TALK: Flat Boy Vs Skinny: Takashi Murakami
And The Battle For 'Japan' - Part IMobile
Superflat Redemption!
Dick Hebdige (IHC)
Thursday, April 12 / 12:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020
Download Flyer
In 2005 Japanese ‘business art’ star,
Takashi Murakami creator of hyper-sexual anime-derived
characters Hiropon, KO2 and My Lonesome
Cowboy and designer of the million-selling Panda
tote bag for Louis Vuitton launched Little Boy:
The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture,
the final exhibition in his Superflat trilogy
at the Japan Society in Manhattan. Referencing the “Little
Boy” nickname for the atomic bomb dropped on
Hiroshima in 1945 along with the assertion made in
1951 before the US Senate by Gen. Douglas MacArthur
(nickname ‘Skinny’) that “measured
by the standards of modern civilization” the
Japanese were “like a boy of 12”, Murakami
explores the matrix of humiliation/infantilization
out of which “the post war tragic apocalypse
of Japan” (Murakami) has been forged. This
talk approaches Murakami’s project as a Redemption
War Machine aimed at the US-centric Art World the goal
of which is to upend all regional enemy victories in
accordance with a loser-wins logic which is applicable
to the following series: ‘America’ vs. ‘Japan’,
art vs. otaku, subject vs. object, ‘adult’ vs. ‘child’,
human vs. monster… WW2…Hiroshima…
Sponsored by the IHC’s East Asian Cultures Research
Focus Group
TALK: Flat Boy Vs Skinny: Takashi Murakami
And The Battle For 'Japan' - Part IIThe
Protocols of Sado-Cute
Dick Hebdige (IHC)
Tuesday, April 17 / 12:00 PM
McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020
Download Flyer
The monstrous cast of so much contemporary Japanese
art and media culture stems from a broader sense of
disenchantment with the human project than is representable
in either the “pathological apocalypse” scenarios
of the otaku subculture or the metaphor of
the post war ‘crippling’ of Japan. Far
from being minor and subcultural, that mounting sense
of mundane disenchantment is structured in for the
declining western subject (including the demi-western
subject in ‘Japan’) at the core of the
current globalized conjuncture. Examining Japanese
contemporary art and popular culture, Hebdige connects
the surge in the monstrous imaginary to broader psycho-cultural,
sexual-spiritual shifts linked in turn to larger scale
technological and societal transformations. Concentrating
on the effects of ‘porn-etration’ (pornography’s
penetration of the public sphere via the internet),
he examines the symbiosis between pornu(s)copic immersion
(overexposure), emotional regression and simulated
innocence in Murakami’s art work with reference
to an emergent structure of feeling he dubs ‘Sado-Cute’,
the defining tactic of which is the tease: the simultaneously
calculated stimulation and baffling of desire.
Sponsored by the IHC’s East Asian Cultures Research
Focus Group
