Seven Days in the Art World (20 page)

As we were concluding our conversation, I mentioned an artist friend without a dealer who hated
Artforum
because it was “exclusive, incestuous, self-important, and self-congratulatory.” Bankowsky laughed and said, “All those things are true. That’s its brand identity, but it could be self-satisfied about worse things.”

My cab pulls up at Paula Cooper Gallery, which sits on both the north and south sides of West Twenty-first Street—and on chapter 1 of the February issue of
Artforum
. Founded in 1968 and having represented many important minimalists, not to mention having paid for the notorious 1974 Lynda Benglis ad, the gallery has a long history with the magazine. Nowadays most of Paula Cooper’s ads contain no image. Every month the gallery issues a straightforward announcement in a no-frills font of the artists’ exhibitions, their opening dates, and the addresses of the gallery’s two spaces. The color of the lettering and background changes, but the format remains the same. An aide told me that Cooper doesn’t like to run text over an image and she wants the work to have a lot of space around it. She has always sought a purist experience of art, so she struggles with illustrations.

A glance in the guest book and the sight of a red signature confirms that
Artforum
’s front man is here. Landesman likes to be out seeing and understanding the art. “If you’re tuned into the galleries’ programs,” he told me earlier, “you have a sense of when it is an important moment for them, when they are ready to step up the size of their ads or take out another one for a museum show. In general, you never push for an ad, but sometimes you know when it is smart for them and when they’ll be happy they did it.” I eventually spot the elfin publisher chatting up a long-legged gallery assistant and recall that he loves the art world because “it’s a neutral ground where people meet and interact in a way that’s different from their class ghettos.” I try to get a view of the Walid Raad exhibition, but the large rectangular room is so crowded with students from Cooper Union (where Raad teaches), CAA art historians (where the Lebanese conceptualist is fashionable), fellow artists (like his stablemates Hans Haacke and Christian Marclay), and assorted others that I can’t do so without backing into people and stepping on toes.

9:00
P.M.
takes me back to
Artforum
’s offices. The building feels entirely empty except for the group of editors who sit around the production table eating Thai noodles out of cardboard takeout boxes. “Come, join us around the campfire,” says Griffin as I enter. “We were just having a bona fide editorial exchange, but you missed it,” he adds as he takes a swig of beer.

“We can recreate it!” offers Schambelan, to whom I had been voicing my frustration that their office didn’t offer enough dynamic interaction.

“Yes, Elizabeth, please lead us in prayer,” says Griffin.

There is silence while the editors eat. Fresh red gerbera daisies now dignify all the desks.

“We were talking rather aimlessly about the next few installments of ‘1000 Words,’” offers Griffin. “1000 Words” is a regular
Artforum
column in which artists discuss a recent or upcoming project in their own (by necessity often highly edited) words.

“1000 Words for the summer issue…,” says Scott Rothkopf, a senior editor who has gone part-time to finish his PhD. “I did recently hear from our dear friend Francesco Vezzoli about his project for the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. It sounds like a made-to-measure ‘1000 Words.’”

“Francesco’s been working you like a flower in a window box,” teases Griffin with a typically outfield simile.

“He’s going to stage a series of mock election campaign commercials, vaguely Republican versus Democrat, starring Sharon Stone and Bernard-Henri Lévy,” says Rothkopf, undeterred. “People will read the issue, then four days later get on a plane and see it in Venice.”

“Then they’ll reach for a drink.” Griffin chuckles. “That sounds fine. Let’s go ahead, but carefully, because I’m sure there’ll be plenty of press. Could you tell him that it would be a huge turnoff if he gave the same statement to
Flash Art
?”

One by one, the editors return to their desks to resume sweeping and clarifying their texts. “I’m groggy because I just crossed one finish line and we’ve all got a few more to run,” explains Griffin with a groan. “We have finally come to a point where we are closing the issues in a reasonable fashion, and at this point in the season we’re all fried.” Indeed, the art world has expanded and picked up speed. With all the money flowing in and the extra editorial pages to fill, I imagine, it is difficult to keep up the pace. As an editor in boom times, Griffin has the luxury of ignoring commercial pressures and pursuing a rarefied exchange about art. “The mission of the magazine is to privilege the art.” He sighs. “It’s the only way to bring meaning to all of this. Otherwise, we’re just killing trees.”

9
:04
A.M
. The glossy red marble lobby of the Westin Tokyo, like most hotels in the city, is dotted with stewards who bow their heads as guests walk by. Tim Blum and Jeff Poe, whom I last saw in Basel, stand by the front doors with their arms folded, their feet planted firmly apart. They glare at me through their Ray-Bans when I arrive a few minutes late, then we set off on our day trip to see an important new work. For seven years the Los Angeles dealers have been observing the artistic evolution of Takashi Murakami’s
Oval Buddha
. It still needs to be covered in platinum leaf, but the sculpture, with the budget of a small independent Hollywood film, is otherwise finished. The eighteen-foot-tall self-portrait is sitting in a foundry in Toyama, an industrial town on the northwest coast of Japan, awaiting an audience.

“Haneda Airport, please,” says Blum in fluent Japanese. The taxi is polished black on the outside with the conventional white lace seat covers on the inside. The driver is wearing white gloves and a surgical face mask. He looks like an extra in a bioterrorism B movie, but here it’s the sartorial norm for those with colds and bad allergies. On the back of his seat, a sign informs us that our driver’s hobbies are (1) baseball, (2) fishing, and (3) driving.

Poe is sitting in the front seat. He has jet lag and a hangover. Blum and I have taken the back. Blum lived in Japan for four years. “I really enjoy speaking the language,” he tells me. “It’s theater to me. I would have loved to have been an actor.” He is tanned and has a week’s worth of stubble. He wears a skull ring that sometimes brings him good luck. “Schimmel says that I look like a deranged movie star,” he adds, flashing his white teeth self-mockingly. While Blum may be a generic leading man, Poe resembles the Dude as played by Jeff Bridges in
The Big Lebowski.

Paul Schimmel, the chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, will also be flying to Toyama today. His solo retrospective of Murakami’s work, entitled “© MURAKAMI,” opens in four months and is supposed to culminate with
Oval.
Blum leans toward the front seat. “Schimmel has been quadruple-dipping!” he complains with a half-laugh. “First we donate a hundred thousand dollars toward the exhibition. Second, Larry, Perrotin, and we pay for the advertising.” He is referring to Murakami’s New York and Parisian dealers, Larry Gagosian and Emmanuel Perrotin. “Third, we have to air-freight
Oval
so it arrives on time. And fourth, we’re expected to buy a few twenty-five-thousand-dollar tables for the gala.” Blum turns to me. “Ask Poe about money. That’s a trauma. He hates to spend.”

Poe slowly shakes his head without lifting it from the headrest. “Schimmel has made history repeatedly,” he says in a monotone. “He’s done some scholarly shit and some spectacular shows. It’s money well spent—peanuts compared to what we’ve poured into fabricating
Oval
.” Poe swigs his spring water, then hugs the two-liter bottle. “
Oval
has enormous significance to us, and not just because it’s the gallery’s biggest-budget production to date.” When Blum & Poe opened in 1994, the partners sold Cuban cigars out the back of the gallery to help make ends meet. Even in 1999, when they showed Murakami’s work in an “Art Statements” booth at Art Basel, they had to ask people from other stands to help them lift the work because they couldn’t afford installers. “Seeing this piece,” continues Poe, “will be emotional.”

A living artist’s first major retrospective is a time of reckoning, not just for critics, curators, and collectors but for the artist himself and his dealers. According to Blum, it is not surprising that the forty-five-year-old Murakami should be “validated” in a foreign land. “Japan is a homogeneous culture. They don’t like it when someone sticks out too much. They want to pound ’em back in.” Blum looks out the window as we drive through an intersection with dizzying electronic signage. “The status of creativity is much lower here,” he continues. “The art market is weak, and there isn’t a well-established museum network for contemporary art. Dissemination is difficult.”

In order to maximize his impact and pursue all his interests, Murakami runs a company called Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd., which has ninety employees in and around Tokyo and New York. The company is involved in what his dealers call an “insane” range of activities. It makes art. It designs merchandise. It acts as a manager, agent, and producer for seven other Japanese artists. It runs an art-fair-
cum
-festival called Geisai, and it does multimillion-dollar freelance work for fashion, TV, and music companies. (When said in reverse, Kaikai Kiki forms a Japanese adjective,
kikikaikai,
which is used to refer to uneasy, strange, or disturbing phenomena.)

“Takashi is an incredibly complicated man, but he’s not precious, and there’s no horseshit,” says Blum. “His father was a taxi driver, but Takashi has a PhD…and he has curated a truly epic trilogy of exhibitions exploring Japanese visual culture.” The third exhibition, entitled “Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture,” which was installed at the Japan Society in New York in 2005, won several awards.

One of Murakami’s most visible commissions has been for the accessories giant Louis Vuitton. In 2000 the company’s artistic director, Marc Jacobs, asked Murakami to reenvision “monogram canvas,” the company’s century-old signature pattern in which the beige and brown initials
LV
float in a field of four-petal flower and diamond shapes. Three Murakami designs were put into production, and one of them, “multicolor,” which used thirty-three candy colors on white and black backgrounds, was so successful that it became a standard line. Murakami then turned the tables on the big brand by pulling it into his own oeuvre with a series of paintings that consist of nothing but the multicolor
LV
pattern. “The Vuitton paintings are going to be important later on,” declares Poe. “People just don’t realize it yet. They look at them as branding and that’s boring, but they’re as
superflat
as anything he’s done,” he says, using Murakami jargon to refer to the way the artist’s works flatten the distinctions between art and luxury goods, high and popular culture, East and West.

As we drive by a canal and catch a glimpse of the red-and-white Eiffel-like structure called the Tokyo Tower, I ask, What is a dealer’s role in the studio?

“When people think of artists’ studios, they imagine Jackson Pollock dancing around a canvas,” says Poe grumpily from under his beige baseball cap. “Dealers are editors and conspirators. We help determine what gets shown and how it gets shown, and we help put art in production.” Poe turns around and looks at Blum, then at me. “At the end of the day, our business is to sell symptoms articulated as objects,” he declares. “I like to think that I have a more honest relationship with our artists than some other dealers, but I don’t want to be anyone’s shrink.”

Two days
ago I visited Murakami’s three Japanese studios. My interpreter and I took a train to the prefecture of Saitama, then a taxi past vibrant green rice paddies and residential streets to the main painting studio, a barn-shaped space with beige aluminum siding. Half a dozen bicycles with baskets and a taxi with its engine running were parked outside. Murakami was on his way out, having just finished his daily inspection. He looked glum. He wore what would turn out to be his uniform of the week: a white T-shirt, baggy army-green shorts, and white Vans without socks. His long black hair was tied up in a samurai bun. I confirmed our interview scheduled for later that day at Motoazabu, his central Tokyo design headquarters. He nodded solemnly and left.

The painting assistants looked like they’d just been chastised. This morning, as always, the staff had arrived by 8:50 (no one is ever late in Japan) and started their day by swinging their arms to recorded piano music for ten minutes of
rajio taiso,
or calisthenics. It’s a national ritual in which they’ve partaken since primary school. When Murakami is there, he joins in. By 9:30, when I arrived, twelve employees were dotted around a white room the size of a long tennis court. Three of them were working on a triptych of circular paintings whose grimacing flower characters also appear in the Murakami-designed opening credits of a popular Japanese TV drama. It needed to be completed for a press conference in three days. Some of the black lines were muddy and wobbly—“not crisp enough.” Some colors were dim and streaky—“not dense enough.” The platinum leaf was flaking off in parts. Plus the triptych needed to be finished “NOW!” One of the painters told me that she has a recurring dream in which Murakami is yelling at her. “He is always angry,” she explained with a shrug. “The atmosphere is usually intense.”

One man took a photo of the first canvas with a small digital camera. Murakami is a stickler for documenting every layer of a painting, so he can follow the process even when he is out of town and look back on the layers to reproduce similar effects in future works. Two women had laid the second and third paintings flat on a long trestle table. One sat cross-legged on the floor with her eyes two inches away from the picture’s edge. She had a thin round bamboo brush in her left hand and a Q-tip tucked into her hair. The other, an artist named Rei Sato, knelt on the floor, reapplying platinum particles. They were all wearing standard-issue brown plastic sandals and white cotton gloves with the thumbs and forefingers cut out. No one had more than a speck or two of paint on his or her clothes. They worked in silence or in their own iPod worlds. When I asked Sato if there was any room for creativity in the work, she replied, “None at all.” However, she is one of the seven artists represented by Kaikai Kiki and would be showing her own art in a group show in Spain. “My work is completely different. It’s deliberately rough!” she added with glee.

I walked around the room, snooping in corners, and discovered a plastic crate full of ten-inch-square mushroom paintings. Murakami has created four hundred different mushroom designs, so the exam given to new staff to test whether they are ready to wield a brush in his name is to paint a mushroom. Deeper in the room, I came upon a phalanx of small, round, blank canvases that had received twenty thin layers of gesso primer so they would be as flat as glass. On the ground, leaning against the wall, was another battalion of works-in-waiting. A total of eighty-five canvases were on the way to becoming what Murakami casually calls “big-face flowers” but are officially titled
Flowers of Joy.
Gagosian Gallery sold the fifty on display in its May 2007 show for $90,000 apiece. (The official price was $100,000, but everyone who’s anyone gets a 10 percent discount.)

At the very back of the space was a notorious unfinished work—sixteen large panels shamefully stacked with their faces to the wall, half hidden under translucent plastic sheets. In fact, this entire studio was set up only six months ago to accommodate this very piece. Commissioned by François Pinault, the influential collector who owns Christie’s auction house, the painting was to be the fourth work with
727
in its title (the first is in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, while the second belongs to hedge-fund manager Steve Cohen). Like the other
727
paintings, it was supposed to feature Mr. DOB, Murakami’s postnuclear Mickey Mouse character, as a god riding on a cloud, which can also be interpreted as a shark surfing on a wave, inspired by Hokusai’s famous nineteenth-century woodblock print
The Great Wave of Kanagawa
. Murakami’s sixteen-panel magnum opus was meant to line the atrium of Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi museum during the opening days of the Venice Biennale, but a few skilled staff walked out on Murakami at a crucial time and the project had to be put aside.

“Takashi’s being late on a painting for Pinault is like Michelangelo’s being late for the pope!” was the oft-repeated quip, originally made by Charles Desmarais, the deputy director for art at the Brooklyn Museum, where the Murakami retrospective would travel to in April 2008. (After that the show would open at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt and the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain.) Later that day, in his finely sliced, sashimi-style English, Murakami described his predicament in another way: “I was in big tension. They was too much tired. Every day upset. They thought, ‘Fuck you, Takashi.’ I thought, ‘Oh my god, I cannot make the work.’ But I cannot say anything to Monsieur Pinault. It was a very tough time.”

Murakami has a painting studio in New York that mirrors this one in many respects. Linked by e-mail, iChat, and regular conference calls, it too is tidy, white-walled, and silent except for the whir of the ventilation and the occasional blow-dryer being used to dry paint. I visited twice—once in April, when everyone was working around the clock in preparation for Murakami’s Gagosian show, and once in mid-May, when people had more time to talk. On the second visit, I watched Ivanny A. Pagan, a Puerto Rican–American painter who’d recently graduated from art school. On a stool beside him were three little plastic pots. “Green three twenty-six, yellow sixty-nine, and orange twelve. It’s paint by numbers with a twist,” he told me. “I don’t want to discriminate on the basis of color, but the yellows are sticky! They’re mean because they show the brushstrokes.” He paused to sweep his brush through a tight spot on an op-art-inspired “midsized flower ball,” then added, “You would think that synthetic paint would be uniform, but all the colors are different.” Murakami is insistent that no trace of his or any other painter’s hand should be seen in the work. “We’re out of Q-tips today and I have a dust problem,” Pagan said with a heavy sigh. “It is frowned upon to touch the painting,” he added as he readjusted his gloves. “About ten days before the Gagosian show, Takashi came into the studio. Most of us were new recruits, so we had never met him. It was pretty stressful. We had to redo all fifty small flower faces.” Pagan dipped his bamboo brush in water and dried it on his jeans. “Thankfully, the painting director here, Sugimoto-san, has been working with Takashi for ten years. She’s so technically precise, it’s spectacular. She can refine paintings in a flash.” For Pagan, going to the opening of the Gagosian show was “like seeing the work for the first time.” He couldn’t believe it. “I worked on one of those flower balls for over a month, but with the varnish on it, under the lights, it was a completely different experience. We’d applied layer upon layer of paint, but for the general public I’m sure it looked like it had just arrived on the canvas.”