Proof of Concept

This is the second in a three part response to

©Murakami the Brooklyn Museum.

After passing the sculpture S.M.P.ko² in the rotunda (see previous post) we are introduced to Mr. DOB, a character featured in Murakami's work as early as 1993. As the wall text explains DOB's name is a reflection of his form. "d" and "b" are inscribed in his ears, while his round head forms the "o". Arthur Ludbow in his 2005 New York Magazine article sights the success of fellow Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara's infantile characters and Japanese obsession with kawaii (a Hello Kitty flavor of cuteness) as the rational around Murakami's shift from the critical satire of utako, emblematic in Lonesome Cowboy, to the com modification of it. Mr. DOB is later joined by Mr. Pointy and Kaikai and Kiki, who become the stars of Murakami's animated shorts.

In Mr. DOB's early appearances he is surrounded by happy face flowers. He has an unctuous smile and the work he dominates is so disappointingly benign.

I find it refreshing to think that Murakami can't keep up his charade of Kawaii. The evidence of this is seen in the complex and terrifying transformations that effect our friend Mr. DOBs.
After a few appearances as a smiling, be-lashed ingenue, Mr. DOB's begins to bear rows of razor sharp teeth. Like a greek god, Mr. DOB possesses many manifestations, many on canvas, occasionally as three dimensions. He transmutates to have several "d" and "b" protrusions, multiple eyes, and many more teeth.

Murakami's PO + KU Surrealism phase is most injurious to Mr. DOBs who becomes stretched, distorted, and endlessly repeated as if he was the victim of some terrible teleportation experiment. Perhaps the impulse that birthed Mr. DOB becomes his undoing, as he is over mediated, reproduced, altered, until he becomes only a motif; a wallpaper of eyes, sharks teeth and colors.

In “Tan Tan Bo Puking” (2002), all the qualities of kawaii have disappeared from Mr. DOBs. In this enormous painting our friend is at death's door as he spews bile and breaths his last few breaths. Despite the overwhelming motifs of smiling flowers and the insufferable cuteness of KaiKai and Kiki, one no longer thinks of Hello Kitty, or Yoshitomo Nara's characters when standing in front of "Tan Tan Bo Puking." I like to imagine, that after several years of living with Mr. DOB's Murakami can help but abandon his "cuteness" charter, and the anxiety, violence, and refreshing criticality that helped him produce Hiropon has bubbled back up, much like the bile that spills from Mr. DOB's blackened, dying, mouth.

The much anticipated retrospective (if a 45 year old artist can have a retrospective) of Takashi Murakami occupies 18,500 square feet of gallery space at the Brooklyn Museum. It features 90 works, an operational Louis Vuitton Store, and an animation written and performed by Kanye West. I felt an exhibition this sweeping warrants more than one post. Below is the first segment in a 3 part review of the show that corresponds with the exhibit's layout


Although it was still only the sneak preview to the opening , I had already read two New York Times' articles about the Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum and felt like I had been aptly prepared for a world populated by commodified smiling flowers and cloying characters. What Roberta Smith's review had neglected to mention is the opening scene of this sweeping show, a the most critical and dark of all the featured work.

We enter the exhibition in the Brooklyn Museums rotunda surrounded by electric semen airborne in razor sharp arches. In the center is three stages of
Second Mission Project KO2. This is a life size anime girl, her miniature frame dominated by gravity defying petal pink breasts. In her second stage the girl begins her transformation into a jet plane, the girl's ass is split apart, her tiny torso flips forward her pubis, now the nose of the plane juts forward thrusting a hairless, but anatomically perfect pearly pink prepubescent vagina towards the viewer. In the third and final form , the transformation is complete, the girl's head and hair become the tail of the jet, guided by the vaginal nose of the plane, it hovers in the air.

Murakaimi has 3 dimensionally staged an internal rape of this hyper-sexualized girl who is internally dismembered by jet plane machinery. Rather than her genitals being penetrated they become appropriated and externalized as she morphs into her own aggressor, she becomes the (jet plane) phalis of her own violation.


KO2, like two other life-size figures, Lonesome Cowboy and Hirpon, is a satire of the sexualization in Otaku, the Japanese culture of anime (film) and manga (comics). The grotesque exaggeration of the Hirpon's lactating breasts and Cowboy's halo' of ejaculate offers an effective comment on the hyperbolic sex inherent in Otaku. However, on the opposing wall is a didactic the museum has produced for children asking them to identify "DOB" one of Murakami's reoccurring characters. Is the institution assuming that all the pastel colored eyes and smiling flowers has anesthetized the Hirpon's gargantuan milking tits, or KO2 pussy which is thrust forward at a 6 year old's eye level? Is this really a kid-friendly exhibit?

Murakami's smiling flower motif spill from circular canvases to populate ad nauseam the walls and sculpture in the third gallery and beyond to the gift-store trinkets and gift bags. How are we to read these sycophantic characters after the tone of the exhibit is initiated by KO2? Initially these flowers along with Murakami's other iconic figures of many-eyed mushrooms and the smiling DOB seem sinister and false like the cartoon characters printed on the panties of a sexually active teen, or worse....


Although KO2 and her friend the Lonesome Cowboy and Hirpon speak to a satire of Otaku culture, their deformities eventually cease to cast a critical shadow over the remaining cast of Murkami's cloying characters.

Labels: KO2, Murakami, Otaku