footprint.
In addition to the lower-level special exhibition galleries, which total nearly 14,000 square feet, the Murakami show includes a large-scale recreation of the eight-sided Yumedono, the Hall of Dreams at the Horyuji Temple complex in Nara, Japan, which dominates the eastern end of the museum’s 39,000 square foot atrium. Inside the Yumedono are four, monumental, dimly lit Superflat-style Murakami paintings. Visitors are allowed five minutes inside, just enough time to allow their eyes to adjust to the darkness. It’s like visiting a religious shrine.
The Lee legacy
The Cleveland museum is a perfect place for the Murakami show because few big American art museums have done more over the past half century to explore connections between Japan and Asia and the West.
That heritage dates to the tenure of Sherman Lee, the museum’s director from 1958 to 1983, who helped to preserve and safeguard Japan’s cultural patrimony by serving as a “Monuments Man’’ there after World War II. Lee later oversaw the Cleveland museum’s efforts to build one of the greatest collections of Asian art outside of Asia.
The Murakami show has unquestionably touched a nerve. Visitors are engaging as deeply with Murakami’s artworks as with the extensive wall labels that decipher his complex, multicultural symbolism. Some of Murakami’s own paintings, in fact, resemble wall labels, with detailed explanations of his views on art and money, his creative process and the evolution of his ideas.
As an institutional nod to pop culture, the show is a far cry from, say, the exhibition of Star Wars props and regalia held at the Toledo Museum of Art in 2001. It’s not a shallow or obvious attempt to goose the box office. And yet, there’s something about the Murakami exhibition that calls for caveats.
The show indicates little about the artist’s growth and evolution. It zooms to a high point of visual and technical accomplishment and stays there. You don’t get much of a sense of Murakami’s struggles and breakthroughs.
As noted above, however, the impact of Murakami’s maximalist aesthetic gradually dissipates across the long haul of a very big show. It leaves you curious, even hungry, to see variations in his output that go beyond turning up the amplifier.
The show also suggests Murakami is aware of a need to break out of his impulse to wow his audience at every second with big, wall-filling paintings and highly detailed sculptures. For example, the exhibition includes an intriguing series of Murakami reproductions of rustic-style Japanese ceramics that he admires. The contrast with the high-wire perfectionism of the rest of his show is clear, but the installation of ceramics doesn’t click meaningfully with the big paintings displayed nearby. What is Murakami really trying to say here?
The ultimate question raised by the museum’s devotion of so much time and space to Murakami is whether his art has real staying power. Will viewers find it compelling 100 or 200 years from now? Is he touching his audience as deeply and as emotionally as Kusama, whose works were shown in Cleveland in 2018, or earlier Japanese masters such as the 19th-century woodblock printmakers Utagawa Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai?
The Cleveland museum, given its global reach and the 6,000 years’ worth of art in its permanent collection, makes it an ideal place to consider those questions, which for now must remain open-ended.
Meanwhile, the museum’s collaboration with Murakami is breaking new ground for an institution that, back in Sherman Lee’s day, never had the space or the inclination to try anything quite like it.
