Amelia’s Magazine | Russian Vengeance & Japanese Farts.

Arriving at the Gagosian on the outskirts of Mayfair feels a bit of a three-way clash. I’m a little scruffy and philosophical-looking today, the gallery’s doorman is impeccably dressed with one hammerhead eye out the window looking for any limousined celebs he might open the door to… and then there is the work. Approaching a Haruki Murakami is always a bracing experience. You can never have chewed enough bubblegum, played enough video games or collected enough Pokemon cards that you might feel you belong in front of a work like Lots, Lots of KaiKai and Kiki. Yet, aieeeee!!!!: Here I am.

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The first thing that strikes me about this is that it’s an all-over painting, similar in size and shape to a Pollock. It’s as if Pollock’s paint-stick ejaculations had each germinated into a Kiki or a KaiKai (Murakami’s two principal anime-style protagonists – a cute bunny-eared thing and a kooky tri-clops bundle of mischief). Lavender Mist gone Manga, there are well over a hundred faces here. Not one of them is merely here, however. Each is vying for my attention. Either throwing a cuddly grin at me, pulling a smug smile at me, lunging a bewildered face at me, snorting at me, shouting, screaming and going la-de-da-de-da at me. Always, intensely, insanely at me, at me, at me. The smiley flowers in the background are a little less so, but not much.

There’s either too much or not enough purity in this. Sure, it’s a haribo-overdose headache, a million cartoons at once and, of course, Murakami is a canny capitalist industry now, with a marketing department that would make Benetton long for the golden years. But it’s nice, too. You can really just melt into the superficiality of it all. For a while, I wondered if some of the grimaces on Kiki’s face were chastising the toon-world for it’s bondage, forcing innocent toon-babies to be sugar-buzzingly hyper-kerrazy all the time, but I don’t think so. If Murakami’s embrace of the Hello Kitty and Pikachu universe was ever partly sarcastic, it’s not easy to see that anymore. Especially in the show’s animated video piece. Aside from one character declaring that the city in the sky is “a little clichéd”, some remarks about Yin and Yang and the big monster’s crescendo of farting and pooping, this could be on any of the more ADHD kid’s TV channels right now. In fact, even with those things, it would get on Toonami I suspect. Oh, and the animation is just as slick as the painting, i.e. very, very, eyes-glazed-over slick.

Which is when I decide to get down to The Hayward, to try and re-elevate my IQ. The Russian Linesman is a pretty cerebral show about, so says the subtitle, Frontiers, Borders and Thresholds, curated by Mark Wallinger. Now, here’s a chap hitherto obsessed with class division and racehorses. Also, it seems, a chap who doesn’t like to be pigeonholed. Not a sign of class warfare anywhere. And there’s even a drawing by George “I draw horses” Stubbs – and it’s of a human skeleton. What a tease! So, if the subtitle doesn’t allude to class barriers and finishing lines, then what?

Whatever the answer, it must be a sign of a healthy art culture when artists don’t feel forever bound to their established gimmicks. Oh, the nailbiting back when Gary Hume gave up painting doors. There’s none of that fear here, and eclecticism is happily the show’s most obvious feature. A Durer engraving faces three stretches of conceptual twine by Fred Sandback, James Joyce’s disembodied voice recites part of Finnegan’s Wake next to a Blake, while a ballerina dances on a projected video loop round the corner. In my favourite leg of the show hangs a masterful 17th Century painting of a dead soldier, thought once to be a Velázquez. The wall on which it hangs forms part of Monika Sosnowska’s Corridor, one of those rare conceptual pieces which will have you laugh out loud and have a conversation with the laugher behind you. I really must resist spoiling the joke for you, simple as it is, but Escher would have loved it.

The centrepiece is Wallinger’s own Time And Relative Dimensions In Space, which is a full-sized polished-steel mirror replica of Dr. Who’s T.A.R.D.I.S, from which it gets the profound-sounding title. This is a thing of stunning beauty.

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Part of the gag, by the way, is that as you try to look “into” it, you see an art gallery, yourself, artworks, people, thus it’s… you’ve guessed it kids, “bigger on the inside than on the outside”. Sort of. There’s something about the way the geometry of the room continues through it, that makes it kind of invisible, as though halfway through a sci-fi disappearance special effect (after all, it brings no colours of its own to the room, or geometric discontinuities or bends) but it”s also garishly, chunkily, heavily there. And the punters flock to this one. Wallinger has wisely not put anything too attention-grabbing near it, and it’s the magnet of the show. It’s also just after halfway through, so if you’ve been scratching your head a lot, wondering what’s going on, you can check that your hair’s not too badly messed up on the Tardis. Dead handy.

History creeps into the show quite a bit. Anglo-Germanic relations are central to the show’s title (the Russian linesman being the chap who decided that England’s dodgy 1966 World Cup-winning goal against West Germany was legit, allegedly admitting later that Hitler’s bloody march on Stalingrad in 1943 helped him decide). And a wall full of stereoscopic viewfinder images (how fun!) presents us firstly with the Nazi War Effort (oh…), and ends up with our own Teutonic Queen, greeting Nigerian subjects in the 1950s. Plenty of loose ends there. More impressive, however, is Ronald Searle’s set of drawings showing his experiences in Burma in the Second World War. It’s a bit of a jar perhaps, to have these painful and violent images so close to the fun of Corridor or the Tardis, but maybe that’s just another threshold to cross?

There are many ways that borders, etc come into the show. Political borders that divide people and send them to war, between reality and illusion, lines drawn between species, and poetics-of-space type boundaries, but I don’t think it’s necessary to try and see this as a coherent body of work. It’s a bric-a-brac feast, and better for it. It’s Wallinger the artist-as-curator, but, as the gallery makes clear from the outset, also curator-as-artist. The Russian Linesman is his scrapbook, providing a good deal of fresh insight into his ideas and interests. It may not all fit inside the boundaries imposed but it looks like a decent goal to me.

Murakami is at the Gagosian Davies St, 17-19 Davies St, London, W1K 3DE. The Russian Linesman is at The Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Rd, London SE1 8XX. Don’t forget your bubblegum.

Categories ,Gallery, ,Haywood, ,Painting, ,Takashi Murakmi

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