Just finished watching Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, an epic meditation on Russia's most legendary icon painter. Intriguingly, the film, really a series of lengthy vignettes linked by an overarching metaphorical conceit, never shows Rublev actually painting - indeed, he is absent entirely from the screen for great chunks of the movie's 3 1/2 hour running time. Yet after virtually ignoring his subject's body of work, Tarkovsky chose to end the black-and-white Rublev with a shock of color, panning over what survives of Rublev's miraculous icons and frescoes during a languid, enrapturing five minute sequence. This celebration of an Orthodox Christian art form in a film produced in the atheistic Soviet Union is striking. It is clear from Tarkovsky's reverent framing that he is not viewing Rublev's work as merely a Russian cultural artifact, regardless of his official minders interpretations or intentions; indeed, it's obvious that Tarkovsky's Rublev is modeled on the monk's own portrayal of Christ. Predictably, Soviet authorities suppressed the film (which they deemed too violent and too politically complex) upon its completion in 1966, but following an ecstatic international reception at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival and subsequent unauthorized screenings in Paris, they relented and allowed Rublev to be screened domestically. Tarkovsky was forced to make cuts, and for years it was only available in various bowdlerized incarnations; Criterion restored and released a widely-available definitive 205-minute cut a few years back.
If Rublev has a stylistic inheritor today, perhaps it is the commercialist-provocateur Takashi Murakami, a Japanese artist renowned for his anime-inspired "superflat" style, wherein brightly-colored figures and symbols are rendered with a complete lack of depth - an aesthetic with obvious metaphorical implications. His work is presently on display at the Brooklyn Musuem in a much-bruited about show predictably titled "©Murakami." Murakami makes no secret of his debt to progenitor Andy Warhol, who popularized the concepts of both mass-produced art and art-as-product; the most-discussed feature of his present exhibition is not any specific catalogue item, but the Louis Vuitton boutique that accompanies it per the artist's wishes, selling Murakami-designed leather goods at exorbitant prices. New Yorker reviewer Peter Schjeldahl, admittedly mystified by Murakami's aggressively garish work, opined that the Vuitton display was his favorite part of the show:
The shop is lovely. Shelving units in chrome and white enamel, with recessed fluorescent lighting that sets brass fittings on the merchandise aglint, caress the eye. They provide a haven from the strident grotesquerie of what might be termed Murakami’s fine-art product lines: paintings, sculpture, and wallpapered environments that play off the charms of Japanese traditional and popular arts with close to no charm of their own.
