Museum Exhibit: Virgil Abloh "Figures of Speech"

Before I left for Europe for the summer, I took in an exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art which I've been thinking about how to write about for almost two months.  The exhibit was a retrospective of Virgil Abloh called "Figures Of Speech."

Abloh is an artist, designer, engineer, and architect, who, while pursuing his masters degree in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, managed to hook up with Kanye West, and become the creative director of his creative team, working on album covers, concert designs, and merchandising.  He parlayed that work to create his own fashion brand Off-White, and recently became the artistic director of Louis Vuitton's menswear collection.

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I was really struck by a couple of the pieces, including "You're Obviously In The Wrong Place" which quotes Pretty Woman with George Segal style sculptures in white that manages to be funny and meaningful on a number of levels, accessing racial discrimination, class discrimination, and impostor syndrome all at once. I loved it.

Another piece I really loved was the Figures of Speech mural, which incorporates a whole lot of imagery and signs and signals.  I did a video flyby of it, but it really deserves looking at and studying.



And a third piece I loved was the Black Cotton Logo.  With a simple inversion, Abloh manages to elegantly make a statement about consumerism, racism, history, and branding.  It's this kind of elegant and sardonic minimalism where I think Abloh is at his best.


There were lots of other pieces that I was not enamored of, but I'm not going to focus on them.

Abloh is an interesting character-- in 2002 he was a student, in 2006 a graduate student and in 2009 he was an intern at Fendi, and by 2019 he is a ruler of the universe.  One of Abloh's mandates in his work is "Question everything."  So here are my questions.  How did he rise so fast?  What is it about his work that is so fantastic that in 10 years he can rise to the literal top?  And could the next Virgil Abloh be a white female septugenarian?


I'm not exactly sure, but after listening to him talk at the opening of the exhibit (which runs through September 22 in Chicago, before going on to Atlanta (Nov 9-2019 to March 8, 2020), Boston (July-September 2020) and Brooklyn (Winter 2020 to Spring 2021) I'd say it's a combination of a few things.

Articulate  Abloh is a good talker.  He's got a lot of ideas and he likes to talk about them.  It was a little frustrating, someone asked him a straight forward question at the opening (about the difference between appropriating, stealing, and quoting) , and he preceded to talk for ten minutes, say all kinds of interesting stuff, and never answer the question.  He didn't even directly talk about the question, he just followed his own thoughts.  This is a guy whose trademark image is a quotation mark.




Actuator.  After looking through the entire exhibit, I think that Abloh is an actuator.  He takes his ideas and puts them on canvas/fabric/sculpture/whatever.  (He's come out with furniture, music, clothing, and a whole lot of other stuff.  It makes sense now when he has the money to make things happen, but I got the feeling from looking at his work that he was making stuff constantly, even if it wasn't very good.  He puts out his ideas concretely, even if they aren't fully formed or fully functional.  He lays it out there.

His Master's thesis project.  He redid it for this exhibition.

Iteration  The second part of that is that Abloh seems able to move on from one piece or idea and into another fairly effortlessly.  He has no problem releasing 10 or 15 different versions of something as he strives for what works (both aesthetically and in the marketplace)

Collaboration  Abloh enlists lots of other artists into his works and is able to use their contributions to fuel his own ideas and then take off even further.  He's worked with some powerhouses, including Kanye, Jenny Holzer, and Arthur Jafa, and has been inspired by diverse influences including the movies Black Panther, Pretty Woman and architect Mies van der Rohe.

Merchandising  Abloh seems to be a master merchandiser.  He's really great at putting price tags on things and getting people to buy them.  It's not so much a zeitgeist thing (I think) but a "knowing how to be the cool kid" thing.  Anyway you slice it, he knows what sells, and he seems to do a great job selling.  (By the way, that's the third artist who is a commercial success that I've seen have an exhibit at MCA- Virgil Abloh, David Bowie, and Takashi Murakami. Food for thought.)

These 5 elements seem to be at the heart of his work, and so I think the answer to my question lies somewhere in the middle here.

But whoever the next Virgil Abloh is, I'm going to guess that they will exhibit some or all of those traits above.

You can find out more about the MCA exhibit Figures of Speech at their website: 
https://mcachicago.org/Exhibitions/2019/Virgil-Abloh   Timed tickets are being sold for this exhibition, which also allows you access to all of the other museum exhibits.  And the Museum has a particularly strong slate of events around the Abloh exhibit, including talks with the artist, performances, student opportunities, and more.  Click the link above to find out more.

Don't Miss: The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg: (Through Sept 24 at MCA)

As part of the last bits of summer before school started, I crossed off one of my summer bucket goals and went with my son to see the Takashi Murakami exhibit The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg, which is at the MCA-Chicago through September 24.  It's an astonishing exhibit, full of exciting art, and I highly recommend you not miss it.

Murakami is a Japanese artist that was trained in traditional Japanese ink and art techniques (He has a PHD in Nihonga, Japanese traditional painting).  He then managed to pair those techniques with Manga and Pop Art and come up with a style of art uniquely his own.  This exhibit is the first major retrospective of his work, and showcases many early works as well as brand new works created especially for this exhibit.  Many of these have never been shown in America before.

These were two paintings on either side of the giant mural in the room.  I added them together.

Murakami works on a huge scale; Some of his paintings are mural sized and require a team of artists to create.  A couple of sculptures in the exhibit were 20+ feet tall, and one painting was 300 feet long!  They have a great video showing the process of making the art, along with the team doing the work while Murakami okays every part of the process.

Panoramic view of one of the larger paintings.  It doesn't really bulge like this.  The room is close to 100 yards long!

One of Murakami's consistent characters is a mouse, who has come to represent him.  Over the years
the mouse has mutated wildly into different characters and has different qualities.

His work has some consistent themes:  Mutation, cartoon characters, and Arhats, Japanese healing monks.  Over the years, he has created a number of paintings of Arhats, who look like they might be R.Crumb characters, but represent different historical characters from Japan.  The work is very detailed, and Murakami oversees every part of the process.

Some of the Arhats, or healing monks, in the giant painting 500 Arhats.

Collaboration with Kanye West 

Murakami's work is playful and evocative at the same time. He has weird titles, and descriptions of the paintings don't always match what's on the canvas. Although sometimes the artwork looks like graffiti, you can see underneath it all is a vast amount of technique. He has also collaborated with the likes of Louis Vuitton and Kanye West.

A large sculpture almost looks like a manga toy

At the gift shop,  a number of Murakami prints and other merchandise is for sale.  Murakami knows the power of branding and marketing.  Over half of the prints that were being sold were already sold out when we went (and some of them go for upwards of $5000!)  (There were plenty of t-shirts however, if you are interested!)

A cartoon octopus, manga style by Murakami

In addition to the Murakami exhibit, the museum has a number of other exhibits on.

It's their 50th anniversary, and they are getting ready for that. As part of that process, they are displaying some older exhibits.  One such was Art By Telephone, where they asked artists to telephone instructions to the curators to make art, and the curators followed their instructions, thereby making art.

They have some old-school telephones on the wall, and you can listen to the instructions. Pretty cool idea!

My son, listening to
some art instructions
from 1969

They have other older exhibits as well, including an infamous visit by performance artist Chris Burden, who lay motionless in the museum for over 48  hours.  They have some film of that, as well as newspaper articles about the furor that it caused.  Hard to imagine that a guy laying motionless would cause such a furor, but it did!

Find out more about Murakami on his instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/takashipom/
or on the museum's exhibit page:

https://mcachicago.org/Exhibitions/2017/Takashi-Murakami-The-Octopus-Eats-Its-Own-Leg

REVIEW: BattleField by Peter Brook at the MCA Chicago

Battlefield is a production of Stunning Beauty and Simplicity.

30 years ago, I saw a 9 hour play at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.  It was Peter Brook's Mahabharata, a play in 3 parts that spanned an entire day, and in the play, spanned centuries and years as it told the Indian epic. It was a seminal moment for me, a young theatre student.

 Director Peter Brook was my hero, I'd read his books, and I saw him put his ideas he'd written in the Empty Space into practice. It was also one of my first forays into New York, my first foray to BAM

a 6 hour movie version of the 9 hour play is 
available via Amazon

It's 30 years later, and Peter Brook is still at it, weaving fantastical theatricality with extreme simplicity and extremely powerful acting.  And I'm still at it, too, being amazed by his work.

I found out yesterday that the new show Battlefield was here in Chicago, and the next day I changed my schedule so that I could see the show.

The new show Battlefield (by the original collaborators of the  9 hour producton- directed by Peter Brook and his collaborator Marie Helene Estienne, and written by Jean-Claude Carriére) is only 70 minutes long, and is a fractal of the epic 9 hour saga.  Despite the fact that it deals primarily with the last portion of the original show, the entire story is also somehow magically encapsulated in this smaller rendition.

In the original 9 hour production there were over 20 actors playing all of the roles, in this new play there are 4 actors and a drummer.  They are all wonderful.

To view photos of the original Mahabharata directed by Peter Brook, visit Wikipedia

The plot:  Battlefield is set after the epic war between the cousins Pandavas and Kauravas.  The Kauravas are 5 brothers, and their brothers, sons of the blind king Dritarashtra.  The Pandavas win, and the blind king Dritarashtra has lost all of his  sons, killed by their cousin and Pandava Yudishtra, who now must become king.  The blind king must accept this bitter defeat and embrace his nephew who has killed his sons.  The nephew feels the victory is hollow, especially after he learns that not only are his cousins dead by his hand, but his half-brother as well.  The play explores the bitterness of defeat and moving on, and the immeasurable costs of victory.

PLEASE NOTE:  THIS SHOW IS NOT FOR KIDS. VERY THEATRICAL DEPICTIONS OF VIOLENCE.

The cast (of four actors and a master drummer) are all phenomenal and play their parts with somberness and artistry.  The play itself, although essentially Indian in story, has deep allusions to the story of Oedipus, and later of Antigone.  Especially Anouilh's Antigone, who must struggle after the war with her deceased brother on the losing side, and not able to receive a proper burial, and Antigone has to risk all to give him the burial he deserves.

As I mention all of the actors are amazing, and their props are simple- a long cloth, a couple of sticks.  Of particular note is the work of drummer Toshi Tsuchitori, who improvises his drumming throughout the performance, and has an ending solo that poignantly winds down the play into a tableau that left the audience breathless.

Also of note, during this story of war and battlegrounds and its aftermath, my watch kept on vibrating.  I looked down mid-show to discover that Donald Trump had dropped 59 missiles on Syria during the play.  This put this story into a contemporary perspective.  Where will the aftermath end?  Whose hundred sons will lay strewn across the battlefield?  And to what end?

I highly recommend seeing this play.  It runs two more nights in Chicago (through April 8) and then has at least two more American cities.  Click the name of the venue to find out more and get tickets.


April 5-8, 2017 Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago

April 13 – 23, 2017: Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis
May 26 – June 21, 2017: American Conservatory Theater, San Francisco

There have been a number of great reviews of the show:

NPR
THE GUARDIAN
SLANT MAGAZINE

And here's a video from Japan (I think) of a promo of the production