Takashi Murakami and Louis Vuitton
An Anti-Capitalist Perspective
This is the script for a video I made for my contemporary art class.
“The World of Sphere”, and the “Monogram Multicolor Collection”, both by Takashi Murakami, incorporate the work of high fashion brand Louis Vuitton. “The World of Sphere” depicts two characters. One sits atop a colorful pedestal grinning ear to ear. The other’s face has a quesy expression that seems to reflect the dizzying patterns atop its diamond shaped body. Aside from a few shoots of bamboo, the rest of the painting is covered with brightly colored versions of the Louis Vuitton logo. Immediately, I couldn’t help but compare this painting to Murakami’s collaboration with Louis Vuitton.
The bag references the classic high-fashion product, the logos here modified by Murakami’s characteristically bright color palette. The integration of high art and fashion is surely nothing new, but these two works perfectly convey a tendency within post-fordist culture: the recuperation of previously radical works of art. To properly understand this, we must turn to French theorist Guy Debord’s notion of spectacle.
1. In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles (The Society of the Spectacle, 1967).
54. The spectacle, like modern society, is at once unified and divided. Like society, it builds its unity on the disjunction. But the contradiction, when it emerges in the spectacle, is in turn contradicted by a reversal of its meaning, so that the demonstrated division is unitary, while the demonstrated unity is divided (SoS).
In essence, the spectacle is the mystical world of commodities imposed onto life, supplanting being with appearing. It is an empire of value that disempowers its subjects into spectators of itself.
2. The spectacle is the autonomous movement of the non-living (SOS).
Rather than simply understanding it as a kind of universal belief, Debord implies that the spectacle is craftier. It does not just maintain itself by the imposition of its own logic, but also by the recuperation of all opposing forces. Given enough time, the most venemous critiques of Capital become a kind of self-depricating affirmation of Capital. For what could possibly be more powerful than knowing that your opposition serves you? Capital reproduces itself by incorporating its most opposing force. Anti-Capitalism becomes integrated into the very dialectic of Capital. In his essay Terminator vs Avatar, Fisher critiques philosopher Nick Land’s apocalyptic view of Capital, writing:
The actual near future wasn’t about Capital stripping off its latex mask and revealing the machinic death’s head beneath; it was just the opposite: New Sincerity, Apple Computers advertised by kitschy-cutesy pop. This failure to foresee the extent to which pastiche, recapitulation and a hyper-oedipalised neurotic individualism would become the dominant cultural tendencies is not a contingent error; it points to a fundamental misjudgement about the dynamics of capitalism” (Terminator vs Avatar, 2012).
Apple’s famous 1984 commercial is a perfect example. It depicts itself as a countercultural force of creativity that destroys the homogeneity of the dominant order. In a sense, Apple captures the imagery of anti-capitalist revolt into the process of capitalist reproduction. What the left often forgets is the fact that Capital is not merely oppressive, but desirable. Walk around the headquaraters of Google, or Facebook and you’ll see an array of art, brightly colored chairs, comfortable lounges, rec rooms, games, and endless “bonding” activities. In other words, the classical critique of Capital as a grey, dull machine of pure repression is no longer applicable. The neon vibrancy of 60’s psycadelia is no longer a subversive challenge to the disciplinary society, but the primary aestetic of control capitalism. This is precisely why we must view Murakami’s “World of Sphere” alongside the Louis Vuitton bag. Not only does he use signifers of wealth and prestige for the work of art: but in some sense Capital uses him for the reproduction of commodities. The bag, covered with colorful interpretations of the classic Louis Vuitton logo, proudly adorns itself with the undead signifiers of formerly avant-garde art. It might as well say out loud: We have killed the pop-radicalism of 60’s psychadelia, and filled its corpse with cash.
Now, let’s perhaps not be too negative here. We cannot expect every work of art to carry insurrectionary potential. Sometimes, art can serve a purely aestetic quality. Despite my prolonged critique, I actually quite like Takashi Murakami’s integration of popular culture into the flatness of Japanese woodblock prints. But if we want art to speak a language deeply repressed by the dominant ideology, or to grasp experiences that transcend any notion of exchanability, we must look beyond the comic repetition of recuperated pop art.
References:
[1] “The World of Sphere”, Takashi Murakami
[2] “Monogram Multicolor Collection”, Takashi Murakami
[3] The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord
[4] “Terminator vs Avatar”, Mark Fisher
