Flat-Out Profound

The periodic blurring of strictly enforced boundaries between art, design and artifacts of pop culture has been a prominent feature of American and European culture since the 1950s. Lately, artist Takashi Murakami and 18 of his friends and colleagues working in Tokyo have been giving the practice a Japanese spin. Appropriately, the results are on view as the inaugural exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s new outpost at West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center.

“Superflat’ is the best name for an art movement since--well, since Pop, from which it descends. Name-wise Superflat has it all over mid-1980s Neo-Geo, its most recent conceptual cousin. The name is market-savvy. It has retro-snap. It’s wry. It takes the hoary critical arguments of the pre-Postminimal 1970s, which insisted on flatness as essential to the truth of painting, and gives them a shove: Oh, yeah? Superflat is more true. It’s supertrue.

And it’s got something for everyone. Painting. Sculpture. Photography. Fashion. Porcelain sex dolls.

It’s also got some laughs. A huge mural of digital prints by Chiho Aoshima that spans the upstairs gallery at MOCA at the Pacific Design Center shows a watery landscape in turquoise blues, through which fish glide and willowy waifs pose wearing fashions that are new and now. Scarves flutter in the breeze--or, are the garments propelled by an underwater current? Either way, they recall stoles worn by courtesans performing Kabuki dances in 17th century painted scrolls. In Aoshima’s “The Red-Eyed Tribe,” the crimson pupils of the young women’s eyes are aglow--not like hot coals, burning with sexual desire or destructiveness, but in sly representations of what happens in amateur snapshots taken with a flash.

Across the room, a big, sideways, digitized photomural of 1970s pop star Karen Carpenter by illustrator Hiro Sugiyama/Enlightenment flattens her features into bright, blunt, jagged patterns of color. Carpenter sports a wide grin in the publicity-style picture, but a viewer feels perversely guilty smiling back--given the tasteless cheekiness of making a famous anorexic into an icon of the Superflat.

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More obscure, but finally just as gruesomely goofy, is Sugiyama’s companion photomural of handsome Formula One race car driver Ayrton Senna, who streaked off course at full speed--approximately 185 mph--during a 1994 race and crashed head-on into a concrete wall. Explaining his death, doctors said Senna’s forehead was crushed and surgery was impossible. Superflat, indeed.

Carpenter died at 32, Senna at 34. The average age of the participating artists in the show is about 35. Youth is a leitmotif. So is consumerism and glamour. And ennui and anxiety.

This is a generation that grew up in the era of the postwar Japanese economic miracle, and that entered maturity just as the boom went bust. The lumpy, full-scale sculpture of a Japanese World War II Zero airplane fabricated by Katsushige Nakahashi from some 15,000 snapshots Scotch-taped together speaks of another kind of kamikaze crash.

Nakahashi’s Zero, stuffed with bubble wrap and suspended in a light well, is certainly a spectacle. Still, the most potent image (and persistent memory) offered by the show is the sinister wariness glinting in the oversized eyes of Yoshitomo Nara’s paintings and lacquered fiberglass heads. They intersect Hello Kitty with the Children of the Damned.

In fact, the eyes have it in “Superflat.” They tell a story not only in Aoshima’s red-eyed mural and Nara’s spooked paintings and sculptures, but also in the life-size, childlike dolls at the gallery entry by the design group that calls itself groovisions. The 33 unisex dolls, clad in identical jumpsuits whose loud orange hue shouts mass caution, form a bland army of generic youth. Their big, brown, Necco-wafer eyes seem dilated in a rush of empty pleasantness.

Murakami acted as curator for the show (with MOCA research assistant Michael Darling). His other principal contribution is a huge graphic banner lashed to the front of the building. The lower half sports a rolling red landscape punctuated by jagged mountains, which instantly transmogrifies into a toothsome mouth like the gaping maw of hell. Above, two dozen eyeballs spin, blink and stare into space, alternately numbed and alert, dazzled and bored.

MOCA’s new gallery, the old Murray Feldman Gallery on the plaza next to the design center’s green building, is notorious for the, well, bad design of its exhibition spaces. Downstairs is cramped, with scant wall space. A long stairway at the rear disables a big unbroken wall in the upstairs gallery as a coherent place for hanging art. The second-floor gallery features a double-height light well smack in the center, while a freight elevator protrudes into the room. Ugly doesn’t describe it.

The curators have done a pretty good job of making the best of a difficult situation. “Superflat” overcomes (almost) the site’s limitations by treating the space less as a gallery and more as a kind of public play room. The effect is helped by numerous TV sets, which feature clips of fashion shows, commercials and the all-important digital animation that provides ample inspiration for the Superflat genre.

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In fact, the exhibition is pretty much stolen by the pair of monitors on the first floor, which show bits of three popular action-adventure cartoons by Yoshinori Kanada, dating from 1979 to 1983. Placed opposite groovisions’ catatonic army, the animations explain their wide-eyed stare. Kanada’s drop-dead graphics show heroic youths struggling to survive demonic forces in apocalyptic settings of roiling abstract space. The powerful visual rhythm of the intense imagery pulls you along, creating the optimistic prospect for survival amid chaos.

That’s a high standard for the younger artists in the show to match. (At 48, Kanada is the show’s Old Master.) Most fall considerably short. Overall, the show feels slight, though it’s certainly on to something worth considering.

If the Superflat artists are bound on one side by the commercially successful brilliance of Kanada’s “Galaxy Express,” they are also crowded on the other by the hugely influential artistic precedent of Jeff Koons (an influence also acknowledged by Murakami). When art, design and pop culture collapse into one another, competition gets fierce.

What Superflat is edging toward, however, is a historical linkage of unusual interest. Everyone knows the degree to which traditional Japanese aesthetics influenced the distinctly Western phenomenon of Modern art, with its abolition of deep illusionistic space. Meanwhile, in the 20th century, Japan struggled, socially and culturally, with a pronounced dilemma: How could the nation modernize without becoming Westernized in the process? By hitching its wagon to an old Japanese aesthetic tradition, Superflat paradoxically proposes a 21st century answer.

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* The MOCA Gallery at the Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood, (213) 626-6222, https://www.moca.org, through May 27. Closed Mondays.