This month in Zurich, 76-year-old artist Keiichi Tanaami
shows vivid works made after a bout with severe illness.
There are conventional ways to describe Japanese artist
Keiichi Tanaami: Pop Art superstar. Designer of album covers for the Monkees
and Super Furry Animals. Long-time art director of Japanese Playboy. Subject of
dozens of solo exhibitions and inspiration to megastar artists like Takashi
Murakami. Then there are unconventional descriptors, which somehow seem more
appropriate: “Dark magician of electric cinema . . . manager of the mental
discotheque . . . designer of young girls’ beards.”
Tanaami, who is now
76, has lived through some of the most significant events of the 20th century.
He was nine when he survived the Tokyo air raid, which threw him into “the
enigmatic monstrosity of war.” He participated in the explosion of the city’s
avant-garde in the 1960s. He hung out in Andy Warhol’s Factory and spent a few
years doing LSD in San Francisco. In his dense body of work, horror, joy, and
eroticism intermingle.
NO MORE WAR, at Studiolo in Zurich, focuses on a fruitful
but tortured period of Tanaami’s career: the '80s, when a severe illness nearly
killed him. During his recovery, he experienced intense hallucinations and
visions, and afterwards, he started experimenting with sculpture.
The wooden sculptures
draw on traditional Japanese puzzle-making craft, but the imagery comes
directly from the hallucinations. Gnarled, neon-hued pine trees snipped from a
vision he remembers, women hanging from gold crests, and phallic shapes inlaid
with fish bones. Goldfish are a constant motif for Tanaami, who says they
recall his father’s malformed goldfish after the war. The sculptures are
intensely personal, but their proportions and volumes were clearly influenced
by Memphis, the maligned Italian design group.
It’s always difficult to assess an artist outside of what
you know about his or her life. Would Tanaami’s haunting visual language exist
if he hadn’t been subjected to the horrors of Tokyo in 1945, or tripped in San
Francisco in the 1970s? What if he hadn’t defied death in the early 1980s? For
Tanaami, it doesn’t seem to matter; memory and imagination are one continuous
fabric. “On the night of the air raid, I remember watching swarms of people
flee from bald mountaintops,” he recalls. “But then something occurs to me: was
that moment real? Dream and reality are all mixed up in my memories, recorded
permanently in this ambiguous way.”