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 .
