In the first moments after the tragic events that took place in Japan in March 2011-the earthquake, tsunami, explosions at the Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant-it seemed that episodes of Japanese science fiction were on the screen. The genre is so popular in this country and is embodied in hundreds of books, feature films, and especially in the world - famous animated films-anime. And the film "The Death of Japan", created by Japanese cinematographers based on the work of science fiction writer Kamatsu Sake "The Death of the Dragon" and successfully held in the USSR in the 1970s, immediately comes to mind.

It so happened that we turned to this topic shortly before the catastrophe in Japan and described in detail the origins of apocalyptic moods in Japanese mass culture (see the article by E. L. Katasonova "Otaku: pros and cons" / / "Asia and Africa Today", 2010, N 12 and 2011, N 1), which, to everyone's misfortune was destined to be realized in life. Today we continue our discussion of this problem by turning to the work of one of the spiritual leaders of Otaku and a pioneer of Japanese pop art, Takashi Murakami, in which, through the love of shocking and undisguised desire for commercial success, you can feel the artist's deep and disturbing reflections on modern Japanese life and postmodern features of modern Japanese art.

Keywords: Japan, postmodernism, Takashi Murakami, otaku, Superflat theory

E. L. KATASONOVA

Doctor of Historical Sciences

Although the concept of "postmodernism" appeared long ago and was used long before the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, the birth of theories of postmodernism in the form that it has found in our days was precisely at this time.

It is primarily associated with cultural studies, which was the first to note the emergence of new postmodern forms in such areas of culture as architecture, literature, and painting. They were strikingly different from the examples of modernist art: "the ' seriousness' of high Art Nouveau gives way to playfulness, carelessness and eclecticism... Unlike its predecessor, postmodern art is fragmentary and eclectic, mixing forms of " high culture "with forms of"mass" " ¹.

In the West, its most striking examples are the pop art of Andy Warhol and the architecture of Las Vegas. In Japan, postmodernism is most pronounced in the works of writers Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto, architecture by Isozaki Arata, and paintings by representatives of Japanese neo-art, whose recognized leader is Takashi Murakami, often referred to as" Japan's Andy Warhol " because of his attachment to serial images and pop culture icons.

THE MANY FACES OF TAKASHI MURAKAMI

Takashi Murakami is currently one of the most successful Japanese artists and is considered a pioneer of Japanese pop culture. He is given prestigious exhibition halls in New York, London, Paris, Frankfurt, his portraits adorn the covers of fashion magazines, his works are bought at prestigious world auctions at fabulous prices by the largest Western collectors, and for the mass buyer their copies are replicated in the form of plastic and plush toys, so popular in Japan.

His work is very diverse and represents almost all segments of the modern art market. The artist works with the same enthusiasm and amazing productivity to create a living room.-

hand-painted canvases and CD covers of fashion singers, anime and book illustrations, modern sculpture and all kinds of installations and art objects, along with a wide range of commercial products - from key chains, T-shirts, computer mouse pads to glamorous bags made to order by the world-famous Louis Vuitton company. In addition to this, there are publishing, teaching, design, production and exhibition activities at home and abroad, various actions in support of young artists, as well as a considerable number of art criticism works on the problems of modern Japanese culture.

In his works, he masterfully mixes past and future," low "and" high " art, traditions and avant-garde, skillfully plays with the East-West opposition, while remaining a consistent champion of national traditions and asserting the special status of national culture in the history of his country. This does not prevent him from remaining at the same time an ardent propagandist of contemporary art, born under the influence of American and European models. He worships teenage manga comics, draws inspiration from amsho characters (his favorite characters are Pokemon) and pop art objects of Western culture, experiencing a pronounced reverence for Western trend-setters (innovators), the first of which is Andy Warhol.

T. Murakami was born in 1962 in Tokyo to a poor family of a taxi driver and a housewife. Since childhood, he became a real fan of Walt Disney and George Lucas and dreamed of making cartoons. However, after entering the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music in 1986, he preferred to get a classical education at the faculty of traditional Japanese painting of the XIX century - Nihonga, and after completing postgraduate studies at this prestigious institution in 1993, he received a doctorate in this specialty. Having mastered the basics of the Japanese art tradition, Murakami still returned to his childhood dream in his work: the popularity of anime and mata directed his interest in the art of modern Japanese mass culture, since, according to the artist himself, it is she who most vividly represents modern Japan.

He considered himself one of the first generation of otaku fans of manga, anime, computer games, etc.and, being a consistent defender and at the same time an exponent of their artistic preferences and ideological positions, openly declared the omnipotence of the otaku subculture in the Japanese art world.

He even introduced the neologism Ro-Ki Revolution, formed from the syllables of the two words "pop" and otaku-a cross between the words "pop art" and otaku, which symbolizes the mixing of Japanese and American pop cultures. And with the word "revolution", he defines the huge changes that Japanese art and society as a whole are undergoing today. "Art is a bloodless revolution, and this is the most important thing for me," ² is written on the wall of his office.

SUPERFLAT THEORY AND ITS AUTHOR'S INTERPRETATION

The artistic credo of all Takashi Murakami's work is quite fully expressed in his theory of" super-flat art " Superflat. Based on it, he seeks to explain not only the new visual language of young artists, but also at the same time the nature of modern Japanese culture.

The main thesis put forward by Murakami is that one of the distinguishing features of the national psychology of the Japanese both in ancient and modern times is a flat perception of the world, which extends both to the artistic sphere and to everyday reality. This is, in particular, why, according to the artist, in Japanese art there has never been a division into "high" and " low " genres, as, for example, in Europe.

"One of my exhibitions was called Superflat," he explains. - This means that in the entire Japanese painting tradition, from ancient times to modern animation, there is no difference between" high "and" low " art. Therefore, I am influenced by a lot of things: the art of the Edo period* (1603 - 1867) of the first half of the XVII century, and modern Japanese pop culture. " ³

Murakami also extends the concept of Superflat to artistic practice, understanding it in this context as an image that has only an illusion.-

* Edo is the medieval name for Tokyo.

a vision of depth and perspective. Speaking about the "superplane", he emphasizes the "two-dimensionality" of traditional and modern Japanese art, which is not characterized by such artistic criteria as depth of content, photographic accuracy.

These shortcomings, according to Murakami, are compensated by the imagination of Japanese artists and their free and bold experimentation with images. "I've been thinking a lot about the realities of Japanese drawing and painting and how they differ from Western art. For Japan, the sense of flatness is important. In Japanese culture, there are no three-dimensional, three-dimensional images of 3D, " he says. - Our drawing is characterized by extremely 2D forms, the so-called superplane, established in traditional Japanese painting, which is akin to the simple flat visual language of modern animation, comics and graphic design"⁴. This, according to the artist, is the special charm of all Japanese painting.

Murakami also sees this two-dimensionality, i.e., a flat perception of the world devoid of true depth, in the life of Japanese people, in which, in his opinion, as in art, there is no division into "low" and "high". That is why the Japanese, Murakami believes, choose the "middle" path in their life in everything.: "mass culture, work, entertainment, family-everything for them exists as if on the same level" ⁵.

And this situation deeply concerns the artist. "Modern Japan is in a state of peace," Murakami said. "But everyone who lives in Japan knows that something is wrong here... Japan can become a prototype of the future. But even now Japan is a Superflat. From social morals to culture, everything has a 2D dimension. Kawaii culture has become a living reality that permeates everything and everything. " ⁶

Reflecting on the reasons for this state of affairs, Murakami talks a lot and interestingly about the infantilism of the Japanese themselves and Japanese culture, which he connects, first of all, with the development of mass consumption society, as well as with the history of the country. "The Japanese culture of anime (otaku) and cute-pretty (kawaii) fans in the post-World War II situation, when our country became militarily and politically completely dependent on the United States, led to the fact that people stopped wanting to become adults." ⁷

So, in general terms, it is possible to outline Murakami's cultural and ideological positions and the main meaning of his superplane theory, which has found more and more adherents among modern Japanese artists in recent years. Among them are such famous names as Nara Yoshimoto, Aya Takano, Chibo Aoshima, Tomoko Sawada and others. This new generation of artists, born in the 1970s, is distinguished, first of all, by a huge creative freedom. However, like their spiritual father T. Murakami, they continue to defend their national identity, while fully immersing themselves in the pop culture associated with the world of childhood.

WESTERN TEACHERS AND THEIR JAPANESE STUDENTS

Many Japanese critics evaluate Murakami's theory as a vivid expression of postmodern moods and trends in contemporary Japanese art, approaching its content from the point of view of the main provisions of classical concepts of postmodernism. As usual, in this context, the works of one of the first Western theorists of postmodernism, Zh. Baudrillard and J.-F. Lothar.

Baudrillard, claiming the end of the era of modernism with its dominants-industrial production and capitalism, as well as such important components as the scientific and technological revolution, market development, etc., proclaimed the beginning of the era of post-industrial postmodernism or postmodernism. For him, postmodernism is primarily associated with the emergence of new forms in culture, society, technology, etc., and the main concepts are:-

It is called "simulations", "hyperreality", "internal explosion".

This means, according to Baudrillard, that in a postmodern society there is a break in all the boundaries between "high" and " low " cultures, visibility and reality, and all other binary oppositions of traditional philosophy, social theory, etc. Here, according to the French sociologist's concept, "simulations" ("simulacra") begin to dominate, which reflect the real world. the world. In other words, only what can be made into an equivalent product becomes real: not only what can be reproduced is real, but also what is already constantly reproduced - the hyperreal ⁸.

This is why so-called "simulation models" precede the real, and society is a "hyperreality". At this stage, "models are preferred over things, and mass production leads to a generation that lives by models." ⁹

In his turn, Lothar emphasized in the development of this theory that in the postmodern era, the "universal Narrative" that united the entire system of knowledge disappears, and a single society splits into many "small narratives" or cultural communities. At the same time, the real, that is, what you can really touch as a living, original, is almost pushed out of life, and the modernist differences between the original and the copy finally lose their boundaries. Thus, according to Lothar, in the postmodern era, everything becomes a "simulacrum".

Japanese scholar Hiroshi Azuma, a specialist in contemporary Japanese pop culture, comments on these concepts in this way, considering them in connection with the analysis of T. Murakami's work and his Superflat theory. "Although Lothar emphasized more political and social changes, and Baudrillard emphasized aesthetic and cultural aspects, their ideas have a common basis," Azuma writes. - In the postmodern era (from the 1970s or 1980s), our society began to gradually lose understanding of the value of "depth", the value of what lies behind the visible and felt objects that we encounter in everyday life. Depending on the cultural context, it can be God, Truth, Justice, Nation, Ideology, or Subject: according to postmodernists, all these great concepts are now losing their plausibility. Thus, the scientist emphasizes, drawing a direct parallel with Murakami's work, "we can say that the concept of super-flat art Superflat is typically postmodern" ¹⁰.

At the same time, unlike Murakami, Azuma believes that postmodern culture has a more complex structure. "It should not be regarded as a sphere of the two-dimensional or one-dimensional, since it is supported by a perception of depth of a different kind," ¹¹ he enters into a direct polemic with Murakami's theory and offers his vision of this problem: "postmodern depth should be treated as a 'database' rather than a 'narrative'. " ¹² In other words ,: "the postmodern social structure is based not on hidden ideology, but on hidden information, like the Internet. Our society loses the "universal Narrative", but instead creates a universal database and simulacrum, covering the layer of postmodernism in reality, which is controlled and regulated by this database, " says X. Azuma.

It follows from this that "all postmodern works (not only fine arts, but also literature, music, and other works related to mass culture) are created not under the influence of any idea, ideology, or feeling of the author, but by deconstructing and re-constructing previous works, or by some combination of them." rethinking"¹³.

In other words, postmodern artists or authors prefer to break up previous works into certain elements or fragments and repeatedly rearrange them in different versions, instead of making the work author's and original. Lots of similar fragments (CDs, video clips, websites...) today it becomes a kind of anonymous database, on the basis of which new works appear.

MURAKAMI AND HIS PUZZLES

T. Murakami's work is a vivid example of how artists draw images, plots and aesthetics for their works from popular examples of the otaku subculture, sometimes, however, allowing themselves open mockery of the original and sad irony over anime culture and consumer idols.

This was the case, in particular, with the history of the creation of many famous Murakami sculptures. "I was strongly influenced by the anime culture, and I have reproduced several anime characters in my works, which I hope will be loved by otaku people like me. This is Hiropon, Miss Ko or, say, Lonsome Cowboy, " Murakami once admitted.¹⁴ All these works, as well as many others, were created on the model and likeness of anime characters.

The most favorite of them is Mr. DOB - a "psychedelic boy" with a huge white smile and wide eyes. "Mr. Dob is the result of an experiment," Murakami recalls. "I wanted to check out how popular characters are born that remain significant and sell well decades after their creation - such as the same Mickey Mouse, Sony the hedgehog, Hello Kitty or something like that ..." ¹⁵

Murakami has its own favorite pop culture-inspired themes, such as funny humanized flowers, smiling mushrooms, funny bears, etc. And all these works, according to the artist, are not exclusively the fruit of his imagination, "everything in them is brought to life by one or another cultural phenomenon and is associatively connected with it," but

* Narrative ( English and French narrative - story, narration) - historically and culturally grounded interpretation of various phenomena; the concept of postmodern philosophy, fixing the process of self-realization as a way of being a text (editor's note).

the interpretation of the images and subjects of his paintings largely "depends on what the audience wants to see"¹⁶.

Let's take, for example, such a replicated image of Murakami as mushrooms. "For me, a mushroom is something that is both sexy and cute, kawaii, and evokes - especially in the European imagination-associations with fairy tales," he admits.¹⁷ Once, while traveling in Japan, he stopped by the museum of the artist Takehisa Yumeji and saw scarves with patterns of mushrooms. And it literally struck his artistic imagination.

But Murakami's creative imagination is not limited to these associations. "The mushrooms in my drawings," explains the artist, " can also be perceived in a historical context as metaphors for the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as a symbol of the atomic bomb. This is very important for people of my generation. " ¹⁸

And it is enough to refer to his famous painting Bokan or his other numerous canvases to make sure that the light outlines of an exploding bomb in the form of a mushroom cloud can often be caught even in absolutely abstract images, and the image itself is drawn from the popular television series "Bokan Time", which was successfully shown in Japan in the 1970s.

Each time, the artist builds up whimsical mosaics of shapes and images of his characters, plots, constantly updating them with new details, changing compositions and at the same time filling them with new emotional and artistic content.

Almost the entire otaku subculture is built on this principle, and both its creators - professional artists, and its fans, who are not limited only to enthusiastic veneration of their idols and regular acquaintance with their new products, but themselves, in imitation of them, are gradually drawn into the process of amateur creativity.

As X points out. Azuma, " in their cultural products, otaku do not look for originality or any deep content, especially since they are not interested in authorship. They simply "choose" their favorite design and character, combining elements of the database " ¹⁹. To make sure of this, just turn to an Internet search resource designed specifically for otaku and consisting of thousands of specialized sites aimed at fans of mata, anime, computer games, etc., and the database is in your hands hands.

Each of these sites, dedicated to, for example, mata, not only contains a huge number of works by professional creators of mata-mangaka, and even more drawings of amateur dojisha, but they are all grouped according to a single principle: topics, genres, titles, gender orientation, etc. This allows you to find a drawing or work on your favorite topic that interests you in a matter of seconds, even without knowing who the author is. By the way, many original characters found in anime, in games, are also created using similar compilations. That is, the process of creating anime characters, for example, is fundamentally different than in Disney animation.

Professor Azuma, following the theories of postmodernists, identifies a two-level system in the otaku subculture - " visible simulacra "and" hidden database", believing that this approach allows us to fully understand the" evaluative-consumer structure " of the otaku subculture.

The first level of simulacra includes ready-made finished images that can continue to function independently or serve as prototypes of future characters and plots. The second level is a so-called database consisting of individual elements and the most typical features of the characters 'appearance and behavior, clothing features, the surrounding landscape, etc., which, according to Azuma, are like" outlines-

the boundaries within which a simulacrum can exist are defined."²⁰

Constantly referring to one level or another, the otaku is evaluated, "broken down" into components, and again "collected" new images. Moreover, the attitude to these two levels, according to Azuma, is very different. On the one hand, according to him, otaku are captured by a holistic "image of the simulacrum, "immersed" in it: they often note that the imaginative world is more acute for them than the real one. In it, they can exist without any need to communicate with people... " ²¹

But at the same time, seeing the image of a dashlo character, an otaku immediately begins to evaluate its appearance in detail somewhere almost on an unconscious level, mentally tries to "disassemble" it into many component parts and rearrange them so as to create something new, more interesting and close to itself. And here the inexhaustible storehouse of the database comes to the rescue, in which a professional or amateur artist draws missing details, various components and operates with them at his own discretion, creating something new. Hence the concept of "superplane" in art, proclaimed by Murakami, Azuma interprets only as the fact that the prefix "over" in superplane art means exactly the "depth"of the database.

HOW IT ALL STARTED...

Having considered the formal side of the problem of postmodern features of modern Japanese culture and Murakami's creativity, Azuma proceeds in his arguments to the question of the sources of this artistic phenomenon. To begin with, he refers to the opinion of such researchers as Toshio Okada and Yoji Otsuka, who see a close connection of postmodern phenomena in modern Japanese pop culture, culture with the national artistic heritage, and consider modern pop culture and its main component - the otaku subculture-to be the "cultural successors" of pre-modern Japanese traditions, mainly traditional Japanese culture. Edo period. In their opinion, the special structure of masha and anime is largely similar to the structure of performances in the Kabuki and Dzeruri theaters of the Edo period.²² Takashi Murakami also makes a lot of arguments about this theory, which supports this theory by drawing a direct parallel between the anime of the 1970s and the Japanese painting of the XVII century, and, in particular, with the work of medieval artists Sensutsu Kano and Yoshinori Kaneda.

This concept can be seen as a variation of the popular idea that premodernism and postmodernism in Japan followed each other, effectively bypassing the modernist era. ²³ This point of view can be found in works on the problems of both Japanese and, in particular, foreign researchers-Roland Barthes, Wim Wenders, William Gibson, Rem Koolhaas, etc.

However, in Japanese art criticism, there is also a directly pro-type judgment that "an attractive and convincing idea of similarity between the Edo era and Otaku culture is a complete illusion. We should not forget, insist proponents of this approach, including the scientist Hiroshi Azuma, that mata, anime, special effects in tokusatsu movies, science fiction novels, computer games-all this was imported from the United States along with the post-war occupation policy, and is of American origin. According to Azuma, otaku culture should be considered not as a direct descendant of Japanese premodernism, but as a result of the "domestication" of post-war American culture, which occurred simultaneously with rapid economic growth and the restoration of national identity in the 1950s and 1960s. " ²⁴

Murakami fully shares this view, clearly lamenting the fact that "the victorious countries were able to make their own culture dominant, and we were forced to break ties with our past and create something completely new" ²⁵. Following on from this thought, Murakami makes another important statement: "Japan lost the war, and for the last 20 years, art has been in an extremely sad state. Everything was destroyed and reduced to poverty. But, on the other hand, America, which won the war, became the leader of world culture. So pop culture was born. We Japanese craved this pop culture, but we were unable to provide the economic base necessary for it to flourish. As a result, under the circumstances, a cheaper and yet enjoyable culture has emerged, a form of minimalism in the entertainment industry, or "super-flat art" that can withstand the pop mainstream. " ²⁶

These two different approaches to contemporary Japanese pop culture in general, and otaku subculture in particular, have much in common with the discussions in NA-

the scientific community about the very phenomenon of postmodernism in Japan.

One part of the researchers, who are conventionally called traditionalists, points out the close connection between postmodernism and Japanese traditional culture and insists that Japan has made the path from premodernism to postmodernism, bypassing the middle link of "modernism" that is essentially familiar in theory, which they see as a kind of cost of the Western model of development or evidence of its dead-end path.

Others, on the contrary, insist on the fundamental importance of modernization processes for the development of Japan, which, first of all, mean "Europeanization", or rather, "Westernization" of the country, and adhere to the usual scheme in justifying the socio-historical development of the country: premodernism-modernism-postmodernism.

It seems that it is still difficult to draw a definitive line under this problem, first of all, in its theoretical coverage, since Japanese postmodernism is a new phenomenon and therefore not yet clearly defined and, moreover, studied.

Nevertheless, Japan has been increasingly associated with this concept in the world in recent years. According to Professor S. Melville of Syracuse University (USA), most Americans believe that "only Japan is a postmodern society, and the Western discourse on postmodernism is haunted by the specter called "Japan", which combines both capitalism and Godzilla"²⁷.

¹ Postmodernism and cultural values of the Japanese people, Moscow, 1995, p. 14.

² http://artradarasia.wordpress.com

³ http://www.proza.ru

⁴ http:// www.caravan.kz

⁵ http://artpages.org.ru

⁶ Little Boy. The Art of Japan's Exploding Subculture. 2005, New York, p. 100.

⁷ http://andrei-fesyun.livejournal.com

⁸ Cit. by: Postmodernism and cultural values.., p. 16.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ http://www.hirokiazuma.com

¹¹ Ibidem.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Ibid.

¹⁴ http://www.proza.ru

¹⁵ Ibidem.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ http:///www.proza.ru

¹⁸ Ibidem.

¹⁹ http://www.hirokuazuma.com

²⁰ Ibidem.

²¹ Ibid.

²² Ibid.

²³ Ibid.

²⁴ Ibid.

²⁵ http //artradatasia.worpress.com

²⁶ http://www.openspace.ru

²⁷ Cit. by: Postmodernism and cultural values.., p. 33.