Murakami/Murakami: LA/Brooklyn Installation Transformations

"Tongari-kun" (aka "Mr. Pointy), installation in progress at the Brooklyn Museum. Murakami-esque suspended black balloons were decor for the benefit gala.

Viewing the Murakami retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum after having first encountered it at its original (and originating) venue, the Geffen Contemporary facility of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, was like seeing two different shows. The works, for the most part, were the same. The impact, completely different.

In the LA's sprawling, warehouse-like setting, the show functioned as one giant installation. It felt like a perverse version of Disney World. But in Murakami World, the theme song would be: "It's a weird world, after all." The experience was powerful and immersive.

In Brooklyn, it's fragmented, due to the linear series of separate rooms, typical of traditional museum installations, and the necessity of splitting up the show among three different floors (counting the ground-floor lobby installation of Mr. Pointy, above) and between two different venues: The centerpiece in LA---the totemic but monstrous Oval Buddha (scroll down)---didn't quite have enough height clearance for installation in Brooklyn's fifth-floor atrium. It's been exiled to Manhattan, where it will hold court in the atrium of 590 Madison Avenue.

As I previously noted (and inadequately photographed), Brooklyn has one terrific site-specific moment, where Murakami created a series of large murals---skulls, flowers, abstract patterns, that confront each other in a sun-filled space. And on the fourth floor (which is the continuation of the fifth-floor installation), the compactness of the museum's separate rooms heightens the intensity of the most disturbingly profound works in the show.

For me, the power center is the gallery in which these two large complex, explosive, apocalyptic paintings face off against each other:

"Tan Tan Bo," 2001, Collection of John A. Smith and Victoria Hughes, courtesy Tomio Koyama Gallery, ©Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co.

"Tan Tan Bo Puking," 2002, Collection of Amalia Dayan and Adam Lindemann, courtesy Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, ©Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co.

I hate to get all misty-eyed about the "Universal Museum," but the one great advantage that Brooklyn has over LA MOCA is the revelatory presence within the same building of Murakami's Japanese progenitors. On my way out, I stopped at the temporary ground-floor exhibition of Japanese 19th-century Utagawa prints. Their serene landscapes, beautiful women who are actually prostitutes, and clashes between humans and monstrous demons resonated with what I had just experienced upstairs.

I recommend your doing it the other way around: See the tradition from which Murakami came; then see where it led.