Rene -- Brian Holmes --Warhol in the Rising Sun -- 08.08.04


Warhol in the Rising Sun
Art, subcultures and semiotic production

Brian Holmes

I'm turning Japanese
I think I'm turning Japanese
I really think so

hit song by The Vapors, 1980


In the wake of Andy Warhol, the artist-producer Takashi Murakami seeks his quarter-hour of fame – or better, his quarter-century. Murakami is the creator of computer-assisted wallpaper works, but also the designer of manifesto-exhibitions, which claim to define a new Japanese art. The most recent of these, on display in summer 2002 at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, was called Coloriage, or "Coloring Book". Inspired by the mangas – a flagship product of the Japanese cultural industry – the exhibition brought together a short list of artists and a mind-boggling series of children's toys: mascot characters, action figures, animated films, Pokemon cards, comic books. Murakami's idea is that a veritable renaissance of Japanese culture is being asserted in these commercial works: "Today we create new outlines on our own – disordered perhaps, but ours, without any origin in the Western 'fine arts.' This new movement finds its origins in what the West calls subculture. Coloring Book is created by Japan, a country which does not distinguish between culture and subculture." In this way, he concludes, a "new Japonisme" is emerging.1
Also in Paris, the Palais de Tokyo – "site of contemporary creation" – wants to blur the distinction between art and commercial subcultures. Here, "the visual arts play the role of a search engine leading to design, cinema, literature and fashion."2 Halfway between the art centre and the nightclub, the Palace aspires to be a theatre of lived events, where the visitor can seamlessly drift from the contemplation of objects – art, design, fashion, etc. – to experiences of use and participation. This is a legacy of "relational art", which posed the aesthetic object as a catalyst of subjective formations. The discourse of relational art functioned perfectly on the French scene of the nineties. It now acquires a touch of exoticism and a higher potential for distribution with the addition of the signifier "Tokyo", connoting nomadic lifestyles and the enigmas of meaning in a multicultural world, but also the automation of a high-tech society and the fascination of media products. The same signifier is added to an entire series of projects: Tokyo Games (works for video consoles), Tokyo TV (artist's clips), Tokyo Books (art world opinion polls), Tokyorama ("alternative" tours through the museum's luxury neighbourhood)... In this way the Palace seeks to develop into a hybrid workshop, where artists can try their hand at all the genres of semiotic production,3 which they individualise and develop in a minor mode.
Takashi Murakami claims a double heritage from Warhol. On the one hand, as a painter-illustrator working with a team of assistants (about twenty) to produce canvases which are at once sophisticated and kitsch; but also, in a more complex way, as a promoter of fashions and trends, via events conflating art works, media glamour and commercial design. The Palais de Tokyo, as an institution, takes its place within the larger turn of contemporary art in the nineties toward teamwork processes modelled on audiovisual production and interaction design, integrating the public's reception of the work.4 In this way, using new tools and addressing a far wider public, the Palace seeks to functionalise Warhol's experimentation in the Factory, where the practice of film served to transform marginal subjectivities – members of the gay and lesbian subcultures, drug addicts, bohemians escaping their class origins – into "superstars", in a transgressive parody of the Hollywood system. The Factory can be seen as a deliberate subversion, not only of the standardised model of the postwar culture industry, but literally of the mass-production system and its fordist discipline. This subversion took the form of collective expression from below: the irruption of subterranean cultures into the normative frame of the cinema. But that was forty years ago. Today, Takashi Murakami gestures toward the same potential when he appeals to the creativity of a very different subcultural fringe: the otaku, those young Japanese who increasingly remain hooked on mangas and video games, even after the age of thirty when the passage to adulthood is supposed to be definitive. And the Palais de Tokyo also adopts this subcultural pose, disguising itself as an artificial squat, complete with graffiti, raw walls, and (fake) disconnected plumbing, smack in the middle of the chic 16th arrondissement of Paris. What is the meaning of such postures today, in the postfordist era? And what exactly is a subculture, if it is no longer to be distinguished from the official, normative one?
To ask these questions is to open up a double analysis: both of semiotic production and of contemporary control (or biopower). But it is also to confront the enigma of the otaku: those playful creatures of pure consumption, who devote their adult lives to an artificial childhood, and pierce reality's bubble with their consoles. Abandoning oneself excessively, but in a deliberately trivial way, to all the traps of the entertainment industry; risking one's adolescent revolt on a bid to become the perverse, but perfectly willing appendage of a product or an image: this would seem to be the dream of these Japanese youth, pulled off the standard track by their allegiance to a social ideal.

Mirrors of Reception
Since the introduction of the consumer society on the island in the decades after the Second World War, the Western gaze wants to see the "normal" Japanese citizen as totally passive, subjugated to the fascinations of fashion. The otaku then becomes the disquieting figure of this passivity.5 In parallel, theories of active reception developed in the West. Since the emergence of British cultural studies, an entire scholarly literature has arisen to illustrate the possibilities of subjective development offered by the mass-produced product, when it is diverted by singular uses. Initially, the idea was to point out class differences in the reception of standardised messages. One of the most famous works in this vein, Dick Hebdige's Subculture, or the Meaning of Style (1979), analysed the way that fashions in clothing and music could be used by proletarian and immigrant youth communities in London as identifiers in a play of semiotic differentiation, constantly evolving across the urban territory. While these "deviant" practices were packaged by major record labels for national and planetary audiences, Hebdige himself, caught up in the excitement of early punk, dreamt of a style that could dissolve into the air at will, escaping from the capture devices. But his dream of exodus would be oddly lacking in the great unfurling wave of reception studies that followed. With the passage to Australia, then to the United States in the eighties, these studies came increasingly to bear on identifications with the stars (Madonna, Travolta) or on the most banal consumption situations (hanging out in the local mall). From an adversarial subdiscipline, cultural studies became almost hegemonic: so that in Japan one can now aspire, in all seriousness, to the status of a majority subculture.
In the mid-nineties, Thomas Frank and Dave Mulcahey did a scathing parody of these theoretical trends, suggesting the uses they could unwittingly serve. The text takes the form of an article counselling the purchase of a particular stock, like those you find in the publications of the Bloomberg group (one of the sponsors of the Palais de Tokyo):

Consolidated Deviance, Inc. ("ConDev") is unarguably the nation's leader, if not the sole force, in the fabrication, consultancy, licensing and merchandising of deviant subcultural practice. With its string of highly successful "SubCults™", mass-marketed youth culture campaigns highlighting rapid stylistic turnover and heavy cross-media accessorisation, ConDev has brought the allure of the marginalised to the consuming public.6

In a flash of wit, this text shows exactly how the functionalisation of subcultural styles gives rise to a regime of semiotic production, inseparable from an imperial mode of control. The music industry offers the clearest example. A musical style from a "problem neighbourhood" is plucked from its context (anywhere in the expanding planetary ghetto), cleansed of its local dross (struggles too complex for a single chorus), recoded for transmission in a standardised medium (CD or video clip) and broadcast to the clientele of the global entertainment corporations (Sony, MTV, Virgin Megastore). Here is one of the mainsprings of the postfordist economy. The advantage of the process, in terms of control, is to break up the development of resistance groups on the local territories through a destabilizing injection of money, even while holding out a mirror of "recognition" to the bearers of an ephemeral subculture – a glittering mirror that becomes the object of desire for all those who haven't yet "broken through". Variations of style, even attempts to put together a counter-style (as in the territorial struggles described by Dick Hebdige), continuously serve as raw material for the functionalisation of new products and images. Despite the occasional exceptions (bands like Zebda or the Asian Dub Foundation), this mechanism has proven extremely difficult to resist. And all that helps us to understand at least one of the meanings of a condition where culture is no longer distinguished from subculture: it is the now-hegemonic condition where minority styles and even individual forms of subjectivisation are constantly surveilled, but constantly encouraged too, so that they can be brought into relation with mirror-products capable of stimulating their differences – before they are parasitically captured at the opportune moment, for functionalisation and translation into economic profit. In this way Warhol's Factory, a vanguard experiment of the fordist era, has become the model for the contemporary social factory, under the regime of semiotic production.
We are clearly very far from the hopes of the academic researchers who gathered around Stuart Hall in Birmingham in the early seventies, thinking that they could find a kind of gap, or even a possible space of emancipation, in the semiotic variations that emerged between the processes of broadcasting and reception (or, as they said, between the "encoding" and the "decoding" of media messages7). One could even suggest – but it's all too easy in retrospect – that the Birmingham researchers did not look closely enough at the ambiguity of Warhol's treatment of the subcultures converging at the Factory. Because there is no doubt that Warhol took a genuine interest in the subjectivity of his haphazard stars (Edie Sedgewick, Gerard Malanga, Mario Montez, the Chelsea Girls...), with whom he carried out a process of collective experimentation, even while using photography, film and video to record the entire range of emotions and interactions that could arise between the participants. But at the same time, and with no less determination, he sought to appropriate Hollywood's means of production and distribution. In a perspicacious text, Juan Suarez remarks that Warhol's deepest desires for success were frustrated by the lack of access to the distribution machinery, and also by his actors' scanty fame. Only through the exploitation of his own status as a painter in the media glow, and more, as a kind of avant-garde impresario gifted in the eyes of his audience with an almost magical power to create, could he achieve the distribution he sought: "Through his ability to turn marginal performers into superstars, daily objects into art objects, and gestures and styles into media images, Warhol incarnates the absolute producer, able to make the most out of the least, to increase the value of whatever came into his orbit, no matter how banal or inconsequential."8 Beneath the camera-eye of the absolute producer, an entire group of haphazard artists can attain their "fifteen minutes of fame"; but the producer himself will build a far more enduring legend. The directive powers accruing to this privileged role of the artist-producer – which Takashi Murakami, like so many others, seeks to fill today – is what the exponents of cultural studies did not take into account, when they located a subjective gap between the moments of encoding and decoding, of distribution and reception.

A Japanese Turn?
The ambiguity of the artist-producer is that of the political entrepreneur, theorised in the studies of immaterial labour.9 A charismatic figure, but always dependent on his project team, the political entrepreneur works in creative fields such as fashion, music, or audiovisual production. He can choose to channel the collective activity of the team towards his own ends, in order to parasitically extract a monetary gain; or he can lead the project in such a way that the working collective develops its diverse capacities and finally dissolves, leaving behind a gain in competence and charisma for everyone. The same model applies to the artistic field. Thanks to the progress in miniaturization, carried out notably by Japanese engineers, we live in societies where the means of image production are within everyone's grasp: the artist's role becomes that of catalyst, of organiser. Positioning himself among the multitude of image makers, the artist-producer can orient his work to encourage subjective multiplicity; or he can invent capture-devices, playing on mirror-products and reception-effects. The "relational artists" whom one finds at the Palais de Tokyo (or at the Musée d'art moderne just next door) find themselves at grips, perhaps unwittingly, with exactly this choice between two outcomes. And curiously enough, it is through the diversion of a Japanese manga film that a group of these artists – circling around two "producers" – now offer us a kind of logical conclusion to the work of the Western theorists on the question of reception. They have created a collective portrait of the artist as otaku.
The project No Ghost Just A Shell began in 1999 when Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno purchased the rights to a low-end manga character (few distinctive features, no pre-written biography). The title refers to an animated film, Ghost in the Shell (1996), the first "Japanimation" blockbuster to be released simultaneously in the US, Japan and Great Britain; it relates the tribulations of a female cyborg, Motoko Kusanagi, concerning the existence or non-existence of her soul. The game will then be one of breathing various artistic souls into the empty manga shell, which nonetheless receives a name, Annlee. Huyghe and Parreno launched the process with very simple animated films, where the former asserts that Annlee is a "deviant sign", and the latter, that she "belongs to all those who can fill her with whatever kind of imaginary materials." Some fifteen creators did so, replaying on the artistic stage the well-known miracle of cultural studies, whereby the standardised product is individualised through its reception. The computer-graphic commodity opens its mouth, becomes a speaking being, endowed with multiple tongues. The artists' collective comes to form a kind of ephemeral subculture, identifying itself around the product that it transforms. And then the owners of the rights to the character orchestrate the transfer of these rights to a non-profit association, whose aim is to "withdraw" (or, they also say, to "liberate") Annlee from the domain of representation, by forbidding any ulterior use of her image. The existing sum of visual interpretations is brought together in an exhibition, the exhibition as a whole is sold to a Dutch museum, and the entire project is consigned to our reflection in form of a luxurious volume, published by the purchaser, the Van Abbemuseum, and signed by Huyghe and Parreno.10 Their quarter-century of fame now appears certain.
And yet everything remains unthought here, concerning the status of majority subcultures and the functions of reception theory. We know that Warhol gave up the name of the Factory in the early eighties, remarking that we had shifted to the era of the "Office" – that is to say, of management. The decade was marked by the "monetary turn" of the American economy, and by the emergence within the financial sphere of what the economist Yoshihiko Ichida calls "the imperial circuit", funnelling Japanese capital to the USA.11 The regime of semiotic production, which had emerged with the use of informational just-in-time techniques in Japanese factories, but also with the miniaturization of computers, now imposed itself in the West; there it gave rise to the new forms of flexible management, both of a highly mobile global workforce and of highly volatile financial instruments. The distance separating Japan from the European countries became more relative, as all the cultures (including America's) became the "subcultures" of Empire. And it was in this context that the analysis of reception – whose great ambition had been to transform the cultural hegemony by introducing "other" voices – itself became a management tool, in the service of a new hegemony. One of the great techniques of biopower, closely intertwined with semiotic production, would now consist in "making people talk" about commercial objects – somewhat the way that the disembodied intelligence of a futuristic secret agent, in the film Ghost in the Shell, seeks first to make the cyborg Motoko Kusanagi speak, then to occupy her body.
How to escape this paradigm? In the course of the nineties, movements of cultural rebellion began to constitute themselves in excess of any identifiable signature, through the playful exchange of multiple names, which became "collective phantoms" open for unlimited appropriation. Elsewhere I have described the subversive potential of this cultural trend, whose best-known avatar is the ubiquitous Luther Blissett.12 These practices of collective dis-identification gesture toward broader fields of cultural experimentation, marking an exodus from the mercantile and bureaucratic system that imposes strict controls on the circulation and use of its knowledge-products.13 But the current development of the art world's institutional market, based on its own star system, leaves little room to explore such inventions in the museums. The signature of the artist still acts as a mechanism of closure, of copyright, as the now-completed story of Annlee seems to demonstrate. Only when artists finally abandon these closed spaces – overflowing their bounds through practices of unlimited circulation – will a new sun rise finally over the world of art, which the dark star of Warhol still dominates today.
Another question concerns the destinies of alienated Japanese youth, at a time of global recession when the imperial circuit is vacillating, and "integrated world capitalism" (to recall Félix Guattari's phrase) seems headed for reconfiguration. What could take the place of the primary relationship to the United States? What Yoshihiko Ichida calls the "financial pump" functioned for decades, despite massive losses on the Eastern side of the equation; and in the same way, Japanese society has long responded to the imposition of the American model by exacerbating its subordinated production and consumption of semiotic commodities. Will we now see a turn toward nationalism, presenting itself as a new fashion, a new fascination? Or will there be an appropriation of the tools of image-making and distribution by the Japanese multitudes, outside the controlling outlines of the local artist-producers? It would be vain, from a distant position in the West, to attempt any answer to such questions. Far be it from me, in any case, to put any words in the mouths of the otaku...


(This article was originally published in French in Multitudes #13 (Paris, Spring 2003), in an issue on "Japan: Margins and Mirrors of Empire". Translated by the author.)

Notes
1. See the exhibition descriptions at www.fondation.cartier.fr.
2. Press package distributed for the opening of the institution.
3. The "linguistic turn" of postfordism has been described by C. Marazzi, dans La place des chaussette, l'Éclat, 1997; Italian edition 1994. For a succinct description of what I mean by a "regime of semiotic production" see Marcos Dantas, "L'information et le travail", in the anthology Vers un capitalisme cognitif , L'Harmattan, 2001.
4. Pioneer, a Japanese manufacturer of audiovisual equipment and content, whose American subsidiary has commercialised the Gundam action figures presented in the Murakami exhibition, is among the sponsors of the Palais de Tokyo.
5. A typically sulphurous image is provided by E. Barral : Otaku, les enfants du virtuel, Denoël, 1999.
6. T. Frank, Commodify Your Dissent, Norton, 1997.
7. S. Hall, "Encoding/Decoding" (1973), in Culture, Media, Language, Hutchinson, 1980.
8. "The Artist as Advertiser", in Bike Boys, Drag Queens, Superstars University Press, 1996, p. 246.
9. For the ambiguities of the political entrepreneur, see A. Corsani, M. Lazzarato, A. Negri, Le Bassin de travail immatériel (BTI) dans la métropole parisien, L'Harmattan, 1996). A definition of the artist-producer, with a central reference to Warhol, has been furnished for the French art world by Dan Graham in "L'artiste comme producteur" ("The Artist as Producer," 1988, in D. Graham, Rock/music Textes, Presses du réel, 1999).
10. No Ghost Just A Shell , Walther König, 2003.
11. See Yoshihiko Ichida, "Circuit monétaire impérial et capture financière de valeur", in Multitudes 13, Paris, Spring 2003.
12. See my text, "Unleashing the Collective Phantom", originally published in Mute, available at .
13. For a useful text on the cooperative production of informational and cultural goods, see Yochai Benkler, "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm", available at .