Fragment, Image, and Absence in 1960s Japan 9780271093154

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Fragment, Image, and Absence in 1960s Japan

Fragment, Image, and Absence in 1960s Japan The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

Ignacio A. Adriasola Muñoz

[Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Adriasola Muñoz, Ignacio A. (Ignacio Alberto), 1981– author. Title: Fragment, image, and absence in 1960s Japan / Ignacio A. Adriasola Muñoz. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “Examines the transformation of “the object” and the aesthetics of disaffection in the experimental art and photography of 1960s Japan”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022026220 | ISBN 9780271092904 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Art, Japanese—20th century. | Photography, Artistic—20th century. | Object (Aesthetics)— History—20th century. | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—Japan— History—20th century. Classification: LCC N7355.4 .A37 2022 | DDC 709.52/09046—dc23/eng/20220708 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022026220 Copyright © 2022 Ignacio A. Adriasola Muñoz All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

For my father.

Aux orties et aux pierres. —Yves Bonnefoy, Dévotion

Contents

List of Illustrations / viii Acknowledgments / x Note on Language / xiii

Introduction: Melancholy Sites / 1

Part 1: Fragment / 13 1.

Situation of the Obuje / 15

2.

Ears, Fragments, and the Pathos of Distance / 43

Part 2: Image / 75 3.

Object, Mirror, Stain / 78

4.

Narcissus at the Fountain / 103

Part 3: Absence / 125 5.

Finding Despair in Landscape / 128

6.

Cast Shadows / 147

Conclusion: On the Return to Things / 173 Notes / 182 Bibliography / 207 Index / 219

Illustrations

Plates (following page 122) 1. Arakawa Shūsaku, Einstein Between Matter’s Structure and Faintest Sound, 1958–59 2. Kudō Tetsumi, Proliferating Chain Reaction in X-Style Basic Substance, 1960 3. Kudō, Distribution Map of Impotence, 1961–62 4. Miki Tomio, Ear of Roses, 1962 5. Ōtsuji Kiyoji, from the series Takiguchi Shūzō’s Study, 1980 6. Takiguchi Shūzō, Untitled (Décalcomanie), after 1960 7. Kawada Kikuji, Hinomaru, Tokyo, from the series The Map, 1960–65 Figures 1. Takamatsu Jirō, On Anti-Existence in Relation to a Curtain, 1963 / 12 2. Arakawa Shūsaku, Container of Sand, 1958– 59 / 26 3. Takamatsu Jirō manipulates his Rope-Obuje during the Hi-Red Center’s Yamanote Line Incident, 1962 / 28 4. Takamatsu, Drawing (Sketchbook 27: On Anti-Existence in Relation to a Boston Bag), 1962 / 28 5. Kudō Tetsumi, Philosophy of Impotence, 1962 / 34 6. Kudō, Smell of 110 Volts, 1963 / 38 7. Kudō, Monument to Metamorphosis, 1970 / 40 8. Kudō, Monument to Metamorphosis, 1970 / 40 9. Miki Tomio, EAR, 1965 / 49 10. Miki, EAR, 1963 / 55 11. Miki, EAR No. 104, 1965 / 60 12. Miki, Untitled (Ears), 1964 / 62 13. Miki, EAR No. 201, 1965 / 63 14. Miki, 50 Fragments of Ear, 1964 / 65 15. Miki, Untitled (Ear Production Plan 1969– 1971), ca. 1968 / 67

8. Hosoe Eikoh, Barakei No. 29, 1962 9. Hosoe, Barakei: No. 32, 1961 10. Tōmatsu Shōmei, Plankton (2), 1966 11. Tōmatsu, Horizon Line, from the series The Sea Around Us, 1966 12. Takanashi Yutaka, from the series Tokyoites, 1965 13. Takamatsu Jirō, Perspective, 1968 14. Usami Keiji, Aquarium Within an Aquarium No. 2, 1967 15. Arakawa, Work, 1963 16. Takamatsu, Photograph of Photograph, 1974

16. Miki, Untitled (I Do Not Make Ear), 1978 / 70 17. Tōmatsu Shōmei, Bottle Molten by Heat Rays and Fire, 1961 / 74 18. Takiguchi Shūzō at his desk / 79 19. Ōtsuji Kiyoji, from the series Takiguchi Shūzō’s Study, 1980 / 80 20. Ōtsuji, from the series Takiguchi Shūzō’s Study, 1980 / 80 21. Ōtsuji, Takiguchi Shūzō and His Wife, 1975 / 82 22. Ōtsuji, A Man Who Hasn’t Finished Piling Up Wood Shavings, 1970 / 85 23. Ōtsuji, A Man Who Has Finished Piling Up Coal, 1970 / 85 24. Takiguchi Shūzō, Sketchbook No. 1, 1960 / 93 25. Takiguchi, Untitled (Décalcomanie), 1960 / 94 26. Kawada Kikuji, Lucky Strike, Tokyo, from the series The Map, 1960–65 / 99 27. Kawada, The A-Bomb Dome, Ceiling Stain, from the series The Map, 1960–65 / 100 28. Kawada, The A-Bomb Dome, Ceiling Stain, from the series The Map, 1960–65 / 100

29. Hosoe Eikoh, from the photobook Barakei, 1963 / 104 30. Hosoe, from the photobook Barakei, 1963 / 104 31. Hosoe, from the photobook Barakei, 1963 / 107 32. Hosoe, Barakei: No. 19, 1960 / 107 33. Hosoe, Barakei: No. 34, 1961 / 110 34. Hosoe, from the photobook Barakei, 1963 / 117 35. Takamatsu, On Anti-Existence in Relation to a Desk Drawer, 1963 / 124 36. Tōmatsu, Asphalt (1), 1961 / 129 37. Tōmatsu, Hateruma Island, Okinawa, 1971 / 130

38. Takanashi Yutaka, from the series Tokyoites, 1965 / 141 39. Arakawa, Landscape, 1967 / 148 40. Arakawa, Sculpting No. 1, 1961–62 / 149 41. Arakawa Shūsaku in his studio, 1963 / 150 42. Arakawa, . . . Is Bottomless, 1964 / 152 43. Arakawa, Untitled, 1964 / 153 44. Takamatsu, documentary photograph of the exhibition Identification, 1966 / 165 45. Takamatsu, Shadow (study for Shadow of a Woman Opening a Curtain), 1965 / 168 46. Arakawa, At the Window, 1968 / 169 47. Takamatsu, Photograph of Photograph, 1974 / 171 48. Ōtsuji, A Pair of Mineral Ore Samples That Are Always on My Desk, 1974 / 172

ix

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Many people and institutions have supported me in the exacting process of distilling thought into words and transforming text into object. First, I would like to express my gratitude to Eleanor Goodman and Jonathan P. Eburne, series editors of Refiguring Modernism, as well as Maddie Caso and the very patient staff of the Penn State University Press for their support. Two anonymous reviewers provided extensive and generous comments that greatly improved the manuscript, which my friend, the incomparable Sara Appel, helped refine through her expert feedback and editorial assistance. This book attempts to address how aesthetic practices mediate the affective dimension of politics. I consider this question mainly in relation to objects, focusing on how a rediscovery of their contingency led artists in 1960s Japan to accidental—or rather, unconscious—encounters with an altogether new form: a melancholic structure that undergirded the aesthetics of disaffection through which they addressed the contemporary situation as a state of impossibility. In the future, I hope to continue exploring how the melancholic structures considered here have likewise informed a reconceptualization of notions of the body and space. For their generative questions, which I have long thought over and have resulted in this rather overdue response, I would like to thank Gennifer Weisenfeld, Kristine Stiles, Stan Abe, and Sean Metzger. Vancouver, the city where I live and work, is built on the unceded territory of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, Squamish, and Stolo First Nations, whom I thank for their wisdom, generosity, and stewardship of the land. I am grateful also to Scott Watson, Dana Claxton, and Andrea Tuele for bringing me here and supporting my work, and to my colleagues in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia (UBC) for teaching me about art’s potential to transform the present’s relationship to the past. Among the friends I have made since my arrival, I would like to thank especially Sanem Güvenç, Christina Laffin, Jaleh Mansoor, Fuyubi Nakamura, Carla Nappi, Vin Nardizzi, Julia Orell, Saygin Salgirli, Cathy Soussloff, and T’ai Smith, each of whom has provided space, ears, advice, and, at crucial moments, a much-needed glass of wine. I also thank the brilliant students in art history, critical curatorial studies, and visual arts who have taken classes with me and from whom I have learned different ways of giving form to thought, especially my advisees, Rosamunde Bordo, Suhyun Choi, Annika Davis, Amy Kazymerchyk, Jeremy Kramer, David Winfield Norman, Asumi Oba, Marcus Prasad, Andrea Sánchez Ibarrola, and Camille Ji Eun Sung.

xi

Acknowledgments

I first presented some of the material included in this book at gatherings that in post-pandemic hindsight appear as a rare luxury. I thank those who over the years have brought me into their conversations: Alexis Clark and Martha Ward at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts; Joan Kee and SookKyung Lee at Tate Modern in London; Tani Barlow and Andrea Longobardi at the Universidade de São Paulo; Miryam Sas and Bill Marotti at the University of California, Berkeley; and, so many years ago, Reiko Tomii, Rika Iezumi Hiro, and Mika Yoshitake at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Miya Elise Desjardins, with whom I have collaborated at the Review of Japanese Culture and Society, has taught me much about translation. I am also grateful to my hosts at the institutions where I worked prior to my arrival to Vancouver: Swati Chattopadhyay of the University of California, Santa Barbara; Andrew Shelton of The Ohio State University; and Nancy Micklewright and Ann Yonemura of the Freer and Sackler Galleries, where, as an Anne van Biema Fellow, I was afforded precious time to find myself as an art historian. I thank Andrea Actis of Capilano University and Helga Pakasaar of Polygon Gallery for organizing a conversation on photography that yielded “Notes on Barakei,” published in 2016 in The Capilano Review, which morphed into the opening paragraphs of chapter 4. This study builds upon the immense work carried out by artists, critics, curators, and scholars in Japan. For their insight and their generosity, I thank Minemura Toshiaki, Mitsuda Yuri, and Nakai Yasuyuki. For their mentorship and friendship over the years, I thank my onshi Ikeda Shinobu-sensei, at Chiba University, and Masaki Motoi. I also wish to acknowledge my dear friends Momoyo Homma and her family, as well as Yumi Kōri and Endō-san, who have hosted me frequently during my visits to Tokyo and Osaka. Research for this book took place at the National Diet Library in Japan; the libraries at the National Museum of Modern Art, the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, all in Tokyo; the library of the National Museum of Art in Osaka; the archives at Keio University Art Centre; and the Smithsonian Institution’s libraries and archives, especially the Japan Art Catalogue Project, housed at the Freer and Sackler Library. I would like to thank the staff of these institutions for their invaluable service. The following individuals kindly assisted me in procuring research materials, images, and securing permissions: Momoyo Homma, Miwako Tezuka, and the staff of the Reversible Destiny Foundation, New York; Matsuda Takeyoshi of Arakawa and Gins Tokyo Office; Katō Ayano of Yumiko Chiba Associates; Kubo Hitoshi of Keio University Art Centre; and Gotō Saori of Musashino Art University Museum and Library. I also would like to thank Masuda Rei of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Yabumae Tomoko and Mizuta Yūko of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Ishizaki Takashi of the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art; Okumura Yasuhiko of the Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama; Ōshita Yūji

Acknowledgments

xii

of the Nakanoshima Art Museum, Osaka; Kakuda Minako and Katsuta Kotoe of Nagoya City Art Museum; Tachibana Miki of Takamatsu Art Museum; Shinohara Seiji of the Ashikaga City Museum of Art; Ishii Masanobu of the Sezon Museum of Modern Art; Araki Tomoko of INTERFACE–Shomei Tomatsu Lab, Naha; Ogawa Takayuki of Photo Gallery International (PGI), Tokyo; Mizutani Sayaka of Taka Ishii Gallery Photo/Film; Miyazaki Yuka of Bijutsu Shuppansha; Osawa Kei of the University Museum, University of Tokyo; Emily Park of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles; and Jonathan Hoppe of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Lastly, I wish to thank the generous support of artists and their estates, particularly Hosoe Eikoh and Hosoe Kenji, Kawada Kikuji, Takanashi Yutaka, Tōmatsu Yasuko, Gōda Nobuyo, Ikegami Yaya, Ōtsuji Seiko, and Kudō Hiroko. Research and manuscript preparation for this book were financed through the Hampton Fund at UBC and a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Publication of this book is made possible by a grant from UBC’s Scholarly Publication Fund. Chase Michael Foster, to whom I am grateful for his loving support in sickness and in health, has often heard me say that in writing about Japan, I write about where I come from. I was brought up in relative comfort in a bilingual household in Chile, at the end of a seventeen-year dictatorship during which many lost their lives or otherwise endured horrific violence for their beliefs. Growing up, I observed the many ways in which the present remained haunted by the past. The post-dictatorship consensus, its climate of concerted forgetfulness or desmemoria, and the disillusionment that neoliberalism begat all inform my understanding of art and politics—their possibilities as well as their limits. My mother, Verónica Muñoz de Sayuk, fostered my intellectual and artistic interests from early on; in supporting my decision to leave Chile for Japan some twenty years ago, she abided my desire to escape the conservative world in which I grew up. Like many of those I write about, my late father, Dr. Luis Alberto Adriasola, was born in the 1930s. He was an optimist and an artist at heart. I dedicate this book to him.

Note on Language

This book generally follows the guidelines of the journal Monumenta Nipponica for romanization and rendering of Japanese and East Asian names. Standard romanization and the traditional East Asian naming order are observed for Japanese names, which are presented here family-name-first. (An exception is made in copyright bylines, as requested by the artists or their estates.) The EuroAmerican order is observed in the case of non-Japanese nationals with a Japanese name, or a Japanese national active chiefly overseas—for example, publishing primarily in English. For Japanese authors of an English-language work, the EuroAmerican order is used if the cited work does so. Similarly, when citing a Japanese-language work by a non-Japanese national with a Japanese name, I follow the usage adopted by the work in question. In the bibliography and notes, translations are provided for Japanese-language titles. However, if a publication was additionally assigned an original English title by its authors, this title has been retained. All translations are mine unless noted.

Introduction Melancholy Sites A ready-made ruin carved on a mountainside. An oversized ear fashioned out of concrete, lying absurdly on the grounds of a world’s fair. Photographs of things, and photographs of photographs. A book that is a mirror. A painting made of cast shadows. And that ultimate object—landscape. This is a book about the object in experimental art and photography in 1960s Japan. Its protagonists are artists, photographers, and intellectuals who were active in Tokyo at the end of the 1950s and in the early 1960s. Reviving the tradition of the historical avant-garde, these artists formulated a visual language of ambiguity and disaffection, with which they sought to address the stalemate of political and aesthetic representation at a moment of social, economic, and environmental upheaval—an inquiry that led them to address head-on long-standing questions in aesthetics and epistemology. Most of the artists discussed in this book were born in the 1930s. Too young to be sent off to fight in the Fifteen-Year War (1931–45), they experienced its effects at home. The war, of course, ended disastrously for Japan: the firebombing campaign carried out in its final months by the US-led Allied Forces decimated the civilian population, reduced entire cities to rubble, and concluded with the unprecedented use of atomic weapons against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Time and again, commentators in the 1960s turned to the image of the flattened ruins

Fragment, Image, and Absence

2

of cities—the scorched fields, or yakenohara, of the immediate postwar period— in order to explain what these young artists were doing today: they had grown up in the rubble, and it made sense that they turned to junk in order to create art. While this observation might appear to be shallow psychologizing, it was quite perceptive. The art of the 1960s was indeed concerned with conditions of presence and absence—a question that was entirely familiar to a generation brought up in lack, both metaphoric and actual. Most immediately, rubble indexed the absence of what and who were once there and are no longer; at an operative level, it stood as a testament for the potential disappearance of what currently is. To artists of this generation, rubble thus appeared to condense the duality of presence and absence in material form. Beyond the immediate link to their surroundings, however, the turn to junk was part of a broader shift by artists as they pursued a practice that would become progressively closed off—a tautological and hermetic visual language marked by skepticism toward the uncomplicated views of political commitment that had become popular in the immediate postwar period, in the context of the rise of the cultural left and the concomitant cult of artistic subjectivity. The artworks examined in this book advance diverse claims about the nature of the object and its relationship to concept. The importance of such experimentation to a discussion of the history and theory of art should not be lost on us, as the object is one of two central categories to fine arts discourse—the other being the once-almighty humanist subject. In classical accounts of the object, things are assumed to exist as entities independent from each other; their existence is either presumed or perceived by the knowing subject. In the modern philosophy and theory of art, more specifically, the artwork enjoys a status more rarefied than that of a regular object, like a thing of everyday use or the mere stuff that makes up the world. This is because artworks are thought to be imbued by their makers with meaning and intention, which are conveyed to viewers by their form; the subject who seeks pure judgment must appreciate such objects in the understanding of their autonomous existence.1 Relying on insights from such apparently dissimilar fields as non-Euclidian geometry, quantum physics, philosophy, sociology, and cybernetics, the artists and intellectuals discussed here stretched our understanding of how objects behave. Their indictment of the classical subject-object dichotomy related to the particular conditions of Japan in the 1960s, but at the same time, it condensed longstanding concerns in the practice and theory of the visual arts. Some objects were woken up and activated in order to concentrate and disseminate energy; others were made to close up and refuse the world as is; still others acted as mirrors, melted into stains, or became their own negation. Objects disappeared and reappeared as landscape— objects that proved in the end that they were not quite there, mere things discretely fixed in time and space.

An Empire of Things

3

Introduction

That the object became such an important point of contention for intellectuals and artists in Japan should come as no surprise. A massive shift in the relationship to things took place in the wake of the war, as the rapid reindustrialization of Japan transformed economic, social, and cultural structures as well as the environment. This context gave rise to new class actors: in addition to the reemergence of the industrial proletariat came the expansion of the service sector–oriented and urbanized middle classes. Moreover, the mesmerizing and not entirely planned-out growth of metropolitan areas, as well as the emergence of a new culture of leisure and consumption central to economic growth, provided rich terrain in which artists could think about the nature of objects and their social lives. The artistic interest in everyday things is inseparable from the politics of prosperity promoted by the government in the wake of the Anpo crisis of 1960. In protests spreading over a year, almost thirty million people mobilized in order to prevent the ratification of the US-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, known in Japanese as Anpo, which had been negotiated by the conservative government of the Liberal Democratic Party. The treaty replaced a previous agreement signed at the conclusion of the Occupation in 1952 that formalized the permanent presence of US forces on the Japanese mainland. To many, this continued foreign military presence represented an obvious infringement of sovereignty and made impossible an independent definition of Japan’s foreign policy in the perilous context of the Cold War. One of the more troubling aspects of the treaty resided in Japan’s ambiguous position under the US nuclear umbrella as the westernmost outpost of the United States’ Pacific imperium. Many suspected that nuclear weapons would be deployed in the only country ever to have experienced an atomic bombing—a suspicion that in later decades was revealed to be correct. The Parliamentary left and the liberal media agitated against the treaty, relying on Japan’s powerful unions and, especially, the All-Japan Students Federation (Zengakuren) in order to mobilize citizens in mass protests that famously culminated with a spectacular showdown at the gates of the National Diet building, Japan’s seat of government, on June 15, 1960. However, the protests failed in their purpose. The ruling party literally forced the agreement through the Diet, physically removing the political opposition from the chamber as it tried to block a vote against Anpo from taking place. In the aftermath of the protests, the cabinet of Prime Minister Kishi Nobusuke fell. On taking power, new Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato, while enforcing the repression of dissent, strategically redirected public debate away from political radicalization, calling for a consensus in favor of economic growth and the formation of an affluent society. The discursive field of the high economic growth period (1956–73) came with its own semiotics of consumption. The government’s endless litany of statistics

Fragment, Image, and Absence

4

proclaiming continued double-digit growth was mirrored in popular discourse in the cult of the so-called three regalia (sanju no jingi) of the postwar household— the refrigerator, the washing machine, and the television set that soon became metonyms of middle-class life.2 Things such as these mediated the myth of an ethnically homogeneous, all-middle-class society and became the binding agent of the post-Anpo social contract.3 For the time being, a male citizen could aspire—at least in theory—to lifetime employment in a corporation, with a salary and benefits sufficient to sustain an independent household. Yet prosperity would come at a cost. As left-wing critics pointed out at the time, in promoting its mantra of endless growth, the conservative government successfully curtailed the reassessment of the contradictions of Japan’s Allied-imposed democracy and the troubling institutional continuities of prewar authoritarianism in the present. Moreover, a reliance on heavy and petrochemical industries, together with intensive resource extraction and the culture of consumerism, left a toxic environmental legacy that expressed itself periodically in crises that lay bare the unequal geographic distribution of economic development and its costs. The changing nature of the object made itself felt in the everyday—and such things were pulled apart with gusto by artists and photographers, in galleries, specialized journals, and (occasionally) directly on the street. Fine arts discourse has traditionally depended on the staging of a type of privileged object relationship— art being, in modern times, as Walter Benjamin once noted, the quintessential fetish in its sanctum: the gallery and exhibition hall.4 However, avant-garde artists realized that art could also be a laboratory for probing modes of viewing and encounters between subject and object. Photographers, who traditionally relied on the camera to mediate between subject and object, found in the materiality of the photograph—in the discovery of photography’s thingliness—a set of questions that put them in direct conversation with other visual artists of the time. One venue for such conversation was the exhibition space, whose implications shifted dramatically throughout the decade. The highly regimented system of viewing— originally put in place in the early twentieth century and epitomized by periodic government-organized exhibitions, such as the Ministry of Education–sponsored Bunten—was reformed in the aftermath of the war to better reflect Japan’s postwar democratic order. While such a system naturally gravitated toward centralization and conservatism, its grip finally broke down in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the relatively free spaces of unjuried yearly exhibitions, such as the Yomiuri Indépendant (1948–63), were taken over by a generation of young artists intent on disrupting the status quo.5 Visitors to the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in Ueno during the eleventh version of the Yomiuri Indépendant exhibition, in March 1960, were greeted by a disconcerting cacophony. The art on display was composed of everyday stuff, featuring materials as dissimilar and distinctly unartistic as clothespins, cement, rotting

food, and industrial refuse; meanwhile, naked performers and noise machines oversaw the proceedings. Artist Kudō Tetsumi, a graduate of the conservative oil painting department at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts, presented a convoluted object composed of industrial cotton insulation and urchin-like bristle scrubs tied together with plastic tubing onto a black metal frame. Proliferating Chain Reaction B (1959–60; presumed lost) exemplified a radical turn in art making among younger Japanese artists: the progressive abandonment of painting in favor of three-dimensional creations (rittai) of a disturbingly ambiguous and at times lewd nature. The art critic Tōno Yoshiaki—who on a recent trip to the United States and Europe had come into contact with the work of assemblage artists and the French Nouveaux Réalistes—found in the work of this young generation strong resonances with the international avant-garde. He knowingly highlighted Kudō’s work in a review, referring to it as an example of the “anti-art made of junk” (garakuta no hangeijutsu) that seemed to have invaded the exhibition in the past years.6 For Tōno, this was the art of a postwar generation that reacted hysterically not only to the vexing politics and stifling mores of a newly ascendant conservative consensus but also against the staid art of the establishment, whose factional politics and predominance of lofty notions of artistic subjectivity he associated (perhaps unfairly) with the then-ascendant gestural abstraction of Art Informel (Anforumēru). As we shall see, Tōno’s comments sparked a protracted debate on the nature and meaning of new art that stretched throughout the rest of the decade. For critics, the fact that these artists actively engaged such visual idioms meant that they no longer saw themselves as laggards chasing after foreign trends. They were demonstrably in dialogue with their peers abroad, and in some cases they even anticipated developments overseas.7

5

A Method for Ambivalence

Introduction

The artworks examined in this book are characterized by their investigation of presence and absence; the articulation of a warped timeframe through recurrence, repetitions, and doublings; and a reliance on the affective capacity of art to defamiliarize the everyday. I argue that the prominent use of these elements in Japan at this particular juncture corresponds in part to feelings of failure, disillusionment, and despondency—negative affects referred to variously as zazetsukan, zetsubōkan, or datsurakukan—in the face of the limits of mass collective action and its incapacity to prevent the ratification of the Anpo Treaty. However, they also correspond more generally to anxieties concerning the limits of art’s capacity to effect change that are embedded within modernist aesthetics.8 I am concerned with how, in the works discussed here, artists and intellectuals articulated a language of affects in

Fragment, Image, and Absence

6

order to give expression to their ambivalence toward the present and their anxiety about the future. My discursive reliance on certain psychoanalytic figures—in particular figures of affective ambivalence, such as melancholia, anxiety, and the uncanny—helps me unpack the formal elements I have listed above. Such formal concerns are not new, and they stand in direct relationship to prewar antecedents, making themselves present here in particular through the legacies of Surrealism. When thinking about the postwar afterlives of Surrealism in Japan, we face a rather complex historiographical question, deriving from the fact of the movement’s suppression under totalitarianism and the war;9 we must sort out the implications and outcomes of such repression. There is a need for a different approach—a method that can account for continuities within rupture and the enduring presence of the past in the present. Because of its concern with recursivity and latency, psychoanalytic theory presents an alternative to historicist teleology, which has insisted upon the idea of the present as an overcoming of the past while privileging the triumph of the new. In historiographic terms, rather than arguing for a simple continuity of practices, I am suggesting here that the persistence of Surrealism—or rather, the desire that is its memory—indicates a type of latency. In Japan, I argue, the full significance of Surrealism is experienced three decades later, as an aftershock. Put otherwise, the experience of Surrealism in Japan is characterized by its “afterwardsness,” or Nachträglichkeit, as first conceptualized by Sigmund Freud.10 Psychoanalysis, as the primary theory of unconscious life, has had an important if not always acknowledged impact on cultural discourse in Japan, especially through its historical affinity with Surrealism. As a heuristic, psychoanalysis relies on the close examination of haunted speech in order to excavate deeply buried psychic processes. It seeks out latent desire in the disavowals and lacunae made evident when observing patterns that characterize the operations of the unconscious, such as displacement, symbolization, and condensation (in other words, through close attention to the work of metaphor and metonymy). Rather than remaining at the level of what is immediately graspable (i.e., manifest content), we are called on to look closer at visible forms as concretizations of desire and to pay particular attention to the creases that render visible the presence of conflict—ambivalence being one of its classic expressions. There are particular aspects of psychoanalytic theory that are immediately relevant to the discussion I have presented; foremost among them is its reconceptualization of the object, which here designates something that receives a subject’s desire. In psychoanalysis, an object can be a physical object or a fragment thereof, a person, or an abstraction, such as the nation-state. Whether the object is in fact there, or whether it is entirely a product of fantasy, is inconsequential; through attachment to its object, the libido is able to provide a screen on which the self is projected. Thus, the object is always presumed to be at least partly phantasmatic.

7

Introduction

As such, the status of the object is put into question, for it can no longer be the stable “objective object” of classical epistemology. Such contested status is referred to as a fundamental “contingency of the object”—an idea that underscores the fundamentally intersubjective nature of the psyche.11 In terms of a theory of art, the projective or “objectual”—rather than objective—nature of the object and its contingency connect quite seamlessly to contemporary theorizations of the ontology of performance and its commissure.12 This also helps account for the critical attention placed by artists on materiality and the conditions of presence and absence explored within the artwork addressed in this book. This theory problematized the status of the object particularly through the figure of melancholia, which has presented a particular difficulty for psychoanalysis because of its apparent irresolution. As in mourning, the subject experiences affective ambivalence (i.e., feelings of love and hatred) toward a once-loved and now-lost object. However, melancholia differs from mourning in that, for some reason (Freud is inconclusive), something impedes the redirection of libidinal energies onto a different object. The melancholic subject’s characteristic dejection relates to an obsessive tendency toward self-hatred in the face of loss, which is a symptom of the progressive identification of the ego with the lost object. There is an interiorization of the conflict represented by affective ambivalence and, by extension, the redirection of the libido toward the self. Freud identified the emergence of a conflict within the ego—the obsessive hatred of self, which in its most dramatic instance may lead to suicide—as the defining aspect of melancholia.13 Of particular interest to us is that such loss of the object may result in a new type of object—a “phantasm,” as discussed by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok in their revision of melancholia.14 Returning to a close discussion of introjection, a concept they borrowed from Freud’s beloved student Sándor Ferenczi, Abraham and Torok further examined the implications of the ego’s identification with the lost object. Calling attention to some of Freud’s initial observations concerning melancholic mania—the exuberant, at times erotic, responses to loss that led Freud to acknowledge that his initial assessment would be necessarily inconclusive—they focused on the pleasure found by the melancholic subject in the process of introjection. Seemingly counter to the unpleasure that marks compulsive behavior, they noted the partial fulfilment found in acts such as repetition—which they understood as a form of calling back into life the lost object in the ego, classically seen in the figure of incorporation. For Abraham and Torok, the phantasm’s function is the preservation of the psychic topography prior to loss; it transforms the subject’s world, rather than allowing loss to transform the subject.15 This account is significant because it recenters the etiology proposed by Freud onto an active subject and accounts for the place of pleasure in revisiting loss, explaining the compulsions associated with the return of the phantasm of the lost object.

Fragment, Image, and Absence

8

In terms of the framework I propose in this book, psychoanalytic accounts of melancholia provide a useful point of reference for understanding the stakes of a mise-en-scène of absence. The artists at times appear unable to let go, as in the case of Miki Tomio’s (apparently) compulsive return to the human ear as form or in the repetitious shadows indexing absent objects painted by Arakawa Shūsaku and Takamatsu Jirō in the mid-1960s. More elliptically, however, such recursivity is found in these artists’ return to the vanishing landscape and the ruins of the yakenohara: that is, in the production of the melancholy site. In particular, Abraham and Torok cite two figures that are important to my analysis. The magic of incorporation, or the ritual cannibalizing of the object, expresses itself simultaneously in two ways. First, it operates as a form of “demetaphorization,” which literalizes something that usually is taken figuratively. Second, it manifests as “objectivation,” or the rendering of absence into an object. Both of these are strategies that allow the subject’s unconscious to ignore the open wound produced by the original object’s loss. These procedures can be seen functioning analogously in the works examined in this book: as mimetic gestures that reveal the conceptual scaffolding of art, in the constant production of indeterminate objects, and ultimately in attempts to render absence itself into an object. Melancholic structures help me recast the importance of the preferred practices artists developed in this period: in particular, the significance of the postwar reappearance of a procedure called obuje. The term is a direct transliteration of objet, an aesthetic category and practice first developed in the context of Surrealism in 1930s France, where these relatively small, nonsculptural constructions fashioned out of everyday materials were originally theorized as concretizations and mediators of desire. In postwar Japan, obuje were envisioned as an effective means of subverting not only the institutions of art but also the space of the everyday, by dislocating things from their preestablished meanings and relationships. The reemergence of this method of estrangement of objects and their relationship to the everyday, together with the theoretical discussion that undergirded it, heralded a fundamental change in artistic practices away from an interest in form and metaphoric meaning and, eventually, toward a reproblematization of materiality. But in doing so, as I will show, what began as a means of contesting the institutions of art and the space of politics would also lead to the discovery of the power of repetition and negativity. Crucially, the artworks that produce the melancholy site mirror Japan’s long postwar, in that their time is out of joint. If Freud posited melancholia as a state of irresolution that forecloses the future, Abraham and Torok’s conceptualization is suggestive of melancholia’s circularity as a potentially productive state of revision. Likewise, an aesthetics of disaffection, of interiority and refusal, is not necessarily productive in a traditional sense—it does not offer a final resolution of conflict, or a new path toward action. However, in its melancholic dimension, such an aesthetics

brings a new perspective from which to reconsider modernity. Melancholia as an analytical entrypoint illuminates the concern with the everyday that characterized the radical interrogation of modernity—what is usually referred to in Japanese as kindai hihan, or the critique of modernity—and has later been associated with the theoretical constellation of postmodernism. In reading this book, students of 1960s experimental art in other contexts will surely find parallels with the case of post-Anpo Japan. Indeed, elements such as the ones discussed above—the ambiguity of presence and absence, recursivity, hermeticism, and the turn to a critical examination of the everyday—can be recognized in artistic practices across the world in this same time period, as the formal and theoretical concerns enumerated at the start of this section connect to those later associated with the broader umbrella term “Conceptualism.” It is my hope that the analyses developed here will offer alternative pathways for thinking about the legacies of modernist aesthetics in contemporary art and resonant practices across different geographic locations. Ultimately, I seek to reposition modernism not as a singular, cohesive, or homogenizing notion but as the fruitful outcome of concepts as they travel, develop, and transform across different locales. I offer here an argument for an art history that seeks the resonances produced by altogether other modernisms.

9

Melancholy Sites

Introduction

The chapters that follow have been organized into sections that correspond to three states of the object in the experimental art of 1960s Japan—as fragment, image, and absence. In each section, I first address a number of artistic practices and critical accounts in order to characterize the parameters for the questions I have identified. I then introduce specific case studies to develop my arguments. My case studies include the examination of an individual practice, analysis of a specific artwork, and comparison of procedures and concerns in the works of two artists. The organization of this book is only partly diachronic, and the periodization used here is deliberately loose. I have sought to characterize the art field as a set of concurrent and mutually informing discussions, rather than a series of discrete events and milestones. The first two chapters examine the work of some of the artists who remained most closely associated with the obuje as a type of procedure throughout the decade: in particular Kudō Tetsumi and, in the second chapter, Miki Tomio. The first chapter situates the obuje within a conceptual genealogy that extends to the prewar period, highlighting the reception and reelaboration of this concept before the war and its resurgence in the 1950s. Throughout, I have sought to highlight both continuities and transformations that resulted from the transfer of particular conceptions in

Fragment, Image, and Absence

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modernist aesthetics between different locales and historical moments. Drawing from Miryam Sas’s discussion of Surrealism in Japan and the dynamics of cultural memory, I argue for an understanding of the process of “translation” as transformation.16 The second chapter develops a discussion of fragments, as a specific category of obuje, in Miki Tomio’s famously intensive exploration of the form of the human ear. Miki’s work connects this generation to an aesthetics of hermeticism (alternately characterized as nansensu, or nonsense, and shinpi, esoteric), part of a long genealogy of refusal in modernism. Hermeticism was key in Miki’s development of a critique of then-fashionable notions of political engagement, thus serving as the cornerstone for an aesthetics of disenchantment that helps recast the work of the 1960s avant-garde, both in connection to prewar practices and as an immediate precedent for the type of neo-objective practices later labeled Conceptualism. In the second section, I explore the problem of object and image in photography, showing how the concerns of the so-called Image (eizō) generation of photographers are connected to those usually associated with experimental art. Chapter 3 discusses the afterlives of the obuje in photography. Here I observe the close rapport between photographer Ōtsuji Kiyoji and critic and poet Takiguchi Shūzō. Ōtsuji’s photographs of obuje and his advocacy for experimental approaches to photography anticipated the turn toward ambiguous approaches to representation by the younger generation who became active in the 1960s. Beyond his advocacy of expressivity in photography, Ōtsuji called attention to the material qualities of the medium, in particular its capacity to convey what he deemed the “skin” of the object. Ōtsuji’s views were greatly informed by Takiguchi, his mentor and friend, who in the prewar period mediated the reception of Surrealism in Japan. Takiguchi provides a crucial bridge between critical discussions of the pre- and postwar periods and thus shows the continued relevance of the historical avant-garde to the formation of practices that heralded contemporaneity in art. Crucially, in the prewar period Takiguchi engaged in a theorization of photography that centered on the material conditions of the image. Tracing his visual experiments of the late 1960s, I show how Takiguchi returned to a problematization of the specific plasticity (zōkeisei) of photography and the image. Drawing from the coordinates developed in this discussion, chapter 4 develops an in-depth examination of one of the most iconic and problematic photographic objects of the 1960s: Hosoe Eikoh’s photobook Barakei (1963), which Hosoe created as a “subjective documentary” of novelist Mishima Yukio. The chapter develops an object-centered interpretation of Barakei, addressing the various transgressions—authorial, formal, and mimetic— that undergird its exploration of the portrait as genre and how it folds and subverts the subject-object dichotomy. Building on this prior discussion of fragments and the image, in the final section I explore forms in which absence is rendered present in experimental art and photography in the late 1960s. Chapter 5 concerns landscape and its critique in

photography and experimental art. Landscape is revealed to operate as a specific way of seeing: it epitomizes the world as object. In addressing the question of landscape in the second half of the 1960s, photographers and artists leveled a critique that was in part a political indictment of landscape as a technology of domination yet also quite explicitly articulated the epistemological and aesthetic entailments of landscape as symbolic form. They relied on a language of ruins, exploring visual signifiers of absence fundamental to the operation of perspective: the vanishing point and the horizon line. Chapter 6 discusses cast shadows in Arakawa’s early diagrammatic canvases of the 1960s and Takamatsu Jirō’s Shadow series, which he began formulating at the same time. The cast shadow is invited into the canvas— and painting is invited back into experimental art—as an index of the absent object. The vanishing exists as its own category of obuje: one that is created to highlight the ambiguity of presence and absence, for which photography became the paramount model for emulation.

11

Introduction

Fig. 1 Takamatsu Jirō, documentary photographs for On Anti-Existence in Relation to a Curtain, 1963. Fifteenth Yomiuri Indépendant exhibition. Album page, photographs, 29.3 × 19.9 cm. Estate of Jiro Takamatsu. Image courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.

Part 1 Fragment

One evening in 1962, a young artist named Takamatsu Jirō jotted down a quick note in his sketchbook: “Think about turning all things existing in everyday life into obuje.” By way of clarification, he later added another, more developed thought: “To turn into an obuje means to free things from preexisting relations and to make them into the object of new ones.”1 In this hasty aide-mémoire, Takamatsu raised a number of intriguing points regarding the notion of obuje. First, there is a question of categories. Takamatsu characterized “everyday life” (nichijō) as a constraining set of assumptions about “things” (jibutsu). Obuje fundamentally transformed things—the stuff that makes up everyday life—into active agents within a new network of relationships. Second, there is a question of method and aims. The purpose of obuje, Takamatsu suggested, was to intervene within “everyday life.” Related to this, an observant reader will notice that art is not evoked in the note; indeed, Takamatsu appeared uninterested in using obuje to expand the contours of what could count as art. Rather, to him obuje was the result of a transformation effected within the everyday. This runs counter to the notion of autonomy on which art traditionally depends. By extension, Takamatsu distinguished obuje from the category “art”: for him, the relationship between these two two terms was ambiguous at best, if not entirely oppositional. Around 1960, the turn of young artists to obuje as a strategy in their work was hotly debated. Some commentators identified the trend as a discrete development in painting; in such accounts, the term obuje was used to characterize the incorporation within the picture plane of distinctly nonartistic materials, presented as either fabricated or found elements. Ostensibly deployed to draw attention to these elements’ formal qualities or to introduce a novel subject, such reliance on obuje appeared to grow as a phenomenon independently from the conventional media and language of the fine arts (fig. 1). The young generation’s turn to obuje presented a critical paradox. This turn to materials both found and fabricated recalled ideas and practices harking back to prewar antecedents, particularly the entwined histories of Dada and Surrealism and their contestation of art. From a critic’s perspective, this was not a new development, but in the context of postwar Japan, its resurgence

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at a later moment in history and in a wholly distinct geography indicated something entirely new. Some saw in the newly rediscovered efficaciousness of obuje a symptom of an altogether changed situation, arguing that the arrival of this procedure anticipated the demise of modernism and the emergence of contemporaneity in art. Obuje in the 1960s offered true emancipatory potential, for they showed that the realm of things, or the everyday, is not composed of static and unchanging “objects”—classically defined in Cartesian philosophy as entities with defined and impenetrable contours, existing independently from one another. Rather, obuje were proof that objects are expansive. In Takamatsu’s account, by “turning things into obuje,” an artist could reveal that relationships between things—and humans— are characterized by a fundamental contingency. The core teachings of obuje are those of potentiality, which account for their heterogeneity as an approach. They would come to designate a broad variety of practices and theories, as well as an uneven configuration of positions in a debate marked by conceptual and material concerns. Obuje, I argue, would be best described as a method whose aim was to upend the viewer’s expectations of the solidity of the world of objects. Key to the operation of obuje is the fact of fragmentation, which demarcates in formal terms a denial of notions of completion and totality that have been fundamental to the operation of art. Although in appearance contained and self-sufficient, like the traditional conception of the artwork, obuje are brought together by their productive mobilization of the effects of visual ambiguity and indeterminate form in the viewer, produced by fragmentation, which helped artists probe the doubled nature of the thing and the paradoxical impossibility of art. My first and second chapters consider the reemergence of an aesthetics of the fragment in obuje produced by artists of the generation that began exhibiting at the Yomiuri Indépendant in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the first chapter, I trace the inscription of a newly created body of work as obuje—considering in particular the conceptual legacies of Surrealism—by considering closely works by Arakawa Shūsaku and Kudō Tetsumi, among others, focusing in particular on the interplay between a notion of thingly agency and the deployment of obuje within actions. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the ruin as a type of obuje that foregrounds an absent object: in this case, community. I further explore the hysteric overtones of obuje as method—seen in the drive to negation, fragmentation, and repetition—in the second chapter, which examines the work of Miki Tomio. Here, I examine closely the connection between fragment and the compulsion to repeat, broadly interrogating the implications of Miki’s allusion to the structure of obsession. We find here a potential slippage into the recursive structure of melancholia.

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Chapter 1

Situation of the Obuje Arakawa Shūsaku’s Einstein Between Matter’s Structure and Faintest Sound (1958–59; National Museum of Art, Osaka) is a lidded box containing a white lump resting on a purple sateen pillow; eight indented almond shapes in black and gray are neatly arranged on the lump’s surface, while smaller appendages grow off its lower section (plate 1).1 Neither painting nor sculpture, Arakawa’s fabricated obuje produces in the viewer a sense of disturbing ambiguity through its juxtaposition of contradictory textures and forms. The soft contours of the lump delineate an almost lifelike figure swaddled in bedding, yet the cold roughness of its surface suggests the remains of something ancient. Indeterminate yet familiar—much like Dora Maar’s celebrated portrait of Père Ubu (1938)—the implausible monstrosity lying in its box is fashioned out of a collection of previously disconnected and recontextualized fragments that configure a being that appears neither dead nor alive. Einstein is known today as part of the so-called kan’oke shirīzu, or Coffin series, a name that stuck after critic Tōno Yoshiaki suggested that the cement lumps resting in their wooden boxes resembled “mummified corpses.”2 The series—which Arakawa presented in Another Graveyard (Mō hitotsu no hakaba), his first individual show, held in September 1960 at the Muramatsu Gallery—brought the artist considerable attention. (Indeed, the animosity this critical success generated led to his acrimonious parting from the legendary group Neo-Dadaism Organizers, of

16

which he had been a founding member.)3 It is quite remarkable, although perhaps unsurprising, that an artist who spent his later years theorizing immortality had his first big break with a series that proposed exploring the borderland between the living and the dead through ambiguous figurations.4 The titles of individual works in the series rely on evocative juxtapositions, recalling the names of heroic figures involved in the massive expansion of the natural sciences in the early twentieth century. But a type of morbid sentimentality contradicts the titles’ hard-edged scientism; the works include, among others, The Recollections of Madame Curie, Doctor Oparin’s Prayer, and Asanaga Shin’ichirō in the Midst of Supermanytime. While initially drawn to medicine, Arakawa decided to study art, arriving in Tokyo from Aichi prefecture after the end of the US-led Occupation of Japan. He dropped out of school shortly thereafter—typically, he found his teachers to be “a bunch of idiots”—and quickly found himself in financial difficulties. Arakawa later claimed to have faced a paralyzing sense of melancholy,5 which led him to the obsessive creation of things made with freely available materials he had gathered on the street: a box salvaged from a fishmonger, which he charred with a burner; a futon rescued from the trash, which he ripped open and whose stuffed cotton he mixed with cement; and an assortment of random debris like discarded irons, rubber tires, and more. When later recalling this moment, the artist claimed to have initially made these boxes for no one but himself and credited the influential critic and poet Takiguchi Shūzō, who visited his “dirty quarters” in Asagaya, with discovering these things he was producing as obuje. After rummaging through Arakawa’s room, Takiguchi asked, “Shouldn’t you be showing these somewhere?”6 What could Takiguchi have seen in Arakawa’s still-nameless things that provoked his recalling of the notion of obuje? A poem he contributed in lieu of an introduction to Arakawa’s second show, in early 1961, explains his fascination. Lying in the coffins, Takiguchi found “a fossilized touch-me-not / trapped by terror / in cement and cotton.” The poem develops an alluring, if terrifying, image—a paradoxical condensation of movement and stillness, of life and death. Takiguchi continues his poem by staging an imaginary dialogue with the artist:

Fragment

He once asked me insistently what I dream of before I sleep— That most absurd thing in the world that most wanted thing inside the bed, that thing that strange, found thing Flesh7

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Situation of the Obuje

After evoking the otherworldly appearance of the coffins and their occupants, the poetic speaker describes the unutterable desires they elicit. Repellent and alluring, the cement lumps are at once fossilized matter and living thing. The speaker finds the coffins’ occupants lying on their satin beds, which in the poem become a stand-in for his own, and where he now finds “that most wanted” yet terrifying thing: a flesh he disavowed. Progressively decomposing language through the tautological repetition of fragmentary sentences, Takiguchi evoked in his words the affective confusion engendered by the works’ clashing fragments, which nonetheless coalesce as a single “being” within the wooden containers. Fragmentation, opposition, juxtaposition, metonymy—elements such as these and their uncanny effects, likewise deployed by Takiguchi in his poem, are characteristically present in Surrealism and can be seen operating in an altogether similar manner in Arakawa’s coffins. To be clear, I am concerned less with biography than with the reception at this specific moment in time of a newly created body of work and its inscription within a discourse on materiality informed by the legacies of Surrealism. The facts of contradiction and the resulting affective ambiguity that Takiguchi recognized in Arakawa’s coffins—which hold at once live flesh and inert matter, presence and absence, desire and terror—squarely identify these works with the Surrealist debate on the objet, the nonsculptural constructions that gained particular importance for the avant-garde in the late 1920s and 1930s. In Takiguchi’s account, Arakawa’s work brought ostensibly inanimate matter back to life and eroticized it, turning it into a fetish stand-in for an absent yet desired body (“that strange, found thing / Flesh”). In discovering the coffins as obuje, Takiguchi aligned Arakawa’s work with the idea of a beauté convulsive, as proposed by Surrealism’s main ideologue, André Breton. Convulsive beauty was found in the inherently ambiguous: the explosive and fixed, erotic and veiled, fortuitous and necessary—contradictions the French author deemed inherent to how the objet effected its particular revelatory function. Breton noted, “The found object fulfils here the same function as that of the dream.”8 These pairs of dialectical oppositions are not resolved but rather enhanced in the crucible-like function of a thing that now operates through displacement and condensation as a dream—that is, as wish-fulfilment.9 Yet Takiguchi’s “found thing” speaks as well of a material reality that cannot be reduced solely to interior life or concept. The boxes condensed chance and necessity, hard material and inchoate sensation, and thus pointed to a fundamental problematization of the conditions of the object’s existence. What Takiguchi found remarkable in Arakawa’s coffins was precisely the material fact of such contradictions. How can we understand the ambiguity of obuje? They are at once object and concept. But unlike an artwork, traditionally conceived of as a form conveying meanings generated by an individual author, there is no immanent meaning to speak of. Obuje can only truly find meaning as a procedure, on becoming activated

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in relationship to a spectator’s experience of them. It is for this reason that there is a fundamental difficulty in defining what exactly obuje are. At once material thing and procedure, obuje are a method of estrangement of the everyday from its constraints under the irrationality of modern industrial society, which relies on a modification of the encounter with the object as experienced by the viewer. This method of estrangement was first developed and tested by the historical avant-garde, as objets. And so, before delving into exactly how and why it is that obuje regained currency in the context of post-Anpo Japan—how it is that this procedure moved and found a new relevance in a different time and place—I will first trace the contours of the debate on the objet surréaliste. In particular, I wish to center the question of whether objets succeeded in overcoming the contradictions between materiality and concept, or whether these tensions remained latent and condensed within them, for this ambiguity is the driving force of the objet as a specific surrealist procedure. In the late 1950s in Japan, this debate found renewed currency as critics sought a template for a new form of art as political action. While aware of these distinctive situations, critics found in objets (or rather, obuje) a template for a form of artistic engagement that could in some way bypass the pitfalls of representation in art and thereby speak directly to the material conditions of existence in the context of mass (re)industrialization. In the second half of this chapter, I will show more concretely how this was actualized in the avant-gardist experiments of the Anti-Art generation by exploring two key ways in which obuje were operationalized: first through a sustained thought on activation, and second in the progressive turn toward an aesthetics of the fragment.

Fragment

The Surrealist Objet: Between Concept and Materiality A growing interest in objets is evident in early Surrealist publications. In Les pas perdus (1924), for example, Breton muses on a (fictional) readymade by Marcel Duchamp, while in Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité (1925) he suggests fabricating objects “such as those only seen in dreams.” However, at the turn of the 1930s, the challenge that the objet surréaliste posed to a positivist understanding of the object began to receive sustained critical attention within Surrealist circles. Breton repeatedly referred to a “fundamental crisis of the object” (une crise fondamentale de l’objet) emerging from the various experiments carried out by the Surrealists, which exposed the adjacency and co-imbrication of notions traditionally perceived as opposite, such as the voluntary and happenstance, necessity and accident, attraction and revulsion, and material constraint and automatism’s unbound freedom of the mind.10 He grounded his account of the objet in the precedent of Marcel Duchamp’s readymade and its associated procedures—most significantly, arbitrary designation. In the act of choosing, naming, and thus resignifying

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Situation of the Obuje

industrially produced objects, Breton found a transformative potential that anticipated Surrealism’s call for a subversion of the everyday, as well as an apt device for achieving its aim of pure automatism. Salvador Dalí, in turn, advocated objectivizing desire through the use of what he named the objet à fonctionnement symbolique, a nonsculptural and “minimally mechanized object based on the phantasms and representations arising from unconscious acts,” in accordance with his preferred “paranoid-critical method.”11 However, from the very start, the objet as a category had exceeded the precedents set both by Duchamp’s arbitrary readymades and by the conscious elaboration of desire undergirding the metaphorical operation of Dalí’s objets. As a procedure—that is, as an approach to the fabrication and theorization of nonsculptural constructions and natural objects that aimed to effect in the viewer an estrangement from the everyday—the objet’s attractiveness resides in how, as concretization of desire, it rendered visible the ambiguous interplay of accident and choice. The deviation of purpose generated by designation, inversion, opposition, juxtaposition, and modification—all formal procedures employed by Surrealists in their manipulation of objets—recognized in things a fundamental capacity for affect. Rather than a passive notion of the object, then, the Surrealist theory of objets granted things a potent, almost agential quality previously denied to them. What drew the Surrealists to the objet was the affective response it elicited, which Breton likened to the effect that chance encounters, accidents, and dreams had in rendering anew the everyday as strange, thus freeing the viewer from the tyranny of reason. Breton increasingly began to associate the affective capacity of the objet with a tension at the center of the Surrealist program, between the hard actuality of the real—l’hasard objectif or objective chance (which he defined as an “expression of necessity”)—and the subjective encounter with le merveilleux, the wondrous and unexpected.12 Whether composed or found, material or immaterial—natural, manmade, perturbed, oneiric, symbolic, or even mathematical—in any of its myriad iterations, the objet appeared at the meeting point between interior life and exterior world and provoked the unconscious into action.13 Therefore, what Breton initially characterized as a “crisis” emerging from Surrealist procedures later became a reflection on the very conditions of the object.14 One can trace the evolution of Breton’s thought on objet from a question concerning the specific potential of the procedure as an aid in achieving automatism in visual form—i.e., the circumstances and conditions of the surrealist object—to a consideration of a more generalized situation surréaliste de l’objet, which altogether necessitated a retheorization of materiality and subject-object relations. The objet likewise helps illuminate various controversies, including the virulent dispute sparked by the publication of Breton’s Second Manifesto (1929), the excommunication of members of the Surrealist group, and the emergence of a dissident circle organized around Georges Bataille and the magazine Documents.

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Beyond the petty factionalism and personal animosity seen in the longstanding feud between Breton and Bataille was a substantial philosophical argument that arose from competing understandings of materialism and, directly related to this, the changing aims and priorities of the avant-garde as it faced the mounting threat of Fascism in Europe. By the publication of the Second Manifesto, Breton’s account of Surrealism had significantly shifted, as he increasingly sought to infuse its program for overturning reality with revolutionary politics and, especially, historical materialism—a core doctrine in Marxism. Breton found in historical materialism a method through which to resignify oppositions and tensions within the Surrealist program, and automatism, as he saw it, was Surrealism’s fundamental intellectual contribution to the revolutionary process. It would allow for a surpassing of the arbitrary division between reality and unreality and the antinomy that pitted concept against material.15 The objet furnished the proof; it was a crucible capable of not only containing such tensions but also overcoming them. It also tested the limits and contradictions of Breton’s position: as a procedure, is objet not the end result of a conceptual operation? In this regard, Bataille advanced a stringent critique of Breton’s position, finding in his version of historical materialism a rather impoverished understanding of the true nature of the dialectic. Bataille took issue with how Breton appeared to subordinate the material actuality of objects to thought. In his view, materialism—which we must note is a necessary fact of the objet—became lost to the act of naming things as objet. In other words, for Bataille, Breton appeared to still privilege concept over a deeper contemplation of material fact, thus curtailing the true ontological potential of the dialectical method. In the pages of his magazine Documents, Bataille began deploying an aesthetic program that positioned materialism as the only possible antidote to a philosophical tradition founded on the denial of the sensible world. But rather than simply advocating for materiality against concept, and thus reifying the idealist opposition of material and form, Bataille opted for a more radical position, dwelling on what art historian Georges Didi-Huberman calls their “contradictory inseparability.”16 Such a notion is perhaps most successfully articulated in Bataille’s sustained thought on the formless, or informe. For Bataille, informe meant “to bring things down.” In a world in which everything is expected to be dressed in its own form and carry its own name, to say that the world is formless is to say that the universe is closer “to a spider or spit.”17 The indeterminate formlessness of the world in its raw state, the baseness of material existence, defies the mantle of reason with which philosophers had for so long attempted to subjugate its mysteries. Crucially, in the context of 1930s Europe, base materialism undid the mystifications with which bourgeois society obfuscated the realities of capitalist exploitation and its extension in Fascism’s ersatz communitarianism and hero worship.

Turning Objets into Obuje: Thingly Agency and the Aesthetics of Revolt

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Situation of the Obuje

The debate on obuje in Japan in the late 1950s and early 1960s rediscovered Surrealism’s emphasis on the social and psychic conditions of materiality as a key issue in redefining the relationship of art to politics. As a number of critics remarked, the objet as procedure—as opposed to a reified format or genre in art making—appeared to become once again an appropriate means of interrogating social relations at a moment when Japan exited an era marked by political possibility and entered a new moment in which social control was reimposed from above. In the aftermath of the 1960s protests and through the following decade, the government aggressively moved to curtail the social ferment that characterized the early postwar moment. With one arm, it repressed labor hotspots and increased the policing of dissent; with another, it fostered demobilization and depoliticization through the promotion of consumerism and the development of a new rhetoric of affluence.18 While Surrealism’s account of the objet was introduced to Japan at the height of modanizumu—the cultural moment preceding the progressive deterioration of political conditions in the 1930s—some postwar critics thought the local avantgarde had misunderstood its potential. In the late 1950s, critics began to reevaluate the development of this notion in order to clarify what they deemed to be a misuse of the notion of objet in contemporary discourse, seeking to rescue the practice from its reification as art. In 1957, for example, the critics Hariu Ichirō and Ebara Jun contributed lengthy essays assessing the potential of the objet surréaliste for a special issue of the art magazine Mizue; the issue also included a roundtable discussion with Takiguchi Shūzō and the critics Tōno Yoshiaki and Nakahara Yūsuke, among others. Reading this exchange, we are able to retrace the steps leading from objet to obuje. Ebara and Hariu thought that the recognition of thingly agency was the key to recovering the potency of the objet. For Ebara, objet not only represented but also elicited an affective response from the viewer; for Hariu, objet could mediate action and intervene within social space. Ebara and Hariu were building on the historical reception and transformation of such ideas in the Japanese context, but their account diverged from the original circumstances in which these ideas had been introduced to Japan, in particular through the translations and critical writings of Takiguchi Shūzō. Takiguchi’s account provided the base understanding in the postwar moment of the objet as an avant-gardist method or approach (yōhō) that stood outside traditional fine arts categories such as format and genre.19 Takiguchi highlighted the debate on the situation of the Surrealist objet as a fundamental question in his monograph Modern Painting (Kindai kaiga, 1938), in which he explained: “An obuje is a thing that evidently stands in opposition to the shūje (F. sujet = subject), and that according to its context can be either an object [kyakutai], a physical thing [buttai], or, within everyday concepts, merely stuff [mono].”20 By naming them obuje,

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Takiguchi distinguished these constructions from other manifestations of the object: the material stuff the subject encounters in the world, as well as the object’s philosophical, physical, or everyday dimension. Even as they retain a clear, material connection to their previous state, obuje have undergone a transformation. Takiguchi highlights in obuje the subversion of the dialectical opposition between subject and object. However, while he pointed to the distinct philosophical problems opened up by the emergence of the obuje as a strategy for subversion of the everyday—specifically, through the abandonment of an idealized notion of subjectivity and a progressive engagement with the material conditions of everyday life—Takiguchi did not evoke the political implications of such a method. This is entirely congruent with the context in which Takiguchi operated: avant-gardist activity was being rendered increasingly difficult by the inexorable rise of authoritarianism, a tipping point having been reached with the adoption of the National Mobilization Law (Kokka sōdōin hō) in 1938—the year of Modern Painting’s publication. Despite Takiguchi’s reticence about investing obuje with political meaning, its connection to political subversion would become key to its postwar reception. Ebara Jun, for example, identified obuje as a means of accomplishing a dislocation of the senses, whose ultimate aim was the discovery of the self as other (tasha).21 In his essay for Mizue, Ebara turned to what he understood were obuje’s three fundamental types: Duchamp’s readymades, Breton’s account of the objet onirique (an objet existing only in dreams), and the type of allegorical objets created by Alberto Giacometti and Salvador Dalí. For Ebara, Duchamp demonstrated the true potential of obuje as a procedure. By turning to everyday objects, Duchamp not only inaugurated an antiformalist procedure that succeeded in breaking art; he also, through the debasement of things, discovered his unconscious and achieved a means for “the exploration of the unconscious exchanges taking place spontaneously among humans, and between humans and things.”22 While his objet onirique would by definition need to remain an idea never truly concretized, Breton likewise indicated the destabilizing potential of the objet; by giving actual form to internal and unknown desires, an objet could alienate a viewer from herself. There was a danger, however, in misunderstanding the resulting objet as a simple fetish—that is, as an externalization of desire—that could satisfy and resolve all internal cravings. Such a fetishistic relationship to objects was most clearly found in the allegorically oriented constructions by Giacometti and Dalí that reduced desire to the sexual act. (Ebara regarded Giacometti’s obscene Boule suspendue with particular contempt.) Obuje as procedure, in Ebara’s thinking, should seek instead to mobilize desire in an upheaval of the senses, leading to an alienation of the self from the experience of the everyday and thus pushing the subject toward a permanent state of revolt. Ebara’s remarks on an estrangement of the self resonate with Hariu Ichirō’s interest in how obuje facilitate a critique of humanism. Hariu noted that twentieth-century art was founded on a confrontation with mechanical civilization and the massive

transformation of social structures; by turning to obuje, the avant-garde foregrounded the irrational nature of contemporary society. Artists, Hariu noted, should learn from these experiments and “use the realm of the unconscious as an aid . . . to render concrete [gushōka] the irrational nature of social reality.” Such a notion had continued relevance; referring to artwork by Tsuruoka Masao and Ikeda Tatsuo, Hariu noted in 1957, “In the past two or three years, in the field of art, the idea of ‘drawing objects, not events,’ or taking up humanity as one would do with things, has become quite common. This is not disconnected from the philosophy behind obuje, in that obuje is not just a protest against the times, an assertion of one’s freedom from notions of humanism and benevolence [zen’i]; rather, obuje aims to pull apart such stereotypical self-identification by relying on material reality.”23 In the shadow of Auschwitz and the ongoing threat of nuclear annihilation, the continued relevance of avant-gardist critiques of humanism was incontrovertible. And yet artists faced a paradoxical gap between obuje as a procedure formulated by the historical avant-garde and its use in their current practice. At the core of this problem was the reification of obuje. The avant-garde had successfully introduced the expressive potential of preexisting materials, but this had resulted in often-stereotyped, overly schematic, and psychologizing images: “Nowadays anyone can rely on the well-known strategies of debasement and montage.”24 And yet no one could escape the potential reduction of artwork to a simple aesthetic shorthand: the crisis of the obuje related to what Hariu deemed was such a generalized condition. Materiality was the key to renewing the function of art. By highlighting the polyvalent role of materiality, obuje opened a path for reassessing burning questions surrounding the documentary function of art and its capacity for social transformation. Materiality furnished the grounds for exploring the alienating aspects of industrial society and its effects on humans. But for obuje to be effective would require a refusal of representation.

Hariu highlighted Dada’s and Surrealism’s shared suspicion of representation and their negativity, drawing attention to the critical potential found in both of these

Situation of the Obuje

[If] we found the resulting images are as easily co-optable and reducible to obsolete notions of objecthood, then once again we must destroy them, seeking instead a direct connection to spontaneous action and expression. It should be possible for us to harness the automatism that the Surrealists relied upon to explore psychological reality, using it instead to explore material reality. In a sense, this is a re-evaluation of Dada: in the context of art in Japan, where the negation of the self has not yet taken place, it is necessary to reassess the importance of this anti-art and antihumanist movement.25

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moments of the avant-garde. Like automatism, materiality could harness directly the alienation of modern society—but artists needed to learn to refuse the temptations of the image. A key element in Ebara’s and Hariu’s arguments is a belief in the potential of thingly agency to subvert the regime of representation: both critics recognized, in different forms, the metonymic function of obuje. Instead of the traditional emphasis on metaphor in art, and through the inclusion and active manipulation of everyday materials, artists privileged a direct connection to changing social and psychological realities. But while the logic of obuje appeared to primarily indicate a subversion of things, ultimately, for both Ebara and Hariu, its present and future potential was predicated on a capacity to generate new relationships between subjects through the action that it mediated or elicited.26 Similarly, Hariu’s discussion needs to be situated in relation to an emergent discourse on action—which he cursorily alluded to in his essay, in relation to the rise of phenomena such as Art Informel and Action Painting—that progressively resignified the transformation of materials as an index of social transformation. The roundtable discussion concluding Mizue’s special issue on the legacy of Surrealism brought together Hariu and Ebara along with Takiguchi, Tōno, Nakahara Yūsuke, and the poets Kiyooka Takayuki and Hiraoka Atsuo.27 Referring to the potential of obuje, the panelists discussed at length the implications of what Ebara called “scandal.” Ebara defined this as the Surrealist objet’s capacity to generate a sense of unease in the viewer, leading to action. Such a capacity indicates that, unlike more traditionally defined artwork, the Surrealist objet is able to negate the distance separating work, artist, and viewer, ultimately generating a new type of relationality (kizuna) between author and spectator. Further distancing the objet from the traditional notion of art is that the need for incompletion is key to the effectiveness of this procedure; the most effective obuje were those that, unlike Dalí’s overly scripted works, allowed for a certain equivocation in meaning. As the theory went, the affective upheaval evoked by obuje would be key to undermining the social order, leading to a state of permanent revolution. Whether this was a viable political and aesthetic program was hotly discussed. Takiguchi saw in this constant production of “anti-theses” the pursuit of an irresolvable contradiction: an espousal of quasi-Trotskyist positions that reflected the radicalized milieu of 1930s Europe. And yet, while the objet was formulated originally as a type of antiart practice, many among such objects had eventually resolved into a reformulated notion of art. Likewise, Hariu called attention to how the stereotyped image or easy scandal exemplified, in his view, the potential for Surrealism’s reduction and commodification as style. Despite such shortcomings, Ebara saw in the short-lived “five seconds” of revolt promoted by scandal a bridge to transformative action. Takiguchi touched upon a crucial aspect of the transformation of objet into obuje at the end of the roundtable, however briefly, when, seeking to expand on the

historical objet’s agential qualities, he introduced a comparison with the Japanese folk belief in mononoke—the spirit of things, a traditional form of animism. Takiguchi’s analogy emphasized the elements of vitalism and thingly agency found in the objet. But by correlating the objet to such folk beliefs, Takiguchi established a cultural substrate for transfer of this practice. Unwittingly, perhaps, he also expanded its purview, bridging the procedure to similar practices and discussions on materiality—for example, the vitalist theories of Okamoto Tarō, which proved influential in the then-raging debate on the status of cultural tradition in modernism (dentō ronsō)28— thus rendering the Bretonian objet into obuje. Why do I insist that the endpoint of this process is obuje and not objet? In other words, what further distinguishes postwar obuje from its prewar precedent, objet? First, obuje is a retheorization, taking place decades after the initial formulation of the concept of objet. This debate is, moreover, rooted in local concerns and mediated through the deliberate and self-conscious deployment of a historicist view of transfer that calls the theory itself into question. Second, the stress of this renewed discussion was explicitly articulated in relation to the space of the social, which delimited both the possibilities and the shortcomings of the procedure. This led to a heightened concern with obuje as mediators of action—namely, the idea of a “five-second revolt” provoked through material means, connecting artist and spectator in an affective exchange. Third, considering the paths that transformed objet into obuje, I further contend that the arrival of Surrealism in Japan should be understood as not simply the process of movement and implantation of an imported idea but rather part of the development of a complex, culturally situated set of theories and material practices informed by and yet exceeding the confines of Breton’s doxa (and Bataille’s heresy). Indeed, the translation of Surrealist theory within Japanese avant-gardism involved a creative and productive adaptation: a process that was, moreover, traumatically interrupted by the rise of authoritarianism and war. Likewise, the postwar debate over the status of the obuje progressively acquired particular forms of stress that drew from, reelaborated, and ultimately exceeded Breton’s initial theorization of the objet. Lastly, obuje as a procedure was ultimately shaped not by critics and theorists but by artists whose practice significantly expanded the confines of this concept through their sustained attention to activation. In the postwar resurgence of this line of inquiry, then, rather than verifying the continuity with Surrealism with the “content” itself, we should attend to how obuje provoke and politicize the uncanny return of once-repressed desires in those who engage with the art.

While the so-called Coffin series is nowadays usually displayed with lids removed, this was a later development. An often-overlooked aspect of Arakawa’s early series

Situation of the Obuje

The Obuje in Action

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is that the boxes were supposed to be opened and examined at close distance by the viewer (fig. 2). I quote again from Tōno’s review of Arakawa’s 1960 show: “For a second the lighting appeared somewhat overstaged, but a shiver ran down my spine as I entered what looked like a funerary chamber in the ruins of a Mayan temple. 26 The artist has asked viewers to approach these coffin-like boxes and open their lids one by one. Inside, cement lumps resembling mummified corpses lie on beddings fashioned out of linen, velvet, and other fabrics. The confused sensation of presence and absence is truly uncanny.”29 Tōno notes the viewer’s manipulation of these obuje as a key aspect of how they operate: setting up a close encounter with each work’s mysterious occupants was essential in eliciting in the viewer an unsettling sense of ambiguity. By inviting the viewer to manipulate them, Arakawa clearly separated the boxes from the traditional object relationship instantiated in the fine arts system, in which a viewer is supposed to experience the art passively and dispassionately. Commenting on the show, Nakahara Yūsuke likewise noted, “Someone fixated on the orthodoxy of painting and sculpture might look at these and think they are seeing only strange objects. However, Fig. 2 Arakawa Shūsaku, Container of Sand, 1958–59. Cement, the cement lumps in the wooden boxes sand, cotton, wood shavings, fabric, wood, 12.5 × 180 × 125 cm. Walker Art Center. © 2021 Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced show a rare creativity that shakes up one’s with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins. Photo: Nakano sense of existence, once the viewer underMasataka. stands that Arakawa’s work is born from the unartistic, barren landscape.”30 They were neither painting nor sculpture, but objects, to be used; while as fragments the boxes are contained and self-sufficient, they were only activated through the viewer’s intervention. On manipulating and opening the boxes, the viewer entered a sort of confused Zwischenraum—an in-between realm of things separate and yet coterminous with the everyday. By signifying this ambiguous space, Arakawa’s obuje generated affective responses and beckoned further action. He inaugurated an approach that he would ultimately expand in later works, such as tableaus demanding viewer interaction in the series The Mechanism of Meaning and participatory installations and architectural projects developed with his partner Madeline Gins. Beyond an uncanny arrangement of material components, Arakawa’s mise-en-scènes

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Situation of the Obuje

always demanded spectator manipulation—the opening and closing of lids. His obuje facilitated the dissolution of the barrier between art and life. Arakawa explored such a refusal of distance in similarly ambiguous actions, in which he sought to directly appeal to the onlooker. Ebara Jun described in an essay how he first met Arakawa at a dinner party, during which the artist unexpectedly broke into a steady chant: “Itai . . . itai . . . itai . . .” (It hurts . . . it hurts . . . it hurts . . .), delivered in an increasingly loud baritone and accompanied by banging on the floor and sobbing. The diners were petrified; Takiguchi alone consoled him. Ebara saw this as a confirmation of the melancholic madness of the artist, which Arakawa nonetheless was able to overcome and sublimate through the creation of artwork.31 Beyond biography, however, the anecdote underscores a broader concern with action. During the inauguration of Arakawa’s first exhibition, he held a rite celebrating “World Artistic Talent” (Sekai geijutsu-zai), in which a spotlight projection became alternately larger and smaller at increasing speed; a chronometer ticked away as a gigantic pair of papier-mâché feet appeared and disappeared from view.32 Arakawa and his generation of artists relied on obuje as initiators of action, thus expanding the obuje’s agential quality. Distinct from a theatrical deployment of props in a scene, these artists’ use of obuje facilitated their engagement with the everyday. In one of the earliest actions now associated with the radical collective Hi-Red Center, its core members organized an intervention in the Yamanote Line of the National Railway in Tokyo (fig. 3). Known later, especially through Akasegawa Genpei’s writings, as the Yamanote Line Incident (Yamanote-sen jiken), the “Yamanote Festival” involved the introduction of manipulable obuje (kadō-teki obuje).33 Nakanishi Natsuyuki deployed his seductive Compact Obuje, egg-shaped polyester resin moldings containing jetsam and debris he collected at the Izu seaside. Ironically relying on a thought process concomitant with “compactness” in industrial design, Nakanishi could be witnessed stuffing the refuse of city life inside the semitransparent ovoids. Dressed as a newlywed in a suit, his face painted white, the artist and his colleagues manipulated the ovoid obuje at Yūrakuchō Station, licking them while crouching and covering them in raw eggs. Using flashlights to shine beams through the obuje, they then suspended them from leather straps inside the train’s carriage. In turn, Takamatsu Jirō used his (at this point still untitled) RopeObuje (Himo-jō obuje, 1962), which he carried around half-dangling out of a bag, to delimit the space of action, uncannily directing the public’s response to the scene of the unexpected (fig. 4). Placing various things along a rope and binding all elements with insulating tape, Takamatsu subverted the notion of line by generating an object that existed in between two and three dimensions; rather than exhibit it as artwork in a gallery setting, the artist used this indeterminate obuje as an aid in discrete actions such as this one. In the case of Yamanote Line Incident, it was as

Fig. 3 Takamatsu Jirō manipulates his Rope-Obuje, documentary photograph of the Hi-Red Center’s Yamanote Line Incident, 1962. Estate of Jiro Takamatsu. Image courtesy of Bijutsu Shuppansha and Yumiko Chiba Associates. Fig. 4 Takamatsu Jirō, Drawing (Sketchbook 27: On Anti-Existence in Relation to a Boston Bag), November 15, 1962. Pen on paper, 17.6 × 25.1 cm. Estate of Jiro Takamatsu. Image courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.

if, by manipulating the obuje in action, the artists sought to break the confines of their shells, letting loose an overflow of debris and desire in Tokyo’s business center. Using obuje, the artists infiltrated the everyday in order to release an affective “agitation effect”—in other words, to generate a moment of upheaval in one of the neuralgic centers of international capitalism. Nakanishi’s notes underscore that obuje were not mere props in the Hi-Red Center’s action but provided a strategy for these artists as they sought to intervene within the social fabric—a strategy that yielded to things the power to initiate action. Writing from the point of view of a mysterious “Urobon K.”—his fictive alter ego—Nakanishi called attention to a third element in the action: the perforated postcard he sent, alerting a select group that an untitled something would occur at a given time and place.

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Wouldn’t it be better to think that the perforated postcard and the events that took place in the train were independent from each other? That’s because in the end, the train’s interior was the place the rope and eggs—in other words, the compact obuje— had demanded. Grasping the “train” from its opposite resulted in the postcard. It is a mistake to think that the postcards and the compact obuje are the same—this would collapse act and thought process [kōi to shikō no kondō]. The postcard’s mission ends with its “greeting.” Isn’t this why, after sending out the postcards, Nakanishi said that there was nothing left to do?34

Situation of the Obuje

For Nakanishi, the postcard played a fundamentally different role from other elements involved. Itself an obuje, the postcard acted according to its own logic. Nakanishi later noted that had he printed a title on the postcard, the card would have become the title for an artwork, and the interior of the train its content. But apart from time and place, no other information was written on the cards; there was nothing indicating that a subversive “agitation effect” (kakuhan sayō) would result from this artwork, “because we weren’t thinking about proposing such agitation effect as a generalizable theory [ippanron].”35 In other words, the agitation effect was ultimately contingent on the presence of obuje and the action they themselves demanded.36 Indeed, by yielding to obuje the capacity to initiate action, Nakanishi appeared to espouse a fundamental antihumanism. In their active capacity, the obuje discussed above share an intensive reflection on and subversion of the everyday relationships established between thing and thing, things and people, and, ultimately, people and people. However, although objects, objets, obuje, and other things have played a central role in mediating this continuous reflection on self and other, narratives of this moment have tended to efface what I will call objectuality, by which I mean an active quality in material

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objects that one might characterize by incompletion and projection. Such projective aspects unsettle the viewer. They can be witnessed at work in the phantasmal remainder of a fetish, the generative force of a fragment, the indeterminacy in certain forms that allows for particular types of spatial interventions, and the instability of objects as they unfold within action. Instead, critics have chosen to reorient the debate in terms of an inexorable advance toward the utopian dissolution of materials. Even the practice of the most conceptual of Japanese artists in this period, Matsuzawa Yutaka, relied on the notion of obuje—although through its utter disavowal. Matsuzawa famously articulated his program as a one-man “movement for the abolition of the obuje” (obuje o kese undō). Here again, we find the cast shadow of Surrealism’s impossible objet onirique: Matsuzawa famously claimed that this idea arrived to him as an order in a dream.37 In obuje we witness an attempt at a reframed materialism, along the lines of Surrealism’s polemic against the philosophical tradition of idealism. But obuje exceed such articulation in that they are characterized by their open-ended projection of materials within action. Above all, the realm they indicate is the liminal space connecting materials and affect.38 While obuje as fragments appear contained and self-sufficient, they in fact continue to develop and unfold in an active relationship with the spectator. Indeed, the quality that makes an obuje is not its thing-ness but this procedural relationship. Activation necessarily raises questions concerning the nature of things and their connection to the social—and thus, as a procedure, obuje demand that we return to the question of art and politics, but on different terms: no longer as a question of representation—for example, as documentation of political struggles—but as a means of direct action effected through the manipulation of materials, where the target of the action is the viewer’s unconscious. Performance, as a methodological approach, called attention to how material belonging has been theorized in relation to function, focusing on the intersubjective linkage, or commissure, between artist and community.39 I argue that obuje enabled similar reflections by positing a procedure that released things from their subordination to humans as a necessary component or catalyst of action. Within this framework obuje appeared not simply as witnesses or relics of action. Rather, as attested to in the debates discussed above, they were imagined as grounding a renewed commitment to an avant-gardist practice (Takiguchi), as fetishes instantiating psychic and social process (along the lines of the critical reevaluations by Ebara and Hariu), or as facilitators of interventions and interruptions within everyday space (in the case of Nakanishi and the Hi-Red Center). While some of these artists—Arakawa, Takamatsu, and Nakanishi, for example— subsequently returned to painting, obuje irrevocably transformed their approach to artistic practice. The construct “painting” itself was altered, freeing it from ideologies of illusionism and representation. This perhaps clarifies the ironic approval implicit in Marcel Duchamp’s reported comments on first encountering

Arakawa’s large-scale diagrammatic canvases, after the latter’s relocation to New York in the 1960s: “These are not paintings.”40

Impotence of the Obuje

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The active capacity of obuje turned the procedure into a key site in the debate over the status of direct action in the post-Anpo moment. The questions animating this return to obuje concerned not only how objects mediated action but also under which conditions action itself was possible. In this regard, it is instructive to reconsider the development of Kudō Tetsumi’s work throughout the decade, which can be seen as a sort of topological exploration of obuje’s capabilities as a procedure, and through which the artist directed a sustained interrogation of art’s capacity (or lack thereof) to effect social change. For Kudō—who spent his early days as a painter exploring the notion of action (akushon)—the obuje was both a generator and a catalyzer of affect. Among the obuje he submitted to the Yomiuri Indépendant of 1960, Proliferating Chain Reaction in X-Style Basic Substance consisted of an X-shaped iron frame fashioned out of prefabricated components, to which Kudō attached bristled scrubs and industrial cotton refuse (plate 2). It was famously in reference to Kudō’s work that Tōno came up with the term “anti-art made of junk” (Kudō was not pleased with this characterization).41 The materials were lumped and held together with pink plastic tubing, and the off-white cotton resembled a foaming substance aggregating uncontrollably on the frame. The evocative, haptic nature of this obuje recalls the life force of organic matter through accumulation. The obuje reflects an almost animistic understanding of matter, a sense that is reinforced in Kudō’s comments on his body of work in a 1961 essay: “When we consider the energy of an atom, if the atom is exploded as an atomic bomb, the energy is dispersed and not converted into any tangible form. We therefore build an atomic reactor and accelerate particles in that reactor to generate massive energy. That energy is converted into electricity and other practical things. Think of my work as doing the same.”42 In Kudō’s view, the obuje not only represents but also does by its very being: operating as a reactor, it concentrates and converts the metaphysical energy co-involving object and spectator into something practical. The obuje as reactor and generator amplifies and channels libidinal investments, potentially leading to an overturning of social structures. (Otherwise, this process might result in failure, as Kudō later explored in his obuje-reliant series Philosophy of Impotence.) While Kudō’s rhetoric of scientism needs to be contextualized within his theorization of society as circuit, which he derived from the nascent field of cybernetics, it is important to observe how his reflection on the agency of objects expanded on and redefined the contemporaneous discussion on the legacies of the Surrealist objet.

Situation of the Obuje

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Throughout his prolific career, Kudō produced obuje in a variety of scales and formats, ranging from key holder–sized models to monumental reliefs, which he deployed as discrete works or as part of complex environmental installations and actions. Whether relying on obuje as catalyzing agents or deploying them as didactic tools, in addressing portraiture or inviting a reconsideration of landscape, Kudō sought to explore the problem of activation, which he articulated in explicitly political terms. Kudō increasingly relied on narrative and iconography in his works’ layered and complex references to consumption and protest—two major features in contemporaneous affluent society. Form and content inform each other, however, in that his obuje likewise stage their inherent impotence—the defining counterpart of the potential for transformative action—through a reliance on the aesthetics of the fragment. The series Philosophy of Impotence capped Kudō’s early exploration of notions of energy, potency, and systems seen in large gestural paintings of the late 1950s. In these, Kudō relied on the idea of systems as both subject matter and a means of theorizing the relationship that work and artist established with the spectator. His turn to the use of obuje redirected his exploration of activation in happenings (hapuningu) and environments (enbairanmento). However, as the title of the series indicates, Philosophy of Impotence reflects a fundamental ambivalence regarding the outcome of action: this became the main question Kudō sought to address in his practice and writings over the following decade. In its first two iterations, Philosophy of Impotence was presented as protoenvironments composed of ephemeral obuje. Kudō exhibited the first version in 1961 at a gallery in Tokyo’s Ginza district.43 Kudō lined up four black cylinders with tapering tips in front of panels hanging on the wall. Some of the cylinders appeared to implode—becoming bulbous on the top and oozing a translucent resinous substance. On the panels’ surface, as well as that of each of the cylinders, were inserted metallic buttons resembling transistors; these swirled around two rows of plastic domes and were in turn cannibalized by biomorphic elements. The spatial orientation of the work allowed the artist to present the interaction of a series of complex, overlapping systems, including a dematerialized network signified by a radio broadcast of market indicators. These components presented a visualization of the excess of desire that simultaneously propels and threatens the society of mass consumption. Kudō was an avid reader of popular science and therefore well acquainted with the expansion of cybernetic theory across a number of disciplines. Articulated initially in the field of machine computation, proponents of cybernetics quickly became interested in extending its study to complex social and environmental interactions. Norbert Wiener, one of its pioneers, defined cybernetics as the entire field of communication and control theory. Even in the early stages of the development of cybernetics, Wiener sought to include specialists in psychology, sociology, and anthropology, as he progressively understood the applicability

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Situation of the Obuje

of this theory to physiological phenomena to have important consequences for the study of social structures. Cybernetics showed significant overlaps with pragmatism in philosophy, whose account of communication was critically adopted in Japan by Tsurumi Shunsuke, a prominent figure in liberal-left circles involved in the Anpo contestation movement. Tsurumi had critiqued John Dewey’s upbeat account of communication in society, positing instead “dis-communication,” i.e., disagreement and misunderstanding, as a fundamental aspect of politics.44 Moreover, as John von Neumann’s noted work on game theory posited, economic phenomena such as the market could likewise be understood as a system—even if Wiener countered that, left to its own devices, this would be a particularly skewed game. “One of the most surprising facts about the body politic is its extreme lack of efficient homeostatic processes,” Wiener wrote. “We are involved in the business cycles of boom and failure, in the successions of dictatorship and revolution, in the wars which everyone loses, which are so real a feature of modern times.”45 When transposed to the realm of social experience, such complex systems were beset with the potential for failure—but failure could also entail a system’s possible transformation. Kudō’s visualizations of failure became increasingly topical in the second version of Philosophy of Impotence—also a multipart environment—that occupied an entire gallery in the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum when it was shown in 1962 at the fourteenth Yomiuri Indépendant. For this iteration of the work, Kudō cast nets from the gallery’s walls and ceiling. From the nets dangled oblong elements fashioned out of black insulating tape with light bulbs at one end (plate 3). Two bundles of phalli were cast from the ceiling; tied to one of them, an oversized papier-mâché phallus stood upright from the base (fig. 5). Under it flowed a stream of udon noodles (later replaced with string), on which rested magazine cutouts depicting consumption, the emerging culture of leisure, and protest. These included reproductions of works by Pop artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg; a geodesic dome by Buckminster Fuller; advertisements for prepared soup; and photographs of body builders training, a couple dancing the twist, and student protestors in school uniforms during the Anpo protests of 1960. The images appear deliberately selected for their solipsism: bodybuilding builds the body for its own sake; in the twist, dancers go nowhere. Left intellectuals such as Tsurumi had portrayed the Anpo protests as the expression of an untapped energy vying for direction and liberation—yet these mass protests had failed to impede the forcible ratification of the Anpo Treaty. Were the works by Rauschenberg and Johns similarly cast as expressions of the limited capacities of the avant-garde? Did the mimetic impulse on which their expressions of resistance relied signal their inexorable co-optation into the cultural industry?46 While gesturing to possibility, Kudō likewise indicated a clear limit to art’s possible intervention in the everyday. The combination of the standing penis and the photographs placed on the stream of ejaculate at its base clearly alludes to (male) masturbation. However,

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Fig. 5 Kudō Tetsumi, Philosophy of Impotence, 1962. Fourteenth Yomiuri Indépendant exhibition. © Hiroko Kudo, the Estate of Tetsumi Kudo / SOCAN (2021). Photo: Yoshioka Yasuhiro. Image courtesy of the Museum of

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Contemporary Art, Tokyo.

this reference was only made explicit in the final version of Philosophy of Impotence, a happening performed at the Boulogne Studios in Paris in February 1963. This happening took place within a multisensorial spectacle organized by the radical French artist Jean-Jacques Lebel. Kudō, who had relocated with his wife to Paris in 1962, quickly found himself communing with the artists of the European assemblage scene, with whom the obuje-reliant artist had much in common. The event reframed Kudō’s work within the context of Lebel’s radical libertine thought, where happenings functioned as a means to achieve a Reichian release of libidinal energies. Lebel’s event, titled To Conjure the Spirit of Catastrophe, deployed happenings as a response to the rise of the affluent society of the postwar period and what the artist saw as its disastrous environmental, political, social, and economic consequences. A series of photographs show Kudō tied up with ropes from which dangle small phalli; he performed undulating movements with strenuous facial expressions, interacting with the audience while holding and caressing a large phallus. The happening ended with Kudō screaming loudly and falling backward “in a mystical orgasm.”47

A purported connection of masturbation to impotence was commonplace in sexological discourse throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Richard von Krafft-Ebing discussed the deleterious effects of “Onanie” on male potency in Psychopathia Sexualis,48 and, as Fae Brauer notes, social Lamarckians decried the “plague of Onan” as a reason for the decline of France’s population in the run-up to the Great War.49 Masturbation as a cipher made its way into avant-gardist discourse in part due to such pathologization, and references to it are frequently found in the work of Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp.50 In Japan, the prewar avantgarde group Mavo similarly referred to masturbation as a site of resistance against ideologies of normalcy and reproduction and used it as an appropriate metaphor for the aimlessness of creative action.51 There are problematic aspects to Kudō’s action: he appeared clad in a light cotton kimono, underscoring his racial and cultural otherness.52 Further, the sexual politics of the distribution of labor in the event as a whole, particularly the promotion of a caste of artist-priests leading the exorcism of society, reinforced in many ways the modernist obsession with male genius and potency. This objectionable aspect should, however, be placed in the context of Lebel’s program for a liberation of the body and sexuality from repression under capital. Kudō’s extravagant happening exhibited more clearly the parodic elements that helped convey his upbeat nihilism. By appropriating and mirroring the accusations leveled by art critics against the young generation of artists regarding what they considered a derivative or pseudo- (rather than Neo-) Dadaist “anti” stance, Kudō subverted the idea that their response to the current state of affairs was one of simple-minded opposition. Yet in confronting the twin problems of a selfcongratulatory but static field of art and an increasingly oppressive sense of a lack of political alternatives, what means remained available to avant-gardists? What was there left of the Left other than opposition, negativity, and irony?

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The Hysteric Obuje

Situation of the Obuje

In the happening version of Philosophy of Impotence, Kudō related impotence to expressions of hysteria, through which nineteenth-century medicine had pathologized women’s rebellion against constricting bourgeois gender norms. Indeed, the sexualized movements, hyperventilation, paralysis, and Kudō’s paroxysmal screams are all reminiscent of the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s description of hysteria’s symptoms, as well as the photographic iconography he introduced in its early study.53 As we have seen, Kudō leveled a multipronged attack on the idea of potency in society and art; availing himself of the iconography of hysteria, he now drew attention to the elements of negation structuring the operations of the avant-garde.

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The term “hysteria” itself was not infrequently deployed in Japanese art criticism to refer to the Indépendant generation’s Anti-Art. But perhaps more importantly, its features were alluded to in describing the comportment of these young artists. Discussed initially as an almost irrational negation of art, the young generation’s work appeared to critics like Hariu Ichirō and Tōno Yoshiaki as an ambivalent although potentially productive oppositional stance that emerged from the shifting social and economic conditions of postwar capitalism.54 Tōno Yoshiaki—prompted in part by his encounter in his travels in Europe and the United States with the work of Jean Tinguely and the Nouveaux Réalistes, as well as Rauschenberg and Johns, among others—famously came up with the idea that the art of the Indépendant generation was a reactive “anti-art made of junk” (garakuta no hangeijutsu), and he noted that just as these artists had grown up during the war making toys out of rubble, they had acquired the ability to integrate all surrounding materials into their art.55 Reviewing this hypothesis a few years later, he suggested that the urge to “use elements extraneous to the notion of painting and sculpture as some form of hysteric opposition, or just as a rush to catch the next thing, must certainly have been there, but in some of these artists (like Kudō, Shinohara [Ushio], or Arakawa Shūsaku) this appeared like a fairly natural and unforced tendency.”56 This account contrasted with the discussion advanced by Miyakawa Atsushi, with whom Tōno sparred over the implications of Anti-Art. While Tōno understood their “junk” primarily as a stylistic development, Miyakawa read into the practices associated with Anti-Art, and particularly the young generation’s turn to obuje, a symptom that pointed to a much deeper shift in aesthetics and epistemology. In Miyakawa’s view, the importance of Anti-Art derived from its promised but forever unrealized annihilation of the border between art and non-art. These artists’ “descent into the everyday” anticipated the demise of a particular, unitary discourse—modernity, or kindai—and the emergence of contemporaneity (gendai). Miyakawa Atsushi’s dialectical argument about art’s descent into the everyday involved an investigation of symptom and structure. I suggest that this polemic may be revisited from a psychoanalytic perspective, as essentially one built upon an observation about the concealed object of hysterical language. In such an interpretation, the Indépendant generation’s impotence might be seen as the inability to articulate a viable alternative to the hysterical denial of art. Their negation (Verneinung) of art is in fact indicative of the desire for something that has been lost: art and the promise of modernity. Likewise, the Tokyo art critics’ hysterical reaction to such work revealed in turn their impotence in the face of the urgent queries opened by the crisis of the modern. Indeed, Miyakawa saw this condition of critical impossibility as defining the contemporary moment. Reviewing a few years later the question of art in the aftermath of Anti-Art in his essay “The Aesthetics of Impossibility” (1966), Miyakawa queried, “Therefore does art no longer exist? If that were the case it would be easy.

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Situation of the Obuje

Nevertheless, the condition of today’s art after ‘Anti-Art’ is such that art has not disappeared. . . . Art exists not as a possibility that it exists, but as an impossibility that it does not exist.”57 Thus—he concluded—ultimately, in the contemporary moment there cannot not be art. However, this series of negations reveals the lost object: Miyakawa himself fell into a sort of hysterical repetition, for even as he probed art’s limits, he was caught within the framework he sought to dissect. Once in it, there was no outside of art. Interestingly, even as they ostensibly disagreed on the implications of the “symptom” that was Anti-Art, Tōno and Miyakawa both noted that the Indépendant artists’ denunciation of the art of the establishment was connected to their capacity to mimetically (if imperfectly) engage their surroundings. Such a strategy operated as an element of negation, further highlighting the persistence of the structure of hysteria in Anti-Art: mimesis is the process through which the hysterical artist effects the destruction or denial of the Other, and—shaped through identification with the Other’s image—seeks to affirm the coherence of the self that masks its actual state of dismemberment.58 The aggression directed at the theological concept of art here enables the constitution of the self through one’s (mis)recognition as an avant-gardist. However, as Miyakawa perceptively noted, the neo-avant-garde provided but a frail identity—one constantly threatened by the realization of its own impossibility. In a vulgar appropriation of the Oedipal myth, hysteria is usually discussed in relation to the lack of a phallus. Kudō, however, articulated a position that far exceeds a denunciation of castration within international postwar affluence.59 Beyond the didacticism of his signature iconography, the severed penis of Philosophy of Impotence anticipated a procedure that would continue to inform Kudō’s work throughout the decade—seen, for example, in the composite obuje he created as part of the series Votre Portrait (Your portrait). In that series, Kudō developed a distinct critical approach in fragmentation, which he posited most proximately as a means of effecting a recombination and resignification of the semiotics of affluence. Ultimately, in furthering an aesthetics of the fragment through its repetition, Kudō staged the hysterical subject as the only possible position from which to articulate a politics in impotence. In the Relationship of Marmots (Marumotto no kankei, 1962) and Your Idol (Anata no gushō, 1962), jars with plastic dolls squeezed into them are arranged in a circuit inside a box. At their center, two symmetrically arranged plastic figures—dolls in the first one, severed penises in the other—are cut open to reveal a transistor inside each. A striking feature from this period’s work is the reliance on boxes, within which an absurd combination of objects waits for whoever musters enough courage to open them. The exterior of Smell of 110 Volts (1963) appears to have been covered with synthetic turf and opens to reveal three human noses modeled in resin, juxtaposed with a rose wired onto its lid (fig. 6).

Fragment

Such sadistic scenes (dolls squished into mason jars, noses forced to smell roses in perpetuity) appear to have shocked European critics. Some relied on cultural essentialism to interpret the humor that Kudō—like his European colleagues among the Nouveaux Réalistes—manically exploited. By contrast, French critic 38 Alain Jouffroy saw in Kudō’s work a systematic interruption and reconfiguration of meaning through the recombination of fragments, identifying in its absurd effects a deeper political implication. In 1965, Jouffroy included Kudō’s work in an exhibition alongside works by established Nouveaux Réalistes Arman and Daniel Spoerri, as well as the younger Jean-Pierre Raynauld and Daniel Pommereulle. In the essay accompanying the exhibition, Jouffroy wrote against critic Pierre Restany’s earlier articulation of the Nouveaux Réaliste program. Restany argued for the unmediated connection of such artworks to the material conditions of the everyday and advocated for a practice that abandoned traditional painting in favor of object-making as expression of what he deemed the “thrilling adventure of the real perceived in itself and not through the prism of conceptual or imaginative transcription.”60 Departing from Restany’s emphasis on such an unmediated connection with the everyday as the basis for a “new realism,” Jouffroy highlighted the conceptual Fig. 6 Kudō Tetsumi, Smell of 110 Volts, 1963. Gelatin silver print, operations behind such objets, which, in 20.3 × 25.4 cm. © Hiroko Kudo, the Estate of Tetsumi Kudo / his view, had a political valence that renSOCAN (2021). Photograph by Shunk-Kender. Image courtesy of the Harry Shunk and Shunk-Kender Archive, Getty Research dered artists “objectors” to society. Kudō, Institute, Los Angeles. he argued, sought to demonstrate “the impotence of philosophy.” He noted, “Tetsumi Kudo short-circuits symbols to such an extent that he manages to overcome their individual sense: it no longer is birth, or suicide, or purity, or crime that he proposes as a remedy, but a mental concentration such that would illuminate these extremes. . . . Kudo’s cruelty must find its ultimate sense in deliverance: the boxes must be opened to be seen, closed to be understood . . . [Kudo’s] is the religion of the Personal Automaton of the reversed domain of souls where objects seem to be endowed with intelligence.”61 Jouffroy found in Kudō’s work an element of contradiction that illuminated the incapacity of thought to free itself from the concrete. While based on material means, Kudō’s work ultimately had a metaphysical resonance: his reliance on things defiantly presented an antihumanist stance that extended the logic of the Duchampian readymade into the present. However, Jouffroy argued, Kudō’s obsessive reliance on object-making was ultimately suspect.

Too comfortably engaging the language of commodity fetishism, Kudō failed to free himself from the logic of capitalism—he failed to rid himself of stuff. Likewise, Jouffroy wondered whether, in exploiting their obsessive relationship to objects, the objecteurs de vision had rendered themselves into an impotence that led them to “love their shackles in order to withstand them.”62 Things bound these artists to a capitalist political economy that would too happily co-opt them in turn. Commenting on Jouffroy’s project, and more generally on Kudō’s series Votre Portrait, critic Nakahara Yūsuke was rather damning: “Jouffroy uses the term ‘objector of vision’ but to me, rather than someone who objects to vision, [this expression] sounds like a peddler of visual objets [vijon no obuje-ya ni kikoeru].” Picking up where Jouffroy left off, Nakahara wryly observed that the charge of fetishism could be similarly applied to the French critic. Moreover, while recognizing the spirit of dissent reflected in the works, Nakahara warned that Kudō’s work, in particular, had become overly fussy.

39

Seeing your colorfully painted boxes I thought, Ah! That philosophy of impotence is still in good health! [Your] misfortune is the paradox of making the impotence of human relations (including sexual ones) into work, and yet, to have to show these among humans. This is a beautiful paradox, and it is necessary to show it in the most beautiful manner . . . or most grotesquely. . . . But your series “Votre portrait” also appears to me as overly naive. This is because it makes us think this must be a difficult problem. Wasn’t your specialty the fear provoked by simplicity? Those black phalli, the dolls inserted in bottles. . . . Simple things are the ones that have the greatest power to capture us.63 In a type of hysterical reversal, Nakahara appeared to misrecognize the work of Kudō’s work. Too taken by the incorporation of everyday materials and the nonsensical drama of the main script—this is to say, the representation’s manifest content—the critic chided the artist for making something simple complicated. Yet Nakahara stopped seeing Kudō’s obuje as fragment and repetition. Dealing with a resisting obuje, Nakahara failed to take into account the dialectical nature of the analytical scene. Like Freud did when Dora walked out on him, the critic failed to take into account the counter-transferential desires he placed on Kudō’s work.64

Kudō and his wife, Hiroko, returned to Japan in the summer of 1969 after an eightyear absence, staying through February of the following year. Having witnessed

Situation of the Obuje

The Obuje as Ruin

Fig. 7 Kudō Tetsumi, Monument to Metamorphosis, 1970. Gelatin silver print, 25.4 × 20.3 cm. © Hiroko Kudo, the Estate of Tetsumi Kudo / SOCAN (2021). Photograph by Shunk-Kender. Image courtesy of the Shunk-Kender Archive, Getty Research Institute. Fig. 8 Kudō Tetsumi, Monument to Metamorphosis, 1970. Gelatin silver print, 25.4 × 20.3 cm. © Hiroko Kudo, the Estate of Tetsumi Kudo / SOCAN (2021). Photograph by Shunk-Kender. Image courtesy of the Shunk-Kender

Fragment

Archive, Getty Research Institute.

firsthand the May events of 1968, and arriving in the midst of a resurgent and increasingly radicalized student movement in Japan, he used this opportunity to reassess and reframe the concerns that had occupied him over the past decade. During this extended sojourn in Japan, Kudō obtained a commission for a site-specific work. Takahashi Yoshihiro, a wealthy industrialist, suggested that he carve a relief on a cliff face, once part of an Edo-period quarry on Mount Nokogiri, a portion of which lay within his property on the border between Chiba and Ibaraki Prefectures. On visiting the site, the artist suggested carving a gigantic penis. Kudō commenced work in November and completed it in January 1970. Monument to Metamorphosis (Dappi no kinenhi) is a relief sculpted on live rock that measures a staggering twenty-five meters in height by nine meters in width. Photographs by Harry Shunk and Jean Kender show the work in its final stages of completion. Its painted inscription reads in English: “For 1970. Tetsumi Kudo” (figs. 7 and 8). The figure carved on the rock is, unsurprisingly, the severed penis of Kudō’s signature iconography of impotence. The dimensions chosen for the work are, however, uncharacteristic—and for this reason it is important to keep in mind the

41

Situation of the Obuje

commemorative function of monuments.65 Monument to Metamorphosis marked the crucial year of 1970. This was the tenth anniversary of the failed protests against the US-Japan Security Treaty and the last possible moment for its repeal. It was becoming increasingly clear that the repeal of Anpo would never occur. That today this monument is virtually lost among the overgrown slopes of Mount Nokogiri underscores the associations of this work with the aesthetics of the ruin. In retrospect, it seems as though, already at the moment of its construction, Monument to Metamorphosis was projected to be like Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “colossal wreck” in “Ozymandias”—an anti-monument that ludicrously posits the hope for the demise of the Anpo system and the conformism of postwar Japanese society, even as it acknowledges the implausibility of such a hope. Still, the monumental obuje remains, marking the transformation of landscape into obuje, as a melancholy site. Of his return to Japan, Kudō claimed, “My hope was to plant chrysalises on the walls of the establishment. For instance, it could be chrysalises here and there to suggest that we would start proliferating and spreading like germs. . . . I’ve spoken about the chrysalis, but in actuality, the chrysalis and the penis have together become a double image.”66 The formal qualities of the fragment are central to the operation of this monument. Kudō’s penis/chrysalis is a perfect example of the ambiguity of meaning in fragmentation: the motif appears as a figure of radical self-referentiality that simultaneously anticipates a whole in which it intervenes. The figure is invoked as both impotence and the capacity to change. How can this penis/chrysalis overcome this inherent contradiction? Monument to Metamorphosis rearticulates the castrated penis-figure as a reframed notion of potency. Whereas potency is usually imagined as a boundless capacity for action, Kudō’s figure suggests a more ambiguous role. The castrated penis figure can be understood as representing at once the possibility of change and its absence. Put a different way, Monument to Metamorphosis is the latent potential for change that is found in impotence. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben has argued that impotence appears as a defining element in being. Failure to effect change in society does not entail irresolution but is rather a very condition of being—where action may or may not be carried out.67 Likewise, Kudō projected the giant penis/ chrysalis in anticipation of the possibility that social transformation may or may not occur. In discussing Monument to Metamorphosis, Kudō analogized the student movement with a syphilitic infection. While the infection is dormant (as is the chrysalis), sickness does not manifest itself visibly, except in periodic bouts. The student protests were a visible manifestation of society’s ailment. And in spite of its invisibility, just as syphilis eventually corrodes and destroys the human body, so would this anti-establishment streak within Japan’s affluent society lead to that society’s demise or transformation.68 Monument to Metamorphosis highlights the inherent ambiguity of the fragment, which is key to understanding how obuje mediate a reflection on the possibility of

Fragment

42

articulating a politics in the endgame of representation. The word “endgame” is commonly understood as the closing moves of a game after a major reduction of forces, but the endgame I refer to in this context is the increasingly widespread perception by the cultural left, in the aftermath of Anpo, concerning the limits of representation as both aesthetic and political programs. The failure of the mass protests to prevent the ratification of Anpo called into question not only the institutional procedures of political representation articulated in Japan’s postwar constitution but also those of organizations, such as parties and unions, that claimed to represent the interests of the people, but whose perception as authentic representatives was undermined when they—inevitably—compromised with the government. The event also more generally problematized the project of representing social reality, and whose voice it represents, as, for example, through the production of documents of protest within the realist program. While avant-gardism—and its intervention in the everyday through direct action—appeared to some as an alternative to this representational practice, Kudō’s Monument to Metamorphosis pointed to the limited possibility of action. In a moment when a new political hegemony appeared to consolidate such limitations, the work spoke instead to the power of not doing. The carved penis/chrysalis is a seemingly mimetic object that foregrounds its own implausibility. As a self-sufficient fragment, it also haunts the whole to which it belongs. Monument to Metamorphosis attempts to inscribe itself in collective memory by altering landscape while simultaneously staging its irrevocable failure. Crucially, the impossibility gestured to by the experience of the monumental threatens the viewer with the characteristic distance of irony. Kudō’s activation of obuje in this case consists of such a process of staging and undoing—in a situation where even the national community that is the ostensible addressee of this provocation has deliberately been rendered absent.

If anyone finds this script incomprehensible and hard on the ears,

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I do not think the fault lies with me. —Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 1887

Chapter 2

Ears, Fragments, and the Pathos of Distance For almost fifteen years, the artist Miki Tomio almost exclusively created semblances of left ears. The works vary in material, size, shape, and presentation. Miki modeled some of his earlier ears in plaster and papier-mâché. Most of them were cast in aluminum, others in bronze and other alloys, and some in plastic. Miki created small works of about thirty centimeters in length, while others exceed two meters in height, including one oversized concrete ear, ten meters in length, which he constructed for Expo ’70, the universal exhibition held in 1970 in Osaka. The ears’ aspects vary greatly: the distended auricle and lobules of some of the works give way to more compact renditions of the organ. Their presentation also changes; while freestanding obuje are among his best-known works, others are part of complex compositions. In his overview of Miki’s oeuvre, Seo Noriaki suggests the following periodization. A first period, before the ear appears in Miki’s work, coincides with the beginning of the artist’s career in the late 1950s to 1962. A second period, from 1962 to 1966, which Seo deems the ears’ “peak time” (seisanki), follows the initial introduction of the motif and includes a subsequent exploration of formal variations. A third period extends between 1966 and 1970, in which Miki began experimenting

Fragment

44

with alternative presentation. And, finally, there is a period of eight years, after Expo ’70, in which the ear appears to recede into the background.1 While this chapter largely follows Seo’s chronology, it resists the idea of a decline in Miki’s career, which is prevalent in the critical literature. Instead, it calls attention to the coherence in the development of Miki’s practice, especially in relation to what obuje can teach us about the aesthetics of fragmentation, of which the ear presents the most fully developed—but not exclusive—example in Miki’s work. Miki’s ears are strikingly esoteric: they stand in front of us like a sphinx. The ear’s curves close in on each other and refuse the outside world. Yet even as they coil upon themselves, the ears open up to the outside: there is no depth, because they are sheer exteriority. Miki’s ears are at once deeply material and metaphysical; they appear to seek a whole to which to belong, while at the same time they are detached and visually self contained. Their evocative power derives from how, as fragments, they ceaselessly stage this contradiction. The ears’ appearance of self-sufficiency was comically reinforced by the artist’s self-presentation strategy. While constantly returning to the ear as subject matter, throughout this period Miki performed an at once cool and frustrating deflection of the question of the ear’s meaning. In interviews, he would insist on the idea that he had not chosen the ears, claiming instead that the ears had chosen him. The absurdity of this proposition underlines the ears’ purpose: the construction of an aesthetics of disaffection that served as a site of speculation about post-Anpo Japan’s political and aesthetic endgame. In this chapter I develop a meandering look into Miki’s work. Examining the emergence of the ear—its reception along with various statements by the artist on its presence in his practice—I begin by addressing the significance of Miki’s critique of choice. In his oeuvre, this critique initially manifests as a way of responding to contemporaneous demands for an aesthetics of commitment and the cult of artistic subjectivity promoted by modernist cultural discourse. Commitment points to a core doctrine in Jean-Paul Sartre’s postwar reframing of existentialist philosophy, in his later humanist phase. For Sartre, humans are condemned to being free; they have to take responsibility for the situation that arrives to them and are responsible for changing such circumstances by generating new possible futures. In such conditions, there is no neutral position and no shirking of responsibility.2 In the popular interpretation of this doctrine in the cultural left, this was interpreted as meaning that artists, who have a privileged subjectivity, must make a choice for society. Miki first posits the ear as a form of negation of these positions. I then turn to an interrogation of the fragment and its relationship to ironic distance, which has operated as a counterpoint to the tradition of commitment. However, Miki’s reliance on an aesthetics built on fragmentation, which through its denial of totality underscores an increasingly antihumanist position, pushes his work in a novel direction. Miki aligns himself with an inquiry inaugurated by Friedrich Nietzsche,

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Ears, Fragments, and the Pathos of Distance

who queried the limits of intelligibility and posited a first approach to a thought on the outside: the real, or that which exceeds and opposes the subject’s interior life. This is a concern that Bataille also takes up in his examination of abjection and sacrifice. This intellectual genealogy thus informs the slippage that takes place in Miki’s work, from negation into radical negativity. At this point, I should clarify my use of these two terms, as they will play an important role in my interpretation of Miki’s oeuvre and more generally inform the argument of this book. The term “negation” (Verneinung) has a particular valence in psychoanalysis: it is a procedure through which the subject fends off repressed content through the act of denying a proposition presented to her. Freud understood negation to operate as a sort of index of repressed content as it emerges into consciousness: “A negative judgment,” he noted, “is the intellectual substitute for repression.”3 Classically, in the analytical scene, the negation of transferential desires (that is, a desire for love or approval projected by the analysand onto the analyst) often plays out as an implicit acknowledgment of such desires. More fundamentally, however, negation hints at a type of hysterical identification with what is being denied. The negation of art in Anti-Art likewise suggests the unconscious affirmation of this system; as discussed in the first chapter, this was frequently observed by art critics at the time and recognized as a limit to the program of these young artists. In contrast, I use the term “negativity” in two senses. The first of these is in the Hegelian sense, where negativity is an immanent act always present in the dialectic. Bataille appropriated such negativity as a creative act: from the immanence of negativity, Bataille rescued what he called the work of death, which for him is the powerful recognition of the limits or impossibility of human action.4 I likewise approach negativity as a manifestation of the death drive.5 The death drive is a primordial tendency to self-destruct shared by all organisms, which acts as a counterpart to the drive to self-preservation. In psychic conflict, self-preservation pushes the individual to redirect aggression outside itself, yet this impulse can just as easily find its way back onto the subject. Freud formulated the death drive upon considering phenomena such as the compulsion to repeat—seen, for example, in obsessional neuroses and melancholic investments alike—in which the unpleasure of return cannot be explained away as a desire to master such feelings or as some sort of perversely derived pleasure. Of interest for our purposes is that structurally—that is to say, beyond its discursive content—negation is a form of aggression. Negativity here thus designates the act itself of negation as it slips from a protest directed against the Other (art, in this case) and subsequently returns as an impulse for aggression onto the subject. In order to address the implications of negativity, in the final section of the chapter I turn to a psychoanalytic interrogation of fragment and repetition in Miki’s work. While many commentators have focused on the apparently obsessional nature of the ear in his work, none of them considers

the structural elements behind this compulsive aspect. I argue that repetition foregrounds a slippage from the hysterical language of negation to a melancholic structure founded on the assertion of negativity. 46

Fragment

Choosing as a Method Miki was born in 1937 to a bourgeois family residing in the Tokyo suburb of Suginami. His father, a professor of English literature at the Tokyo University of Science, initially resisted Miki’s wish to drop out of high school to become an artist, forcing him to enroll in a barber-training program at a vocational school. Upon graduating, Miki began a correspondence course at a local art academy, but given his short stay there, it is unclear whether he completed his training. He is perhaps best described as self-taught.6 At the end of the 1950s, Miki began creating paintings and increasingly elaborate constructions with found materials, which he exhibited most notably at the Yomiuri Indépendant. A characteristic of his work at this time was a concern with the deconstruction and reassembling of found materials; by 1960, Miki was producing assemblage-like works, by, for example, burning and smelting wheel rims to produce large, woven steel frames and towering robotic constructions, relying on a typically intensive processing of materials that resonated with the forceful iconoclasm espoused by his generation. Like many of his peers, Miki grew as an artist at the Indépendant, where he exhibited yearly beginning in 1958. He developed close friendships with the young artists showing there, such as Neo-Dada Organizers Shinohara Ushio—with whom he initially shared workspace—and Yoshimura Masunobu. Although Miki was on good terms with these artists, like his friend Kudō Tetsumi he decided not to join the group and continued working independently. While driven by their collective exploration, he expressed at the time a sense of apprehension of being drowned out as an individual artist.7 Miki debuted his ear works in 1963, at the fifteenth—and final—Yomiuri Indépendant. However, even prior to this submission, Miki had already created a first version of the ear in papier-mâché (plate 4). One in a series titled Ear of Roses (Bara no mimi, 1962), the obuje is shaped as a left ear and is covered in kitschy cutouts of naturalistically rendered roses. Modeled in paper and plaster over a wooden armature, the large white ear appears at once solemnly dumb and sentimental. The roses—which are printed on some sort of vinyl surface, possibly a plastic tablecloth—have been cut out and positioned as a garland that gravitates toward the upper section of the auricle, accentuating the otherwise flat object’s labyrinthine curves. At first, this turn toward a type of contained figuration in Miki’s work appears to depart from his concern with energy and action as well as the machinelike and destructive aspects of his assemblages—yet this ear shows continuities with his

The cast ears are arranged as if they were part of a geometric series, from large to small. Solid lumps that appear to refuse all sound. Otherwise, similarly sized ears cast in white plaster are lined up in

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Ears, Fragments, and the Pathos of Distance

previous work in its attention to surface, accumulation, and especially the characteristically intensive processing of materials. Ear of Roses seems not to have been exhibited publicly at this time, but it remains an important milestone in Miki’s telling of the story of the ear and periodically appears in the background in art press photographs of his studio. In contrast, EAR (1963) was originally part of a group of five aluminum ears Miki submitted to the Yomiuri Indépendant as a single work, originally titled Your Insurance (Anata no hoken). Four of the ears—including this one—were right ears, which in his oeuvre would become of the utmost rarity. The ears were exhibited propped up on cinder blocks against the gallery walls of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum.8 The material lends itself to a more meticulous rendering of the ear’s concentric curves than papier-mâché. The aluminum surface has been roughly polished and retains coke-like grime within its crevices. On closer inspection, this ear further departs from the earlier version’s semblance of naturalism. Like Ear of Roses, the ear is not anatomically accurate and is too large to be true to life, but the aluminum used in its casting lends the object a sense of mass that is absent in the papier-mâché version. Compared to its predecessor, the aluminum ear comes across as rather distant and cruel. The exaggeratedly elongated lobule, the imperfections on its surface, and improbable indentations and cavities on its cartilaginous structure make the aluminum ear appear at once terrifyingly grotesque and spiritual. In a 1963 review of Miki’s work, critic Tōno Yoshiaki recalled a scene from earlier in March: “On returning from this year’s Yomiuri Indépendant, Jean Tinguely keeps on repeating, ‘Oreiyu, oreiyu.’” Tinguely—the French-Swiss Nouveau Réaliste—had seen the exhibition while visiting Tokyo that past spring and could not stop talking about the aluminum ears made by an artist whose name he could not remember. Unsure to whom Tinguely referred, Tōno visited the exhibition and was surprised to find that the author was none other than Miki, who until then had exhibited works fashioned out of piled-up car parts resembling “gigantic insects or totems.” Tōno reported Tinguely’s approval of Miki’s work: he found the ears haunting and “solid.” But Tōno initially could not square this shift in Miki’s practice. While appearing to withhold judgment, Tōno’s review was far from neutral. He showed a clear interest in the ears, seeing in Miki’s chosen subject matter a stringent critique of contemporary society: “The ear refuses communication, refuses sound; it is a metaphysical obuje that condenses feelings of impotence and alienation.”9 Tōno’s review further provides insight into the process and concerns present at this early stage in Miki’s work. Commenting on Miki’s landmark solo show later that summer, Tōno noted:

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a box. The author claims that they are not individually important; neither is it meaningful that he lines together a limited number of ears. Indeed, the only thing that matters is that there are so many of them. . . . Smooth like pieces of meat, a set number of lumps are stuffed into nylon stockings. They hang from nails on the wall and can be taken down by the viewers.10 Most striking in Tōno’s account of the Naika Gallery show is that even at such an early stage there appear to be so many ears: in plaster, in aluminum, exhibited on the walls, framed in a box, and hanging from nylon netting. Seo Noriaki, who organized the first major retrospective of Miki’s work in 1993, calculated that in the fifteen years between the Naika show and his untimely death, Miki created more than one hundred and fifty individual ear works, almost all of them left ears; the critic Minemura Toshiaki estimates at least two hundred, and very possibly more.11 In a 1966 roundtable, Miki evoked a plan to make as many as one thousand ears—but the final number, rather than indicating a concrete quantity, should be understood to stand in for the fact of many.12 Tōno—who found in Miki’s ears resonances of Jasper Johns’s cast body parts and Duchamp’s objets—was, at least in the beginning, highly invested in promoting Miki’s work, including him in the landmark exhibition Young Seven, which he organized at Minami Gallery the following year.13 Despite his youth, Miki was hailed as one of Japan’s most promising artists. In the second half of the 1960s, Miki showed in major exhibitions in Japan and abroad, receiving multiple awards, and his work was purchased for public and private collections. Indeed, his cachet was such that, unlike many of his peers, Miki did not need to leave Japan during the 1960s.14 (Sponsored by a Rockefeller grant, he eventually did undertake a yearlong residence in New York in 1971 and visited the city again in 1976.) The introduction of aluminum to Miki’s work is a crucial development in his practice. The material and casting methods Miki used further distanced his ears from the human ear. As a material, aluminum is pliable, durable, and resistant to corrosion, qualities that make it ubiquitous in manufacturing. Further, among aluminum’s material properties is its capacity for rapid oxidization, which generates a virtually invisible patina that helps the metal retain its characteristically shallow sheen. This property lends Miki’s ears a cold appearance that underscores their antihuman overtones; his reliance on a material of widespread industrial use immediately set his obuje in conversation with a critique of modernity’s “machine civilization” (kikai bunmei). In addition to permitting a uniform approach to form, casting (and later, casting by parts) enabled Miki to explore dimensionality in his works and to experiment with a number of unconventional compositional choices, such as the extension and protrusion of parts of the ear that enhance its sense of abjection and the grotesque.

Fig. 9 Miki Tomio, EAR, 1965. Cast aluminum, 214 × 190 × 40 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Photo: The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo / DNPartcom.

Ears, Fragments, and the Pathos of Distance

Miki treated the surface in a variety of ways, alternatively leaving it alone and polishing or burnishing it to different degrees. Likewise, he explored the retention of accretions and imperfections that result from casting. For example, one striking version of the obuje—an oversized ear originally exhibited at a show at Minami Gallery in 1965—seems to have been taken out from the root (fig. 9). The ear stands on two distinct supports, the lobule and a pointed stump, and is propped against a wall. The auricle has been massively amplified when compared to the lobule; intersecting lines on its surface reveal that it was cast in parts that were later welded together. The stump, while anatomically inaccurate, suggests the violence of the ear’s severance. The auricle exhibits a sequence of evenly shaped depressions along the edge. Miki sanded and polished extensive sections of the outer surface and carefully burnished interior protrusions, creating sparkling silver lines and curves

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that overwhelm the viewer. The divergence between the texture of the twisting stump, when compared with the smooth and meandering surface of the auricle, is striking. While the surface is smoothed to a preternaturally luminous sheen, the stump appears to decay like wood rot: these elements place the viewer at the edge between the familiar and unrecognizable, between image and matter, the formal and the informe. Before problematizing the reception and discussion of the meanings of the ear, it is useful to sum up some of the main features of Miki’s material practice to this point. First, his practice was established in dialogue with classical sculptural methods: modeling and casting, both in the round and by parts. Miki evinced a keen interest in controlling surface effects of his materials, including their contrasting textures. While his practice can be understood as figurative in certain regards, the ears he created are not anatomically accurate. Rather, Miki appeared to be interested in interlocking or resonant forms within the obuje—the concentric curves, lines, and indentations. Yet Miki deliberately insisted on a type of ambivalent distance from artistic markers of subjectivity, emphasizing that his ears are not sculptures per se. Rather, he appeared more invested in the relationship the viewer can establish between individual pieces—by, for example, gesturing toward an altogether absent whole—or as instantiations of an entirely exterior, god-like, archetypal ear. Miki’s was an intensive practice. Judging from the number of ears he produced and exhibited, and recollections from his colleagues and friends, we know that Miki worked at great speed, from modeling to casting. Even as the artist increasingly evoked mass production, none of the molds used for the ears appear to have survived.15 Lastly, we should note that, together with the adoption of aluminum, Miki chose not to give his works evocative titles. Almost all of the ear works are either unnamed or carry the same capitalized EAR as a title. Only occasionally would Miki single out the work by a number or a descriptive subtitle. This should be understood as furthering a strategy of dedifferentiation: although each ear appears unique, Miki often expressed that they were all equally the same left ear. Tōno’s valorization of Miki’s ears was largely conditioned by his interest in an international field of young artists whose work he had encountered during travels in Europe and the United States in the late 1950s—and which he understood as representatives of a shifting tide that reacted against the “Picassos” of postwar abstraction. He labeled these artists “Anti-Artists” or “Neo-Dadaists” and characterized them by a “refreshingly adventurous spirit, and an absolutely sincere madness.” Referring in particular to two well-known works by Jasper Johns, Tōno noted: A strange transformation happens the moment he congeals in encaustic the American flag [Flag, 1954–55], that most un-artistic

object. . . . Here vulgarity and myth, reality and metaphysics, are reconciled and coexist. . . . Johns’s world is that of a “metaphysics of vulgarity” (zokubutsu no keijijōgaku). . . . [Target with Plaster Casts (1955)] depicts a target made with blue and yellow concentric circles, over which Johns has lined up nine small boxes; within them are plaster casts of (his own?) green penis, a white nose and mouth, an orange ear, and a red foot. . . . It is easy to find in Target the masochism of today’s youth; rather this work picks up [masochism] as the negative medium of an intelligence that compels a critique of civilization. . . . Today, in the midst of what many decry as the academicization of abstract painting, Johns’s interest resides in that, using flags and targets and numbers, he has recovered the symbolic reality of painting with one stroke.16

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Beyond the idea of a generational contestation led by artists who attempted to break free from the conventions of an ossifying painting orthodoxy, Tōno appears to be, above all, interested in the recovery of “reality” in painting. The introduction of everyday themes as direct citation, rather than through representation, implied at a formal level the rediscovery of reality in painting’s symbolic space, allowing artists to find a “metaphysics of vulgarity” that helped them establish a critique of modern civilization. Tōno positioned Miki’s work in relation to such ideas in the pamphlet for the Young Seven show—which opened in the aftermath of the Yomiuri Newspaper Company’s decision to cancel the Indépendant in 1964 and thus became a de facto summa of the Anti-Art years. In addition to Miki, the show featured Arakawa, Kudō Tetsumi, Tateishi Kōichi, Kikuhata Mokuma, Nakanishi Natusuyuki, and Okamoto Shinjirō. Notably, all of these artists could at this point be seen as operating within rather traditional media categories—painting and sculpture. For Tōno, these artists were exemplary of a generation that, starting out from the “image of burnt ruins” (yakeato no imēji), had relied on waste materials (haibutsu) as a means of developing their Anti-Art. While initially the reliance on such materials derived from their unartistic quality, Tōno found in them a new line of thought—a metaphysics—that overcame the limitations of a simple-minded exploration of the unconventional quality (ishitsu-sei) of the materials. The aim was the development of a critique of what Tōno called the “blank, endless Sunday” of contemporary experience—an everyday that, like a radio jingle, endlessly repeats. Miki’s ears were thus understood by Tōno to embody a “solitary pathos, coldly solidified into a metaphysical obuje,” frozen to such a point that they paradoxically refuse all emotion; they are an embodiment of alienation, the same obsession that permeates the accursed ears present in the hellish imagination of a Hieronymus Bosch painting or in Jasper

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Johns’s casts.17 At the risk of oversimplifying Tōno’s position, we might characterize the logic he pursued here as relying on two interrelated principles: the new as a permanent overcoming of previous expression, and subject matter as a visual index of critique. This contrasts, perhaps, with the more materialist interpretations developed by Hariu Ichirō, or someone like Miyakawa Atsushi—a consummate metaphysician with whom Tōno would continue to spar over the implications of Anti-Art.18 The question of the “new” and the indexical meanings Tōno ascribed to the work of the Anti-Art generation are crucial to understanding why he first championed—and later let go of—Miki, whose practice insistently drew from a frustratingly coherent set of concerns. Initially, Miki perfectly fit the framework drawn by Tōno: an artist who transformed orthodox media from within and found an aptly obsessive image through which he developed a critique of society. His subject matter, materials, and form immediately appeared to connect him to everyday themes. A number of other commentators similarly noted devices such as Miki’s enlargement of the ear, associating it with the international ascent of a Pop sensibility; because of his reliance on enlargement, artist Ikeda Tatsuo, for example, compared his work to Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculpture.19 From early on, Miki resisted such interpretations. In a statement included in a dossier on contemporary artists compiled by Tōno for the art magazine Mizue, published in January 1964, Miki wrote that central to his work was its subject’s meaninglessness. The “stupid joke” (waraenu jōdan) of an ear that is just an ear reflected the animosity that things hold toward our presumption of meaning. Miki asserted that his work was not parodic; to those suggesting a connection between his work and that of Pop artists, he countered that Oldenburg relied on the straightforward visual humor of enlargement, whose aim was to signal some sort of essential quality. He saw a similar strategy in the reliance on imitation (mohō) often found among Japan’s avant-gardists. Miki stated he was uninterested in visuality or inner meaning; he claimed that, unlike Oldenburg, he was “more attached to things” (mono ni shūjaku ga aru).20 Miki’s interest was paradoxically material, dependent neither on its symbolic dimension nor on a pure exploration of form. It emerged, he claimed, from a particular methodology: The structure of the ear is made out of curved lines whose movements intersect and coil into each other. Rather than the snail’s movement Dalí speaks of, it is more like that of a rose. . . . The methodical work I did for a piece called Ear of Roses was to tie together [musubitsukeru] two materials whose concepts differed but shared the same structural principle. As to why I chose roses, this was not because of the structure, nor because I aimed for the

cruel image of an avant-garde art that, including its hybrids, has seen its roses bloom after centuries of improvement. But I find it just as difficult to understand why I chose roses as to why I chose ears. And choosing, rather than any other contemporary methodology, is the meaning I’m interested in, and is what provokes my desire to produce work.21

Ears, Fragments, and the Pathos of Distance

Minemura Toshiaki suggests that, for Miki, the interlocking curves of the roses and the ears canceled out such images’ referentiality as similar forms that nonetheless point to different concepts. Indeed, this extends to the very materials Miki worked with—the shift from plaster to aluminum underscores his attempts to distance the ear from the human ear. All that is left is the raw fact of choosing, which is present in Miki’s work in two ways. In a narrower sense, and speaking to the idea of an artistic method or approach, the act of choosing connects Miki’s work to theories of the obuje and the agential quality of things. The reversal here is telling, for it is—we are constantly reminded—not Miki choosing the ready-made ear but rather the ear choosing him as a ready-made subject. In other words, Miki chose the ear in order to underscore a fundamental estrangement from notions of subjective agency. In selecting a seemingly innocuous but perfectly esoteric figure, Miki intended to make the work’s iconographic meaning a secondary matter; indeed, he refused to address the rather obvious question of meaning altogether. As he himself wrote in recounting his exhilaration upon envisioning, for the first time, a meters-long ear: “Bakabakashii. Sō” (Absurd? Indeed).22 A second, interrelated strand deriving from Miki’s reliance on choice as a method is revealed in an anecdote. Miki recalled his excitement on realizing the absurdity of his imagined enlarged ears—but also the anxiety they provoked. “I have memories of the terror I felt—like Roquentin, who turned toward a tree and threw up without any apparent cause—when I was riding the train and felt as if hundreds of ears were attacking me. However, this is not really an answer to why I make ears.”23 Miki’s account of the hallucination he experienced in the train pokes fun at a potentially more psychological interpretation of the ear’s meaning: the idea of a pathological obsession. Instead, he invoked the figure of Roquentin, the protagonist of Sartre’s 1938 novel Nausea, whose vomiting signals the onset of existential anguish—the first stage in the existentialist subject’s full awareness of the lack of meaning in life. Likewise, in a later response to a questionnaire from the magazine Bijutsu Techō on the image of the body in recent art, Miki argued against the reduction of his work to an exploration (or denial) of the figure, noting that his ears do not belong to a larger body. In other words, Miki argued that the ear is whole unto itself. Further,

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his ears are autonomous and reproducible: he had made models of them, which could be used by anyone in the future to make more ears. More revealingly, Miki noted, “For me, these ears are not things springing from their comparative relationship to a self that chose them. I believe that they emerge from the self-denying point of view that the ears chose me.”24 Miki implied here that the ear is not a fragment standing in relation to a whole—a choosing subject. On the contrary, the ear is an extraneous, autonomous element that exists because of his self-effacing action. Miki then continued, “People [ningen] seem to be these strange beings that exist in between the humanist obsession [ningen-teki kyōhaku kannen] with the inescapability of choice and the inhuman hope that denies the reality that was chosen.”25 Rather than the ear, then, the obsession is that of a contemporary culture that continues to insist on the agency of human beings, even when constantly confronted with proof of its absence. In saying that the ears exist in spite of him, Miki gestured to the Sartrean problem of being and essence. For Sartre, the meaning, or essence, of the object only emerges after the object comes into being.26 On realizing this, the subject is faced with existential anguish when confronted with life’s lack of immanent meaning. This negative aspect of Sartrean philosophy, however, is countered by the necessity of meaning for human existence. In Sartre’s existentialism, this is resolved through an ethics of social commitment, or engagement: an artist must choose to give meaning to his work (and his existence). In his denial of authorial potency, however, Miki refused the comfort of an ethics of choosing. In considering Miki’s early career, we encounter three major shifts in his material practice that are resonant with his problematization of choice: first, the shift from modeling to casting; second, the incorporation of aluminum as a preferred material; and third, his progressive use of seriality, which evokes the idea of industrial mass-production. Before addressing the question of seriality, however, we should first examine the role of the fragment, which is the primary form the ears take, the romanticism of which permeates the distances Miki sought to address.

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Fragments, Interiority, and Absolute Exteriority Among the works Miki exhibited in 1963 at his Naika Gallery show were plaster ears, each roughly thirty centimeters high. One ear, now in the Asakawa collection, appears ancient—frail, almost skeletal—as if the material has abraded with the passage of time (fig. 10). Critic Kitazawa Noriaki wrote that the plaster ear seemed to him to look as if it were “wind-bleached bones or a seashell.”27 The granular, sandlike surface of the auricle possibly resulted from an oversaturated plaster mix: the material has set in and shrunk during drying, withering its edges and shriveling its surface; its much denser body breaks up into an open orifice at its back. It is

Fig. 10 Miki Tomio, EAR, 1963. Plaster, 30 × 16 × 4 cm. Asakawa Collection, Ashikaga City Museum of Art. Photo: Narita Kōbō.

Ears, Fragments, and the Pathos of Distance

unclear whether these plaster casts were originally intermodels or whether they were intended from the beginning to be shown as completed work (Miki apparently switched to metal casting in part becuase he disliked plaster for its brittleness).28 Regardless, the material is very effective. The plaster obuje appears like a ghostly remainder, anticipating comments Miki made toward the end of his life in which he claimed that, for the past decade, he had been making corpses.29 At once broken and complete, distinctly flat and yet full of volume, Miki’s ear appears as an undecidable fragment, sandwiched in between two chains of signification. It is at once interiority and exteriority, the subjective life of spirit and the objective fact of material. Even as Miki discursively claims it does not connect to either, the ear inevitably evokes for the viewer the body to which it belongs, as well as the imaginary sounds that it captures. Its auricle faces the viewer and turns outward, seeking a sound. It is an instrument of communication between the subject and the Other. But the ear stands alone—it no longer has a body. Moreover, with

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a hole gaping in its back, its incomplete form could never capture sound. Like a ruin, the plaster ear, with its rough and degraded surface, underscores the melancholic nature of obuje and their self-containment. The ear-motif surprisingly and persistently creeps up in Nietzsche’s early work. Nietzsche invokes the ear in the subject’s relationship to the unknowability of what exists outside. For example, in a haunting passage of the Fröhliche Wissenschaft, Nietzsche exclaims,

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Do I still have ears? Am I ears but nothing else? Here I stand in the flaming surf whose white tongues are licking at my feet; from all sides I hear howling threats, screaming, roaring coming at me. . . . Then, suddenly, as if born out of nothing, there appears before the gate of this hellish labyrinth . . . a large sailboat, gliding along as silently as a ghost. Oh what ghostly beauty! How magically it touches me! Has all the calm and taciturnity of the world embarked on it? Does my happiness itself sit in this quiet place— my happier ego, my second, departed self? Not to be dead and yet no longer alive?30 Nietzsche opens the aphorism with a contradictory image: the speaker, overwhelmed by noise, has become an ear that at once hears all and nothing. Suddenly, a beautiful vision appears—a sailboat gliding by. Yet this vision cannot be touched. This vision is truth, as perceived by the subject. Nietzsche likens it to woman (die Frauen): an unapproachable object whose power—her charm, her seduction—can set faraway things in motion.31 But her power, Nietzsche stresses, depends on distance. And the power of this vision of truth is such that we will continue to believe in its objective reality (wirklichkeit) and accommodate our understanding of the world for its sake. Nietzsche similarly invokes the ear motif in relation to the contingency of understanding in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where it reappears, this time in the eponymous protagonist’s excoriation of those who lack the third ear (das dritte Ohr) that would allow them to listen to the music of his words. Frustrated by how his audience ridicules him, Zarathustra reflects, “Must one first smash their ears, so they learn to hear with their eyes?”32 The convoluted path of the ear’s canals—which mediate between the visible and the invisible, interiority and exteriority—point to the meandering, almost impossible task of understanding and the treacherous nature of appearances. We are moved by a truth that almost certainly is there— outside. And yet we can only hear what we wish to hear. Prewar avant-gardists in Japan were attracted to Zarathustra’s iconoclastic indictment of common sense—his capacity to cut through the noise—and his stance of radical affirmation contrasted with the apparent passivity of nihilism. Zarathustra descended from the mountain to announce the death of God and the emergence of the overman in its wake: He

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says, “I teach you the overman. Human being is something that must be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?”33 Likewise, the editors of the Surrealist journal Rose Magic Theory proclaimed, “We are the young Zarathustra”—those who announced the last man, and the arrival of the new.34 Like the aphorism as literary form, the ear as fragment overcomes the roaring sound of the sea; its power derives from the pathos of distance. Connoisseurial art history’s point of departure likewise relies on such fragments; however, it reduces them to proximate meaning, heavily investing them with notions of intentionality and artistic subjectivity.35 Giovanni Morelli, the forensic art historian, for example, remarked, “It is a known fact that every painter has a peculiar type of hand and ear.”36 Miki’s plaster obuje appears to parody Morelli’s seemingly innocuous observation, which prized the artist’s signature touch as an index of interiority. The singular ear works are remarkably distinct—and yet they return to the same, self-effacing author. From Tōno’s review: “The pedantry continues. ‘Must look up the reasons why Van Gogh cut his ear in particular,’ the document-obsessed art critic jots down and immediately he remembers Dalí’s shock on first learning of Van Gogh’s ear-cutting incident.”37 Most obviously, Miki’s obuje recall Vincent van Gogh’s ear and through it the heroic narrative of the avant-garde: the isolation and eccentricity of the artist and the profound unknowability of creative action in the modernist imagination.38 Such theories played an important role in aesthetic debates in modern Japan, as they did in Europe and elsewhere. In the aftermath of the war, for example, the conservative literary critic and translator Kobayashi Hideo penned a series of extended essays exploring the psychological conditions of creativity. Building on a long-running series of essays in which he explored the likes of Mozart and Dostoyevsky, he returned to commentary on the visual arts with a study of Van Gogh. His point of departure was Van Gogh’s correspondence with his brother, Theo.39 Kobayashi summed up his views in a public lecture titled “Van Gogh’s Illness” (1962), delivered in conjunction with an exhibition of the Dutch artist’s paintings at the recently inaugurated National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo. In this lecture, the critic disparaged forensic psychiatry and psychoanalysis for their assessment of Van Gogh’s creativity as byproduct of pathology. To him, the significance of Van Gogh’s illness resided instead in how it expressed the artist’s inner spiritual struggle. As with Van Gogh’s tortured art, the conflict between reason and unreason reflected the irrepressible force of the creative mind. The tragedy of Van Gogh’s life, Kobayashi insisted, was that the inner conflict that made him a great artist inevitably also consumed him.40 Implicit in Kobayashi’s convoluted assessment of Van Gogh was a romantic defense of the autonomy of art. Above all, the critic sought to isolate creative action from what he deemed “environmental” conditions, such as social dynamics or even the deep structures of the psyche. He instead identified creative action

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as an expression of interiority—of spirit (seishin). Stressing what he deemed to be Van Gogh’s lucid understanding of his own inner conflict, Kobayashi mobilized the legendary ear-cutting episode to buttress his claim that, in order to understand creativity, it is essential to view it as an entirely autonomous phenomenon. Creativity as the expression of inner conflict had obvious consequences for those who lived it, but it was ultimately extraneous to their lives. That Kobayashi retreated to the interiority of spirit in the postwar moment makes sense when considering his trajectory. Championing artistic autonomy ultimately presented him with a means to escape the memory of his politically committed past, including philo-Fascistic views that he never truly recanted. In the prewar period, Kobayashi was the longtime editor of the journal Literary World (Bungakukai) and a key promoter of the influential Japanese Romantics—the Nihon Roman-ha, a literary group that included luminaries such as the Nobel Prize– winning novelist Kawabata Yasunari, later a mentor to the young Mishima Yukio. While Kobayashi initially had embraced a decidedly aestheticist outlook—he was a self-professed Valéryan, an admirer of the French poet Paul Valéry—his tenure as editor coincided with the inexorable rise of totalitarianism and the concomitant consolidation of political control over cultural production. The Japanese Romantics all too gladly complied with the new imperative to produce art in the service of the State: Kobayashi was one of the organizers of the notorious wartime symposium “Overcoming Modernity” in 1943. The symposium promoted an interpretation of the Pacific War in Hegelian, world-historical terms and portrayed it as a necessarily violent expression of the spirit of history and the triumphant consolidation of a distinctive Asian modernity.41 In the postwar moment, retrenching to his prior position as a defender of artistic autonomy was, for Kobayashi, a politically expedient way of deflecting criticism. However, Van Gogh’s ear-cutting incident as a traumatic expression of selfalienation does not necessarily align with a notion of interiority isolated from social process. Different from Kobayashi’s assessment, it can also serve as a springboard for a problematization of the relationship of artist to community. Bataille, for example, saw Van Gogh’s act of self-mutilation as bringing an imperfect self into communion with an ideal, exterior Other, which he identified as the sun. Bataille associated Van Gogh’s intense engagement with the sun (seen in his series of paintings of sunflowers) with a desire to engage and transform what was outside him: exteriority. In this sense, Van Gogh’s act was akin to self-sacrifice, a gesture that radically altered the self in its attempt to engage the transformation of community: “[Beyond] the many uses of the mechanism of sacrifice, such as propitiation or expiation, one notes the basic fact of the radical alteration of a person; [such alteration] could be associated endlessly to any other change taking place in collective life. . . . Such action is capable of freeing the heterogeneous elements of a person and undoing its homogeneity. . . . Sacrifice considered in its essential form

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is none other than a rejection of that which was once an attribute of a person or a group.”42 Bataille found in Van Gogh’s self-mutilation a radical refusal of the whole and a transformative assertion of the work of negativity. The fragment enacts its critical operation in a similar manner. The fragment causes the subject to purge itself of its interiority; rejecting resemblance, it performs a refusal to identify with the subject purported to make it whole. Miki repeatedly shaped such a critical operation into the coiling curves of the ear. For an illustration accompanying Shibusawa Tatsuhiko’s translation of an excerpt from Antonin Artaud’s sordid novel Héliogabale, Miki produced an abstraction of the ear motif: two interwoven coils in teal, embossed on high-grade cotton paper.43 Miki’s plaster ear recalls in its mystery that base materialism that Bataille identified in the ancient Gnostics—and that the French author later famously condensed in the image of the detached and self-sufficient big toe, le gros orteil—an abject materialism that “alone may escape the constraints of idealism because of its incongruity.”44 Such base matter, “remaining exterior and strange to the ideal aspirations of humanity . . . refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the grand ontological machines resulting from such aspirations.”45 Why did Miki choose to continue making ears? In a remembrance, Tanaka Shintarō claimed that—according to Miki—a fortune teller told him that he was Van Gogh’s reincarnation and that for the rest of his life he would make ears in search of the one Van Gogh had cut off.46 Like the persistent question of Van Gogh’s ear, Miki’s ear is an endlessly repeated question. (The answer is that he did not choose it; it chose him.) The incomprehensible, fukakai, implies literally a form of impotence: the impossibility of understanding. Similarly, the word kikinikui means both hard to hear and hard to ask: the ear presents the viewer with a deaf question; the ear is absurd. The ear inhabits the space of romantic irony. Whole unto itself, the made ear detaches itself from the idealized human ear. It now becomes something altogether different: a phantasmatic demand from the Other. Miki noted, “The ears that I make have nothing to do with human ears. And yet if anyone sees them, they’ll know they are ears—they are conceptual ears” (kannentekina mimi).47 Throughout the years, Miki rehearsed different answers: the ear was meaningless; he had chosen it for its absurdity; what mattered was the fact of choice.48 But then again, it could not not be the ear, which he had seen in a hallucination: the ear had chosen him.49 And, finally, the discovery of the ear not as an ear but as an external demand impressed itself upon him: “People would often ask why I made ears, and it was fine for me to continue doing that even as I wasn’t sure about it. But once the question ‘So, why is it that you make ears?’ emerged within me, I felt as if the ear had become an altogether esoteric form [shinpika sareta youna katachi]. . . . I know it’s strange to say, but recently I have begun to feel a type of hostility [tekii] toward the ear. It’s as if I hadn’t met it yet.”50 Miki—sensing perhaps that the ear emerged within him as an already identified and assimilated imago—intuited that

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he needed at last to prepare to seek out the ear as an exterior, otherwise unknowable entity. In true Lacanian fashion, Miki appears to understand that the ear was a missed encounter that nonetheless structured him. The turn to cast aluminum further distanced the ear from the modernist myth 61 of interiority. The first aluminum ears Miki submitted to the 1963 Indépendant, in the form of a single work titled Your Insurance, hinted at a type of antihuman concern that went beyond the problematization of choice. Tatehata Akira sees in the choice of aluminum—and not, for example, bronze, wood, marble, or any of the nobler materials of the fine art of sculpture—an emphatic marker of alienation that similarly distinguishes Miki’s work as obuje and not art.51 Indeed, the material is cold and impersonal. Miki burnished some of the individual ears’ exterior walls to a fine polish; others retain a coarse, coke-like residue attached to the interior crevices of the auricle. EAR No. 104 Fig. 11 Miki Tomio, EAR No. 104, 1965. Cast aluminum, screen-printed is a particularly disturbing iteration of the work, exhibited at acrylic panels, and plywood, 200.5 × Tokyo’s Minami Gallery in 1965. The ear appears suspended 122.5 × 23.6 cm. Asakawa Collection, in an oversized acrylic box, like a specimen pinned down to Ashikaga City Museum of Art. Photo: an insectary (fig. 11). Silkscreen inscriptions, including the Narita Kōbō. illustrations of eight other ear types, are printed on the box. The most salient feature of this work is the immense, disproportionate stump that appears to grow out of the ear and contorts downward like a root. Relying on the Vitruvian system, the ear’s auricle corresponds to one-seventh of the whole sculpted figure; the suspended metal figure stands in for the complete figure of man. As noted earlier, Miki almost immediately abandoned the use of evocative titling for his ears, simply presenting them as otherwise undifferentiated works starting in the mid- to late 1960s. This allowed him to increasingly espouse a mass-produced aesthetic; in the end, he claimed, they are all the same ear. A further development of the aluminum ears can be seen in the creation of cubes that serve as print-like matrices for rows of blocks, each carrying one left ear on a single surface. Untitled (Ears) (1964) is one such work, included in the exhibition The New Japanese Painting and Sculpture organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which toured across North America in 1967 (fig. 12). Cast by parts, it shows ear-blocks inserted and neatly arranged into an eight-by-six grid. Beginning in the midrange, ears begin to disappear from the grid on the left, and one appears slightly tilted, as if about to leave its current placement. Similarly, EAR No. 201, shown at the Minami Gallery, is a fifteen-by-thirteen matrix that has been divided diagonally into two areas. The lower left area has been left blank except for the impression generated by a gnarled stump, which occupies a diagonal that parallels the division of the fields and is otherwise absent from the composition. The division on the upper right is filled by repeating rows of ears, totaling 128, possibly produced from the same mold. Barring a few randomly placed casts, which show small indentations or have been more finely polished, all are otherwise remarkably homogeneous (fig. 13).

Fig. 12 Miki Tomio, Untitled (Ears), 1964. Cast aluminum, 54.3 × 48.3 × 3.8 cm. Philip Johnson Fund. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, New York. Fig. 13 Miki Tomio, EAR No. 201, 1965. Cast aluminum, 106 × 88 × 4.5 cm. Takamatsu Museum of Art.

In his sketchbook, Miki jotted down the following instructions, written out in the emphatic katakana syllabary of official documents:

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Do not create over 10 works in this [grid] style Use a cast for in-the-round molds; do not retain the hand’s trace Make all of them left ears, where No. 1 [the smallest] is one’s own left ear, and No. 12 is 80 cm52 These notes provide clear orders—but from and to whom? In their isolated manifestation, Miki’s aluminum ears literalize a ghostly take on the idea of the autonomy of art. By contrast, these repetitive, boxed-up ears amount to an outright critique of notions of individuality. But even as Miki became increasingly interested in the ear itself as type (the “conceptual ear”), each individual work relies on a fairly distinct iteration of the form, relaying a continuing concern with the myth of subjectivity. The serialized works perhaps succeed in further staging the ears’ distance from the

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hand of the artist—Miki himself notes these are certainly not Rodin’s ears, as they do not emphasize the imprint of the master’s touch. Akatsuka Yukio suggested early on that Miki’s constraints, rather than the objects themselves, had become the work. And yet this is rather unconvincing, for the material, sensual, and profoundly affecting nature of the work is undeniable. If Miki had indeed employed such constraints to create his obuje as some sort of Duchampian resonance, then the ears would return not to Marcel Duchamp as the cerebral maker of readymades but to his other persona: le marchand du sel, the saltseller, who peddled works dealing with sensuality and perception.53 Materiality, Bataille notes, is neither self nor concept but sheer exteriority.54

“I Do Not Make Ear” At Miki’s 1965 show in the Minami Gallery, viewers encountered ears in life-sized and larger-than-human scales: in matrix-like blocks, framed within boxes, trapped in silkscreened Plexiglas, and half-eaten and attacked by forks. The ear was even evoked in its absence, as a reverse cast. The show marked an early high point in Miki’s trajectory, but Akatsuka Yukio, as noted above, had already sounded a note of skepticism. Two years later, in 1967, the critic Fujieda Teruo asked whether, in continuing to pursue such ideas, artists of his generation were falling into some sort of repetitious formalism. Pointedly, he queried whether, rather than the ear, Miki’s investment in “art” had in fact captured him.

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Maybe it is not that Miki is seeking freedom through his work. Neither is he moving from a purposeless object of expression to an object for expression. But Miki is not captured by the ear. He is not making ears, as one would paint pretty landscapes. Maybe this is why, if he indeed were captured by anything, we would have to call it art. Is this why he has produced the type of work we see before us? . . . I believe today he faces a new question: around the ear, what work can be done between freedom and unfreedom.55 Even as they queried the possible limitations to Miki’s study in self-constraint, Akatsuka and Fujieda’s reviews noted there had in fact been a change in Miki’s practice. Indeed, when considering Miki’s early career, we witness within the space of five years an equal number of major conceptual developments. Earlier, I discussed the significance of the shift from modeling to casting, the introduction of aluminum, and the progressive embrace of an aesthetics of seriality. Two further extensions of the ear appear to be of particular importance: first, the introduction of

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fragmentation within the work, and second, in a related development, an apparent return to the image, seen in attempts at articulating disembodied “environmental” ears, produced with greater or lesser success at the end of the 1960s. Exhibited at the 1965 Minami Gallery show, 50 Fragments of Ear (1964) consists 65 of an inchoate assembly of aluminum ear parts (fig. 14). For the show, Miki produced ears of about two meters high, including large freestanding ears that were cast in parts. The method requires careful planning; from the beginning, Miki needed to determine a plan for the sectioning of the figure, then the production of casts, and the reconstruction of the whole. 50 Fragments clearly connects to the material process involved in the creation of the large-scale ears, which may account for Miki’s allusions in interviews to having developed a method for the serial production of individual ears. Measuring 172 centimeters in length, a similar ear from this time period—now in the collection of Kyoto’s National Museum of Modern Art—is presented as one complete work, although it consists of four detached fragments. Even as some commentators remarked on the beginning of an apparent slowdown during this period, Miki continued to explore possible extensions of the project. He took on major commissions, for which he experimented with alternative Fig. 14 Miki Tomio, 50 Fragments of Ear, 1964. Cast aluminum, materials and alloys. Reinforced plas- dimensions variable. Art Institute of Chicago. Photo: Art Institute tic fiber—pliable and light—was used of Chicago / Art Resource, New York. to create large-scale fluorescent ears for the Tokyo Biennial of 1967, which were bought by advertising giant Dentsū for their corporate collection. He also created a bronze-plated plastic ear, now at the National Museum of Art, Osaka, and presented aluminum-plated plastic works at the Venice Biennale of 1968. In a radical departure from the curatorial strategies typically adopted by Japanese commissioners at the Biennale, the Japanese Pavilion that year introduced work by Miki and Takamatsu Jirō as well as two older artists, Yamaguchi Katsuhiro and Sugai Kumi. By focusing on the type of experimental work produced by Miki’s generation—which to an unfamiliar audience would have appeared congruent with major trends seen in the exhibition, such as narrative figuration, light and movement, and primary structures—the critic Hariu Ichirō, in his role as the Japanese Pavilion’s commissioner, sought to highlight the “international contemporaneity” of Japanese artists. For the Biennale, Miki prepared two large-scale works and a set of ten smaller triangular blocks, which contained repeating rows of left ears. The smaller blocks were placed on a reflective metallic surface, some of them stacked up in threes.

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Meanwhile, the large-scale work, titled Orecchio-Specchio (Ear-Mirror in Italian), consisted of two ears of roughly two meters in height, which were placed symmetrically at the end of brief ramps leaning against the walls. Like 50 Fragments and the untitled ear in Kyoto discussed above, each of these was carved up into eight pieces but presented as an ensemble. The highly reflective surface of the blocks diverged from the rough patina of his earlier work and endlessly multiplied the ear as a series of almost disembodied images. The ears would have appeared to float in the gallery space, like an actualization of the hallucination that had attacked him in the train. Introducing Miki to the Venice Biennale spectators, Hariu remarked on the industrial resonances of the cheap materials used to make the objects. Hariu situated Miki’s work squarely within a critique of modernity (kindai hihan), evoking the antihuman overtones of the work: “Miki has worked for the past decade on the ear. The ear for him is no longer a part of the human body, nor a congealed obsession. . . . The ear is for Miki an obligation and a norm that was imposed by our era of mass production.”56 Hariu notably distanced himself from Tōno’s focus on Miki’s subject matter and materials as an index of reality, as well as from the recurring theme of obsession. In part, this has to do with how Miki himself shifted the focus to the distinctive issue of visual detachment provoked by his discovery of the ear as a type of environmental image. Prior to the Venice Biennale, Miki said of his large-scale ears: “The ear is not a part of the human being. At the same time that it is an obuje complete unto itself, the ear divided into eight parts separates itself from the ear and becomes an independent thing. The carved-up thirty-two sides separate themselves from material form and become part of a topological space” (isō-teki kūkan).57 Miki identified three elements present in the divided-up ear: the ear fragments, the “topological space” created by these fragments, and the whole ear, or gestalt. Topological space is defined in geometry as the space emerging in between the relative positions of a family of objects. Hence, this space is essential to the creation of the whole. In its most literal reading, Miki’s statement seems at first to point to a primary concern with the material process of enlargement and the formal coherence of the resulting images. His concern then appears to shift to the conditions that render an image intelligible and its relationship to matter. Most crucially, however, with Orecchio-Specchio, Miki returned the ear to the central issue of his focus—the implications of fragmentation. The last of the large-scale commissions Miki undertook in the 1960s, and the one whose status remains most contested, is a ten-meter-long ear in concrete placed in Friday’s Plaza at Expo ’70. The concrete structure lay horizontally on the ground with its auricle facing up—a deaf monument, a monument to the absurd. Standing four meters tall and appearing to have fallen haphazardly from the sky, it dwelled among other such monuments marking the triumph of the postwar state. An ear this size could not feasibly be cast in metal and was instead directly modeled with

Fig. 15 Miki Tomio, Untitled (Ear Production Plan 1969–1971), ca. 1968. Ink and graphite on paper, 33 × 24 cm. Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.

Ears, Fragments, and the Pathos of Distance

concrete. Minemura Toshiaki described this implausibly gargantuan obuje, painted in purple, as “like a dead fish,” large to the point of being unrecognizable even to those who knew Miki’s work. The ear no longer exists, and most have chosen to forget it.58 And yet, it at last was the embodiment of the original ear Miki had envisioned at his friend’s house—the phantasm that prompted his earlier comment on the solipsism of form: “Absurd? Indeed.” The politics of participation in this national festival were indeed vexed; however, Miki’s contribution can only be understood as ambiguous and self-mocking. Was this perhaps a nod to the perceived exhaustion of the motif? If so, the oversized ear’s convoluted forms denote a site of endless return, marking the impotence of an avant-garde staging its failed resistance. Even as he forayed into the terrain of total environments, Miki retained the signature ear (fig. 15). Was he stuck? Was he, as some have speculated, thwarted in his attempts to depart from the ear by his promoters? Minami Gallery owner Shimizu Kusuo, for example, reportedly insisted on having him show ears rather than other work in 1972; Tōno also facilitated Miki’s inclusion in major cultural events at the end of the 1960s, including Expo ’70. Did he do it for the money, or was it the crushing weight of what he may have perceived as a generalized expectation? None of these hypotheses on its own appears to provide a satisfactory answer.

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What can be made of Miki’s obsession? Numerous commentators have posed this question, reducing Miki’s work—and by extension, that of his associates—to a rather shallow psychology.59 The question of obsession is an opaque one; answering it necessarily sets the interpreter in search of the various elements that overdetermine the artist’s obsessional representation as a “riddle” for which there initially appears to be no answer outside of psychobiography. But a reliance on psychobiography would lead to the type of farfetched “wild analysis” (Wildeanalyse) that Freud in later years decried; in other words, the shallow application of analytic categories. For Freud, wild analysis was not necessarily indicative of a misdiagnosis but rather constituted, more fundamentally, a misunderstanding of the function of analysis. It reduces interpretation to pathology—the act of calling out symptoms.60 Reflecting the interpreter’s desire for resolution, it says much more about us than it does about our object of study. In this case, it indicates our obsession with biographical categories and the endurance of modernist views on intentionality in the study of art. From a psychoanalytic standpoint, the question of Miki’s obsession is wrongly posed, for it privileges what is manifest over the unconscious. If we indeed are to take seriously the idea that the ear is the potential expression of a Zwangsneurose, Freud’s term for an obsessional neurosis—that the ear is an obsessional representation that condenses an irresolvable conflict between desire and repression—we should first take heed of Miki’s silences and omissions. Miki refers rather explicitly to the ear in terms of negation. In one such instance, he remarks that he had chosen to orient his artistic activity toward a “self-denying position.” He elsewhere described the ear as the negation of action.61 And very early on he wrote, “For me, who has been denied the [capacity of] transformation, the ear is nothing other than consciousness as it shifts from self-aggression [jigyaku] into sadism.”62 Cutting the ear, smashing it into fragments, repeating it endlessly, and subjecting the viewer to the hallucinatory experience of encountering over and over again his “stupid joke,” Miki appears to direct aggression onto an exterior object—as sadism. And yet, Miki’s assessment of himself is missing an active subject. As in Freud’s classic case “A Child Is Being Beaten,” Miki notes that action (transformation, henshin) is being denied to him. But who is denying such transformation, other than himself? Miki: ( . . . ) Hariu-san, you wrote that I chose the ear because of a type of obsession, and that this contradicts a rational approach to creation, but I have never had any obsessive fixation with the ear. My obsession is that in a limited amount of time, I need to choose something. In response to changed circumstances, my consciousness always demands something, but even as it demands it knows it will not be satisfied—and to do this is an extremely self-torturing [jigyaku] thing. That I only make ears is meant as

a way to self-constrain my demands. The ear arises from such restriction. Hariu: So it’s a tool to erase yourself [jikō]? Miki: I also would like to lose the self that erases. Reversing the relationship between the subject who says “I have chosen the ear” and its object is crucial to create the ear. To say that I was chosen by the ear is no mystification [shinpisei o dasu tamedewa naku]; it is tremendously important in the process of making the ear.63

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For Miki, the act of making the ear becomes the vehicle through which a primary impulse toward self-aggression is redirected toward the outside. Yet the ear returns to Miki as a conscious phantasm that masks an ultimately self-imposed constraint— one that he disavows: “I have never had any obsessive fixation with the ear.” And yet the ultimate objective of the ear is to erase the very self that erases. Psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche describes the structure of masochism as follows: “Introject the suffering object; turn the object into a phantasm; make the object suffer; make myself suffer.”64 These appear to be contradictory statements, and yet the slippage between them parallels the redirection of aggression back onto the self, as masochism. Miki succeeded in producing work detached from the author. Doubtless for many he became the “Ear-Man,” even as he disavowed the fact of choice. But in refusing to provide meaning, he transgressed the modernist imperative of significant form. Indeed, our continued desire for biography demonstrates his success; we seek to inscribe the work within his life precisely because he divested himself from authorship. Moreover, while Miki positioned himself as a type of self-effacing, masochistic subject, his actions resulted in the paradoxical expansion and reaffirmation of his persona (at least in appearance): that is, of the artistic ego.65 For example, in lamenting Miki’s untimely death in 1978, sculptor Tanaka Shintarō wrote of the ear as the great idea that ultimately consumed his friend.66 Tanaka reflected in this eulogizing statement the same theology of art and the artist that Miki had sought to undermine in his work and that is reproduced every time we ask—even as we already know the answer—why did he continue making ears? Of course, “it is not that I chose the ear, the ear chose me.” And yet, in facing the hermetic nature of Miki’s work, we are left, again, with the artist’s biography as the only possible avenue for interpretation. There are many inconsistencies to Miki’s myth. One may have originated in the artist’s refusal to speak of the work but, as the eminent art critic Minemura Toshiaki has noted, ultimately was nurtured by the milieu that promoted him. In a recent, still-in-progress essay, Minemura reconstructs Miki’s activities outside the myth of the Ear-Man. Minemura notes that the ear came and went. Not only did Miki create accomplished work before the ear, but together with the ear obuje, he experimented from the mid-1960s onward with a series of alternatives, including the replication

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Fig. 16 Miki Tomio, Untitled (I Do Not Make Ear), 1978. Crayon on paper, 38 × 26 cm. Museum of Contemporary

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Art, Tokyo.

of other body parts (for example, in the Vitruvian Man–inspired works produced for the set of the film The Face of Another). Instead of the ear as form, he submitted three rotating letters spelling out “E-A-R” to the Second Japanese Sculpture exhibition of 1967. (This is admittedly a weak example: a nominalist critic would most certainly argue that in presenting us with a word instead of a figure, Miki was finally giving us his conceptual ear.) In 1969, Miki made large and low-lying horizontal works in glass: Seven Floors, submitted to the Ninth Exhibition of Contemporary Art in Japan; and Vidro, vidro, vidro, which he submitted to the Bienal de São Paulo. Further, as mentioned earlier, he created printed matter, as well as a variety of small-format obuje composed of found materials, to which he returned in the early 1970s. The only constant among these works appears to be his concern with fragmentation.67

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Miki was an accomplished draftsman. His sketches and drawings are refined and show a keen sensitivity to modeling and tonality. Unlike the restrained aesthetics deployed in the ear works, some of his drawings of the 1970s are busy compositions reminiscent of collage, combining figural elements probably encountered during his time in New York. One drawing, a sketch of a crucified figure produced in 1978, takes its title from an English-language inscription next to the figure: “I do not make ear” (fig. 16). The artist has carefully rendered the trunk of the body as well as the tilted head with its crown of thorns. Is it a coincidence that the scene chosen here is that of the sacrifice of the Son by His Father? The ear is a cruel god. We can only speculate on the source of this image. It is tempting to follow a psychobiographical route, conditioned in part by our knowledge of Miki’s impending death. We note the use of the English-language inscription scribbled on the drawing. Miki’s father was a scholar of English literature who did not approve of Miki’s artistic vocation, and it is reported that Miki had difficulty with the English language. Freud associates the masochistic aspect of the Zwangshandlung, or the compulsive behavior characteristic of some obsessional neuroses, with a particularly oppressive superego, the self-critical tendency that assimilates the father-figure upon resolution of the Oedipal conflict. But most striking here is the apparent disavowal made by the Ear-Man: “I do not make ear.” Superficially, the drawing presents the artist negating the ear that many observers thought he had become: the artist depicts something other than an ear and verbally disavows it. But is this drawing truly constitutive of self-denial? This is a “denial of self ” (jiga no hitei), rather than Miki’s “self-denying position” (jikō hitei-tekina tachiba). In a 1985 review, Akita Yoshitoshi suggested an implausible diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia for Miki, based on such purported dissolution of the ego68—a claim that is rather inexplicably repeated by Tatehata. If the “paranoia” angle were to be taken seriously, a smoother art-historical argument could be drawn in relation to the paranoid-critical methodology proposed by Dalí—who posited the literal objectivation of desire in visual representation, an idea that had a wayward influence on Jacques Lacan’s theorization of the mirror stage. But acknowledging this method as part of an art-historical precedent would imply that such an “obsessional” figure in fact returns to a deliberate deployment of repetition, thus contradicting the idea of a possible dissolution of the ego, which would belong to the realm of unconscious processes. To restate the problems associated with wild analysis, the most salient problem in this case is the lack of clarity as to what or whom analysis returns. In psychoanalysis, there is some question as to the actual value of the object of obsession outside of symptomatology. The ear is what we see endlessly repeated, but what is the structural component behind it, other than the fact itself of the compulsion to repeat? Freud queries the nature of such compulsion in his famous essay on the “uncanny.”69 The diffuse sense of dread accompanying the encounter of doubles

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and recurrence arises from the memory of a primordial tendency to repeat, tied to our most base impulses—a tendency strong enough to overcome the pleasure principle that rules supreme over our lives only in appearance. Freud designates this phenomenon of recursivity Wiederholungszwang, or repetition compulsion. The development of this idea led him to eventually posit the existence of a counterpart to the pleasure principle, the inexorable drive to become inorganic—the death drive—that organisms pursue in their quest for the resolution of all conflict.70 Freud increasingly noted that the aggressive expressions of such a drive often paradoxically return to the subject—a tendency that is operative in masochism but is similarly present in melancholia.71 For our purposes, it is important to note that repetition compulsion does not pertain to what is manifest—what we see, the image—but rather emerges at its margins. In Miki’s case, repetition is not found in the form itself. The ear reappears, but it does so in different guises; it is always distinct. Here repetition expresses in fact our desire to contain Miki’s ceaseless return to a specific procedure, which is consciously deployed across his oeuvre—not just repetition but also fragmentation, the negation of totality. Miki posited the process of repeatedly generating fragmentary obuje as a means of distancing the Father-God that is art, the totalizing moralism of commitment, and, eventually, his absolute artistic self from himself. Ultimately, his staged return to the ear moves us toward the recognition of death. “I do not make ear,” he claimed in 1978. In fact, he never did. Miki endlessly produced himself as obuje, that is to say, as a ready-made subject. Repetition compulsion is present as our futile quest for meaning in his made ears—our ceaseless rehashing of notions of artistic intention and the pathology inhering in the modernist life of the artist as genre. We are motivated by a desire for fixity and stability in meaning: that is, by representation. Miki Tomio’s ear obuje engage the social situation—but at a distance. They appear incongruous, absurd, and ironic. Their power arises from formal aspects proper to the aesthetics of the fragment, as well as specific procedures associated with the obuje—in particular its arbitrary designation, its seeping antihumanism, and its reversal of the subject-object dichotomy. I have likewise explored here how the self-detached ear and its coiling forms evoke interiority, subjectivity, and hermeticism—all notions steeped in modernist debates on the function of art and its relationship to society. The ear may appear as an obsessive fixation (kyōhaku kannen) but is it not in fact the logical response to the fixation with core theological concepts of humanism that find paramount expression in art—the belief in the once almighty subject, in choice, in artistic subjectivity? If we were to approach the ear in terms of Miki’s compulsion, it would perhaps signal the staging of a type of perverse subjectivity: a type of masochism that seeks through utter passivity the undermining of such theological concepts.

In closing, I will note that Miki’s ears shift from the hysterical language of negation to an altogether new terrain—a change that may be dated perhaps to the end of the 1960s, when, abandoning the developmental logic of modernism, Miki sought to reach out to the ear outside and encountered a new, melancholic formal structure. Through insistent repetition, the ear ceases to be merely a negation of art; rather, it becomes art’s own impossibility. Miki’s ears as solipsistic and recursive statements demarcate the melancholy site on which to build a new collective politics in failure. In psychoanalytic terms, this recursivity highlights a passage from negation to absolute negativity, from hysteria to melancholia. The implications of this passage might today best be characterized as a practice—a politics and aesthetics—of undoing (désœuvrement). Miki’s refusal in this sense is an expression of the potentiality of change through radical negativity; it is a refusal arising from the betrayed promise of a different society.

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Fig. 17 Tōmatsu Shōmei, Bottle Molten by Heat Rays and Fire, 1961. Gelatin silver print, 25.2 × 25.1 cm. Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. © Shomei Tomatsu—INTERFACE.

Part 2 Image

Writing in 1960 in Asahi Camera, Natori Yōnosuke directed harsh words at photographer Tōmatsu Shōmei, who had recently introduced the breakthrough series titled Occupation. Tōmatsu’s erstwhile mentor and supervisor at the Iwanami Photo Library, Natori accused the photographer of creating “mere impressions” that he did not even make an effort to render intelligible to others: “He abandons the privileging of a specific truth . . . and attempts to move in a direction where he is limited by neither time nor place.”1 Indeed, after nearly a decade of engagement in reportage had amply demonstrated his ability to construct and develop photojournalism’s preferred forms of visual narrative, Tōmatsu attempted something altogether different. The photographs, which depict everyday encounters in the environs of US bases in Japan, were loosely threaded together. Rather than conveying a fully resolved narrative, Tōmatsu instead sought to capture a type of disjointed psychological state: “What was suddenly given to us / This strange reality / Is what I call ‘Occupation.’”2 For Natori, photography’s referentiality was at stake; the fragmented, epigrammatic quality of the series and Tōmatsu’s deliberate refusal to locate the material within an immediately recognizable context ran counter to photojournalism and its concern with objective truth. Tōmatsu responded that his practice offered subjectivity as an antidote to postwar photojournalism’s increasingly sclerotic approach to the real.3 His celebrated response marked his departure from photojournalistic orthodoxy: Tōmatsu became closely associated with a newly emergent sensibility among photographers who, together with incorporating greater expressivity in their visual narratives, sought to interrogate the ambiguity of the photographic image.4 This frequently cited episode was not just an important event in the development of Tōmatsu’s career. Leveraged as part of a narrative of consolidation of photography as an autonomous art practice in the postwar period, it has become a classic locus signaling the end of the hegemony of realism (rearizumu) at the hands of the so-called Image generation—the young photographers who, at the end of the 1950s, pursued alternative narrative and compositional techniques and relied on darkroom manipulation in their search for more expressive forms

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of photography. The shift from objective to subjective approaches in photography occurred, it is often argued, as part of the exhaustion of realist idioms, as articulated by the three key figures who bridged prewar neo-objectivism into the early postwar years: Kimura Ihei, who had privileged the snapshot as a type of mechanistic engagement of reality; the aforementioned Natori; and Domon Ken, who conveyed the reality of social conflict in postwar Japan. But within what critic Nishii Kazuo has described as Japanese photography’s “dialectics of history” (rekishi no benshōhō), the Image generation itself became a transitional milestone, surpassed in the consolidation of increasingly subjective approaches to the photographic medium at the end of the 1960s.5 Given that the question of function and the redefinition of the medium in terms of artistic autonomy have traditionally been placed at the axis of its developmental narrative, photography from this period is usually discussed independently from concurrent debates in experimental art. Yet there are important resonances from the perspective of aesthetics. One can be found in the keen interest these younger photographers developed in the conflicted relationship between image and materiality, which Tōmatsu famously foregrounded in his photographs of survivors and relics from the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, to which he applied cropping and darkroom processing techniques more usually associated with avant-garde photography (fig. 17). Likewise, by the end of the 1960s, visual artists engaged a multitude of alternative accounts of the image. Inspired in particular by concerns in the emerging field of media sociology,6 artists with practices as diverse as those of Miki Tomio, Takamatsu Jirō, Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, and the younger Sekine Nobuo explored the dichotomy between the illusionistic nature of the image (kyozō) and the actuality of objects (jittai-sei). These concurrent developments speak to a common problematization of the material underpinnings of the image. This section’s chapters concern themselves with the ontology of the image, in particular its vexed relationship to materiality as a central and shared concern for artists and photographers in the 1960s. Rather than offer a revisionist history of photography, together the chapters propose an orthogonal position afforded by the legacies of the avant-garde, examined here first in the close rapport between Ōtsuji Kiyoji and Takiguchi Shūzō, as well as in the baroque fantasies of Hosoe Eikoh’s Barakei. Their experiments informed the rediscovery of expressivity in photography by the Image generation, which embraced ambiguity. In this section I observe two sites where the legacies of avant-gardist accounts of photography and the image become most apparent: in the exploration of materiality through photographs of obuje, which allowed for a rediscovery of photography’s material conditions or its thingliness, and in the exploration of the ghostly nature of the image, which is evinced by the ambiguity of presence and absence in photographs. These interests underscore Surrealist debates, which indifferently cast both images and physical objects as objects and characterized photography as a medium that could assist in

probing and undoing the tyranny of reason through the subversion of visual form.7 In these photographers’ problematization of the object, likewise, we find a structural dynamic at work similar to that discussed in the previous chapters, leading to a transition from the hysterical language of negation—the denial of realism—to a melancholic position that demanded the elaboration of an altogether new understanding of reality. This move might, perhaps, be characterized better as a shift not so much from objective to subjective, but from negation to negativity.

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Chapter 3

Object, Mirror, Stain

Object (Takiguchi’s Study)

What an utterly embarrassing moment has the camera chosen to visit my master. Should we call this a “study”? If so, should we not for this very reason call it instead “a room where shadows live”? What are those hands on the desk doing? They probably do not know. That desk full of papers, those pens—estranged from their usual meaning—now most certainly embarrass me. They speak loudly of that “silence of mine” with which I struggle. Yet—just as I write now—I can still write. It still seems to be my craft. What a gift.1 For poet and critic Takiguchi Shūzō, at the limit of words, there were things. In his essay “Margins of the Blank Page,” he discusses the act of writing and its physical support—the desk, the study, its walls, and those objets on his desk that physically instantiated poetry and gave material form to a private language of memory. Instead of the clarity of words, this language relied on shadows, on images, to make itself

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intelligible. Published in the magazine Mizue in 1963, Takiguchi’s words accompanied photographs of his study (fig. 18). In the text, the desk of the poet tells the reader about its owner’s retreat from words, as he bears witness to his embarrassment on confronting the hesitations and reticence of old age. 79 A year after Takiguchi’s death in 1979, Ōtsuji Kiyoji took a series of photographs of the poet’s study (plate 5). The room appears overtaken by things: one of the photographs shows books piled upon books before an already full bookcase, an architectural lamp angling over a desk, dry roses lingering in a crystal vase, and framed artwork sitting on the tatami mat and resting against the walls. Brushes and pens stand still in a jar beside a covered typewriter; seashells rest on the table and inside acrylic cases; packages and correspondence lay unopened next to a mounted autograph of one “Rrose Sélavy,” Marcel Duchamp’s alter ego.2 On the shelves, in the background, we see postcards, photographs, and paintings (fig. 19). Another photograph in the series focuses on a side table. Two framed works preside over a curious menagerie: rocks, more books, more seashells, more paper, magazines, postcards, a wrapped package, and a morpho butterfly in a wooden case keep company with assorted objets d’art. Everything appears carefully organized, as if these belongings await a poet Fig. 18 Takiguchi Shūzō at his desk, originally published in the magazine Mizue 697 (March 1963). Photographer unknown. to bring them back to life. This is clearly Courtesy of the Takiguchi Archives at Keio University Art Centre. display, rather than storage—a wunderkammer, or an altar (fig. 20). On first encountering Ōtsuji’s photographs, one cannot help but note that, as a workspace, Takiguchi’s study is somewhat dysfunctional. The desk appears to have almost no free surfaces. Where did he write; where did he draw? Indeed, by this point in time the room’s arrangement had undergone a series of transformations, perhaps due to the poet’s increasing lack of mobility in his final years. Maybe the desk ceased to be necessary as he retreated from the world of professional art writing; maybe his reconnection with his prewar artistic practice required him to look for a broader, freer surface. Indeed, in the early 1960s, Takiguchi had taken to working on a backless sofa and low table at the center of the room, while a jumble of objects piled up on his desk.3 Postcards and correspondence hung from nearby nets; artwork and various objects plastered the study’s walls. Indeed, the study became a kind of vedette in its own right. It was regularly featured in the art press, and in addition to Ōtsuji, a number of other significant photographers also captured it (Kitadai Shōzō, Hosoe Eikoh, and Takanashi Yutaka, among others). In

Figs. 19 & 20 Ōtsuji Kiyoji, from the series Takiguchi Shūzō’s Study, 1980. Gelatin silver print, 17.5 × 17.8 cm. Musashino Art University Museum and Library.

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those photographs, the study appears as background, or as an attribute of the poet. By contrast, in Ōtsuji’s posthumous photographs, the study and its many objects are the protagonists of the series. Perhaps these photographs would be best described as commemorative: a group portrait, like the pictures taken at a gathering of friends, old and new. As the viewer sorts out the affinities revealed here from within the mass—those bonds of kinship among arbitrarily chosen but otherwise unrelated things—individual items beckon. Their power pierces the camera’s viewfinder: we see these things and want to quiz them, to find out more. In “Margins of a Blank Page,” Takiguchi notes: These things in my study are not a collection. Their association is that of a bricolage of keepsakes bound together by something unique to me. Also, by dust and by time. Pebbles and an empty sardine can, a terracotta figure from India, fallen leaves, a watercolor by Michaux, or a tightly wrapped shell I once received from Duchamp titled “The Legend of the Moon,” an autographed portrait of Breton, Munari’s ashtray, matchsticks, a pickax whose label

reads “Hiroaki” . . . etc., etc. Only I know in which dimension such random things come together and converse. They are objets, and they are words. Oh, books that will never be bound or paginated, oh walls—open up!4 81

Why objects? Maybe words had indeed abandoned him. Poet and critic Okada Takahiko suggested he had fallen into “some kind of aphasia that prevented him from writing words that could thread together phrases of common use,”5 a condition that led him to explore a different form of writing altogether: painting, burning, and staining, a type of wordless tracemaking, a substitution of objects for words. Okada echoed what Takiguchi himself implied amounted to a discontinuous trajectory. Counter to this assessment, however, art historian and critic Mitsuda Yuri has argued that a common thread runs through Takiguchi’s lifetime of activities, which included poetic experiments in the 1920s, an interrupted career as art critic in the 1930s, his postwar reemergence at the epicenter of the avant-garde in the 1950s, and the mysterious turn his career took around 1960—away from words and toward things—which will be addressed in this chapter. Mitsuda locates in Takiguchi’s trajectory a unique problem opened up by the relationship between word (kotoba), matter (busshitsu), and image (eizō).6 These three elements converge in Takiguchi’s study, which, judging from the photographs, the poet seems to have deliberately refashioned as he crafted his late persona in his work and public presentation: a change visible in Ōtsuji’s vision of Takiguchi’s study. Takiguchi discussed his monomania—his fetishism—in an aphoristic essay published in 1965. He opens his “Notes on Things” (Monomono-hikae) with the salvo: A biography of things. A biography for things. What if my whole life ended up being haunted by things that I cannot have? Even to consider this terrifies me.7

Object, Mirror, Stain

Takiguchi acknowledged that his biography could only be written through objects— things that, as we have previously seen, are alive and thus require biographies (henreki) of their own. In this sense, Takiguchi’s study is his biography. Ōtsuji’s posthumous photographs in the series Takiguchi Shūzō’s Study capture this space as an instantiation of a biography of and for things. The series renders this impossibility as a visible paradox: an overflowing proliferation of objects whose master is no longer present. Inanimate yet animate, on the desk, on the side table, these objects at rest—these relics—have a power that attracts the viewer. They trap the monotsuki, those easily captured by the mononoke, the spirit of things. Yet as Takiguchi clarified in “Notes on Things,” this attachment does not derive from a collector’s

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lusting after objects but rather emerges in the anticipation of his own demise. In addition to focusing on things present, Ōtsuji’s photographs stress absence, or a haunting present-absence of objects that cannot be had except as photographs, or as remembrance of things past. In the photograph they are metonymically tied to 82 the unbearable absence of their newly departed owner: Ōtsuji’s friend and mentor, the critic Takiguchi. The 1980 photographs were not the first instance of Ōtsuji approaching Takiguchi’s study. Ōtsuji first created a series of color photographs documenting the study and its objets in 1979, shortly after the poet’s death. In this initial approach, the components appear crisply rendered: a broader frame, vivid colors, and precise lighting allow for an individuation that is completely lost in the later black-andwhite photographs. The latter images are framed tightly, are closely cropped, and make use of a much darker range of value overall. Thus, they contrast not only with those photographs previously taken by Ōtsuji— both the 1979 color series and photographs taken in 1975 (a black-and-white portrait of Takiguchi and his wife, Ayako; fig. 21)—they also diverge from the photographs appearing in the art press throughout the 1960s.8 Ōtsuji’s photographs in the Takiguchi Shūzō’s Study series Fig. 21 Ōtsuji Kiyoji, Takiguchi Shūzō and His Wife, 1975. Gelatin silver print, produce something that exceeds 16 × 22.4 cm. Musashino Art University Museum and Library. their ostensible function of documenting this space, and even the avowed aim of evoking the figure of the poet. We note this in how the series depicts a sequence of pictures within pictures: for example, the composite group portrait mentioned earlier, which is visible on the bookshelf. The untitled collage was sent by Arakawa Shūsaku and Madeline Gins to Takiguchi on the occasion of the publication of Takiguchi’s homage to Duchamp, To and From Rrose Sélavy: Collected Sayings of Marcel Duchamp (1968); it melds portraits of Duchamp, Greta Garbo, and Takiguchi. Through photographic mediation, these three phenomena are not only sutured together;9 they have become coextensive with the bookshelf, its tomes, and the seashells lying on the table. Garbo, Duchamp, and Takiguchi—all rendered part image, part object, part words10—appear in equivalence to Sélavy’s autograph, now a freestanding object sitting on the desk. Indeed, Ōtsuji later reminisced that

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the carefully composed collection of objects appeared to him to be “almost a solid collage” (rittai korāju).11 On the side table, a mysterious chimera returns our gaze—a magnetic painting by Nakanishi Natsuyuki—and next to it, what appears to be a print, showing a repeated pattern based on Sélavy’s autograph. Portrait of Rrose Sélavy Based on the Wilson-Lincoln System (Uiruson-Rinkan shisutemu ni yoru Rōzu Seravuī, 1967), coauthored by Takiguchi and Duchamp, was issued as part of a set of original prints that accompanied To and From Rrose Sélavy. The print’s image shifts depending on the angle from which it is approached, alternately revealing Man Ray’s 1930 profile of Duchamp and the repeated run of Sélavy’s autograph, which the French artist had licensed to Takiguchi in 1963.12 Takiguchi called it a “double picture.” Naturally, the photograph is unable to retain this ambiguity of the work: instead, it provides a dark frame with the writing mirroring Sélavy’s original autograph on the desk. Beneath the print, the frames of photographs, paintings, and postcards generate a dissonant composition, their parallel lines running counter to the grid produced by the camera. This at times renders it difficult to distinguish image from object, thing from photograph, background from foreground. This muddling of the camera’s objective eye—or, alternatively, the camera’s eye for objects—grounds my interest in the ontology of the photographic image. Through his exploration of thingly affinities and sources, Ōtsuji provides as much a consideration of photography itself as he does of Takiguchi’s life. This question is of a conceptual order, for what are these things of which Takiguchi’s biography is made but images themselves—shadows, representations, repetitions, revenants? Ōtsuji noted a few years later: “One could not say one had visited the study without having witnessed the books and magazines piled up on the side tables, with their hoards of objets and artwork, and the paintings and pictures crowding the walls. Indeed, it was this surface of the room, completely plastered over by what appeared on first sight a random assortment of things—the skin of this space—that was its true substance.”13 The camera cannot convey the object: it can only access such skin, such surface. Yet, as Ōtsuji astutely notes, the shadows that fill up the room are indeed its true nature. The Takiguchi Shūzō’s Study series extended Ōtsuji’s investigation of the relationship between objects and photography. The images recall earlier photographs by Ōtsuji, such as the shots taken during the installation of works for the Tenth Tokyo Biennale, the celebrated Between Man and Matter show curated by Nakahara Yūsuke in 1970. The exhibition famously featured the deadpan artworks of young Japanese and foreign artists, displayed for the first time as equivalent to each other, side by side, at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.14 But in contrast with Takiguchi’s study, the galleries are spartan in their severity and restraint: Ōtsuji’s camera matter-of-factly approaches the artworks, which are displayed in large, empty rooms, and focuses on a single object or a gallery interaction. Ōtsuji’s

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contribution was ostensibly a documentary assignment—beyond his art photography practice, he had ample experience in commercial and press photography and taught the subject at various institutions beginning in the late 1950s. However, like the study series, the photographs Ōtsuji took during the Tokyo Biennale expose the contiguity between photographic documentation and a more expressive form of engagement with these objects. Rather than providing a clean “look,” the photographs are gritty, using harsh lighting and high contrast, and some are printed with visible graining. Most striking, however, is the tactility they evoke. For example, light bounces off the surface of the charred cypress logs Narita Katsuhiko used for his work Sumi; the glare renders their black surfaces white. I argue that the difference is not just a stylistic flourish but is in fact conceptual: Ōtsuji appears interested in how to access the thingliness of the objects he sought to portray. He achieves this through a contrast elicited by focusing on the objects’ skin. Such difference from standard art documentation becomes particularly evident in the outtakes from the series Ōtsuji published in Asahi Camera in 1975: a pair of high contrast, black-and-white photographs, part of a photo essay titled That is over there.15 These images are humorously framed by a caption printed underneath that neutralizes the truth the viewer perceives in the pictures. The first photograph shows artist Barry Flanagan laboriously picking up wood shavings with an improvised set of tongs and placing them on top of a precarious sculptural installation, which he has loosely pulled together out of cardboard, sand, and plywood (fig. 22). The artist is dwarfed by the implements with which he manipulates the shavings; he struggles to manipulate the shavings as they roughly fall in place. The caption reads: “A man who hasn’t finished piling up wood shavings.” The second shows the German Conceptualist Reiner Ruthenbech pausing pensively next to his Heap of Coal (1970), which sits next to him on the ground (fig. 23). The caption reads: “A man who has finished piling up coal.” Appearing off-center, Ruthenbech is reduced almost to a shadow that mirrors the flatly dark mound at the left corner. In the written component of the photo essay, Ōtsuji explained how photographers can exploit the tension between the object photographed and its surroundings. In this case, the contrast between the active figure (wood shavings) and the figure at rest (coal) is framed by the high ceilings of the gallery and the empty space surrounding the work.16 These elements are rendered more poignant through the use of a wide-angle lens and the combination of the bright, high-contrast lighting provided by fluorescent tubes, which enhances the texture of each element. A secondary effect is that the depicted artists’ gestures and posture are simplified into a caricature-like outline. The effect is comical; the photographs seem to echo the disbelief with which many greeted the cerebral yet melancholy statements of this younger generation of international “postminimalists.” In the photographs, the artworks come alive as a mischievous and playful question—“But is it art?” The question turns on itself, for the photograph equally appears to ask, “If so, am I art, too?”

Fig. 22 Ōtsuji Kiyoji, A Man Who Hasn’t Finished Piling Up Wood Shavings, 1970. Gelatin silver print, 20.4 × 30.7 cm. Musashino Art University Museum and Library. Fig. 23 Ōtsuji Kiyoji, A Man Who Has Finished Piling Up Coal, 1970. Gelatin silver print, 20.4 × 30.7 cm. Musashino Art University Museum and Library.

Object, Mirror, Stain

The procedure Ōtsuji relied on in these photographs was not new for him. He had long exploited the ambiguity of vision facilitated by the camera’s distortions of space and volume—its inevitably failing translation of reality—thereby establishing a poetic register that he first revealed in his early photographs of obuje taken in the 1940s and 1950s. Back then, obuje appeared to him as a means for photography to interrogate its relationship to objects more generally, and photographic objectivity in particular. Ōtsuji later extended his reflections on the characteristic planarity of photographic representation in a more narrative-oriented series of kumi-shashin—for instance, in the series Mute Song (Mugon no uta, 1951–53). Significantly, this approach to photography was reliant not simply on subject matter but also, rather intuitively, on the plastic characteristics of the medium. In a 1951 letter to Takiguchi, Ōtsuji explained his approach:

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To this day I am driven by my attempt to find out how to free photography from its lack of liberty (and of creativity) [hijiyū-sei (hisōzō-sei)]. . . . Until now I have done this by placing as much distance as possible between a concept and the actual “thing.” . . . I have recently realized that in front of the actual “thing,” a photograph is but a dirty piece of paper. . . . As realistically as you may make an effort to portray a rock . . . the actuality of the existing rock will be forever stronger.17 There was, however, one particular way in which photography’s incomplete grasp of reality could in effect provide a way forward. As in Ōtsuji’s posthumous pictures of Takiguchi’s study, this required the photographer to focus his lens not on the actuality of the thing or on a particular meaning attached to its representation, but rather on the thing’s surface—that is, by seeking out the skin of the object.

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Mirror (Takiguchi’s Theory) Ōtsuji problematized Takiguchi’s apparent disengagement from the medium of photography in his aptly titled essay “Takiguchi-san and Photography” (1974).18 Takiguchi had not directly addressed photography in his postwar criticism, despite developing remarkable collaborations with individual practitioners over the years. Frequently meeting with photographers, attending their exhibitions, writing for their projects, and providing them with access to his ample contacts, he mentored, for instance, not only Ōtsuji himself but also Kitadai Shōzō (Ōtsuji’s colleague at the Experimental Workshop), Ishimoto Yasuhiro, Narahara Ikkō, and Hosoe Eikoh, even after retreating from the frontlines of criticism in the early 1960s. Yet this evident interest did not lead Takiguchi to engage in sustained theoretical debate on photography. What would explain what looks like a deliberate omission on his part?19 For Ōtsuji, the paradox was compounded by the deep affinity that Takiguchi seems to have felt for the medium. Ōtsuji ventures that such affinity may have been in part due to biographical reasons: Takiguchi’s father—who passed away suddenly when the poet was a teenager—left him his camera, and Takiguchi had attempted to teach himself how to use it.20 More significantly, however, such affinity also arguably derived from the fact that photography condensed a series of aesthetic questions that Takiguchi explored throughout his lifelong engagement with Surrealism—in particular, the relationship between word, image, and materiality. After all, photography took pride of place in Surrealist debates. André Breton, who corresponded with Takiguchi, wrote extensively on photography and actively deployed it in his publications.21 Before the war, along with his better-known writings on modern art, Takiguchi penned a series of articles on avant-garde photography (zen’ei shashin, or

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avangyarudo shashin) for a low-circulation but relatively influential journal called The Photo Times (Foto Taimusu). Taken together, these essays are Takiguchi’s attempt at theorizing the medium. While his point of departure is a reflection on Surrealism’s potential contribution to a theory of photography, he quickly arrived at a broader question. In these essays, Takiguchi appeared particularly concerned with the nature of photography’s connection to the realm of objects, which arose from its documentary capacity, or kirokusei. However, in attempting to elucidate this relationship, Takiguchi found himself struggling to define the specific plasticity (zōkeisei) of the photographic medium. Photography provokes the viewer, Takiguchi notes, but at the same time it produces distance. Such ambivalence is promoted by the unbridgeable divergence between what is represented and the actuality of the object portrayed, which despite its appearance on the photograph’s surface, no longer is. “Evidently,” he notes, “a photograph could never be one and the same thing as the object portrayed, or allow for it to be touched.”22 And yet photographs have a capacity for affect that is based on the fact that somehow they still manage to convey an absent object’s presence. Takiguchi’s interest in photography, however, seems to have come to a premature end. He was forced to put his critical writings on hold in the latter part of the 1930s, due to the increasingly complex political situation at home brought about by the ascent of authoritarianism and a worsening of wartime conditions.23 Ōtsuji notes a series of important events in his essay; for instance, The Photo Times, which had become a key venue for debate on experimental photography, was restructured under the government’s cultural consolidation policies (bunka tōsei). Merged with Hōdō shashin (Photojournalism) in January 1941, the new journal’s mandate became the production of informational and patriotic photography appropriate to the national emergency.24 On March 5, Takiguchi was arrested by the notorious Tokkō—the Special Higher Police—and held for over eight months on charges of subversive thought (fuon shisō).25 Only a few weeks after his release in November, the Japanese Navy carried out a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 8, 1941, leading to the outbreak of hostilities between Japan and the United States. There Takiguchi’s direct engagement with the problem of photographic ontology came to an end. In his essay, Ōtsuji relates this interruption to the ascendancy of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity)-inflected photojournalism: an approach to photography preferred by the authoritarian government, whose hegemony paradoxically extended well into the newly democratic postwar period. In his prewar writings on photography, Takiguchi appears enthralled by photography’s ambiguous presence-absence, a paradox he was never fully able to reconcile. Takiguchi associated such ambivalence with the workings of the Surrealist objet.26 His essay “Buttai to shashin” (“Object and Photography,” 1938) considered a corpus of photographs of various objets—a body of work that in his view illuminated the specificity of the medium. Whether in explicitly Surrealist photographs by Man

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Ray, formal experiments with objects such as peppers by Edward Weston, or even neo-objective projects such as Karl Blossfeldt’s close-ups of plants in Urformen der Kunst (Archetypes of art, 1928), Takiguchi found a similar approach that he noted held much in common with Surrealism’s views on the contingency of the object. As noted in the first chapter, Takiguchi differentiated the objet from a notion of idealized subjectivity, or the clean division between exterior world and interiority. Instead, after Breton, he saw in the objet a type of transgressive tool that furnishes a means for investigating the true nature of reality—where reality is understood as the basic conditions of material existence—and also the spiritual consequences of materiality. In considering photography, Takiguchi problematized its capacity to mediate between the viewer and the object portrayed. What does it mean that a photograph captures and accurately renders an object’s likeness to a viewer? How does such a likeness return to its referent? Takiguchi argued that photography is like the objet in that it similarly generates an ambiguous response in the viewer. Once photographed, the object may disappear, but another object is in fact still there—a photograph, which stands in place of the now-absent original, and which mediates the viewer’s desires. However, resolution is an avowed impossibility. Takiguchi identifies here another paradox: the substitution of the photograph-as-object for the now-absent thing, which depends on the promise entailed by likeness. In other words, rather than substitution or permutation, Takiguchi appears to have understood photography as marked by metonymy, animated by a fundamental coextension with the photographed object. Photographs are a strange type of objet, one that is coextensive—extending, as it were, the photographed object’s skin, and yet at the same time effacing its own surface. We more often than not do not see the photograph as an object, but a photograph is entirely different from a vehicle simply conveying contents through its image. It would be quite different to, say, have Ōtsuji walk us through Takiguchi’s study than to encounter these objects bound together by the photographic skin. The study turns a collection of disparate objects into the poet’s singular biography, one that we see and touch, as evoked by the photographer. Indeed, surface—skin—plays a key role in Takiguchi’s theory. In “Object and Photography,” Takiguchi sought to elucidate the specificity of photography’s operation by comparing it to the object relationship crystallized in painting. He located the difference between photography and painting in the way each medium relates to surface. In a somewhat pleonastic passage, he wrote: “Photography completely ignores the tactility of a painting’s surface; rather, it is transparent like a mirror. Photography is essentially art that relies on light for its medium. Photography completely subverts Impressionism’s theoretical underpinnings [rironteki konkyo]. Photography is a second mirror. . . . Increasingly, it will exploit the illusion generated by its flatness [heimen no iryūjon]. I believe it is precisely here [i.e., in such flatness] that the objectuality [buttaisei] and true tactility [shokkakusei] of photography shall be

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demonstrated.”27 Takiguchi contrasts photography, a light-reliant medium, with painting. While Impressionists sought to portray light—effectively substituting light for pigment—photography actually uses light to depict its objects. Photography, he argued, removed itself from the animating concerns of painting, which was intent in utilizing tactility in order to generate the fiction of the object’s presence—a ruse achieved by means of pictorial illusionism. By contrast, the photograph’s analogic qualities permitted it to be unequivocally coextensive while retaining the object’s absence. Photography was able to refuse painting’s ersatz tactility: as a light-based medium, its seemingly unequivocal referentiality helped it efface its own material conditions, while at the same time it called into question the reality of its referent. It is precisely this push-pull effected by the distancing of the referent that makes the viewer of photographs sink into them as into a limpid pool. A photograph is able to capture not only its object but also its viewers and convince them that what is photographed is in fact “real.” The idea of the photograph acting as a mirror of an exterior world—or as the proverbial shroud of Turin—is a familiar one in the history of photography.28 Yet Takiguchi proposes here something slightly different: photography is not just any mirror but a second mirror (dai-ni no kagami). “Photography is most appropriate for expressing the spirit of the objet,” he wrote, “because, compared to all other arts, its expressive function keeps so-called artistic intervention to a minimum. However, this does not mean that the objet is displayed without interpretation. The photographed objet is already a found object; this is why I earlier called [photography] a second mirror.”29 Photographs of Surrealist objets already contain within them a first mirror: an object that entices and provokes the viewer, one that is, moreover, both metonymic and metaphoric. Photography thus enacts a second degree of mediation, which becomes evident in considering the relationship made visible in such photographs. The photograph mediates an object that in turn already mediates something else: the sur-real. In producing such an objet’s likeness, the photograph also calls attention to itself as photography. This secondary degree of mediation awakens the viewer to the photograph’s capacity as mirror, one that the viewer sinks into like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, or the character of the Poet in Jean Cocteau’s influential film Le sang d’un poète (The blood of a poet) (1930).30 Takiguchi intuited a core question on the specific capacities of the photograph and its image: what material conditions enabled a photograph’s capacity as second mirror? In other words, what was the specific nature of the photograph as form? This explains perhaps the strange turn in the argument of what would become Takiguchi’s final contribution to The Photo Times. “A Reconsideration of Photography and Plasticity” (Shashin to zōkeisei no saikentō, 1940) is an urgent and important essay beyond the historical conjuncture at which it was written, although its questions remained unresolved and are only fully grasped when considered together with his earlier essays. Here, Takiguchi relied on a series of rhetorical comparisons, or

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comparanda, whose function becomes evident with the recognition that his entire theory of photography relied on the analogy introduced above: as with the objet, so is photography. In “A Reconsideration,” Takiguchi reviewed the trajectory undertaken by photographers in Japan since the medium’s discovery as “art.” Pictorialists, who created hazy depictions of bucolic scenes and still-lifes, were followed by a second wave of mostly amateur photographers who embraced a type of nonobjective expression that relied on technical manipulation to generate new types of abstract visual experiments. Initially these approaches may appear far apart, but Takiguchi noted they were both informed by the language of painting. He set these photographers apart from photojournalists, who, enthralled by the analogic capacities of the medium and its ability to confirm a seemingly irrefutable reality, took matter-of-fact snapshots and composed images into visual essays that sought to narrate events as they took place. Somewhere in between the two, Takiguchi called attention to the emergence of a third group that found a venue for diffusion and debate in the journal’s pages. They developed a type of expression reliant on a subversion of vision akin to that used by the Surrealists. They combined all of the idioms developed by their predecessors, including distortive techniques—such as double exposure, montage, and other forms of darkroom manipulation—seeking the recreation of dreamscapes and the interrogation of everyday reality. Yet Takiguchi was dissatisfied with all of these strands. He longed for an outcome only possible through a reconsideration of the true nature of photographic expression.

Image

We can think of plastic form in photographic expression as a more general problem. In order to discuss its artistic nature, photography is frequently compared to painting, but the two should not be conflated. Photography is not Painting, but a sort of Picture; it is not peinture [panchūru] but a type of image [imāju]. . . . Taking these limits into consideration, we can still say that photography, too, is a cultural technique that constructs twodimensional forms [forumu]; but a specifically photographic plasticity [shashinteki zōkeisei] must be among the crucial elements that enable its appeal and irrefutability as image [eizō].31 Pictorialists, and likewise nonobjective photographers who wished to emulate painting and establish photography as art, had misapprehended both of these categories. They did not understand the important difference between painting’s tactility and such tactility’s apparent elision in photography; moreover, crucially, they failed to grasp the importance of photography’s flatness. By contrast, the mirror of reality pursued by photojournalism failed in that it led its viewers to focus solely on

questions of plausibility and truth-likeness; the irrefutability of the photographic image was mistaken for the actual material form that provoked it. On the other hand, those photographers who found themselves in communion with Surrealism were also deceived into thinking they could grasp the surreal through the denial of plausibility. They too misapprehended the power of the photographic surface—the skin of photography.

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I would like to end these rather preliminary notes toward a reevaluation of plastic form by referring briefly to one of the conclusions I have reached. This is, to be specific, that if there were any such thing as an artistic nature of photography, it would not exist as an unreachable ideal, beyond or separate from direct photographic documentation. For this reason, all of photography’s distortional techniques should be seen as nothing else but a phenomenon within art comparable to the use of rhetorical figures [in literature; hiyu], and cannot be said to be its art’s essential tendency. In this sense, I believe we must recover a plain and simple method [shikata] that demands art in photography.32

Object, Mirror, Stain

It is important to note here Takiguchi’s emphasis on the term zōkeisei, which I have rendered “plasticity.” In its use here, plasticity appears as a core element of the art object—its material dimensions are indicative of the fact that it has been shaped, molded, or arranged as a physical form. This runs counter to art’s reduction to a notion of visuality (captured in the terms les arts visuelles or bildende kunst). This is remarkable in relation to photography, a medium that has usually been reductively posited as solely image. Indeed, the question of image is somewhat inconsequential to Takiguchi: he notes that the manipulation of vision enabled by darkroom techniques is simply one example of photography’s range of capabilities, but just as realism does not define photography, neither does its capacity for distortion. In Takiguchi’s view, the genius of photographers such as Man Ray or Edward Weston resides precisely in that they did not deny photography’s documentary quality. Indeed, just as in Karl Blossfeldt’s objectivist photographs, the photographic avant-garde shared a reliance on the medium’s documentary quality, which they mobilized in order to reaffirm the fundamental ambiguity of the real. The notion of tactility (or the absence thereof) invoked in relation to photography producing a specific plastic form—i.e., a form that emerges relative to the spaces engaged by the frame—stresses Takiguchi’s focus on the material preconditions of the image. Ultimately, for Takiguchi, photographs existed as the quintessential objet. A photograph was an object that behaved strangely in that it was also a mirror; simultaneously object and nonobject, photographs were forms that called

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themselves into question. What photography certainly was not was disembodiment, or sheer visuality without matter. This sophisticated theoretical intervention renders the earlier question, concerning Takiguchi’s abandonment of photography as a critical concern, even more mysterious. Ōtsuji does not go as far as stating this outright in “Takiguchi-san and Photography”—but his implied suggestion is that Takiguchi may have felt he had nothing left to say to postwar photography. In Ōtsuji’s view, the mainstream of photography, represented by Neue Sachlichkeit–inspired engagements from wartime propaganda to the postwar period’s socially concerned photography, appeared to completely miss the point of the question in relation to photographic mediation. They were simply not interested in understanding photography as doubled mirror. Perhaps this disconnection was because Takiguchi’s writings on photography were characteristically at odds with commonly held positions in the ongoing debate between expressive and documentary photography. But Takiguchi’s argument anticipated and intuited a resolution to the critique of discourses of photographic realism that gained traction among critics and practitioners two decades later—in the 1950s, that is, after the Occupation-era reintroduction to Japan of a discourse on “subjective photography,” at the hands of New York MoMA’s Edward Steichen. This discourse came to inform the work of a newly emergent generation of photographers, the so-called Image generation, whose work was predated by Japanese avant-gardist photographers. In 1951, Ōtsuji pointedly asked—in an apologia for nonobjective and avant-garde photography, derided in the mainstream Japanese press as incomprehensible (wakaranai shashin)—if the hegemony of objectivism did not oversimplify the capacities of the medium. “Is the domain of photographic expression really so narrow?”33 In his (avowedly partisan) history of this moment, photography critic Fukushima Tatsuo relishes recounting how even the most eminent proponent of “realism” in the postwar period, photographer Domon Ken, appeared exasperated before the impoverished understanding of reality insisted on by defenders of photojournalistic dogma.34 Eventually, space would open up to more subjective experiments in photographic debates. But by reproducing the dialectical structure that pitted subjective against objective photography, such discourse may also have been blindsided by the question of photography as plastic form: avant-gardists, too, reduced the capacities of the photographic medium to what is visually apparent.

Image

Stain (Takiguchi’s Scrapbook) On the half-ripped first page of a scrapbook dated 1960, Takiguchi wrote in clear block letters: “initiation à l’écriture” (fig. 24). Spider-like traces of ink spread in rhythmic patterns, page after page. Markings are organized vertically or horizontally, traversing the page only to change direction and meander back to their

Fig. 24 Takiguchi Shūzō, Sketchbook No. 1, 1960. Takiguchi Shūzō Archive, Keio University Art Center.

Object, Mirror, Stain

point of origin; others create spirals or appear in discrete groupings across the blank space, composed without any apparent orientation. The markings at times appear to weave phrases in coiling handwriting and come close to resembling words, but this is a private language for which the reader is offered no key. Among the repeating patterns of curves and lines, drops of ink splashed from a fountain pen stretch out like stars. The exercises included in this “Initiation to Writing” are indebted to Surrealist automatism. Yet it is hard to pin down a specific correlate among European artists. Takiguchi departed from the experimental trace-making of figures like André Masson or Henri Michaux; he did not make the scrapbook’s lines and stains available for painting. Neither are these exercises entirely calligraphic,35 for while self-defined as writing (écriture), Takiguchi’s traces do not instantiate words. Moreover, the lack of frame, and the work’s support—a notebook—sets his experiments apart from the discursive context of painting and calligraphy.36

For Takiguchi, the traces drawn on the page remained intimately connected to an idea of writing, even through a negation of words. In his autobiographical “Self-Chronology” (Jihitsu nenpu; 1969/1974), Takiguchi associated his shift to experimental trace-making in the 1960s with a particular type of writer’s block, evoked in the introductory section of this chapter.

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1959 (Shōwa 34), age 56: About this time, I start feeling as if an obstacle prevented me from writing journalistic criticism. I am shocked by a belated realization: only now do I understand the difficulty of leaving this world I once entered of my own free will. . . . 1960 (Shōwa 35), age 57: On a scrapbook I buy at the start of the year, I begin tracing with a fountain pen lines that are not writing. Regardless of whether this was Fig. 25 Takiguchi Shūzō, Untitled (Décalcomanie), 1960. Ink and color conscious or unconscious, it is clear I attempted to on paper, 21.5 × 15.2 cm. Takiguchi find even the vaguest of connections between the Shūzō Archive, Keio University Art motive [dōki] animating my sketches [dessan] and Center. the motive behind my writings [bunshō].37

Object, Mirror, Stain

What was Takiguchi searching for? A source of expression that eluded him, he retrospectively claimed. He intriguingly connected trace as writing with trace as plastic expression—both emerging from the same source and returning to the same problem, a desire to find a motive for his art existing outside language. Likewise, “Watashi mo kaku,” the title of an essay published in 1961, plays with the homophonic and polysemous reading of two distinct characters: the title’s “I too paint” (kaku) could also be read as “I too write” (kaku). Indeed, for Takiguchi these actions were equivalent and interchangeable: “The truth is, painting must be for me a substitute for writing.”38 Nearing the end of the scrapbook, one page is particularly intriguing: the poet has applied a thin wash of pink color over which he has inscribed small hieroglyph -like signs. Similarly, a single-leaf work dated to 1959, Miroir ininterrompu (Continuous Mirror) presents esoteric inscriptions on an oval-shaped stain. Word and image appear conjoined here, at their limits: they anticipate a shift that apparently took place only a few months later as he prepared for his first-ever show at the Nantenshi Gallery. Relying essentially on the same tools he used in writing—paper, ink, and pen—Takiguchi began producing increasingly elaborate décalcomanies (dekarukomanī): direct-contact prints produced by pressing a piece of paper onto a surface treated with ink (fig. 25). Takiguchi already knew of this procedure before the war39 and had translated Breton’s discussion of this mark-making method in 1936; he was particularly interested in the work of Canarian artist Óscar Rafael Domínguez and appreciated that the procedure used to generate a single contact print was so simple as to make it available to anyone.40 Yet unlike the décalcomanies

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by Domínguez or Yves Tanguy (with whose work he was also well acquainted), Takiguchi’s are entirely abstract and nonreferential. Takiguchi continued creating décalcomanies into the 1970s. These joined his other preferred visual procedures: “burned drawings” and mechanical roto-dessins, produced by applying ink on a page mounted on a turntable, among a host of other chance methods that he appropriated in his belated return to visual experimentation. In 1971, he wrote, “I must be the last person using such antiquated methods.”41 Takiguchi’s décalcomanies are usually modest in size: most of them were created on pages of sketchbooks and later detached. They are characterized by the tension between the flatness of the page’s surface and the sense of depth of the resulting image, its uneven modulation of color generated by differing densities and absorption times of water and ink. Takiguchi experimented with a range of techniques. Initially, he mixed blue and black inks and later started adding splashes of color; occasionally he used a method akin to the tarashikomi of neotraditional painting, in which an artist drops colored ink onto still-wet stains or otherwise previously moistened sections of the paper’s surface. He also sought to control absorption by using a blotting sponge to remove excess ink, applying retardant on the surface, and working with papers of varying texture (plate 6). It is difficult to see in reproductions, but the surface of the décalcomanies is almost photographic; some even show the characteristic sheen of gelatin silver prints. “To this day, I have never used a paintbrush,” he wrote. “That blotting sponge is but an aid. However, I need these stains and water drops in order to give space to these lines. Indeed, the water applied starts a movement on the surface of the paper, whose energy had been strangled out and was once dead, awakening my interest. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, it stands up and appears like a phantom, and just as quickly, it fades.”42 The referent for “it” is unspecified. Whatever “it” is, it appears on the surface of the paper, only to later fade. “It” is the visible index of movement: that which appears and vanishes like a phantom. More proximately, “it” is the stain on the paper’s surface. Neither calligraphic nor painterly, this undifferentiated “it” is located at the mysterious origin, before word and image. In a series of fragments titled “Words from an Image-Man” (Eizōnin no kotoba), Takiguchi queried:

Image

Is it true that in the beginning was the word? Could this have been a legend invented to lend authority to God’s speech? Through words, what does a poet seek? Through words, a poet seeks an image [imēji], an unknown image— moreover, an impossible image.43 There is something very intriguing about Takiguchi’s invocation of images, propelled by his experimentation with décalcomanies and other mark-making procedures.

What precedes the word is the “image.” It seems we have reached the age of images.

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Object, Mirror, Stain

He situates the image as something that precedes words—something that a poet aspires to but that eludes him. It is unclear to what extent he was finally successful at distancing himself from words, but in siding with images, Takiguchi appears to affirm a belief that a thing comes before its idea. Throughout the 1960s, eizō was a commonly used translation for “image.” Takiguchi himself uses eizō in equivalence to the French image in his essay “A Reconsideration of Photography and Plasticity,” discussed above; however, his specific discourse on eizō in the 1960s appears quite distinct from contemporaneous usage. Usually associated with the reception of new theories of information in Japan—Norbert Wiener’s writings on cybernetics, semiology, structuralism, and post-structuralist critique, for example, were all introduced throughout the decade at a vertiginous speed—the term eizō generally is discussed as if it exists in opposition to matter. Takiguchi, however, remained invested in the question of the image’s vexed relationship to materiality.44 This becomes perhaps most apparent in Takiguchi’s choice of characters to render the term. Rather than the commonly used ei, a cognate with utsuru, or to project (this is 映, a character marked by its radical hihen, the sun), Takiguchi preferred the homophone ei 影, a cognate with kage, or shadow. In a rather Platonic twist, images are associated with the world of shadows—except that there is no simple falseness here, but rather phantoms.45 For Takiguchi, the world of images was a world of apparitions. Such apparitions have a flickering existence of their own; like stains, they appear and disappear. They have a referent: images are connected to, and mirror, the world of things. Indeed, beyond their symbolic capacity, images are mediators between things and words. Takiguchi evoked apparitions in relation to photography in an essay published in the early postwar period. “Photography’s Mythical Sense” (1949) presents to a general readership a personal reflection on what he deemed to be the source of photography’s power, through a recollection of his experience in the darkroom after his father’s death. Takiguchi’s father, a physician in rural Toyama, was a dedicated amateur photographer who had installed a darkroom in his home. After his death, young Shūzō inherited his camera and a precious stock of Ilford paper. Without telling his mother, he entered the darkroom and tried to figure out on his own how to develop film. Following numerous failed attempts, he shook a negative in the chemical bath. All of a sudden, a shadow started to appear on the paper—yet as soon as this apparition revealed itself on the surface, the paper went dark, and the image vanished.46 Takiguchi closes this essay remarking that the power of the photograph resides in the darkroom—in a room full of shadows—rather than the moment of capture. Takiguchi, the Image-Man, later wrote:

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Picture books continue to proliferate and become gigantic without end. Picture books of the night, picture books of the day, picture books of sleep and dreams. The mechanism of images pervades matter, peeps into life, explores the universe.47

Image

Though somewhat general, Takiguchi’s comments speak quite directly to the contemporaneous emergence of the photobook as a privileged form of engagement for experimental photography throughout the 1960s. Such “picture books of the night” departed from the typically narrative approach to documentary photography and seemed to rescue the poetics of the prewar photographic avant-garde. The ambition of this experimental approach resided in considering the possibilities of photography itself as something that exceeded the bounds of the photographic image and extended to the book as object—as a kind of enveloping, photocinematic apparatus. A sequence of ambiguous, ghost-like images flickers in the dark in Kawada Kikuji’s celebrated photobook The Map (Chizu) of 1965. Like Takiguchi’s apparitions, these images return to us from the past. While some of the images are semi-recognizable, others melt like black stains onto the paper. The materials, which he collected between 1959 and 1964, had been previously excerpted in the magazine Nihon Kamera and shown at a series of exhibitions organized by Fukushima Tatsuo.48 In The Map, Kawada collaborated with the consummate designer Sugiura Kōhei; in addition to the finalized book, the designer also created a dummy for an unpublished alternative version. Despite its modest size, The Map set out to accomplish an ambitious goal: the production of a monument-document of Japan’s haunted trajectory over the prior two decades, from the end of the war and into the post-Occupation period. The Map departs from the standard photobook in that it contains no text whatsoever. The index is printed on the book’s jacket, and an essay by novelist Ōe Kenzaburō is included only as a separate, single sheet of paper. The book nests within a folding box, which is in turn contained in a case. Its suite of photographs is printed on heavy gravure paper, in gutterless foldout pages; images are organized as two- and four-page spreads and are printed recto-verso. Besides being a physically enveloping object, the book sutures photographs together, weaving them into a quasi-cinematic sequence. The photographs show the walls and environs of air-defense structures; the Atomic Dome in Hiroshima; elaborate montages and double exposures combining portraits, belongings, and letters to family members (kisho) left behind by the young pilots of the tokkōtai (the kamikaze) before their final missions and now enshrined in Etajima; relics from victims of the atomic bombings; cropped photographs of the medals of elderly officers of the former Imperial Army; an abject Hinomaru flag, trampled over and covered in mud on a road; and a blood-splattered Imperial Navy flag. The book closes with

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Fig. 26 Kawada Kikuji, Lucky Strike, Tokyo, from the series The Map, 1960–65. Gelatin silver print, 45.7 × 55.9 cm. © Kikuji Kawada, courtesy of PGI.

Object, Mirror, Stain

photographs of wrapping paper for chocolates and bubble gum, advertisements for films, Coca-Cola bottles, Lucky Strike cigarettes, the Self-Defence Forces parading on TV screens: in sum, the detritus of the early postwar period (fig. 26). The use of recognizable visual cues helps situate and gives a vague sense of narrative to the sequence. Among them, the famous photograph of that trampled Hinomaru is most affecting, as a coolly detached yet powerfully direct indictment of the war (plate 7). More interesting, however, is the visual resonance of the planar, almost abstract high-contrast photographs that bookend the series and appear interspersed throughout; they depict the surface of air defense structures and the scarred skin of the Atomic Dome’s walls and ceilings (figs. 27 and 28). Rather than aiming for a narrative arc, their disposition seems to have strictly followed a principle of visual contiguity: the more iconic images appear to materialize among the nightmarish darkness provided by the walls. These images—these ruins—that occupy most of the photobook’s pages play a crucial role in giving form to a reflection on the sense of abandonment, dejection, and simmering anger animating the aftermath of war and occupation: memories still fresh and now revived in the failure of the Anpo struggle. The explicit connection to elements associated with the postwar period also attests to the continued currency of the past within the present.

Shortly after the publication of The Map, the critic and novelist Shibusawa Tatsuhiko wrote in a review, In this photobook, images of the misery of a transformed human 101 flesh—the keloids of the victims of the atomic bombing—do not appear even once; regardless, we can hear how the indignant sound of humanity’s groan, heavily layered within the walls’ materials, starts to rise up. As I viewed its pages over and over again, I was finally able to comprehend the profound meaning of Kawada’s fixation with these stains on the walls. Here, the photographer is fighting the staunch resistance of matter. Kawada is trying to recall a hidden and repressed humanity from barFig. 27 Kawada Kikuji, The A-Bomb ren, dry things.49 Dome, Ceiling Stain, from the series The Map, 1960–65. Gelatin silver

Object, Mirror, Stain

The photographer titled this series within the series “Stains” print, 45.7 × 55.9 cm. © Kikuji Kawada, (shimi). What are these stains? What work do they do? The courtesy of PGI. stains are formally distinct from the more iconic images in Fig. 28 Kawada Kikuji, The A-Bomb that, like the montage sequence of the Etajima relics, they Dome, Ceiling Stain, from the series have been flattened out to the point of forming one continu- The Map, 1960–65. Gelatin silver print, 45.7 × 55.9 cm. © Kikuji Kawada, ous visual loop. Shibusawa notes their affinity with the trace courtesy of PGI. in Informalist painting, in particular the Art Brut movement articulated by Jean Dubuffet. Within the book, these stains are presented as grotesque markers—they map the national trajectory. In the essay accompanying the volume, novelist Ōe shared a parable. As a boy, during the war, he was taken on a class trip to the countryside: “I meandered away from our line when, appearing out of nowhere, an older man punched me. I fell over and with my cheek against the ground I saw a map right in front of my eyes. It was just a lump of earth dirtied by machine oil, but to me it looked like a map of that world full of violence that from now on I would have to inhabit.”50 The stains in Kawada’s photobook form a confused map of this history. They mark the place of the original scene—the loss of innocence that marked the lives of a generation growing up during and after the war. These stains are both cause and effect. They cover and reveal the disintegration of the fantastic wholeness of the national body. The stains on the walls of the Atomic Dome are stains of blood, stains left elsewhere as shadows on the surviving walls of the city; their referents pulverized by modernity, all that is left of them now is ruins. Kawada could have told the story of war and its aftermath with directly recognizable images, as other photographers more invested in realism did. (Indeed, he appears to have toyed with this idea; the alternate dummy, today part of the New York Public Library’s collection, consists of two volumes. The first was dedicated exclusively to the stains, while the second contained some of the more readily

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identifiable photographs.) Instead, Kawada enveloped such icons with signs that effectively supplant them. Shibusawa noted this in his review, remarking on how the stains contest the space of signification of iconic images. To Shibusawa, those flags and helmets and wills were “almost all transformed into cheap symbols” (hotondo yasuppoi shinboru), akin to empty wartime sloganeering: they say too much (katarisugiru). Ōe calls these relics the “fossilized thought” of war. For Shibusawa, the ultimate function of the stains is precisely to oppose these symbols, these fossils of mad speech. The photobook’s originality resided in how, by dangerously treading the fine line between abject and sublime (guzoku to sukō), Kawada staged a conflict between different systems of meaning-making, exposing the limits of representation.51 Kawada’s juxtaposition of different classes of signs connects with Takiguchi’s diagnosis of the nature of this age of images—and, more importantly, the reasons society has turned to such shadows.

Image

The symbolism of images has now reached its limit. Images are now exacting their revenge. Symbols can only mean a world that is fixed and limited. That words are being rapidly overtaken derives from the same accomplice’s logic [kyōhansha no riyū]. For this reason, symbols are being progressively supplanted by signs. It is because signs are directly connected to an unknown existence [jitsuzon].52 Takiguchi is concerned here with the limits of representation—limits that for him are intimately tied to the crisis of the object. I suggest here that the stain, as seen in the experimental forms pursued by Takiguchi as well as Kawada and other photographers operating in this context, is deployed in relation to the discourse on images as a specific type of mark-making. The stain is a sign with two characteristics: first, it demarcates an event, and second, it is coextensive with an object that now is missing. Crucially, the stain is—to borrow Takiguchi’s taxonomy—sign and not symbol; in other words, a stain is something immediate that is at the same time the possibility of an actual existence (jitsuzon). The stain marks the site of the joint origin of word and image. It is also the sign of history, a ghostly trace that signals a past event as well as its continued presence and inevitable return. It is the physical instantiation of a haunting. Having observed a procedural similarity between experiments in photography and avant-garde art, I have sought in this chapter to probe the points of overlap between these two realms of inquiry, with (and through) Takiguchi. In the following chapter, I will explore a specific photographic object and the way that it instantiates object, mirror, and stain.

The discovery that his outward appearance was himself was above all a type of social discovery. Narcissus’s love was sparked by his realization that the image reflected there, while truly being that of himself, was in fact a pure existence entirely separate from his own consciousness. —Mishima Yukio, “On Narcissism”

Chapter 4

Narcissus at the Fountain Surface Barakei is all surface. The luxurious cloth binding of Hosoe Eikoh’s famous photobook, first published in 1963, opens to reveal translucent vellum pages covered with tactile abstractions: monochrome renderings of thorny rose stems, petals, and an egg that bleed into one another and separate with each flipping page. Dark, velvety leaves follow: collotype printed in heavy gravure. The gutterless pages bear images that pour over the edge of the book. Figures appear in various stages of undress, alone and in groups, assuming absurd allegorical poses: the novelist (and future terrorist) Mishima Yukio, the butoh dancer Hijikata Tatsumi, the fashion model Ishida Masako, and Mishima’s child. The stark black-and-white contrast in the photographs flattens out their forms; woven together through extensive manipulation—from projection and double exposure to montage, solarization, and negative printing—the images fuse tissue and lace, ornamental volutes, and the crevices of the body (fig. 29). Barakei is eminently baroque. Its pages unfold and fold back onto themselves, like the draping marble of a sculpture by Bernini.1 The painterly and ghostly quality of its images, the interplay of fragment and totality that plays out in its luxurious pages—decorative, subsumptive, and extensive—transport the viewer into a world of shadowy repetitions. Opening and closing the large, heavy pages, the viewer is

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Figs. 29 & 30 Hosoe Eikoh, from the photobook Barakei (Tokyo: Shūeisha, 1963). First edition. Printed paper, 44 × 28.5 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Taka Ishii Gallery Photo / Film,

Image

Tokyo.

absorbed within the photobook, drifting into intimate and outrageous encounters that mirror the scenes of punishment the protagonist undergoes in his inexplicable ordeal (fig. 30). This enveloping nature is at the root of Barakei’s difficulty. Falling into the book form, the viewer drowns in the darkness of its pages and is compelled to engage as both witness to and participant in its proceedings. Barakei deploys a mimesis that exceeds quotation or likeness—instead it proposes identification, subsumption, and coextension. These are not necessarily new ideas in potraiture, but in Barakei they are pushed to rather extreme ends. While the portrait is in many ways an assertion of autonomous subjecthood, it is also true that when that link is challenged—be it through a mimetic gesture or simple denial—the intersubjective encounter it portrays is phantasmatic. Such is the work of Barakei.

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Narcissus at the Fountain

A portrait claims to be at once less and more than what it appears to be. Not a person but an evocation of an absent presence, it is at once a representation of the absent figure, its idea, and praesentatio—itself the material means through which such an idea becomes physically present. We must remind ourselves that the “it” being looked at is a portrait—not the subject—and that the whiff of death that so enthralls the viewer—its mise-en-scène, or ruse—is fundamental to its workings. Originally commissioned to function as a straightforward portrait of Mishima, Barakei became an increasingly baroque object, reflecting the convergent interests of the photographer and the novelist in the nature of the image. But Barakei has also become increasingly entangled with Mishima’s historical demise. The carefully crafted icon of Mishima as star2 is now fixed in the collective memory with the unthinkably violent abduction of Self-Defence Forces General Mashita Kanetoshi on November 25, 1970. This incident was part of a failed coup attempt that concluded with the novelist’s spectacular suicide by ritual disembowelment (seppuku). Presented with the strange scenes of Barakei’s pagan passion play—the dramatized story of inexplicable punishments undergone by its protagonist—the viewer’s instinct is to approach them as evidence of Mishima’s eventual demise. But is it possible to resist the impulse to look back upon this portrait—the photobook Barakei—from the standpoint of history’s apparent outcome? Is it possible to see it for what it is—but an image? Barakei, which in more ways than one has become coterminous with the Mishimaimage, shows the limits of portraiture and its promised access to subjectivity. As Catherine Soussloff has noted, “It can be said with some assurance that portraiture, with the important inclusion of photography, remains the visual genre in which the social imaginary has been most heavily invested throughout the modern period, precisely because it appears to present us with the assurance of our own identities. The seduction of this apparent assurance has proven problematic from the point of view of the theory of the subject.”3 Soussloff has shown how portraiture inherits and condenses contradictory ideas about identity. On the one hand, it relies on the idea of likeness; that is to say, a faithful adherence to external resemblance. On the other, it furthers the belief that the fact of resemblance represents the subjectivity of the sitter. In other words, there is a fundamental ambivalence that is condensed in the genre of portraiture: its presentation of exterior fact, and the projection (on the part of viewers) of a certain idea of interiority upon the image. Soussloff characterizes this as the functional dialectic of portraiture. Soussloff ’s discussion of the genre of portraiture in modernity is crucial to my argument, for in it she notes how the image as surface becomes the site where such dialectic unfolds. This is why I have started at the surface as a means of describing the nature of the trap laid out for the viewer in Barakei and how it operates. In his treatise De Pictura, Leon Battista Alberti located the origins of painting in the Greek myth of Narcissus falling in love with his fleeting image, reflected in

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a pool at the base of a fountain. Referring to the mimetic impulse that fundamentally animates the genre of painting, and extending it to art more generally, Alberti asked, “Is it not true that to paint is nothing else than to embrace with art the surface of the fountain?” Here painting gives material form to desire through mimesis. There is, however, a second way in which Alberti’s allusion to the transformation of Narcissus is significant, for in deploying this episode he also frames the portrait as always set in relation to death: Narcissus’s enthrallment with his ultimately fleeting image drives him to madness and despair. The counterpart to the desire of recalling an absent figure and rendering it present is found in the fact that, for Narcissus, the action of embracing the surface of the fountain is all-consuming—it entails death. I find Narcissus not necessarily in Barakei’s subject matter; rather, Narcissus is what Barakei does. The photobook’s problematization of resemblance and the limits of mimesis reflect two converging impulses—desire and death—as they inhere in the portrait as the surface of the fountain. As object, Barakei dwells on the strangeness of portraiture and thus estranges its conventions. In order to effect such estrangement, Barakei relies on a number of transgressions, ranging from obfuscating the boundaries of authorship within collaboration to muddling the limits of resemblance in portraiture and the boundary between reality and fiction. Ultimately, Barakei exemplifies the portrait’s difficulty for Cartesian thought and the subjectobject dichotomy. I will show how, through a discussion of the undoing of notions of autonomous subjecthood in the psychoanalytic account of Narcissus’s discovery.

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Collaboration Mishima Yukio—the celebrated author, media personality, and main protagonist in the Barakei photographs—described the origins of the photobook in its prologue: “One day, Hosoe Eikoh came over and took my flesh to a strange world. . . . The world I was taken to by the sorcery of his lens was abnormal, twisted, ridiculous, grotesque, savage, pansexual—however, one could also hear in this world the murmur of a clear and cool stream, the undercurrent from within the invisible heart of a gutter.”4 Mishima’s words resonate with the perversely pleasurable scenes of punishment in the photobook.5 He presents himself as a completely passive figure, carried away through the “sorcery of [Hosoe’s] lens” to a world unseen. In reality, the genesis of the project was rather intuitive, even if the resulting object is as mischievous as the ecstatic world of perversity it depicts.6 Mishima first invited Hosoe to take his portrait for use on the cover and in the plates of his first collection of critical writings, The Attack of Beauty (Bi no kōgeki; 1961).7 The bodybuilding novelist enjoyed having his portrait taken, but Hosoe’s photographs resulted in a different kind of portrait altogether (fig. 31). Hosoe’s assignment wound up extending over a year—well beyond the purview of the original project. In addition

Fig. 31 Hosoe Eikoh, from the photobook Barakei (Tokyo: Shūeisha, 1963). First edition. Printed paper, 44 × 28.5 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and Taka Ishii Gallery Photo / Film, Tokyo. Fig. 32 Hosoe Eikoh, Barakei: No. 19, 1960. Gelatin silver print, 21.6 × 30.4 cm. Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. Image: Tokyo Photographic Art Museum / DNPartcom.

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to the initial photoshoot, which took place at Mishima’s home—a neo-baroque palazzo located in Tokyo’s Meguro ward—the photographer added sessions in his studio. Some of these involved the use of elaborate stage backdrops; others, projections of images onto Mishima’s body. Hosoe then deployed a host of darkroom techniques in order to suture the writer’s body with images taken from early modern Italian painting—canonical works by Botticelli, Titian, Giorgione, and Guido Reni—producing a spectacular phantasmagoria (fig. 32). I retain here a somewhat problematic distinction between photo album and photobook.8 There is no such distinction in Japanese—the term shashinshū means literally a “collection of photographs.” However, there is something useful in the term “photobook”: like other such objects, Barakei is not simply an accumulation of photographs. Photobooks, which became quite prominent in this period, are enmeshed within a long history of experiments in photography that extend to the prewar period. As the prewar avant-garde did before them, postwar photographers

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mined the book form in order to query the possibilities and limits of the medium. In the 1960s, Japanese photographers produced photobooks in order to explore what photography could accomplish at its limits—as photography as well as something else. Barakei was conceptualized within a highly specific system of production: a collaboration that involved a photographer and his model as well as designer Sugiura Kōhei, whose role in setting up the object’s ruse was essential.9 That each of its members contributed a set of specific concerns and procedures is self-evident. It is much harder, however, to pull apart these concerns from the crucible that the object has become. Barakei is successful because of the way that each component appears to merge seamlessly into the other, constructing a singularly cohesive device.10 This aspect is usually lost in the contemporary gallery context, where the single print has superseded other forms of display. In fact, Hosoe was closely associated with that turn and the adoption, since the mid-1960s, of a discrete format he called the “original-print” (orijinaru purinto)—a print produced by a photographer, or under his direct supervision—deemed to be the distillation of the photographer’s subjectivity. The subsequent adoption of this concept by a number of other artistphotographers represented an important departure in photographic practices in postwar Japan, where the photograph had usually been understood as inherently reproducible and presented mainly in other print formats—such as photo essays (kumi-shashin), photo series, albums, and photobooks. Collaboration as modus operandi constitutes the first of Barakei’s numerous transgressions. Where does Hosoe’s contribution end and Mishima’s begin? How could the object work without Sugiura’s transformation of the book form into a pseudo-cinematic apparatus? Echoing Mishima’s prologue, Hosoe wrote retrospectively that the novelist requested a position of absolute passivity as a model: hishatai, the word used by Mishima himself in describing his role, translates as “a photographed body/object.” Moreover, Hosoe is adamant that Barakei was not a representation of Mishima’s novel-world; it was a “subjective documentary of the novelist Mishima Yukio,” which dwelled on the likes and dislikes of the writer.11 However, it is hard not to see Mishima operating at least as an instigator, if not an active coconspirator: the photographer recalls Mishima playing a key role in determining the visual cues he incorporated into Barakei’s baroque compositions.12 Further, besides the introductory text, the indelible trace of the Mishima-image cannot be effaced from the material. Mishima’s literary production and public persona frame the photobook and further complicate its interpretation. Before embarking on this project, Hosoe had been interested primarily in exploring narrative forms and figuration in photography. Hosoe perfected in Barakei an approach that he had developed in his previous work—most notably in the series Man and Woman—that required the recognition of the photographed scene as analogous to the mise-en-scène in a performance. Hosoe was already deeply

interested in stage practices, and his main collaborator throughout these years, butoh dancer Hijikata Tatsumi, played a secondary role in Barakei’s passion play.13 In Barakei, Hosoe posited photography as an extension of a performed action.14 Hosoe’s interest in collaboration is related to the procedures and problems inherent to portraiture as presentational practice, which converged in this project with Mishima’s exploration of questions in literature—particularly, the contiguity and continuity of truth and fiction, author and narrator, in the first-person “I-novel.”15 Hosoe and Mishima’s deliberate transgression of authorial propriety within collaboration—even as Hosoe is acknowledged as single author of the work—is one of the ways in which Barakei plays with such coextensive categories. Likewise, the photobook effectively exploits the mechanism of autofictionalization—the blurring of the boundary between narrative and self brought about through excess mimesis—and its effects on the viewer. At stake for the photographer is the question of portraiture. Barakei explores what a portrait is through a mimetic operation that destabilizes the very notion of resemblance on which portraiture is founded. Hosoe wrote, “If [photography] were a window, it would also be a mirror.”16 It is not simply a matter of looking out of the window created by the camera’s frame; what resemblance returns to—i.e., who the portrait resembles—is ultimately the self. At a certain level this resonates with the idea of automimesis: “Ogni pittore dipinge sè” (all artists depict themselves).17 More accurately, however, that truism should be rephrased in terms of what the actual portrait does: portraits depict the idea of self. Barakei reveals portraiture as the foremost staging device of subjectivity.

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Resemblance

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Hosoe is correct when he points out that Barakei is not an objective record of Mishima or his literary works. It functions as a different type of object altogether. Indeed, only two of the photographs included in the photobook explicitly reference Mishima’s novel-world. One of these is presented on a two-page spread—a vertical, décalcomanie-like composition in which a symmetrical stain almost completely conceals Mishima (plate 8). Double-exposure and montage seamlessly recombine the ornate volutes of a tabletop clock, with Guido Reni’s Saint Sebastian (1615–16) wallpapered over the writer, who sits at the composition’s base. Another photograph portrays Mishima against a painted trompe l’oeil backdrop (fig. 33); his hands are tied behind his back (another pictorial allusion, this time to Rubens’s ca. 1614 Saint Sebastian). He looks away from the camera, and the legs of a child dangle out of focus, entering the frame from the upper left corner. Perceiving the composition at an angle, the viewer intrudes behind the scenes of a passion play—yet another knowing wink from the photographer, who draws attention to the artificiality of

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the project and, falling back on the rhetoric of the snapshot, renders explicit Barakei’s function as stage. This explicit breaking of the fourth wall, while unambiguously declaring the mimetic nature of the enterprise, also frames Barakei through the Mishima-myth. 110 Through the explicit deployment of the image of Saint Sebastian, the photobook establishes a link to Mishima’s literary breakthrough—the homosexual coming-of-age novel Confessions of a Mask (Kamen no kokuhaku, 1949). The novel’s pseudo-autobiographical overtones turned it into an instant succès de scandale. Literary scholar Kawakami Yōko notes that at the time Confessions was published, Mishima deliberately presented contradictory statements regarding its facticity. The first of these appeared as advertising copy prior to the book’s publication, in which the author asserted, “This novel is my vita sexualis; it is, as far as possible, a faithful account of my sexual autobiography.” However, in the “Notes” published as an insert (geppō) in the first edition of the novel, Mishima declared, “I envisioned creating a complete fiction based on [the idea of a] confession.” While in the first instance author and narrator coincide, in the second the author and narrator have been completely dissociated from each other.18 In Confessions of a Mask, the protagonist’s dilemma is his apparent inability to fulfill a fantasy—his death-wish, which is also a wish for complete subsumption within the Other. In a key passage, the nameless first-person narrator Fig. 33 Hosoe Eikoh, Barakei: No. 34, 1961. Gelatin famously recalls his teenage enthrallment with— silver print, 30.4 × 20.4 cm. Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. Image: Tokyo Photographic Art Museum / and ejaculation over—a reproduction of Guido DNPartcom. Reni’s painting of the saint: The black and slightly oblique trunk of the tree of execution was seen against a Titian-like background of gloomy forest and evening sky, somber and distant. A remarkably handsome youth was bound naked to the tree. . . . His white and matchless nudity gleams against a background of dusk. His muscular arms . . . are raised at a graceful angle, and his bound wrists are crossed directly over his head. His face is turned slightly upward and his eyes are open wide, gazing with profound tranquillity upon the glory of heaven. . . .

The arrows have eaten into the tense, fragrant, youthful flesh and are about to consume his body from within with flames of supreme agony and ecstasy.19 111

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The narrator’s fascination with Sebastian’s body resides in the combination of the portrayed ephebe’s youthful beauty with the “flames of supreme agony and ecstasy” expressed in his gaze. Such ecstasy could only arise in martyrdom and the fulfilment, through death, of the saint’s divine mission. The narrator asks, “Was not beauty [such as his] a thing destined to be killed?” (korosareru bi dewa nakattarōka). The martyr portrayed is a subject of pleasure whose ecstasy derives from the deadly encounter with an absolute Other. In Confessions of a Mask, the narrator ultimately displaces such a desire for death onto himself. Barakei reveals how yearning for the Other is in fact yearning for the self as Other. And yet as psychoanalysis has shown, this self is itself porous. Individuation—the process of establishment of the self—always relies on an outside figure: an Other. This is what Mishima meant when he noted that Narcissus’s discovery was primarily a social one. Not merely learning to see himself as others see him, in contemplating the pond’s surface Narcissus learned to objectify himself and see himself as other—finding his self by losing himself in the Other. Freud noted that there is a fundamental narcissism at play in all identificatory exchanges—and this is what renders Barakei at once so compelling and disturbing. Without narcissism, it is impossible for the individual to establish either a sense of self or a rapport with the world. The power of narcissism is such that, as Laplanche later wrote, it undergirds the integrity of the psychic apparatus: “I live for love of myself, for the love of my self.”20 Paradoxically, Narcissus’s discovery played a pivotal role in Freud’s turn to an account of the inherently intersubjective nature of psychic development. Freud first discussed narcissism in his observations on erotic object-choice in homosexuality; he noted that the homosexual chooses someone like himself—this is to say, he chooses a proxy—in order to love (himself) like his mother once did.21 The explanation neatly mirrored the substitutive pattern advanced in his account of the Oedipus complex, but Freud appeared concerned by this return of the libido onto the self. The retreat of libidinal investments challenged Freud’s initial views on the homeostasis necessary for a healthy psyche, in that narcissism prevented the correct redirection of the libido out toward a different object, instead leading to the accumulation of libidinal energy within the self, which could lead to psychosis. While initially restricted to a specific subjective formation, later studies on the etiology of psychosis led Freud to understand narcissism as a probable stage more generally associated with subjective development: “Narcissism in this sense would not be a perversion, but the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self-preservation, a measure of which may justifiably be attributed to every living creature.”22 The discovery of narcissism at once

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elucidated and complicated the topography of the psyche. Through his reelaboration of narcissism, Freud further undermined a basic tenet of the subject-object dichotomy of classical philosophy. The psychoanalytic ego supplanted and displaced the self/subject of philosophy—that mythic reserve of autonomy. Porous and permeable, the self was reenvisioned as empty at its core: it was in fact composed of multiple instances (the ego, the superego, and the id) and was always dependent on an elusive object for its constitution, an outside Other. Freud’s developmental account of narcissism, in turn, famously informed Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage. Lacan noted that the narcissistic fascination with an imago is what allows a child to form, for the first time, a sense of wholeness—that is, a sense of self.23 A Lacanian viewpoint might account for the drama playing out in Barakei’s diegesis, especially in the montage sequence, where Mishima’s semblance merges with art-historical monuments. Resolution here would entail an identification with a (suggestively) culturally distinct Other that enabled the constitution of the self through recourse to the imaginary.24 Yet the purported stability found in the mirror stage is but a fantasy of wholeness and unity belying the fact of bodily and psychic fragmentation; moreover, the mirror that the child projects itself upon is broken. The mirror’s surface merely reflects externality, which is hardly indicative of a whole without the incipient subject’s projection of a notion of completion. The Other’s wholeness appears at once enticing and threatening to individuals who, as Lacan elsewhere notes, will seek to suppress their own insufficiency in relation to the imago through erotic aggression.25 Yet who is the figure reflected on the surface that is Barakei? Neither the protagonist nor the model/ author, for as Mishima noted in his landmark essay “Sun and Steel” (1967), “When I say ‘I,’ I do not mean an ‘I’ that relates strictly back to me, nor is it the case that all the words that have left me flow back into my interior—When I say ‘I,’ I refer to a remnant that neither relates back nor flows back.”26 In this sense, Barakei would be more accurately understood as instantiating that rendering-object of the self that Mishima pursued in his writing. Mishima introduces the reference to Saint Sebastian partly in order to establish Confessions of a Mask’s narrative of perversion. The protagonist’s sadistic fetishism and its displacement upon himself appear as the expression of a narcissism that ultimately resolves in the avowal of his homosexuality. But the appropriation of Sebastian also had a specific political lineage in which Mishima would become increasingly invested later in the decade. Venerated as a patron saint of the plaguestricken in medieval and early modern Italy, the figure of Sebastian was conflated by the Romantics with the Apollonian ephebe and later taken up by the Italian proto-Fascist author Gabriele D’Annunzio in his French-language play Le Martyre de St. Sébastien (1911). The saint—who in D’Annunzio’s play pleads “Encore . . . ! Encore . . . !” as arrows tear into his flesh—is in Mishima’s later work a reference to the undeniable totality of death but also the agency found in the encounter with

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the absolute Other. Throughout the 1960s, Mishima deliberately cultivated Sebastian as a political idea in an increasingly explicit manner. In the aftermath of his own death, Mishima was notoriously successful in harnessing this image’s significance and linking it to his persona. This success is predicated on the question of resemblance foregrounded in Barakei, whose interpretation is burdened by the trace of Mishima-as-Sebastian.27 And yet Barakei speaks to its viewers. In setting up its mimetic ruse, the photobook actively asks viewers to look not for resemblance but for what it does: the enactment of its own passion play. For viewers to understand its workings, Barakei demands of them something impossible: to evacuate the subject from the portrait. Mishima similarly asks of his readers—perversely—to suspend disbelief and forget that he and narration are not the same; in doing so, he mimetically inscribes an empty subject into his writing. For example, in the novella Voices of Heroic Spirits (Eirei no koe, 1966), the third-person narrator sets up a mirror that reflects an evacuated subject-position. The novella focuses on the disclosure of the identity of angry spirits (aramitama) summoned in a séance. The narrator explains the process: “[The medium] enters the realm of the departed [reikyō] without even himself noticing it, and through his mental concentration becomes able to feel spirits [reikan o eru]. This situation is imperceptible to others, so we can think of it as being similar to what people call artistic inspiration [geijutsuka no insupirēshon].”28 In this instance, the speaker is not the actual source of speech but instead the medium through which the message is delivered. The idea that the artist is in a sense a medium is not entirely unfamiliar and has a lineage that includes the early German Romantics. Schelling, for instance, characterized inspiration as the at once conscious and unconscious activity of the artist. For our purposes, however, what matters is that Mishima frames artistic inspiration as existing outside a notion of subjectivity and connects individual action to a radical outside, or totality. Voices of Heroic Spirits was the last of three works in Mishima’s Patriotism cycle, dedicated to the February 26 Incident of 1936, in which a group of radicalized officers attempted to carry out a putsch against the Japanese government in order to devolve power to the emperor.29 Voices was Mishima’s most explicitly political work to date and a rare instance, in the latter half of the 1960s, of a critique of the reigning emperor, Hirohito. It was, moreover, a right-wing critique. Throughout the early postwar period, the general press had regularly featured excoriating attacks on Hirohito by left-wing artists and intellectuals, in particular relating to the problem of wartime responsibility. This changed in the wake of the Anpo protests, however, where in addition to increased policing of dissent on the part of the state, there was an alarming rise in right-wing terrorism. The publication of Fukasawa Shichirō’s satire Fūryū mutan (A dream of courtly elegance) in the January 1961 issue of Chūō Kōron (The central review) incensed the extreme right. The private residence of publisher Nakajima Hōji was attacked by a seventeen-year-old

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right-wing terrorist; the publisher was away at the time, but the attacker seriously wounded Nakajima’s wife and stabbed their housekeeper to death. In the aftermath of the incident, the publishing house issued an apology for publishing Fūryū mutan, which was printed in four of the major Japanese newspapers and intensified an ongoing chill on publications critical of the imperial household.30 Mishima’s critique in Voices thus needs to be understood as a potentially destabilizing speech act that, much like the putschist officers it depicts, sought to overturn the conservative compact that served as a basis of the postwar democratic order. Unlike previous works in the Patriotism cycle, however, in Voices, Mishima made the officers who participated in the putsch speak directly to the reader—but through someone else. They are the spirits whom the medium, Kawasaki, channels first. “We are the ghosts of those who were betrayed.” The spirits tell of the unconditional love (koi) that led them to take action for the emperor. “To love . . . we were taught that if we dedicated even our maddest love, the Emperor would accept it.”31 In her analysis of the Patriotism cycle, the literary critic Chigusa Kimura-Steven has called attention to the many contradictions and historical inaccuracies found in the texts that form the trilogy. Counter to what Mishima claimed, the young officers’ call for renewal was not a pious prayer directed to the reigning emperor. Mishima’s contention that corrupt old politicians had deceived the emperor, and in turn had led to the war, reproduced closely the claims made by the nationalist ideologue Kita Ikki, who in his 1930s writings argued for a Shōwa restoration (Shōwa ishin) and inspired the young officers into action. Had the coup been successful, it would have probably resulted in Hirohito’s death and his brother Prince Chichibu’s enthronement. In denouncing the officers as coup-mongers and having them executed, the emperor had neither made a strategic mistake nor been deceived by evil ministers; Hirohito actively took sides with the constitutional monarchy and self-preservation.32 Kimura-Steven correctly identifies the ideological substrate on which the novels are constructed and the contiguity of Mishima’s literary and political programs. It is clear that, despite the semblance of realistic description, the novels are vehicles for Mishima’s reactionary politics. However, Kimura-Steven’s thorough discussion of the discontinuities between Mishima’s novel-world and historical fact disregards the function of the novel’s excessive mimesis. Conversely, Gavin Walker’s analysis of Mishima’s “Sun and Steel” hinges on a similar question regarding the nature of resemblance. In Walker’s view, the difficulty that the great majority of critics encounter in their examination of Mishima’s literature derives from the problematic mechanism of autofictionalization that the author set in place in his work—that is to say, Mishima’s own self-production as a fiction, effected through the conflation of narrative voice and the image of the author. Walker identifies a “double scission” provoked by the blurring of fiction and reality in the essay that calls into question the possibility of criticism as a

metalanguage: “We are compelled to acknowledge the doubled effect that Mishima’s machine sets up: it both acknowledges the falsity of its own motor-force and at the same time revalorizes its existence by co-opting certain critiques into service on its behalf.”33 This mechanism is further strengthened by the mythos surrounding Mishima’s own coup attempt of 1970, which effectively reinforced the desire for autobiography as the only possible approach to his oeuvre. “This future or deferred theatricality, what could be called a kind of ‘necroperformativity,’ functions by valorising the dead Mishima-figure as the authoritative interpreter of his own textual field—the work is performed from beyond the grave.”34 Mishima’s “double scission” is in fact extremely effective, as it reflects the desires of the critics that engage his work. In exposing Mishima’s untruthfulness, critics consistently sought to foil the fulfilment of the author’s neo-Fascist program. Falsity, either invoked as historical inaccuracy or identified as theatricality, serves to contain Mishima’s excess and neutralize his intervention. This operation has traditionally and almost invariably been carried out in overtly homophobic language; as literary critic Keith Vincent has pointed out, the denunciations of campiness or sexual ambiguity double as warnings about the dangers of Mishima’s political (qua sexual) perversions.35 Beyond the difficulties generated by the Mishima-image and its furthering of the “double scission,” Barakei is undergirded by yet another mimetic trap: the photobook exists somewhere between fiction and reality. This is in part due to Hosoe’s interest in probing the limits of the documentary form, which resonated with Mishima’s concerns about the limits of verisimilitude in the novel. Mishima’s theory of photography, laid out for us in Barakei’s prologue, delves into the problems opened up by photography’s mimetic powers. There, Mishima describes the camera’s magic as deriving from its capacity to capture and relay the object’s presence. But before a photograph can become art, the photographer must choose between two approaches to processing such presence: photography as documentary (kirokusei) or as testimony (shōgensei).

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When photography chooses documentary, the absolute credibility [shinpyosei] of the object portrayed becomes its form, and its distilled meaning becomes [the photograph’s] subject. Counter to this, when photography chooses testimony, the meaning of the object relayed by the camera is filtered; part of it is lost; another part of it is warped and is adapted into the form of the work. And as far as the subject of the work is concerned, the photographer declares from a merely subjective perspective: –This is real. –This is a photograph. Therefore, as you can see, I am not lying. He can only testify in such manner.36

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The question that Mishima poses here is where the truth resides in pictures, and he does so by obliquely referring to the debate on objective versus subjective approaches to photography. He reveals that beyond photography’s apparently unequivocal claims to the real, there is the helplessness of the photographer, who is reduced to testimony and can but only repeat the reality he once saw and now conveys to the viewer. And yet, is documentary any different in its ultimately subjective filtering of reality? Mishima appears to leverage mimesis in its two received meanings—as the fact of exterior likeness, and as the performative statement of its truth-claim, the imitation of life—to cast a mantle of ambiguity on the medium. Barakei is testimony of the invisible. Yet for Mishima, such impotent helplessness of subjective testimony is at the same time the strength and specificity of the medium—its lyricism.

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Here lies the pathetic lyricism that hides underneath the fraudulent photographs of spirits, or pornographic photographs whose faces have been swapped—their form is expanded to the extreme. The bizarre, uncanny [gimi no warui] lyricism of photography that says: –This is a real ghost. –This is a photograph. Therefore, as you can see, I am not lying. This pathos suggests that photography can only be born from the repetition of this scream, this refrain. And isn’t this screamed testimony Hosoe’s own confession? Doesn’t the confession of the photographer only become possible through this constant repetition of testimony?37 Testimony as the interruption and interrogation of the link between photograph and “reality” calls attention to the function of photography as phantasmagoria—the spectacular proof of ghostly existence. Only phantasmagoria could ever contain the world of Barakei, a project that depicts not a place but a displacement—a subject-position as it writhes and shifts within a staged phantasmatic encounter. The photobook stages identification under the guise of a passion play, in which the subsumption of the fictive subject within an Other is in turn mirrored in the viewer’s perversely pleasurable subsumption within the photobook’s unfolding pages. Through Hosoe’s lens, Mishima’s body refracts into multiples that fade in and out of focus. These repetitions are entrapped in a series of canonical works exemplifying the history of painting—Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, Guido Reni’s Saint Sebastian, Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas—and become sutured within increasingly elaborate tableaux. Beyond its function within the photobook’s ambiguous narrative, the spectacular montage sequence grounds the project in Mishima’s signature aestheticism—but these baroque fantasies, above all, serve the purpose of furthering

Hosoe’s program of reclaiming for photography subjective expression over documentation.38 At stake here is the contiguity of painting and photography, which Hosoe appears to formulate through analogy: as with painting, so is photography. While not fully resolved in Barakei, these photographic comparanda point to Hosoe’s aspirations in reclaiming expressivity for the medium—for it, too, to embrace with art the surface of the fountain. This is not through the superficial imitation of painterly effects but by laying claim, through photography, to the discourse of mimesis. In positioning photography so closely to painting, Hosoe asks us to consider mimesis itself—that is to say, how rather than who the portrait recalls.

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To Embrace with Art the Surface of the Fountain

Narcissus at the Fountain

Following the montage sequence, Barakei reaches its climax in a moody portrait of Mishima taken from a slightly elevated angle. The two-page spread presents a close-up of his face and bare shoulders: he stares back at the camera; he is covered in sweat; and his mouth is stuffed with a rose (plate 9). The photograph is haunted by an irrepressible sense of tension. The background is completely dark and highlights Fig. 34 Hosoe Eikoh, from the photobook Barakei (Tokyo: Shūeisha, 1963). First edition. Printed paper, 44 × 28.5 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and his facial features—thick eye- Taka Ishii Gallery Photo / Film, Tokyo. brows, bloodshot eyes, and the pores of his skin jump back at the viewer. The forceful stance of the model and his returned gaze are tempered by the binds that hold his body down, constraints reinforced by the photographic frame. The scene resolves in a series of snapshots of Mishima lying on a carved stone bench with roses placed on his body, looking as if he were dead, or asleep, in an ecstatic release that contrasts with the dark scenes immediately preceding (fig. 34). The connection between death and desire is part of Barakei’s “storyboard” throughout; it is the conscious fantasy manifest in its content. In the scene described above, the overpowering encounter between the protagonist and the Other beyond the frame resolves in the former’s unconditional surrender: death or its obverse (i.e., satisfaction, orgasm). In this way, the passion play evokes at once the possible construction of a perverse subjectivity—and (retrospectively) appears to

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foreshadow a nihilistic action. However, the yearning for subsumption expressed in the scene—the desire for a dissolution of interiority within an absolute outside— should not be taken at face value and reduced to the objective documentation of a Todeswunsch, or death-wish: the semiconscious fantasy of a would-be homosexual, a sadomasochist, or a neo-Fascist terrorist in the making. As we have seen, simply reading this as such—taking the surface as unmediated symptom—is to fall prey to the photobook’s autofictionalizing trap. Concealed in plain sight is a narcissistic exchange apparent in the mechanism deployed in the photobook. Barakei is not merely allegorical, or illustrative of this exchange between self and Other; it goes as far as turning the viewer into an accomplice of its unfolding action, for the exchange is mirrored in the viewer’s own encounter with the photobook as object. The photobook acts like the surface of the pond upon which two gazes converge; however, these gazes are in fact one and the same. As the physical instantiation of such an encounter, the book becomes a mirror. It is the surface of a pond that reflects the viewer who sinks into its pages, seeking in the inscription of meaning a way to fulfill their own desire within the portrait—for biography, for Mishima’s death, or for another such object masking the self and its demands. This trait is shared by all of Mishima’s literary works. His literature is similarly concerned with surface and reflection, a quality that, as we discussed earlier, cannily diverts—if not outright deactivates—all critical engagement. One of Mishima’s most stringent critics, Etō Jun, saw his writing as superficial, tensionless, overly descriptive, artificial, and decorative. In Etō’s view, these characteristics put Mishima altogether outside the realist program. While this observation might be understood partly as deriving from Etō’s commitment to the novel-form—and expressing a reticence with regard to Mishima’s politics (and sexuality)—Kawakami Yōko argues that he correctly identified a key aspect of Mishima’s aesthetics, what she designates Mishima’s philosophy of surface (hyōmen no shisō). In other words, Etō understood that Mishima embarked on the production of a type of narcissistic literature.39 Within Mishima’s later writings, surface appears as a motif signaling the subsumption of the individual within a collective—showing us the pleasures of the sun and staging a Fascistic structure of identification, as is the case of “Sun and Steel” and his political treatise “The Defense of Culture” (1967). In the closing passages of “On Narcissism,” Freud posits that such an identification with the collective—family, class, or nation, working as substitute for the parents—informs the formation of the ego-ideal; thus, identification with groups, in addition to love of the same (the homosexual libido), is driven primarily by narcissism.40 In other words, it is but a reaffirmation of the self. However, it is also possible to find in Barakei an underlying dynamic that operates in an altogether different register. This requires us again to look beyond the storyboard and instead seek out the unconscious representation concealed in the passion play, by examining its active potential as it presents its consideration of object relations on a deeper level.

Loving the Void

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Narcissus at the Fountain

Here we must recall the fundamental paradox of the myth of Narcissus: Narcissus must watch intently so that the ghost he desires does not escape him,41 yet in continuing to stare at the pond, this ghost—his desire for himself—physically consumes him. The self-destructive nature of this rapport with the imago evinces a fundamental ambivalence toward the object—that ideal seen on that pond that masks the self, the actual void at the bottom of the pond. Narcissism’s retraction of the libido onto the self manifests at once as a positive (erotic) and radically negative investment. Identification is partly animated by the negative facet, which in his later years Freud suggestively named the Todestrieb, or the death drive: the individual’s yearning for a return to an inorganic state. This negative facet of narcissism manifests in a number of ways. In the case of melancholia, the subject experiencing loss undergoes a type of narcissistic regression that leads to the identification with loss and its causes. Freud noted that in melancholia, such identification leads to hatred of the self, most dramatically expressed in suicide.42 Narcissism in this sense entails the apparently paradoxical growth of the ego through its own negation.43 Rather than the simple death-wish represented in Barakei’s storyboard, then, in contemplating the fantastic structure of the photobook, we recognize the invisible trace of the death drive, which plays a fundamental role in identification.44 Such a concern with the structure of identification can be found in a number of Mishima’s literary works. The Patriotism cycle, for example, involves in its first two parts—Patriotism and The Chrysanthemum of the Tenth—different forms of reenactment.45 Most suggestively, Voices of Heroic Spirits, discussed above, presents a perverse form of identificatory mimesis: Kawasaki, the medium, engages in a subsumptive action that ultimately leads to his death. By channeling the departed, Kawasaki seeks to bring within himself—to incorporate—the ghosts of the departed, and ultimately he becomes a ghost. Voices, however, is more accurately characterized as a case of false incorporation—as the ghosts find a voice through the medium, eventually disclosing their names.46 In Barakei there is no such disclosure, and for this reason, no resolution. The phantom haunting its pages remains unnamed and unnameable. In its place we find the rose occupying the protagonist’s mouth, which prevents him from uttering the magic words that would lift the haunting. Indeed, he must not mention these words, lest by giving it a name the phantom is conjured, and the once-loved and now-lost object is irremediably banished. Barakei’s rose masks a void—that is to say, a debt. It could be associated with the broken promise of modernity that Mishima denounced in his later writings. Mishima found in the consumerism of postwar Japan—in the desire for the acquisition of endless stuff, what he called “my home-ism”—a means of filling in the metaphoric void within society that he associated with the demise of the “divine emperors” (kaminagara

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no tennō) of mythical times.47 Mishima thus advocated for a spectral politics; he sought to redress modernity’s debt through revolutionary—or in his case, radically reactionary—action. But, as with Mishima’s political writings, Barakei conceals the true source of the haunting. Mishima himself admitted that, rather than attaching to things (such as “my home,” or the reigning emperor), he sought something “more spiritual than that.” In his writings, he claims this is the role he reserves for national culture, ideals of courtly elegance or miyabi, the divine emperors of mythical times, and so on. He grieves the realization that there is no ideal self—that in fact such an ideal is impossible to attain, for the theological father-figure in charge of imposing such an (ego) ideal is now gone. The Other in question—the entity beyond the photographic frame, to whom the protagonist wishes to submit but cannot—is itself a fantastic projection that has now become truncated. This leads in turn toward a fruitless search for a new theological figure that can stand in for it—an abstraction, such as revolution, as Mishima suggested the radicalized New Left students who occupied universities at the end of the 1960s had done. Mishima may have sincerely felt that in siding with reaction—his imagination of miyabi, national culture, beauty, or the recovery of the “emperors of mythical time” within modernity—he had somehow circumvented such failure. But in fact, Mishima identified with the void. Loss is ultimately indicative of the self, for the object once loved and now lost “carries the ego as its mask.”48 Conversely, fixating on the void—rendering it into an object—allowed Mishima to pretend all remained unchanged, whereas consciously he knew that this was not the case. Barakei departs from the formal, psychic structure delineated above only in that, unlike in Mishima’s literary works, an object—the rose—metaphorizes the incapacity to utter the magic words that would conjure the ghost of the lost object. A rose occupies the mouth, the site of speech. Indeed, the rose is not unlike the floating words that helped Mishima conceal the true source of his haunting. It gives concrete shape to the impossibility of mourning. Therein lies the secret: the void is itself the object of desire. Because the loss cannot be addressed, it usurps the place of the original object. As a negative fetish of sorts, the void is abiding proof of the originally loved object’s continued existence.49 The traumatic process of loss is history; the inability to mourn it ensures its recurrence through the figure of the ghost that comes back to haunt the subject. It is from this dynamic that the protagonist derives his pleasure. The masochistic scenes depicted in Barakei’s passion play could thus be rewritten as follows: My pain (which is my pleasure) is the expression of a loss that I cannot name, yet without my pain I cannot either be or lay claim to my (better) self. This pain then is who I am—or rather, who I wish I were. The pleasure I find (my manic state, playing out in this storyboard) derives from the return of the ghost of that once revered, now lost theological figure. A stand-in for the actuality of loss, this ghost ensures that the type of projection Freud named “ego-ideal” remains intact.

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Narcissus at the Fountain

Under the guise of presenting us with the surface of the pond as the site that enables the pleasures of a tenuous, and at times dangerous, identification with the imperious and inscrutable demands of the Other, Barakei reveals the displacement of a self in conflict, split between a drive for life and the drive for its dissolution— both functional to the process of consolidating the ego. Barakei ultimately appears not so much invested in the dissolution of the subject within the Other as it is in the foreclosure of any possibility of “self ” beyond intersubjective fantasy. This observation takes us back to Mishima’s portrait as he stares back at the camera, which, I argue, epitomizes the problem of portraiture as articulated in the photobook. Jean-Luc Nancy notes in Le regard du portrait that the gaze in portraiture is directed nowhere and returns to no one: “The portrait’s gaze does not gaze at anything; it gazes at nothingness. It seeks no object, and plunges into the absence of the subject.”50 In its staging of the scene of identification, Barakei presents on the one hand what appears as a dissolution of the self in the Other—the total subsumption within an idealized yet unattainable object of love—and on the other, a reaffirmation of the self through its identification with a loss or debt. And yet neither of these positions is tenable, even as they are mirrored within the (psychic) transactions facilitated by Barakei as (material) object. This is precisely what Nancy refers to as the portrait’s staging of a perpetually “failed encounter” between the figure depicted and the viewer, who conjures the absent presence instantiated by the photograph.51 Barakei forces the viewer to contemplate the fact of having arrived too late to this encounter. Beyond the ultimate implications of Mishima’s program (and its actualization) or Hosoe’s modernist aspirations for photography as medium, there is, in this photobook, an intuitive grasp of the transformation of object-subject relations within portraiture. Barakei operates as the surface of the pond in which the viewer is invited to take a plunge. Portraits, which seemingly confirm the autonomy of the subject and return to the intentions of artist and sitter, are in fact far removed from them and invite a different type of viewing. As Nancy suggests, “The subject here is no longer evidence of a self-sufficient interiority sustained by the suspension of the world, as it is, or it would seem it is, generally in the Cartesian philosophical model.”52 Instantiated by the portrait, in this encounter—missed, delayed, or failed—objects dissolve into directions of libidinal energy, and the self disappears within intersubjectivity and its phantasms. In Barakei, Hosoe Eikoh reveals the matrix by which fleeting ghosts materialize. Barakei’s surface is where the image resides, the screen where the subject meets its phantasmatic Other. Hosoe exploits the ambiguities of the image, generated in this case by the conflict between ideas of external resemblance and the revelation of interiority that are part and parcel of the tradition of portraiture. The iconic element of the image is deliberately constructed by relying on its sitter’s celebrity, but also, importantly, it is projected by the viewer. These ghosts that flicker on the

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page are projections of the self that likewise conceal its emptiness. In establishing surface as his fundamental concern in Barakei, Hosoe displaces the question of objectivity in documentary. Instead, he focuses on photography as the phantasmagoric surface on which desire congeals as an image. In this and the previous chapter, I have discussed examples of how photography has instantiated a thinking-through of the object as an extension of the concerns foregrounded in contemporaneous visual art practice and critical discourse. The object is opened up for questioning, either through a sustained theoretical intervention—in the case of Takiguchi’s problematization of the object and the image—or through experimental practices, such as Hosoe Eikoh’s Barakei. By querying the potential for expressivity (art) in photography, Hosoe produced a crucible in which an inquiry into the medium opened up, more broadly, a question about the relationship between the seer and the seen. Art is, of course, a theological figure. In more ways than one, like Mishima, Hosoe sought to hold the fort against modernity as the age of mass reproducibility. The theme of debt and loss also more generally connects to the question of the whereabouts of the object. The following chapters will consider the subject-object dichotomy more directly, first as it relates to landscape and its critique in the late 1960s. Elaborating a discussion of conventional markers of absence in spatial representation, part 3 will show how this concern is connected more generally to a persistent obsession with absence and the vanishing.

Plate 1 Arakawa Shūsaku, Einstein Between Matter’s Structure and Faintest Sound, 1958–59. Cement, cotton, nylon, painted cotton, wood chips, and polyester cloth in wooden box, 166 × 107.7 × 21 cm. National Museum of Art, Osaka. © 2015 Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins. Photo: National Museum of Modern Art / DNPartcom.

Plate 2 (opposite) Kudō Tetsumi, Proliferating Chain Reaction in X-Style Basic Substance, 1960. Rope, iron, vinyl tube, and scrub brush, 73 × 82 × 65 cm. Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. © Hiroko Kudo, the Estate of Tetsumi Kudo / SOCAN (2021). Plate 3 Kudō Tetsumi, Distribution Map of Impotence (preparatory sketch for Philosophy of Impotence), 1961–62. Pencil, colored pencil, and felt-tipped pen on paper, 42.2 × 60 cm. The National Museum of Art, Osaka. © Hiroko Kudo, the Estate of Tetsumi Kudo / SOCAN (2021). Photo: National Museum of Modern Art / DNPartcom.

Plate 4 (opposite) Miki Tomio, Ear of Roses, 1962. Wood frame, papier-mâché, fabric, plaster, and collage, 90.5 × 58 × 18.5 cm. Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka. Plate 5 Ōtsuji Kiyoji, from the series Takiguchi Shūzō’s Study, 1980. Gelatin silver print, 38.0 × 37.8 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Image: National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo / DNPartcom.

Plate 6 (opposite) Takiguchi Shūzō, Untitled (Decalcomania), after 1960. Ink and color on paper, 19.8 × 13.8 cm. Takiguchi Shūzō Archive, Keio University Art Center. Plate 7 Kawada Kikuji, Hinomaru, Tokyo, from the series The Map, 1960–65. Gelatin silver print, 29.8 × 39.8 cm. © Kikuji Kawada, courtesy of PGI.

Plate 8 (opposite) Hosoe Eikoh, Barakei No. 29, 1962. Gelatin silver print, 30.4 × 29.5 cm. Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. Image: Tokyo Photographic Art Museum / DNPartcom. Plate 9 Hosoe Eikoh, Barakei No. 32, 1961. Gelatin silver print. 15.2 × 29.9 cm. Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. Image: Tokyo Photographic Art Museum / DNPartcom.

Plate 10 (opposite) Tōmatsu Shōmei, Plankton (2), 1966. Silver dye-bleach print, 24.5 × 29.7 cm. Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. Image: Tokyo Photographic Art Museum / DNPartcom. © Shomei Tomatsu—INTERFACE. Plate 11 Tōmatsu Shōmei, Horizon Line, from the series The Sea Around Us. From the magazine Camera Mainichi 154 (December 1966). © Shomei Tomatsu—INTERFACE.

Plate 12 Takanashi Yutaka, from the series Tokyoites, 1965. Gelatin silver print, 22.3 × 30.5 cm. © Yutaka Takanashi. Image courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery Photography/Film.

Plate 13 Takamatsu Jirō, Perspective, 1968. Pencil and colored pencil on black paper and tracing paper, 27.5 × 38 cm. Estate of Jiro Takamatsu, courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.

Plate 14 Usami Keiji, Aquarium Within an Aquarium No. 2, 1967. Oil on canvas, 185.2 × 276 cm. Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama.

Plate 15 Arakawa Shūsaku, Work, 1963. Acrylic and collage on canvas, 127 × 127 cm. Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art. © 2021 Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins.

Plate 16 Takamatsu Jirō, Photograph of Photograph, 1974. Gelatin silver print, 116 × 95.8 cm. The National Museum of Art, Osaka. Reproduced with permission from the Estate of Jiro Takamatsu. Image courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.

Fig. 35 Takamatsu Jirō, documentary photograph of On Anti-Existence in Relation to a Desk Drawer. Shown at the exhibition Room in Alibi, Naika Gallery, Tokyo, in July 1963. © Estate of Jiro Takamatsu, courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.

The works grouped here might bring to mind a “room.” This is because there is nothing strange in imagining a room when you see something that looks like a bed or a desk or a chair. However, the purpose of this is not at all to negate the un-reality of an illusionistic room drawn by means of perspectival projection on a canvas, and to regain reality by placing a bed or a desk [in the gallery]. . . . The furniture-like things in this space are a collection of objects [buttai] selected to negate, delete, or conceal reality. What is stressed here is not existence, but non-existence. It is not that the desk is deformed—the desk is in the process of becoming a non-existence. In sum, its roomlike-ness indicates simply the fact that this is not a room.1

Part 3 Absence

In July 1963, the art critic and curator Nakahara Yūsuke organized a group show titled Fuzai no heya = Room in Alibi at the recently opened Naika Gallery. Ten young artists exhibited works of varying dimensions that incorporated objects of everyday use, modified and situated to emphasize different effects. Among its participants, Hi-Red Center members Akasegawa Genpei, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, and Takamatsu Jirō introduced an array of mysterious obuje. Akasegawa exhibited a sofa, a carpet, and a radio that were each tightly wrapped in paper and bound with string; Nakanishi presented his ovoid Compact obuje, which was suspended from the ceiling; and Takamatsu showed a new series of “shadow” paintings and an elaborate construction titled On Anti-Existence in Relation to a Desk Drawer (Tsukue no hikidashi ni okeru han-jitsuzonsei nitsuite) (fig. 35). Documentary photographs show a wooden chair and desk, upon which were placed writing paper, a pen, an open book, a full ashtray, a lamp, and other accoutrements. The desk’s open drawers appear to have ejected string, which covers and wraps all of these items, seemingly attempting to nullify their presence. Even the writing paper, and the text in the book, were struck through with one continuously drawn, serpentine line. Although Nakahara provided an English-language title for his exhibition, a more literal translation of the Japanese would be Room of Absence. In notes published as a pamphlet, Nakahara noted,

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The objects introduced in this exhibition were chosen as stand-ins for nonentities, and the room itself was in fact the “alibi”: evidence furnished to demonstrate that there was no room. Put another way, the purpose of the show was to explore the possibility of rendering absence present. In Takamatsu’s work in particular, there is a clear attempt at presenting absence by literally striking through the objects in order to effect their nullification (matsusatsu). Nakahara had published an important book the previous year, The Aesthetics of Nansensu (Nansensu no bigaku, 1962). Nansensu is most immediately a loan word that means nonsense, but Nakahara distinguished it from the usual dichotomy between common sense and its simpleminded denial. As a third term, nansensu indicated a type of speculative space that altogether surpassed rationalism, by effecting what Nakahara described as the extinction of “value judgment” (kachihandan no shōmetsu). In other words, by moving beyond “common sense,” nansensu suspends its system of values, which reinforces the primacy of reason by delimiting what is reasonable from what is not.2 Nakahara traced the presence of nansensu and its expressions—most notably humor, irony, and the absurd—as the operation through which the historical avant-garde, particularly Surrealism, had carried out their attacks on art and society. He drew particular attention to the potential of this concept in overcoming modernism. For example, evoking the mechanistic logic of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Marcel Duchamp’s attempts at effacing subjectivity from his work through the readymade, Nakahara drew attention to modernism’s fixation with individuality.

Absence

Among the requisites for nansensu we must discuss is the erasure of individuality. Of course, this is not to say that all such erasure of individuality is nansensu. One method to prove the absence of self in artistic expression is to give existence to a nonexistence— the active procedure that seeks to prove such absence is nansensu. This is why it surpasses value judgment. However, were we to insist on the position we call modernism, even if the notion of proof of the self ’s absence could be grasped, it would seem to be merely a capricious renunciation of the self. This is because modernism is, in a word, proof of the individual’s existence.3 In this passage, Nakahara highlighted absenting—or the process through which an “erasure of individuality” is enacted—as an important means of achieving nansensu. Moreover, absenting implies a substitution of existence for nonexistence that would, as in Room in Alibi, provide proof of the actuality of absence as something beyond the utilitarian logic of reason. Yet nansensu could just as easily be co-opted in the service of modernist notions of individuality, if it were to be interpreted as the mere outcome of erasing subjectivity rather than the act of denial

and its source: negativity. Success could only come from the painstaking process of absenting through which actual objects are rendered into nonexistence. Nakahara highlighted the fact of unpleasure in the process of absenting: the difficulty inherent in devising strategies for its proof and the alienation involved in the return to a now autonomous material reality—that is, a world free from thought. Some commentators have positioned Room in Alibi as an important milestone in the development of experimental art practices in the 1960s—part of a series of exhibitions including Tricks and Visions (1967) that anticipate the turn toward an analytical approach that departed from Anti-Art. In this they equate the process of absenting with that of dematerialization.4 However, this disregards the logic behind absenting and the material underpinnings of this practice. It is easy, retrospectively, to read in Nakahara’s words a premonition of Conceptualism, yet what is so astounding to see is that, rather than the logic of dematerialization, the process highlighted here is one of permutation—a laborious and deeply painful elaboration that sought to give form to absence. These final chapters examine markers of absence in the work of photographers and artists at the end of the 1960s; as instances of absenting, they indicate a renewed, if wayward, concern with the actuality of material.

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The first thing I do before painting a surface is to draw a rightangled frame, as large as it pleases me, which I shall now use as an open window from where to see historia. —Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura (1435–36)

Chapter 5

Finding Despair in Landscape On surveying Tōmatsu Shōmei’s prolific output, a viewer notes that the photographer’s camera is trapped in constant oscillation: at one moment his viewfinder is fixated on the detritus found on the ground, while at the next it obstinately searches for an elusive horizon line. Consider two similar but contrasting series produced roughly ten years apart. The first is titled Asphalt (Asufaruto, 1961). Tōmatsu directs the viewfinder to the ground, in order to freeze a miniature galaxy composed of the detritus found on city streets (fig. 36). Closely cropped, flat, dark, deprived of any sense of direction, the photographs ensnare a precious microcosm in black amber: discarded metal, nuts, safety pins, a razor blade, random pieces of wire resting on the amphibian-like surface of a road. At the opposite end of this continuum we find an expansive view captured off the coast of Hateruma in Okinawa, part of the series Pencil of the Sun (Taiyō no enpitsu, 1971).1 Composed with minimal elements, the black-and-white photograph is at once flat and deep, paradisiacal and foreboding: the dark but peaceful ocean, a clear sky, a furiously slanted horizonline that slashes the frame, and a lonesome and almost perfectly round cloud that drifts off to the left and is mirrored by its reflection on the water (fig. 37). The cloud is so crisp and the sky so deep, it is almost as if the photograph were inverted— the dark ocean could be the sky. Indeed, the slight burn around the edge of the image lends the sky a depth that is missing in the solid sea, upending the viewer’s

Fig. 36 Tōmatsu Shōmei, Asphalt (1), 1961. Gelatin silver print, 25 × 25.3 cm. Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. © Shomei Tomatsu—INTERFACE. Image: Tokyo Photographic Art Museum / DNPartcom.

Finding Despair in Landscape

expectations. Recession here occurs not through the disposition of elements on the surface of the earth, but in the void depicted above it. Throughout his career, Tōmatsu constantly shifted his frame, enacting a dizzying movement: up and down, near and far, closed and open. Such back-and-forth runs counter to the idea that there is a formal telos, or ultimate aim, to this movement: there is no progressive lift of the gaze. These photographs suggest a fundamental contiguity that cuts across these seemingly distinct approaches. Tōmatsu stressed the interplay of long and close range—deliberately amplifying the gap in between. In procedural terms, there is no divergence beyond that of his object choice or the way the chosen object is portrayed. Rather, the modes of address discernable in Tōmatsu’s oeuvre coexist and are at times deployed at the service of the very same ends. Such modes are revealed to establish the same visuality, just like “up close” and “wide open” are but two opposite confines within a singular practice of gazing upon the world. There are no surprises here, for such is the work of photography. Traditionally, these opposing modes of address were interpreted as reflecting the photographer’s desire either to create an accurate record of the world or to convey her subjective world to the viewer. Here, however, I suggest that Tōmatsu was in fact attempting something altogether different, that toward the mid-1960s he increasingly began to examine the photographic gaze itself as it sought to give form to its object, doing so through a mode of seeing that epitomizes the world as

Absence

object. Tōmatsu’s work is unique because, intuitively and very early on, he sought to disaggregate the components of landscape, revealing its conventions and taking it up less as a genre category than as a verb: a particular way of shaping the world. From this standpoint, it is apparent that both of these photographs equally pro130 duce landscape. In this chapter I address a series of statements concerning landscape that were articulated in visual arts practice, photography, theory, and criticism in Japan from the mid-1960s through the late 1970s. I begin this chapter with a discussion of Tōmatsu Shōmei’s photo series The Sea Around Us (1966), showing how his problematization of the sea as image led him to query landscape as a specific form of visuality. Relying on an at times jarringly contrasting camera frame, Tōmatsu explored how landscape enacts an objectification of the world, demonstrating the form’s operation diagrammatically through fragmentation of its component parts and reconstitution as obuje. Tōmatsu’s series proposed a major intervention in postwar photography. The complex debate sparked by this series raised questions about the development of landscape as artistic genre in modern Japan; the phenomenological and semiological aspects of landscape as aesthetic object; the status of landscape Fig. 37 Tōmatsu Shōmei, Hateruma Island, Okinawa, 1971. Gelatin silver as a set of representational conprint, 21.6 × 31.6 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Purchased with funds contributed by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, 1990, ventions, or as a specific way of 1990-51-104. © Shomei Tomatsu—INTERFACE. Image courtesy of seeing; and, alternately, the idea Philadelphia Museum of Art. of landscape as a fantastic projection that seeks to make the world its object. The series is complex in its consideration of the absences embedded within landscape. In The Sea Around Us, it would be more precise to think of landscape itself as a type of obuje—an absence, as Tōmatsu indicated while describing his motive during interviews, in particular in his reflections on the horizon line. In what follows, I highlight Tōmatsu’s connection to other contemporaneous critiques of spatial representation—in particular, the reflection on landscape as expression of ideology. While some of this terrain is well-trodden and has been addressed before in Japanese studies—particularly in literary criticism and film studies—I stress the import of these questions as they relate to long-standing discussions

within the theory and history of art. I am especially concerned with how these voices trace the relationship between vision, knowledge, and power in landscape and relate it to perspective—the paramount formal device present in the very construction and operation of the photographic camera—and, in so doing, anticipate later findings and debates in poststructuralist art history.2 Partly as an echo of this debate, I have used some of the critical categories introduced in Leon Battista Alberti’s De Pictura to organize this chapter. While Alberti’s treatise on perspective may seem at times exclusively technical, his discussion of painting was geared toward a specific aim: “The most important work of the Painter,” he wrote, “is history.”3 Likewise, the great question opened up in this generation of Japanese artists’ mimetic return to landscape concerns the problematization of history as objective reality. The artists discussed here problematize historia not merely in terms of their critique of the ideological saturation entailed by national allegory—in other words, the critique of history as a subject-matter category, or genre. Rather, these artists directly addressed history’s place as a core concept in the fine arts framework, which needs and produces specific forms: the frame, the horizon, perspective, and the veil. This generation of artists realized how in art, history emerges from a specific type of object relation mediated by vision, and that history became naturalized precisely through such forms. History as an idea—or rather, “historicism,” the idea that the present is defined by the progressive overcoming of the past—needs its own type of objectual vision, or objectivity, reproduced through forms that both belong to it and generate it.

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A Frame, Large as It Pleases Me

Finding Despair in Landscape

In an important photo essay serialized monthly throughout 1966 in the journal Camera Mainichi, Tōmatsu attempted to capture the sea. The series consists of straight color photographs of and off the coast, from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to Amami in the south.4 Predictably, there are ample photographs of seascapes, sunsets, and waves; however, Tōmatsu also sought to capture the patterned surfaces of sea rocks, the intertidal flora and fauna, and the dreamlike world of microscopic plankton (plate 10). Produced in between major landmarks in his career—the series I Am a King (1964) and the photobooks 11:02 Nagasaki (1966) and Japan (1967), which he published in quick succession—The Sea Around Us (Warera o meguru umi, 1966) shares these photographic works’ problematization of national community. Writing shortly after the series’s conclusion, Fukushima Tatsuo observed that Tōmatsu chose the sea as object ultimately because it surrounds “us” (warera). To him, these are not simply photographs of the sea—of nature—but rather should be understood as part of Tōmatsu’s reflection on Japan, his point of departure, and the return of his entire oeuvre.5

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It is not a coincidence that Tōmatsu turned to this reflection on the sea right at the moment when the disastrous environmental effects wrought by Japan’s postwar industrial redevelopment were beginning to be felt most intensely. Beginning in 1956, as Japan embarked on what would become almost two decades of rapid economic growth, petrochemical combines mushroomed along Japan’s coastline;6 meanwhile, the growing development of landfill areas in the greater Tokyo conurbation rendered access to the coast increasingly difficult.7 The essay resonated with Tōmatsu’s previous interest in creating a visual chronicle of Japan’s transformation in the postwar period, thus attempting to capture history.8 However, while important, the type of national allegory that animates much of Tōmatsu’s oeuvre is not really the thrust of this project.9 The Sea Around Us is most significant as a statement on the nature of photography. With the series, Tōmatsu explores what could be called the objectual capabilities of the medium and the consequences of its specific plasticity, critically engaging the idea of landscape for the first time. At the core of Tōmatsu’s inquiry was the camera’s capacity to access the sea; the series queried the camera’s ability to produce the sea as image. Tōmatsu interrogated the estrangement that landscape is through the decomposition of form: a literal disaggregation of the sea, for example, through an inventory and taxonomy of intertidal flora and fauna. This becomes most evident in his depiction of plankton—organisms usually living at the threshold of visibility, implausibly transformed here into hypervisible obuje. By rendering landscape into the sum of its components, The Sea Around Us reveals it as the byproduct of a gaze intent on contemplating absolute exteriority. In pulling apart its constituent parts, the series reveals how the subject colonizes such exteriority and organizes objects into a whole image, to create a pretty picture, so to speak. A specific way of gazing upon the world, reproduced as a perfectly naturalized form—and thus almost imperceptible as such to its viewers—landscape as technology creates what philosopher Martin Heidegger once designated Weltbild, or “world-picture.” This is not merely a picture of the world, but the world itself grasped as a picture—one in which humans are at the center.10 Tōmatsu had approached the sea before, as had many of his contemporaries. Yet through this artistic re-turn to the sea, he addressed what to him was an apparent impossibility. In text accompanying his earlier series I Am a King,11 Tōmatsu narrated an episode in which he decided, in the middle of the night, to photograph the sea near Chiba, to the east of Tokyo. He hired a taxi to drive him through miles of reclaimed land, but to no avail—the neverending industrial infrastructure meant they could not reach the seaside. Exasperated, Tōmatsu ordered the driver to take him back to Shinjuku, where he finally found the sea he was seeking—rather disappointingly, in the photographs that decorated the walls of a café. Of course, as critic and photographer Taki Kōji commented, whether or not this episode actually took place is irrelevant; Tōmatsu’s more general point is that the sea could only be consumed as sign.12

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The Sea Around Us is unique in the variety of registers Tōmatsu used to address his subject matter. In the obsessive record of minutiae comprising his work’s totality, Tōmatsu emulated oceanographer Rachel Carson’s bestselling book The Sea Around Us (1951), which famously conjoined science with poetry in documenting and dramatizing the sea. Importantly, Tōmatsu’s photographs were serialized month-to-month for publication, a method unusual for him; most of his previously published series had extended gestation periods and involved the recycling of previously captured material. Perhaps for this reason, the series retains a general veneer of tentativeness unusual in his work. The brusque changes in style and the type of content tackled in each delivery register at times almost as if he were struggling to isolate the specific question he wanted to ask of the sea. Addressing this experiment as a whole for the first time, Tōmatsu claimed, “To be honest, it’s been only upon completing this eighth shoot that I finally feel as if I were done with the prologue and now standing at the start line.”13 The Sea Around Us met a rather muted response. To some, the subject matter and approach seemed pedestrian compared to the high lyricism of Tōmatsu’s masterful Nagasaki series—completed immediately before The Sea Around Us—and the photographic record of the post-Occupation era for which he had become famous. Critics Fukushima Tatsuo and Taki Kōji were notable exceptions to the criticism. Fukushima dismissed those who derided the work: “Some say this is Tōmatsu training for his next reportage, that turning to nature is a kind of breather for him, that it’s all merely personal. Nonsense! Through these photographs he has gained a greater freedom, a viewpoint from which to reach out for the world—this is how he was able to arrive at a total vision” (sōtaiteki vijon).14 Fukushima intuited that Tōmatsu’s series was an experiment in establishing a new type of gaze, which he associated with a “total vision” of a rather conceptual order. Such total vision was not merely a reflection of a particular style or subject matter; rather, it pointed to a completely different way of looking and of approaching the act of taking photographs. Indeed, Fukushima appears to suggest this series was about photography, a subject Tōmatsu had taken on for the first time in his career. Fukushima associated such vision with an auteurist view of photographic production; with this series Tōmatsu confirmed his stature as an artist.15 Critic Taki Kōji, on the other hand, found something different in the series. While he acknowledged Fukushima’s eye, Taki was dissatisfied with his theory. Rather than praising Tōmatsu as auteur, Taki complicated Tōmatsu’s externalization of what he deemed an interior gaze (uchinaru shisen). “[Tōmatsu] claims, ‘The sea is inside me,’ but this is not a question of emotion,” Taki writes. “He is talking about an internalized vision. For a photograph is vision [shikaku] that has been inserted in between us and the world.”16 For Taki, Tōmatsu’s innovation was to identify the role of photography in the assimilation and interiorization of a gaze that exists a priori. Through the series, the photographer deliberately attempted to

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examine how such an internalized gaze had come to be, relying on photography to effect its externalization and thus render it intelligible. Taki positioned Tōmatsu beyond the naïve claim to objective reality promoted by photojournalism and, indirectly, the auteurist subjectivism promoted by Fukushima. He found in the series not an auteur seeking to articulate a unique artistic language but a photographer addressing vision through a reflection on mediation. These pictures were no mere aestheticization of the sea: “Were we to explain differently what Tōmatsu attempted in his photographs of the ‘sea,’ we could say it was an aesthetic consciousness of the world. This is to say, he was able to express a fundamental consciousness of the world by choosing as his subject matter the sea as aesthetic object” (biteki taishō).17 The objective of the series was not the production of an aestheticized—here understood as deliberately picturesque—rendering of the sea. Rather, Tōmatsu demonstrated that photography could simultaneously instantiate and render intelligible a phenomenological consciousness of the world.18 In its variance, the series showed the body perceiving the sea not as a total pretty picture but as the accumulation of disjointed details that later become “world” through the viewer’s reflection as a viewer. For Taki, photography aided Tōmatsu in staging the encounter of the viewing subject with her surroundings, one that is always inevitably mediated by the gaze. For this reason, Taki situated Tōmatsu’s series at what he named the “origins of the image” (eizō no genten). From this perspective, whether the object represented was or was not the sea might seem somewhat irrelevant: photographic mediation could be explored in relation to any number of possible objects. Yet the sea was in fact crucial to Tōmatsu. In an interview, he remarked that, with his series, he was seeking to establish a “new orthodoxy” for pictures of the sea—but that such orthodoxy or standard would not be found in the sea as external object, in part because the sea was no longer. The sea mattered to Tōmatsu because it was absent. “Since the very beginning, I knew that the real sea had disappeared from our surroundings; this did not come to me as a shock at all. . . . I now wanted to look for the ‘sea within me’ [jibun no uchinaru umi]. If I were asked to further elaborate what I mean by such sea, I could only call it ‘love.’”19 Intent in rescuing Tōmatsu as he grappled with the semiological and phenomenological aspects of photographic mediation, Taki declared in his essay that the photographer’s invocation of love was no mystery. After all, the exercise of the gaze is by its very definition sensual, perceptive. Taki acknowledged the sensuality of the gaze, yet he did not appear to give full attention to what Tōmatsu might have meant by using a term such as “love,” which within psychoanalytic theory signifies a subject’s progressive identification with something external to her, the fantastic introjection of a fundamentally unattainable object within the self. Tōmatsu, in essence, suggests that the sea is nowhere but within us—and accessible only through the gaze that produces it as a photograph.

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In an essay accompanying the final installment of The Sea Around Us, Tōmatsu described the particular nature of what he attempted to capture in the series: “Sparks fly when, poring over the sea, my gaze touches the photographic act. The sea is my phantasmatic mother [maboroshi no haha], who lives within my depths. My sea isn’t blue: the ocean is stained with blood. The sea embraces me with the largeness of its silence. The sea tells me of a youth’s urge to kill, and with the gentleness of a uterus reveals the world to me. In other words, the sea is my home. For all us humans, the sea is also our distant home.”20 Finding the sea had become an increasingly difficult task. The very system of domination that had first turned the sea into landscape generated the conditions of its absence, through industrial overgrowth and environmental depletion. In producing the sea as image, the photographer sought to fill in what was missing, to complete with a photograph something that had been lost. He deemed this absence something common to humanity (ningen), its “distant home.” By framing a scene and pressing the shutter, Tōmatsu sought to enact a return home to his “mother” through landscape. We leave here the objectivist rhetoric of photo-documentary and enter squarely into the realm of fantasy, for what Tōmatsu sought to produce is ultimately an interior image—“the sea within me.” Tōmatsu’s comments are intriguing in that he posits a type of ambivalent vision. At once objective and hypersubjective, this picturing is a gesture that reaches out, attempting to grasp the world-as-is through its deliberate decomposition, and ultimately seeks to introject such an “outside” within the self. The operation is doomed to fail, for belief in the totality that landscape once was is no longer available to us. Tōmatsu appears to query the camera’s capacity and limitations in capturing and organizing such an outside as landscape. Taki, Fukushima, and Tōmatsu appear to present conflicting interpretations. Taki approaches photography in relation to the structures of meaning-making and the phenomenological operations of the image, while Tōmatsu develops a highly personal yet universalizing rationale—which Taki implies has been informed by Fukushima’s modernist subjectivism.21 This disagreement is inconsequential to a more general and deceptively simple point: at a most basic level, The Sea Around Us investigates the act of depicting nature—that is, photography’s relationship to exteriority. In a few years, Fukushima would recognize—in part because of Taki— that this series had been indeed an origin: the beginning of the problematization of landscape in contemporary film and photography.22 Tōmatsu does not in fact deploy the word “landscape” explicitly in the few, sparse texts accompanying each installment in the series; he elided and thus disavowed the expected term. But should this absence be understood as itself a type of haunting? Tōmatsu elaborates on the motivation behind his series, invoking the language of affects and referring to drives, loss, and returns. To address his phantasmatic mother—the sea, which is now lost—he relies on stand-ins: objects he seeks out with his camera, and that serve as placeholders for the sea’s present absence.

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This accounts for the way Tōmatsu breaks down forms encountered in his search for the sea, rendering the world into obuje with his camera. At stake are neither nature nor the sea but a type of objectifying vision that can be subverted: landscape as a distinct mode of spatial representation, whose operation can be diagrammed through the decomposition of its forms. Further, he appears to articulate a different landscape that now demarcates an absence: “I knew that the real sea had disappeared from our surroundings,” he notes, and therefore this requires in its stead a new image. But how can something be absent when it is there? Tōmatsu suggests that landscape is not simply taking in the world; rather, it is a projection that creates the world: “For me, ‘we who surround the sea’ are external reality, while ‘the sea within us’ is literally our inner vision. The relationship between the two can be diagrammed geometrically: if the first is axis X, and the latter axis Y, it follows that we should be able to arrive to the coordinates for Point P.”23 Tōmatsu identifies landscape as a set of conventions extraneous to a viewer’s subjectivity. Point P—photography—occurs at the clash of this conventional, exterior world with the interior world of the viewing subject: desire. Tōmatsu’s oscillating camera movement, its varying frame, ultimately seeks to locate the elusive Point P. The landscape photography he seeks is thus an attempt to represent an object that this series has revealed to be absent—not just the sea but the sea as a concept. In other words, this is the world grasped in its totality, an image that in the aftermath of modernity’s depletion of nature can only be accessed as a series of fragments.24 The final installment of the series features a sequence of four photographs, some of them approaching subtly hued monochromes. Each photograph depicts the horizon from different vantage points and at distinct times of the day: the sky and sea meet behind an iceberg in the grisaille-like pre-dawn light; the dark sea sways under billowing fog as the rays of dawn break forth from in between the clouds; the peaceful ocean fuses into the bright blue sky, vanishing into a mist; and a purple and orange sunset comes to a full stop at the horizon line (plate 11). It is unsurprising that Tōmatsu leaves his viewer at the horizon. In his own words, he attempted to establish a new “orthodoxy” for pictures of the sea in this yearlong quest, and thus he had to contend with the question of the horizon line: “A line stretched across. / Nothing but a perfectly ordinary, monotonous line,” yet one that as image invariably “spins together photographs of the sea. / The horizon line is the sea’s tension.” He continues:

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The horizon line is the beginning and ending of things. The vibration of the sea Relays to the shore a message from the past and the future.25 Two points of interest are brought together in this passage. The spatial dimensions of landscape converge with a durational aspect alluded to through the notion of

beginning and ending. At the same time, its specificity—this landscape, its geographic situation as water stretches from land to sky—is presented through the image of encounter, the sea and the shore. A void that, while perceptible to the naked eye, the camera can only render conventionally as a single line that slashes the frame, the horizon stands between past and future. The horizon line behaves like an obuje rather than an object with a presumed stability and fixity, for as vanishing point it is the negation of space: an anti-object that condenses history. Discussing Tōmatsu’s work several years later, Fukushima claimed that the horizon sequence appeared to him as the antithesis of Arthur Rimbaud’s luminous poem “Eternity” (1872), which is recited in a whisper against a static panoramic shot of the sea at the end of Jean-Luc Godard’s film Pierrot Le Fou (1965).

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It has been found again. Elle est retrouvée. What?—Eternity. Quoi?—L’Éternité. It is the sea gone C’est la mer allée with the sun. Avec le soleil.26

Finding Despair in Landscape

In fact, Rimbaud’s poem and Tōmatsu’s photographs have much in common. Rimbaud noted that the horizon line is where history comes to die: his horizon (“C’est la mer allée / Avec le soleil”) is ambivalent at best. The poet has forewarned his reader, “No hope shall be found there. No light shall rise from the darkness.”27 The present is liberation precisely because there is no future beyond it: there will be no sunrise to come after the eternity that is the now. Fukushima, however, identified the stalemate that the horizon represents as marker of a denial of futurity. He asks, “And so you found love, you found nature. So what?”28 Tōmatsu, who in the early part of the decade photographed mangled objects and the keloids on people’s skin, finding history in the traces of the destruction wrought by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would have been well aware that there could be no hope in landscape. A year later, in 1967, he wrote: “After restructuring nature, humanity carved the nuclear bomb’s shadows of death on the thick walls of science and technology—what we call civilization. Because of this, we cannot unconditionally accept nature thus transformed. We can only share the nihilism of nature, today suspended amid the destruction of the value system—we can only share the nihilism of the world.”29 As a form, landscape addresses humanity’s relationship to nature. The depiction of nature—seemingly untouched, but in actuality irremediably transformed in the wake of industrial capitalism and the continued threat of nuclear annihilation—is part of its actual restructuring and domination within modernity.30 If landscape was ambivalent at first, its deployment in the aftermath of these transformations could now only happen from a position of radical negativity. The horizon—a line that cuts the frame and thus orients space-as-representation—signals here the end of history, or rather, the place where

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A Veil, or Grid

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history comes to die. As anti-object, the horizon turns landscape into its negation, which Tōmatsu reveals to be the only possible position at the end of progress.

The Sea Around Us was a major departure from midcentury engagements with landscape in photography. Whether in Hamaya Hiroshi’s documentary images of Japan’s rural northeast, or the saccharine submissions amateur photographers periodically sent to Domon Ken for adjudication in his monthly photo classroom in the 1950s,31 the predominant postwar landscape imagery was inextricably tied to a nostalgic yearning for an imaginary past. Since the introduction of photography and notions of the picturesque to Japan in the mid-nineteenth century, the genre of landscape progressively became equated with the search for a disappearing ideal place. Signifying a lost and ostensibly more authentic lifestyle, the rural landscape was hailed as proof of the fantastic origin and preserve of true Japaneseness; images of the countryside served to envision the fabled “village society” once described by ethnologist Yanagita Kunio. This discourse purported that such authentic Japaneseness had been lost in the process of modernization, and its disappearance was mobilized to explain the moral corruption that had led to war.32 (Ironically, in the prewar period, bucolic idioms were deployed to justify Japan’s imperialist endeavors in Manchuria.)33 Not unlike many other photographers of the early postwar period, Tōmatsu had set out in search of authenticity; he sought to find the “land” in landscape. However, in extricating the genre from the tired clichés of national culture, he intuitively reached a deeper question concerning photography’s capacity to reorganize space as landscape. Tōmatsu’s interrogation of landscape anticipated efforts by Taki Kōji and his colleague Nakahira Takuma, both of whom were about to undertake a major retheorization of the workings of the image in their writings and photographic series published within the celebrated magazine Provoke (1968–69). Eclectically drawing from Marxism, phenomenology, and Structuralist theory, Taki and Nakahira, along with Takanashi Yutaka and Okada Takahiko, sharply questioned the implications of landscape through their production of gritty and ambiguous images. Similarly, Tōmatsu anticipated the concerns of one of their key interlocutors, the film critic Matsuda Masao, a key figure in what later became known as the landscape debate (fūkei-ron). Matsuda argued that landscape is a technology of domination: a visual instantiation of state power. In a series of essays later collected as part of a volume titled The Extinction of Landscape (Fūkei no metsubō),34 Matsuda identified landscape as both a symptom of and a site for the subversion of late capitalism. As symptom— in other words, as pro-filmic “reality”—landscape’s accelerated transformation and

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homogenization was indicative of the moral and social depletion characteristic of the high-growth, socially conformist post-Anpo political system. However, as representation, landscape and its conventions enabled a critique of the workings of the state. In his involvement with the cinematic avant-garde of the late 1960s, Matsuda advocated for what he called “landscape film,” a type of counterhegemonic practice that sought to generate a deliberate despectacularization of the world. As a politicized intervention, landscape was thus used in a potentially functional way, to contest the saturated mediascape of post-Anpo Japan through depicting what film scholar Yuriko Furuhata aptly described as the “eventless space of everyday life.”35 Like Matsuda, Nakahira Takuma and fellow Provoke contributor Moriyama Daidō sought to subvert the conventions of landscape in order to create a critique of high-growth capitalist society. In a radical gesture, they rejected the camera’s viewfinder. By meandering through city streets and pressing the shutter at will, they sought to render the photographic act as sheer exposure, an unstructured encounter with the world.36 This strategy contrasted with the highly structured framing mechanism of perspective—in particular, the grid and its supplement, the veil. Seeking to explain how the painter succeeds in producing an exact copy of what he encounters, Alberti suggests imagining a piece of cloth (a veil, or velo) enveloping a given form, whose cut-up pieces then help the painter reconstruct a view at scale. The idea of the veil supplements that of the grid (rete), whose geometric principles undergird one-point perspective. As a structuring mechanism of landscape, the perspectival grid is fundamental to the camera, which relies on it in order to transpose and translate three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional representation, mechanically disposing of the pieces of cloth enveloping such forms.37 Nakahira Takuma shared Matsuda’s critique of landscape as an ideological apparatus, although he recognized that it would be powerless without the seductive quality of its apparently seamless construction. He wrote, “To me as well, the world can only appear as ‘landscape’—lustrous and hard as plastic. Doubtless, this is due to my hapless flesh and sensibility. Yet we could also say that this is precisely why I continue to take photographs. Most certainly, the city is not unrelated to ‘landscape.’ Indeed, the city is ‘landscape’ itself.”38 To Nakahira, the false sense of nostalgia encoded in representations of the bucolic landscape epitomized the genre’s fictiveness—although he rejected the idea that the city as subject matter could in any way escape a similar form of mystification. Like Matsuda, Nakahira recognized the power concealed behind landscape’s lustrous surface, but he added a critique of the former’s position: to solely read an image for the visible signs of social violence and state domination imposed by urban space reduced and effaced how landscape gives form to such structures and situates viewers as compliant subjects within them. Nakahira felt his role as photographer should involve revealing the structure concealed and sustained by the image by seeking a fracture in the apparent seamlessness of landscape. Photography could act like a hole through

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which to “turn the glove [that is landscape] inside out”39—acting in a manner similar to the stones and fire of protestors or the rifles of a revolutionary army. While Nakahira and Moriyama sought to resolve the question of how to subvert landscape by, in a sense, creating photography without the frame, Takanashi Yutaka was famously more reticent. Two years before becoming involved in Provoke, Takanashi published a photo essay titled Tokyoites (Tōkyō-jin).40 In the foreword, he called attention to the connection between the origins of linear perspective and representations of the ideal city in the Italian quattrocento. To address this connection, he played with depth of field and framing in order to exaggerate perspectival recession in his depiction of social housing and the narrow back streets of the capital’s working-class “low city” (shitamachi) (fig. 38). He also experimented with layout in his presentation of the resulting photographs in the journal, exploring their juxtaposition as a resignifying device. Takanashi sought to generate visual disjuncture with his placement of the photographs, for he felt that “collage alone could capture” the particular experience of alienation in contemporary cities and their fracturing of vision—a phenomenon that stood in contrast to the rationalist organization of urban space found in representations of the ideal city. Takanashi identified in this divergent conceptualization the foundations for a critique of postwar humanism: a fiction he found the post-Anpo state now relied on in order to justify social control (plate 12). Although the interrogation of spatial representation, particularly the status of perspectival conventions, was an urgent concern for artists working with photographic and film cameras, it was by no means exclusive to them. A number of other artists of this period became explicitly interested in the function and implications of perspective and its rendering of space. For example, as part of his sustained exploration of the fundamentals of painting—including point, line, and shadow—Takamatsu Jirō, one of the foremost figures of the Indépendant generation, similarly explored in drawings, prints, and proto-installations produced later in the decade the mechanism of perspective, relying on exaggeration, inversion, and the retranslation of the perspectival grid onto a three-dimensional format.41 In his environments, the resulting objects are comically warped, revealing the implausible proportions and deformation necessitated by perspectival recession, despite its associated claims of verisimilitude and accuracy. For example, a table and four chairs are placed on a ramp that lifts toward the back; the objects’ edges line up with a grid drawn on their surface, with the sharply designed diagonals suggesting an implausibly proximate vanishing point. Only from one viewpoint will the objects appear to recede relatively naturally—but this is, of course, an illusion. Takamatsu’s Chairs and Table in Perspective (1966–67; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo) was included in the landmark exhibition Tricks and Visions organized by critics Nakahara Yūsuke and Ishiko Junzō in 1968; this work and others in Takamatsu’s perspective series are usually discussed in relation to a growing interest in

Fig. 38 Takanashi Yutaka, from the series Tokyoites, 1965. Gelatin silver print, 30.8 × 20.5 cm. © Yutaka Takanashi. Image courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery Photography/Film.

Finding Despair in Landscape

the mid-1960s with the conditions of perception and, especially, anxieties over the falsity of the image.42 But was this simply formal experimentation? Most immediately, Takamatsu’s interest in the vanishing point appears related to his ongoing exploration of conditions of absence (fuzai). Spatial recession could thus be seen as instantiating a point of nonexistence. But Takamatsu’s choice of one such work as his submission for a public monument in Expo ’70 in Osaka likewise inscribes his problematization of perspective along the lines of the critiques of social control in the post-Anpo state developed by figures like Hariu Ichirō and Tōmatsu in the run-up to the exposition (plate 13).43 For Expo ’70, Takamatsu designed an outdoor environment consisting of a pair of descending and ascending ramps, shaped as warped trapezoids and painted over with a curving grid, leading the viewer’s eye to their point of convergence, thus exposing the fictitiousness of landscape conventions. Another artist who became keenly concerned with how perspective is enmeshed with knowledge and power was Usami Keiji, who explored in his paintings the disruption of the perspectival grid (plate 14). Usami, who hailed from Osaka, maintained a critical distance from his contemporaries and, unlike them, never sought to abandon the medium of painting. In the mid-1960s, he shifted from an

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early affinity with gestural abstraction to creating large-scale paintings in which he layered repeating silhouettes captured midmotion against intricate backdrops of intersecting parallelograms, curves, and diagonals. The paintings are executed in bright colors that modulate smoothly across the surface, evoking classical representations of la città ideale, the ideal city. In Aquarium Within an Aquarium No. 2 (1967; Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama) the figures are placed in a balanced composition—one walking toward the viewer, another turning away and running, and another following through with an arm extended forward, regaining balance as if he had just thrown a rock— with the orthogonal, almost static layout disturbed by a vertical wave-like pattern. Discussing his work, Usami focused primarily on form, or the interruption of the perspectival grid through the inclusion of silhouettes and their arrangement in repeated patterns within the composition.44 However, there is explicitly political meaning attached to the silhouettes that he would continue to rely on for the rest of his career. They were based on photographs from Life magazine’s sensationalistic coverage of the Watts Rebellion of 1965, where longstanding grievances arising from racial inequality and police brutality sparked confrontations between Black residents and the city police in South Central Los Angeles. In late 1960s Japan, such imagery would have resonated intensely alongside the local student movement and protests against the Vietnam War. Through these silhouettes, the series indirectly alludes to the problematic discourse on student violence, or gewalt, articulated at the time in the mass media.45 By appropriating the image of the (Black) protestors and recontextualizing it within a disrupted system of diagonals, Usami problematized the deceptions inherent to the perspectival grid and its ideological function within photographic neo-objectivism. By forcing the viewer to assume a specific viewpoint through carefully framed and cropped point-of-view shots, Life photographers and editors led the viewer into a visual identification with the police in Watts. As promoted around the world by Life, photojournalism naturalized the perspectival grid that became, in this case, fully identified with an ideologically determined monopoly on truth: the camera automatized the window through which history could be gazed upon. As a secondary feature of his subject-matter choice, Usami foregrounded the city as framing device and the possibilities of protest as a type of contestation that could interrupt the city’s highly regulated movement. The protestors in the Watts neighborhood—like the student protestors at the self-styled “Quartier Latin” of Kanda, in Tokyo—were similar in how they stood in the way of the power concealed by the fictions of perspective. In both cases, they stood in the way of history. Usami’s series was particularly timely and relevant in its foregrounding of perspective as the preeminent symbolic form within the fine arts system, one whose ultimate end is, as French art historian Hubert Damisch suggests, “the conquest of the world as representation.” Damisch remarks that, as fiction, one-point perspective

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is not simply reflective of the world, nor passive with regard to the viewer. Quite to the contrary, he argues that “above all, at the level of representations—that is, the order and sense of things—[perspective] is constitutive of ‘the world of objects.’”46 Likewise, Usami understood that “landscape” involved not simply the act of depicting an external reality but also presented a specific way of educating vision. Landscape, in other words, taught its viewer how to gaze upon the world. It became the screen on which a particularly insidious form of object relationship was instantiated. Usami explored the specificity of perspective as form and its historical development in an ambitious essay, “Finding Despair in Landscapes” (Sansuiga ni zetsubō o miru), published in the magazine Gendai Shisō in 1977.47 Usami’s essay considered an exhibition addressing premodern “mountain and water pictures,” or sansuiga, which was held at the Tokyo National Museum. Compared to other accounts of landscape previously developed by his contemporaries, Usami’s discussion is more far reaching. His essay relies on genealogical tracing, as opposed to simply offering a diagnosis of the present, developing an analysis that hinges on a distinction between premodern and modern representations of space in Japan—in particular, the significance of the progressive introduction of European conventions of spatial representation, which in his view also entailed new forms of understanding the world. Through this discussion, Usami posited the adoption of perspective as symptomatic of a profound epistemological shift in the wake of modernization. The Tokyo National Museum exhibition cast sansuiga as a continuous tradition in Japanese ink painting—in other words, as a coherent mode of spatial representation—that originally developed in China and was introduced to Japan in the Heian period, and that had remained fairly consistent until the nineteenth century.48 While both sansuiga and European landscape painting ostensibly took nature as their object, Usami argued that they are not commensurate modes of representation: the sansui tradition was much more extensive and developed what he designates a “metaphysical” approach. The terminology he used presented certain problems and complexities. Usami was wary of the reduction inherent in the words used to describe these painting styles and thus began his essay by alerting his readers to the transhistorical implications and cultural essentialism of the terms’ usage in relation to Japanese art. As noted above, the Japanese term sansuiga is more faithfully rendered in English as “mountain and water pictures”—neither landscape nor painting—but this retranslation does not in fact solve the original problem of what to name these objects. Indeed, Usami noted that the use of sansuiga to refer to an overarching category was fairly recent; in the nineteenth century, the term came to be used as an indigenous counterpart to what was a purportedly coherent European landscape tradition. In the exhibition, both genres (landscape paintings and sansuiga) were understood as ways of depicting nature, even though the notion of “nature” is itself modern.49

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Further, “mountain and water pictures” had likewise been characterized in art history as a continuous and coherent tradition of depictions of nature, whose ultimate aim was similarly to construct cultural difference: a coherent “West,” which relied on landscape conventions to at once assert difference from and dominate nature, as opposed to a coherent “East,” which embraced it.50 Usami’s historical tracing is not entirely accurate. Moreover, given the tendency toward deconstruction in his essay, it is surprising that he does not hold categories like “Japanese painting” or “ink painting” to similar scrutiny. His observations are useful, however, in his problematization of how objects are instantiated by painting. While the perspectival grid facilitated a unified approach to spatial representation, Usami found in premodern painting a multifocal approach to composition and, by extension, the development of an asynchronous time axis. In Western European landscape, the viewer was situated outside the scene as the source of the pyramid of vision, fixed in place and time. In the sansui tradition, however, the viewer’s eye was invited to meander through a composition that focused on movement, generating a tentative and shifting identification with the fiction present in the painting. The use of devices such as the fading transitions between scenes in narrative painting, or the use of mist as a type of visual caesura designating recession, suggested an altogether different modeling of the visual relationship. This approach had proved compelling even in the case of Watanabe Kazan, a literati painter active in the late Edo period, who through study appears to have familiarized himself with certain conventions of European painting, such as modulation, atmospheric recession, and shading. Yet despite the presence of such an extraneous tradition, Usami noted that Kazan’s sansuiga titled Myriad Mountains and Rivers (Senzan bansui-zu, 1841; Tahara City Museum) still suggests a meandering and shifting approach to time and space. Usami noted that although the sansui tradition was not perfectly stable, it presented an alternative to the model of objectivist representation suggested by Western European landscape. Ultimately, what he deems sansuiga’s subjective approach to representation was distinct from the unitary, rationalist approach to spatial representation that would later be disrupted by the modernist revolution. The sansui tradition did not seek to replicate the position of a single, omnipotent viewer—and in this sense, it appeared fundamentally distinct from a perspective determined by Cartesian subjectivity. Rather than attempting to capture and replicate for a spectator the concrete relationship between artist as viewer and object as fixed point in a plane, the sansui model sought to portray a self-displacing symbolic relationship between the spectator and the seen. But in Usami’s view, although distinctive, sansuiga could not offer a plausible methodology for future practice. “My question, ‘What space is there’ becomes lost in the mist in Tōhaku’s Pine Grove,” he wrote. “I do not yet know how to discover a way to reverse that sansui-like space, or ‘closed-off world’ that probably still exists within me.”51 What comes after this crisis in representation? Usami did not know. He suggested that turning to the

sansui tradition would mean retreating into the “closed-off world” of aestheticism, as opposed to enabling an objective engagement of current conditions. Despite presenting an alternative model, there was no way to set back the clock and return to the past through painting history. Drawing from Usami’s notes, literary critic and philosopher Karatani Kōjin identified in his classic essay “The Discovery of Landscape” an equivalent issue in Japanese literature. The idea of realism in literature, as an objective approach to the description of nature, similarly necessitated the alienation or dislocation of the self from one’s surroundings—with the paradoxical outcome of such detachment being the production of subjectivity. “What I am referring to as ‘landscape’ is an epistemological constellation, the origins of which were suppressed as soon as it was produced,” he wrote.52 Landscape produced objects, but it also produced the self. Ultimately, this idea of landscape simultaneously produces and effaces the subject-object dichotomy of Cartesian thought. But how could anyone aspire to overcome this way of understanding the world? To achieve this, as Karatani suggests in closing, one must historicize how landscape has naturalized such structures by rendering its mechanisms visible. The artists discussed here do so by problematizing landscape as a mode of vision: through the fragmentation of its component parts, by refusing the frame and seeking to subvert its seamless construction, and by deconstructing and exposing the grid and the veil. Ultimately, they show how perspective instantiates not simply a mode of domination over nature but also a means of creating, structuring, and naturalizing the all-powerful subject.

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The Most Important Work of the Painter Is History

Finding Despair in Landscape

For Alberti, history is everything; it is the totality produced by art.53 The artists discussed here devised strategies in response to the production of such totality. Quite naturally, fragmentation became the preferred modus operandi for the development of a critique of history. Fragments enabled a type of mimetic co-optation of the operations of art. However, in renouncing the possibility of another totality, they failed to articulate a viable alternative or “outside” to the system beyond the gesture of iconoclasm. This explains, perhaps, the despair found in landscape. In May 1968, architect Isozaki Arata presented an environment (kankyō) titled Electric Labyrinth at the fourteenth Design Triennial in Milan, Italy. Famously, the display became a casualty of the student occupation of the Triennial. Destroyed during the scuffle between organizers and occupying students, Isozaki’s project has since been invoked to illustrate the context of political radicalization that informed his turn away from the totalizing aspirations of modernist architecture and its blind belief in progress, and toward the articulation of a new program based on its negation—what was later designated postmodernism.54

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Electric Labyrinth involved Tōmatsu Shōmei, the designer Sugiura Kōhei, and the avant-garde composer Ichiyanagi Toshi, who provided a dissonant recording of musique concrète that tied together the display. Viewers moved through a darkly lit room partitioned by rotating walls: curving Plexiglas panels, silkscreened by Sugiura with a selection of nineteenth-century horror-themed prints, including scenes from Katsushika Hokusai’s One Hundred Ghosts and Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s warrior prints. On the walls were projected photographs, selected by Tōmatsu, of relics and survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while at the end of the room, viewers encountered a photo collage by Isozaki, titled Re-Ruined Hiroshima (Futatabi haikyo to natta Hiroshima, 1968). This work is an intervention of a panoramic photograph of Hiroshima in the aftermath of the atomic bombing. Among the ruins the viewer finds new ruins: modern residential high rises and skeletal, futuristic megastructures that loom large over the flattened-out city. Isozaki has written eloquently about the experience of the scorched fields, or yakenohara, and the cycles of violence and destruction that have periodically affected and given form to the contemporary city.55 Ironically, however, in Electric Labyrinth the architect posited the ruin as a signifier neither of the past nor of the future but of the present. The procedure utilized by Isozaki—his insertion of readymade ruins, fantasy objects, within the urban landscape—is of interest. The gesture is mimetic in the sense that it relies on a romantic image that, like Tōmatsu’s photographs of the sea, similarly sought to demarcate the externalization of the gaze. Yet the ironic force of the ruins disrupts the conventions of landscape. Through such fragments, landscape itself becomes a ruined object that, marking an absence, renders history visible.

Make a shadow, a fake shadow.

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—Takamatsu Jirō, note dated January 1964

Chapter 6

Cast Shadows In Landscape (1967), Arakawa Shūsaku reduced the genre to its most basic components—a square and a line (fig. 39). The six-by-four-foot, off-white canvas is almost entirely blank; a prismatic line cuts across the top fifth section, serving as the ground on which stencil-like block letters read, “a line is a crack.” Color trickles down from the line and letters; tinted smudges and white impasto on the surface generate a sense of transparency and depth; and below, the viewer finds the title drawn in longhand, along with the year of execution and the artist’s signature. In some respects, Landscape is a conventional picture. The drawn line is the horizon as it would appear to a viewer encountering any other painting—that is, the line organizes the pictorial surface and renders intelligible its representation of space. Yet here the horizon is transformed. The artist presents the line as a mere length of the light spectrum, and thus it acquires a new meaning, as it were, by subtraction. Through the gesture of naming, the line returns to being but a line. The prismatic line is a visual demonstration of “line,” the named thing; in turn, the line is shadowed by words that line up to denote (with a twist) a notional “line” as a geometrical, mathematical, and philosophical convention.1 The shadow cast by these words adds a further dimension of meaning to the line. The apparently stenciled admonition—in reality, each letter has been painstakingly drawn in freehand—calls attention to the idea that the line not only divides the surface but also

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cracks it. The line provokes a break or gap, demarcating an absence in the picture. As a crack, the line betrays one-dimensionality by suggesting a negative volume— an impossible form, that is, or a potential form that could only exist on a diagram.2 Madeline Gins notes in a 1979 essay the inherent ambiguity of the line-as-crack. She reminds the viewer that for Arakawa, these are “not primarily paintings”; she instead suggests that maybe this is sculpture, hinting at the translation of dimensions that Arakawa began to articulate in his diagrammatic canvases of the 1960s. The name she gives this act of translation is “to hypostatize”—meaning, to render concrete an otherwise abstract notion.3 While the idea of rendering concrete something abstract may evoke the traditional role of painting within the fine arts tradition, Arakawa’s canvases are not meant to produce an illusionistic rendering of a concept; the aim is not to present a concept as if it were given in “real life.” Rather, in his 1960s diagrams, Arakawa sought to give form to a potentiality—to render an object in the moment prior to it taking form. He achieves this through subtraction: by casting shadows as a means of absenting the object.

The Diagram as Obuje Fig. 39 Arakawa Shūsaku, Landscape, 1967. Acrylic and graphite on canvas,

With his turn to the production of diagrammatic canvases, Arakawa seemed to depart from the Coffin series, discussed in the first chapter. Unlike the sense of mass and dark terror conveyed by the fossilized cement lumps resting on their satin beds, his large-scale canvases appear sparse, restrained, and cerebral (fig. 40). Based on this observation, critics identified a discontinuity in Arakawa’s practice, an idea that has become commonplace in the discussion of his work since; for this reason, it may be important to reconsider momentarily Arakawa’s activities in these years. Arakawa permanently moved his center of activities from Tokyo to New York in December 1961, joining the first wave of expatriate Japanese avant-gardists living in that city after the war—at a time when funding for such a move had not yet materialized for many other artists.4 The critical acclaim his Coffin series met in Tokyo presented Arakawa with an immediate sense of the limitations in pursuing a career as a young artist in Japan. His success distanced him from some in his generation

124.5 × 185.4 cm. Estate of Madeline Gins. © 1981 Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins. Photo: Rob

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McKeever.

Fig. 40 Arakawa Shūsaku, Sculpting No. 1, 1961–62. Acrylic, pencil, and colored pencil on canvas, 182 × 122 cm. National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. © 2021 Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins. Photo: National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo / DNPartcom.

Cast Shadows

who more militantly embraced the iconoclasm of the Yomiuri Indépendant exhibitions. It also clearly showed the limited growth potential for experimental artists in early 1960s Tokyo, prior to the institutionalization of contemporary art—while there was a fairly developed and sophisticated critical milieu in Japan, the patronage base was minimal. Moreover, even as museums began to collect new art created by the younger generation of artists, public sources of support were virtually nonexistent.5 Arakawa’s decision to leave Japan could be understood partly as arising from a desire to find a larger public; however, he also appears to have understood early on the need to find a way to continue elaborating, at a larger scale, the lessons learned in the context of the Tokyo art scene.6 The move would have been a complex undertaking, but he benefitted from the backing of important actors in Tokyo and New York.7 The exposure to a different milieu and the connections Arakawa made in New York with other artists, critics, and gallerists—and importantly, his encounter in 1962 with the poet Madeline Gins, who became his partner in work and life—catalyzed the rapid development of his practice (fig. 41). Arakawa’s move allowed

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Fig. 41 Documentary photograph of Arakawa Shūsaku in his studio, 112 Chambers Street, New York, 1963. Reversible Destiny Foundation, New York. © 2019 Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the

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Estate of Madeline Gins. Photo: Reversible Destiny Foundation.

him entry into the Euro-American art scene,8 but he also retained in these years his connection to the art world in Japan through his contacts Tōno Yoshiaki and Takiguchi Shūzō, both of whom played an important role in his transition to New York and ensured his continued relevance in Japan in subsequent years.9 Tōno, in particular, made certain that Arakawa’s work stayed in the public eye. Besides covering his work in the art press, he included Arakawa’s coffins in the important Young Seven group show at Tokyo’s Minami Gallery in 1964 and organized a crucial retrospective there the following year—the first time Arakawa’s new work was shown in Japan. While many critics identified a shift in Arakawa’s practice upon his arrival to New York, in a letter to Tōno he pointed out that the diagram works were not entirely disconnected from his initial concerns. There certainly are differences in presentation. Arakawa seemed to put an end to the use of dramatic staging and the directly emotive appeal elicited by his earlier coffin-like assemblages in favor of a restrained, almost deadpan presentation. He claimed in later interviews that the discovery of the diagram was happenstance; in reality, this development appears to have been fairly deliberate, and as he suggests in his letter, it was preceded by experimental work made in a similar vein while he was still in Tokyo.10 Meanwhile, Arakawa continued to produce his coffins, exhibiting two such works (dated 1962 and 1963) in Boxes, a group show held at Virginia Dwan’s Los Angeles gallery in

February 1964.11 A month later, Arakawa held his first solo show at the Dwan Gallery, with whom he would continue exhibiting until it closed its doors in 1971. As can be gleaned from this cursory glance at chronology, there is an overlap between Arakawa’s two series, rather than a clean break. While they initially appear to diverge in formal terms, there are important similarities, including the aesthetic ambiguity and hermeticism of the work, the sense of uncanniness endowed by the strategic de- and recontextualization of found objects (as well as their juxtaposition and repetition), and a concern with materiality. Moreover, like the coffins, the canvases similarly demand a type of involvement and activation, despite their cool and detached appearance. As Marcel Duchamp reportedly said of them—and Madeline Gins reminds her readers—Arakawa’s diagrams are not paintings. They are the outcome of the debate on the obuje, and among the obuje produced by his contemporaries, Arakawa’s work shows most clearly an affinity with the debates preceding his generation. Genealogically, conceptually, and affectively, Arakawa was clearly indebted to Surrealist theorizations of the objet across all his projects. Besides quintessentially Duchampian procedures such as the readymade and the diagram, we find refracting through his canvases the aesthetics of chance encounter, eroticism, formlessness, and incompletion, along with the interest in movement and multidimensionality that Duchamp explored in his post-paintings. Such a conceptual debt, or lineage, was directly acknowledged by the artist in his work and readily available to his critics. But what was he trying to achieve?

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Bottomless, Shadows, and Other Impossible Forms

Cast Shadows

In his early diagrams, Arakawa sought to render visible an impossible state of the object: its formless possibility prior to its actual, embodied existence. Arakawa posited in these representations the object in transformation; he sought to represent a potentiality, rather than to produce a descriptive or mimetic representation of the object as an ontologically static or stable given. Arakawa claimed that in his work there was “a method for humans to become something else through their fall. The discovery of a second perspective. All of it is here.”12 He experimented briefly, between 1963 and 1965, with a figure that condensed an early vision of this transformed notion of the object, called Bottomless—a suspended, polyhedral structure fashioned with an opening at either end. Madeline Gins designates it “wordless,” in the sense of its indescribability, as it pertains to an impossible state in between dimensions: “‘Bottomless’ was a three-dimensional object open on both top and bottom, suspended by different means of support at each corner, below a skylight divided into nine equal parts. Each side was composed of a different combination of pressed and intermeshed widely different materials. The subsequent early versions were diagrammatically composed of self-dividing grids. A place for second

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nature to keep track of itself as it occurs?”13 Such a speculative “second place” could only exist at the border of the conceptual and the sensorial—the limits of which Arakawa and Gins subsequently explored in reframing the diagrams as part of their ambitious book The Mechanism of Meaning (1971). In its iteration as three-dimen152 sional obuje, Bottomless’s capacity to suggest to the viewer something other than sculpture was limited, perhaps leading Arakawa to attempt to develop the concept as a diagram.14 For example, the canvas . . . Is Bottomless (1964) shows the inside of a structure: the figure is tipped with its top toward the viewer, revealing its back wall (fig. 42). A grid progressively divides up into smaller grids—in this case, subdivided into multiples of four. On the top edge of the canvas, a sequence of numbers runs from left to right, reversed and mirrored along the bottom edge—suggesting both the skylight of the obuje version as well as a temporal axis flattened out into two dimensions. The reference to the geometry of perspectival recession is clear in this figure, but there is a discomfiting sense of planarity, in part derived from the hard lines of the diagram and the lack of shading characteristic of axonometric drawing. The resulting sense of uncanniness is further accentuated by the contrast between the receding lines that form the contours of the object and the orthogonal rendering of the grid on the back wall of the pictured Bottomless. The sides of the structure conceal the vanishing point; the outer Fig. 42 Arakawa Shūsaku, . . . Is Bottomless, 1964. edges of the object taper, as does a curving red line Acrylic, graphite, and marker on canvas, 175.3 × 124.5 cm. © 2021 Estate of Madeline Gins. that closely follows the inside corners of the figure Reproduced with permission of the Estate of and tips downward, suggesting a descent within Madeline Gins. the object. Yet to where does this thin red line lead? The bottom of Bottomless is—as the name implies—incomplete: the firm line of the edges gives way to painted and airbrushed feathery traces, in color and white. The image depicts an open-ended, referentless object, making the canvas a diagrammatic demonstration of movement within an impossible figure. Bottomless belongs to the world of representations but also to what is unrepresentable: ideas, a world of in-betweenness and transformation. While often he depicted it as a single figure, Arakawa incorporated Bottomless into his increasingly esoteric iconography. For example, in Untitled (1964), Bottomless appears within a complex composition combining images and words (fig. 43). A collage composed of two photographic sequences traverses the upper

Fig. 43 Arakawa Shūsaku, Untitled, 1964. Oil, pencil, ink, and collage on canvas, 162.1 × 130.3 cm. Nagoya City Art Museum. © 2021 Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins.

Cast Shadows

register. The photographs are taken from Eadweard Muybridge’s Animal Locomotion—an inverted sequence depicting a naked man walking and turning away from the camera, and a second row running parallel to it, showing a woman settling down on the floor to read a newspaper. On the top left corner (identified with the word “sky”), the tip of a flattened-out tube cuts diagonally across the plane to the bottom-right corner; within it, a shapeless shadow flows downward. Meanwhile, a fishing hook, rendered as a silhouette, descends from the tip of the tube into the first of two Bottomless structures, which appear stacked on top of each other, in the lower left corner. It is unclear whether these differently sized Bottomless forms are two distinct objects, or, as in Muybridge’s images, two discrete moments captured within the single picture plane. They suggest perhaps a shortcut on the road to transformation: elements are lowered within the larger Bottomless on top, while the smaller one produces an ethereal emanation leading to the lower right corner. Arakawa has signed the canvas twice, in the middle and bottom sections, each time

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with a different year: 1564 and 1964 (the former is the birth year of Galileo Galilei). Arakawa gestures here to an epistemological shift, from a fixed notion of independently acting bodies to bodies in constant entanglement and transformation.15 In order to represent bodies in motion, Arakawa necessarily relied on twodimensional elements: line, collaged figures, and airbrushed color. Each of these elements operates in a distinct manner. Movement, for example, is suggested in the use of both chronophotography and recognizable graphic elements such as arrows, lines, and stenciled words; these act as entirely denotative elements and guide the reading of the painting, even if the grammar used is not made fully available to the viewer. The application of airbrushed pigment is the most striking element in the composition. Unlike the additive process of incorporating visual elements, the airbrushed passages are indicative of an extrapictorial element that has been subtracted, which generates in the viewer a sense of ambiguity. We similarly find such an application of pigment in the seemingly unfinished edges of . . . Is Bottomless and in the ghostly figurations present in a number of the works Arakawa produced in the second half of the 1960s. Arakawa referred to the diffusely airbrushed contours of figures incorporated in his canvases as “shadows.” In annotations included in a diagram, published in lieu of a statement on his practice in the journal Mizue in 1963, Arakawa calls attention to the shadows cast by a projected spherical volume, a linear element seemingly contained within a sphere, and a folded polyhedron: “The world of the balloon, / [it] is empty / but for the shadows.” He then adds in an almost illegible annotation, “This object here, its shadow [is folded] within [itself].”16 What are these shadows? While in this sketch they act as a two-dimensional projection of a volume, Arakawa claims they are able to carry out impossible tasks: the shadows “fold unto themselves”; they are there, but they are empty; independent from the object, they exist entirely autonomously as projections. Arakawa later wrote to Tōno Yoshiaki, “I am working on [finding] a new perspective, and a new angle. This is what you are calling a diagram of things. Thinking of perspective and angles is a tool in discovering things like the analysis of memory, or the extinction of objects. Right now, Freud and the like are of no use to me.”17 Arakawa’s interest in shadows was to a large extent informed by the work of Marcel Duchamp and the Surrealists. Cast shadows were of interest to Duchamp in that they translate one dimension into another; he wrote extensively about them in notes included in his so-called The White Box of 1913, which evinced his interest in the idea that the world perceived by humans is itself a projection.18 He contended that, just as shadows cast by a volume render a three-dimensional object into the world of two dimensions, the three-dimensional object might itself be a projection of a fourth, and the fourth of a fifth, and so on.19 Duchamp drew such ideas from non-Euclidean geometry, and especially from the work of the nineteenth-century mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré. Breton’s Surrealists similarly drew from the work of Poincaré, although for somewhat different

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Cast Shadows

reasons.20 For the Surrealists, the ultimate importance of what they classified within their taxonomy as “mathematical objects” (objets mathématiques)—models created by Poincaré in order to aid in visualizing his n-dimensional geometry—resided in how they appeared to give concrete form to abstract thought.21 Arakawa’s shadows featured prominently in canvases shown at his Dieagrams exhibition at Virginia Dwan’s Los Angeles gallery in 1964. (With its nonstandard spelling, the title of the show intriguingly connects the Coffin series to the diagrammatic canvases.) Oversized silhouettes of everyday objects dominated over intricate, hard-line diagrams: coat hangers, umbrellas, combs, and stockings inexplicably cast their shadows on the canvases, but their actual embodied forms were nowhere to be found. Discussing photographs of the exhibition in an article published in the magazine Gendai Bijutsu, the critic Tōno Yoshiaki called attention to the paradoxical distance (kyori) that Arakawa appeared to set between object and idea: “The exhibition is characterized by a type of expression [hyōgen] akin to the x-rays of things [buttai no Rentogen shashin]. . . . These everyday objects are painted almost as if they had dropped their shadows. The objects whose shadows have been stolen have now disappeared. What might the shadows of these objects be?”22 The object that once was there is no longer—all that remains is the shadow the object once cast and has now shed. The shadow reveals the internal composition of the object, as an X-ray would, yet withholds its presence. Arakawa appears to refuse any easy identification of the objects, for the shadows cannot act as a stand-in for an object that is missing; they simply demarcate its absence. Arakawa notes as much when he states that Freud is of no use for what he is trying to accomplish. Tōno interpreted this statement as implying that Arakawa’s absent obuje do not operate along the lines of Surrealism’s objets à fonctionnement symbolique—that is, as forms that metaphorically condense meaning or desire.23 Rather, for Tōno, the precedent for Arakawa’s practice could be found in the readymade. Duchamp’s philosophy “casts shadows on Arakawa’s work. . . . This is the world of Duchamp’s Tu m’ of 1918,” he claims, in which Duchamp “atavistically invited back ‘painting’” after abandoning it with his work on Large Glass. He concludes, “It is here that we find for the first time the idea of the object’s shadow, the obuje’s X-ray.”24 For Tōno, Arakawa’s work was important because it charted a pathway connecting the readymade to the diagram. Tōno found in this procedure a means of distancing the work from subjective expression—a clear rejection of the hallowed notion of subjectivity embedded in the tradition of the fine arts. According to Tōno, the shadows in Arakawa’s canvases worked against art. That is to say, they worked as an extension of the ethos of Anti-Art that had made itself felt in Arakawa’s early work shown at the Yomiuri Indépendant. Arakawa’s oversized combs referred to a classic Duchampian icon,25 and he went as far as incorporating an entire reproduction of the French artist’s work inside Diagram with Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass as a Minor Detail (1964; Nagoya City Art

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Museum), designed to be placed at the center of a gallery. This large diagrammatic work consisted of a pair of glass panes within which Arakawa included objects and airbrushed figures featured in the Dieagrams canvases, such as umbrellas, funnels, and rackets; a film slide depicting Duchamp’s Large Glass was discreetly placed in the top right corner of the composition, a detail functioning as a diagram within a diagram. Arakawa discusses the inclusion of such direct references in his letter to Tōno: “These are dim windows. They are negatives [nega] of Duchamp’s Large Glass. Were I asked why I used them I would say that it is because I start from the place that within it umbrellas and funnels cannot intersect. . . . The umbrellas and funnels are asleep.”26 Arakawa claims here that he is including Duchamp not merely as a direct quotation but rather as a procedural source. Indeed, at this rather profound level, the reference to Duchamp provides a lineage for his practice. Considered in this light, could Arakawa’s earlier dismissal of Freud be a thinly veiled attempt to conjure the trace of Oedipus? If so, here is an absent father, or one kept at arm’s length: Arakawa implies he has somehow overcome Duchamp. He describes his works as negatives of Duchamp’s. A negative, however, is not the same thing as a negation or disavowal but rather an inversion: a double, or a thing’s shadow. One might further ask, are the photographs on the top right corner of Arakawa’s glass—those “dim windows” (usugurai mado)—themselves shadows cast by an object that is not there (Duchamp’s Large Glass)? The object is brought within—cannibalized, incorporated in an outright melancholic gesture—into Arakawa’s diagram. Like the shadows cast on Arakawa’s other canvases, Duchamp’s work is ever present, but as a sign independent from its referent—a sign of absence. Artist and critic Willoughby Sharp, writing in the art magazine Quadrum, similarly noted of the shadows: “These images are neither paintings of objects nor the objects themselves. [Arakawa] declares (and this is the central idea of all his oeuvre): ‘I make casts or negative prints on canvas.’ . . . A cast can be described as the tangible reflection of an aspect of reality that, although it truly stands in relation to an original, may also exist in a unique state and on its own: that is to say, as the shadow of an object.”27 As independent objects, shadows operate in the same manner that the arrows and isolated words in Arakawa’s diagrams do: they point elsewhere. They are indicative not necessarily of a presence but rather—in the negative—of possibility, and thus they have necessarily been given form as an absence. Because of how they appeared to foreground the absence of an extra-pictorial object, the shadows appearing in Arakawa’s canvases spurred a protracted argument about their significance. There was agreement that Arakawa’s reliance on shadow was not simply a problematization of trace in painting, even if its use originated as a strategy for the depersonalization of the canvas. Ultimately, in the denial of subjectivity—ironically, a disavowal of the figure of the artist that mirrored Duchamp’s Oedipal struggle with painting as tradition28—the shadows returned not to painting but to an indictment of the notion of art itself.

The critic Miyakawa Atsushi advanced one such discussion. Introducing Untitled to readers of the magazine Bijutsu Techō in 1966, Miyakawa compared the shadows in Arakawa’s work to the gaze of the first-person narrator in Alain RobbeGrillet’s anti-novel La jalousie (1957)—an ever-present figure that nonetheless is never in full view. Miyakawa wrote: “His nameless eyes—they are not the possibility to see; rather they are the impossibility of not seeing. And for eyes such as these, all is shadows; in other words, this must be not the possibility of existing, but rather the impossibility of not existing. Maybe Arakawa Shūsaku is peeking into another world. A world of impossibility that emerges from within the shadows of our world of possibility. . . . The emergence of impossibility—the invasion of shadows—is the very experience of art today.”29 Arakawa’s work would have been tremendously significant to Miyakawa in that, as part of the young generation associated with the Yomiuri Indépendant, Arakawa had first turned to the making of obuje and thus engaged in what Tōno had identified with Anti-Art. Yet now, Arakawa appeared to return to art through shadows, in some other guise or as something yet to be named. Miyakawa associated Arakawa’s use of shadow with impossibility, which he claimed was the defining condition of contemporary art. Arakawa’s new work was, for Miyakawa, an extension of their generation’s initial reaction to “Art”: a further development of the dialectic that had animated the turn to making obuje and facilitated the detheologization of art—its descent into life. Miyakawa’s assessment of Anti-Art in his landmark essay “Descent into the Everyday” (1964) relied on a revision of the link between the art object and the “everyday” signified by the materials the younger generation of artists incorporated into their work. However, positioning himself deliberately against the more immediate link argued by Tōno between the junk of the postwar period and the obuje now created by artists, Miyakawa argued for a metaphysical understanding of art and its operations. In his account, the deployment of everyday objects and materials foregrounded a dialectic of matter and gesture at a moment that anticipated the end of modernity: the importance of Anti-Art derived from its promised but forever unrealized annihilation of the border between art and non-art.30 For Miyakawa, Arakawa’s work was significant because, in foregrounding shadows, he had called attention to the paradoxical experience of the impossible. Shadowing, perhaps, Arakawa’s interest in the notion of possibility, Miyakawa positioned his practice in relation to the impossible as a sign of what was yet to come.

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When Shadows Debate Cast Shadows

While some critics spoke of an introspective “quiet mood” (taihei mūdo) following the discontinuation of the Yomiuri Indépendant,31 others found that Arakawa’s work raised crucial questions about the new concerns of the avant-garde, which seemed

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to materialize in the form of shadows that resonated with those found in works by local and international artists. Partly triggered by the responses to Arakawa’s 1965 show at the Minami Gallery, this “shadow debate” (kage ronsō) was in a sense an extension of the protracted discussion on the implications of art making in the aftermath of Art Informel and the emergence of so-called Anti-Art—in other words, in the generational transition from the 1950s into the 1960s. Debating shadows, critics interrogated a perceived shift in approaches to art making in the mid-1960s, problematizing the significance of the Anti-Art generation’s renewed interest in figuration as well as their engagement with the ascendant culture of the image. The first salvo in this controversy appeared in the form of critical texts reproduced in the pamphlet accompanying Arakawa’s show (plate 15).32 As expected, most of the writers immediately remarked on the shadows present on the canvases, although each emphasized fairly distinct points. Tōno, for example, reprised some of the ideas he had introduced in his earlier article for Gendai Bijutsu; this time, however, he asserted more forcefully what he understood as Arakawa’s separation of object and idea. “Arakawa begins projecting objects onto the [pictorial] surface. They receive baptism from the airbrush. He is neither ‘drawing a thing’ [on the canvas] nor placing it itself [within the canvas]; rather he merely focuses on the object’s ‘concept,’ on its ‘name.’ . . . On the surface drifts but the name of things, their concept, as a Platonic idea would. . . . ‘To see a concept’—Arakawa’s ‘diagrams’ are nothing other than the device used in this unheard of, dangerous task.”33 Tōno assimilated the shadow to the world of Platonic ideas.34 In their earlier efforts, the young generation had turned to the wholesale incorporation of mono (things) into their practice as a means of counteracting the dominance in the art of the establishment of koto (also things, or alternatively events or subject matter). Arakawa appeared now to gesture toward an outright rejection of materiality in favor of pure concept (gainen). While initially this stress on concept might necessitate a return to the type of recognizable subject matter proper to painting in the fine arts tradition, Tōno found that Arakawa’s work staged a type of ambiguity—what he characterized as the “fog of consciousness”—that estranged these forms from meaning, making them unavailable to the viewer and thus upending the logic of art. Hariu Ichirō’s comments echoed Tōno’s assessment, although for the critic, the interest in Arakawa’s dislocation of concept and matter resided not in the relationship between idea and things but rather in the distance Arakawa appeared to place between the fleeting images within the pictorial space: “These stolen shadows, the shadows split from the actual object, unexpectedly meet, pass each other, and speak. However, the transparent distance between them cannot be bridged. Various objects are there, but there is no subject, and moreover, no copula that can pull them together.”35 For Hariu, the paintings generated not only a divergence between form and meaning but also a type of alienation that is proper to the new society of images. These figures that never appeared to fully meet spoke of changed social

conditions in which the divorce between sign and object had become exacerbated. “The trampoline that is the image, liberated from memory precisely by the distance of dis-communication, can be found in the impotent dialogue of things and their shadows.”36 Hariu noted that in the new society of the image, the growing separation between signs and reality related to an increasing dis-communication: there was “no copula,” no connecting agent that could bring subjects together in a new polis, a meaning-making community. Hariu associated Arakawa’s intent gaze on the image with its fundamental role in mediating an increasingly alienated capitalist society. In contrast, Nakahara Yūsuke contested the notion that Arakawa’s work centered on the dislocation of object and concept. To him, Arakawa played up the tension between the sheer materiality of the objects depicted and their absence from pictorial space as a means of achieving something else:

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Virtual shadows of things such as umbrellas and surgical gloves float around in Arakawa’s work. . . . I know nothing of the object that originated the silhouette: what it feels like, its color or luster. Put otherwise, the silhouettes are as abstract as words are, lacking in individuality or concreteness. If this is the case, then, are these almost the same as the world of words? Not truly so. . . . The silhouettes break free from the inviolability of things [busshitsu no fushintōsei]. It becomes possible for them to interpenetrate each other and, peeling off the difference of their materiality as actual objects, they achieve a sort of equality. And yet, they never fully become one.37

Cast Shadows

Ultimately, for Nakahara, the shadows divorced from the actuality of objects called attention to themselves as implausible stand-ins. Arakawa, as he saw it, foregrounded the tension between the actual object and its shadow precisely to draw attention to the workings of the image. This implied a transformed understanding of the role of painting: “These must not be paintings, but paintings of paintings. Just as there is a consciousness of things, and the consciousness of such consciousness of things, in Arakawa’s works we find not the formation of an image, but an image of the formation of such image. We confront an odd experience. This is because we are thrown into the strange space between images and words.”38 These canvases do not refer merely to the relationship between the objects appearing on the canvas, or that of the depictions and their referent. Instead, they appear to focus on the nature of the image itself, which Nakahara assimilated to shadows. To him, therefore, the image appeared no longer entirely distinguishable from the realm of actual objects. In subsequent essays, Nakahara positioned Arakawa’s canvases in an arthistorical genealogy that stretched from Leonardo da Vinci’s theory of painting to

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the work of Marcel Duchamp. He recentered shadow as a once-neglected yet crucial problem for painting; at the core of his argument is the tension (kakushitsu) between things and words that is contained within the image. The Impressionist painters, who focused on the unity of the seeing subject’s eye with nature as its object, wholly elided this problem by reducing shadows to an effect or expression of light; by contrast, in Dada and Surrealism, the shadow became a key component of artworks as indication of fantasy—an inner image that ultimately did not have an actual exterior existence. Likewise, in Arakawa’s canvases, the image foregrounded the tension between words and objects, which he resolved through the use of overlapping silhouettes that interfered with each other, giving rise to further, implausible forms. “In truth, in his paintings, what is depicted is not silhouettes; rather it is the shallow world of the image in its naked appearance,” Nakahara elaborated. “What Arakawa presents us with is simply the idea that the image is a ‘shadow.’”39 Building upon such observations, Nakahara began to develop a theory of painting, situating Arakawa alongside other artists in Japan and abroad in whose work shadow and image appeared to be of the same material (dōshitsu).40 For Nakahara, the absence of actual objects in Arakawa’s diagrams was akin to Takamatsu Jirō’s shadow paintings—trompe l’oeil works in which the simulated shadow depicted on the canvas and the actuality of the shadow of extrapictorial objects appeared to converge, thus dissolving the difference between shadow (or image) and object. In Takamatsu’s work, the inability to pin down an extrapictorial object as the origin of the cast shadow was a demonstration of the independence of images from the object; to Nakahara, this functioned along the lines of Jasper Johns’s famous flag paintings and Roy Lichtenstein’s monumental depictions of comic strip panels. The fact that these artists drew their material from extra-artistic sources, such as printed matter, eventually led Nakahara to query the transmedial capacities of the image. He later asked, “Is it the same thing, to copy a painting, and to copy the painting that appears in a photograph of that painting?”41 In his argument, Nakahara sought to render images independent from objects— thus he naturally related Arakawa’s and Takamatsu’s shadows to Johns’s flags and Lichtenstein’s comic book panels, which he deemed quintessential examples of images lacking any referent or “real-world” correlate. Nakahara finds in this interest the basis for a different theory of painting, what he calls a “meta-painting” dedicated to generating images of images. And yet the shadows in Arakawa’s and Takamatsu’s works do indeed require some kind of relationship to an extrapictorial object, unlike the type of icons present in the paintings by Lichtenstein or Johns. Nakahara thus appeared to disregard the procedures used to generate these paintings.42 Despite their highly mediated nature, the “fake shadows” in Arakawa’s and Takamatsu’s canvases are indeed a type of index. Certainly, what is painting pointing to in their work, if not the absence of the object?

Impossible Shadows Contrasting somewhat with these earlier statements, art critic Miyakawa Atsushi developed a particular understanding of these shadows. Miyakawa took particular issue with Nakahara’s position, which he thought missed the point. Countering Nakahara, he argued forcefully that images were not simply shadows.

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Even if a shadow is an image, is the image a shadow, as Nakahara Yūsuke insists? . . . The shadow is unto itself a reality. . . . To think of the image as a false projection [kyozō] surely reproduces the logic of actual objects. As an object of recognition, an image is outside the subject. But an image is not merely the shadow of an actual object. Rather, it is the in-between that corrodes and stains such a dualistic scheme of recognition, the neutral terrain of that “and” between subject and object, between the actual object and its projection—and it is none other than our action, unable, as we are, not to fill in such empty void with it.43 Even if a shadow were a type of image, Miyakawa reasoned, not all images are shadows. This is an important point, for the specificity of what artists like Arakawa and Takamatsu were seeking by inviting shadows into their works was being lost within such reductionism. Miyakawa found in shadows a demonstration of the corrosive power of the image. Not fully an object, but not simply a projection of the subject’s desire, the image, according to Miyakawa, was located in the liminal space between the actual object (jittai) and its perception. In focusing on shadows, the artists in fact were exploring a means of undoing the dualism of Cartesian categories. Elsewhere, Miyakawa continued elaborating this idea: Rather than saying that there is a return to the image in painting, what this trend appears to tell us is that painting itself is returning to the image, in the original sense of the word. The image is not by itself painting, and neither is painting art. For example, it is as if what the works by Arakawa concerned with the image are debating were none other than our situation today. It is not that the image is a shadow; possibly, it is that art itself is a shadow.44 Cast Shadows

An image is not a shadow, and painting is not, unto itself, art: art is the shadow. From his initial concern with the nature of the image, Miyakawa moved to a characterization of the conditions of art at that moment. Miyakawa placed art at the

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center—right in the gray zone between subject and object—and yet this was not art in the usual sense of the word. Seeking a means to understand the transition represented by the artists of the Indépendant generation, Miyakawa was informed by the critical revision of metaphysics taking place in contemporary philosophy; his criticism contains resonances of French phenomenology, especially of the work of French critic and philosopher Maurice Blanchot. At the end of 1965, just a few months after Arakawa’s show, Miyakawa published an important essay titled “The Invasion of Shadows,” in which he reprised some of his recent observations on the turn to the image in the work of Arakawa and his contemporaries. In the opening paragraph, Miyakawa echoed Blanchot’s discussion in L’espace littéraire of Orpheus’s descent into Hades in search of Eurydice as an analogy for the artist’s quest to make art: “Even if he lost Eurydice for eternity, Orpheus had to turn back to look at her—I have in the past seen in Anti-Art such a gesture.”45 For Blanchot, Orpheus’s descent represents the core paradox of art—its impossibility: “When Orpheus descends toward Eurydice, art is the power through which the night opens up. . . . Eurydice is for him the limit of what art can attain . . . the darkest point toward which art, desire, death, and night aim. . . . His work [oeuvre] is to bring [such a point] to daylight, form, figure and reality. [Yet] Orpheus can do anything except stare directly at this ‘point.’”46 Orpheus is bound to fail in his mission to bring back Eurydice. He loses her because he looks at her; “he sees her invisible, he touches her untouched, in her absence as a shadow”47—but it is precisely the combination of Orpheus’s excessive desire and his failure not to look that are crucial to the artwork. “[Such] desire, and Eurydice’s loss and Orpheus taking flight, are necessary to his song, as proof of its eternal undoing is essential to the work,” Blanchot wrote.48 Miyakawa emphasized this fundamental contradiction by highlighting the shadow that art is. In his essay, he observed: “In the aftermath of Anti-Art the situation of the art world is such as that of Orpheus coming back aboveground.”49 The apparent quiet of the art world belied the profound transformation of the very notion of art in Anti-Art’s wake. Maybe one could think that Anti-Art was one experience of ambiguity—even as art achieved a certain level of anonymity, becoming undistinguishable from everyday actions, it had to remain as something, which nevertheless could not return to anything. As if it were a sunspot, or a black shadow within transparent light, that something was the presence of impossibility. Here is what we truly mean when we say that art cannot become praxis. Art can no longer be a possibility today. However, this does not imply that art has come to an end. On the contrary: art will soon show its shadow. That [shadow] is the experience of impossibility today.50

Art no longer returned to the creation of something recognizable within a previous schema of representation—Arakawa and his contemporaries understood this. Their turn away from the obuje would probably appear to Miyakawa as the escape route taken by the Indépendant generation on encountering the presence of impossibility: the rotting face of art. Yet now that they have seen the impossible, they will carry it with them to the world above as a question—how can art be? The impossibility that is art begins to appear as shadows on Arakawa’s and Takamatsu’s canvases. They appear anonymous and indistinct. The shadows are fragments of objects and stories that matter not because of what we can see of them but rather because of what we cannot see: “[They] at once reflect the structure of the desire for totality, and the experience of impossibility.”51 The experience of impossibility and the desire for a now-unattainable sense of completion or totality are linked to each other. This leads to what Miyakawa designates as a “crazy” question. “Totality today is absent, it is impossible. . . . The only approach to totality for us is to make it present as absence, as impossibility. But is this feasible?”52

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Absence as a Shadow

Cast Shadows

While the shadow debate began partly in response to the silhouettes in Arakawa’s diagrams, another shadow was cast on the virtual screen of the controversy— that of artist and theorist Takamatsu Jirō. Takamatsu graduated in 1958 from the oil painting department at Tokyo University of Fine Arts; members of his class included Kudō Tetsumi and Nakanishi Natsuyuki, among other figures associated with the Anti-Art generation. Takamatsu showed with them yearly at the Yomiuri Indépendant, beginning in 1958 through its last version, in 1963. Famously, in the early 1960s, he, Nakanishi, and Akasegawa Genpei formed the celebrated group Hi-Red Center and took part in their memorable actions. Upon graduating from his studies, Takamatsu briefly joined the film studio Tōei, later taking up a position as an industrial designer, from which he resigned in 1964 in order to concentrate on developing his career as an artist. In this early period, Takamatsu—a self-described “Sunday painter”—developed the nightly habit of filling in notebook after notebook with notes and sketches of ideas for works, which he would later execute in his off-hours. An expansive and ambitious thinker, Takamatsu developed a writing practice out of his note taking, which became a coconstitutive aspect of his artistic production. Beginning in 1963, he periodically published essays in which he developed key concepts informing his art. An important characteristic of Takamatsu’s practice is that he structured artistic production in the form of series rather than discrete works. Some of these were very brief; others ran concurrently throughout his lifetime. Shadow (kage), which Takamatsu began in 1963 and exhibited for the first time in 1964, was the third

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such series and became his longest.53 In the series, simulated shadows are cast on a surface by an extrapictorial object. While he initially appears to have focused on capturing a single shadow—his wife, Yasuko; his child; random household objects; his hands; himself—the series quickly evolved into elaborate compositions. Relying on various supports, including canvas, paper, wooden panels, and even the floors and walls at galleries and a restaurant, Takamatsu incorporated overlapping shadows and a variety of actual objects within the painted surface, producing works that queried the border between pictorial and extrapictorial space. His self-portrait as a shadow—Shadow (portrait) (1964; Tokushima Modern Art Museum)—is a striking rendition of this idea. The shadow of a male figure raises its arm, meeting in the top register a band of red paint that the figure is hypothetically in the midst of applying. Takamatsu paints his own shadow as he paints on the canvas—the artist is at once present and absent from the painting. The artist uses an altogether different approach in Shadow A (1964; Iwaki City Art Museum), an elaborate trompe l’oeil composition painted on the wooden surface of a cupboard. The simulated shadows in the painting are cast by objects that (in theory) should hang from the metallic hooks inserted in the panel. The resulting work expands the illusion depicted from within the pictorial space and projects it onto the outside. A further development of this idea is found in the proto-environment developed by Takamatsu for his exhibition Identification (1965), on which he asked a number of prominent figures of the art world to collaborate. After photographing their cast shadows during a sitting, he reproduced the silhouettes by painting them onto the wall at the Minami Gallery; the same individuals then encountered each other in the space of the gallery during the opening of the exhibition (fig. 44). Arakawa’s and Takamatsu’s approaches to painting are not necessarily the same: they diverge in key aspects, ranging from the precise use of what was being designated “shadow” within the composition to the method of depiction and technique. In Arakawa’s case, the airbrushed silhouette appears almost as if it were situated in a plane parallel to that of the hard-lined diagrams, whereas in Takamatsu’s work the cast shadow is the main aim and purpose of the composition. (In this sense, Arakawa’s work is much more of a photographic negative than Takamatsu’s more straightforward shadows.) In terms of technique, Arakawa generates diffuse silhouettes by means of a virtual impression of extrapictorial objects on the canvas with an airbrush, while Takamatsu relies on a rather traditional approach. In Takamatsu’s series, the shadows are rendered through careful figure study—either based on a photograph or through detailed sketching—followed by the accurate transposition of the design onto the canvas through a grid, and careful modeling of the figure through the smooth and even application of pigment with the brush.54 Despite these key differences, both artists appeared to hold in common—at least momentarily—a desire to call attention to absence through the effacement of the extrapictorial referent at the origin of the trace.

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Fig. 44 Takamatsu Jirō, documentary photograph of the exhibition Identification, Tokyo Gallery, July 1966. Gelatin silver print, 9.1 × 24.8 cm. Estate of Jiro Takamatsu, courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.

Indeed, the pursuit of absence (fuzai) was central to Takamatsu’s practice and theoretical production. He first envisioned a hypothetical “absent body” (fuzaitai) and later pursued absence as a general condition (fuzai-sei). For Takamatsu, absence was the only possible response to the world of actual objects (jittai), where people sought meaningless satisfaction in the excess of things.55 In this sense, he appeared to articulate an apt critique of post-Anpo Japan’s affluent society. However, Takamatsu’s focus on absence did not simply represent a wholesale rejection of the world; optimistically, he referred to his lifework as a “Plan for the Expansion of the World” (sekai kakudai keikaku). If presence (jitsuzai) was about the present time, absence, he suggested, was the future: the expansion of the world would be carried out through the actualization of absence, by slowly rendering absent, or nullifying, stuff—or, put another way, by rendering everything in the world into obuje. Among his early series, Takamatsu’s Shadow series came closest to such an actualization of absence. He clearly states this purpose in a brief text in which he weighed in on Miyakawa and Nakahara’s discussion in the shadow debate.

Cast Shadows

By artificially producing shadows (and only shadows), I have begun to erase the world of actual objects. (By this I mean only vanishing it = rendering it absent [fuzaika], and not overcoming it.) I believe that this must be the simplest, most direct method to pursue “perfection” in such a world. However, that the world of objects becomes itself the frame is evidently a problem. Even if there is no such thing as absence without relation to presence, I believe there must be a purer absence. What I must do now is carry out an experiment to see how far I can get away from presence. Even

if in this task there is a convergence toward perfection, it is evident that it cannot be attained.56

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The immediate limitation of this procedure was that in this world—a world of objects—it is impossible to completely break free from presence: absence always exists in relation to present objects. This not simply due to the idea that the shadows are indications of a formerly present and now absent object; rather, this is because the very process of making things, by definition, brings things into existence. Takamatsu then posits the procedure of “erasing the world of objects” as a means of furthering or envisioning a more perfect absence in the world—an experiment that is always doomed to fail, as through his action he is himself producing another object’s presence, and through it asserting his own. Takamatsu appears to have developed his notion of absent body (fuzaitai) and rendering existing objects absent (fuzaika) based on an idiosyncratic reading of Sartre’s early phenomenological work, in particular the theory of art expounded in L’imaginaire (1940).57 The notions of fuzai and fuzaitai thus corresponded roughly to the notion of néant, or nothingness; and by extension the process of fuzaika corresponded to that of néantisation, or nullifying. In Being and Nothingness (L’être et le néant, 1943), Sartre introduces néant and néantisation as terms that exist always in relation to “Being.” The process of nullification is one that always returns to consciousness, as only consciousness is capable of establishing a change in the for-itself (pour-soi). In other words, only consciousness can designate an absence. However, as seen in his extensive notes and essays, Takamatsu develops a distinction between two forms of fuzai—one that is imperfect, as it is simply the denial of the actual object, and another that he deems a more perfect absence, or a goal that cannot be attained.58 For him, such “purer absence” cannot simply be yet another mode of presence or moment of being—that would be, by definition, a contradiction. There must be an absence that exceeds the negation of presence, which exists as absence before there was presence. Simple negation would entail the reaffirmation of presence. Takamatsu sought instead to access such purer absence as the only possible place, in a context where presence—the realm of stuff—has saturated everything, as affluence. Takamatsu understood that a purer absence, however, belongs to an altogether different realm: it exists solely as an impossibility. Takamatsu thus aligned art with the work of negativity, as its forever-unattainable promise.

Absence

Two Windows into Absence Should Takamatsu’s program for fuzaika be considered a type of hypostatization? Takamatsu appears to allow for this possibility in one of his more ambitious compositions in the series, Shadow of a Woman Opening a Curtain (1965). The painting is

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set within a frame fifteen centimeters deep. A white curtain hanging from a rail has been pulled and tied to one side of the frame, revealing the shadow of the woman who—the viewer may surmise—has drawn the curtain. The woman’s shadow is painted on the back panel, which has in turn been rendered as a trompe l’oeil of a white curtain. Within the box we find a second, inset painting. Above it appear four objects that cast their own shadows: a plaster cast of the head of the Venus de Milo that hangs from the back, a detailed drawing of the plaster cast, a vacant silhouette of the same figure, and, finally, a hole in the shape of its contours. The second, inset painting in essence repeats the first composition, flipping it along the vertical axis and inverting its color scheme in hues of blue. The white curtain in the back panel appears to billow toward the back; it suggests the moment just prior to which someone will pull open the curtain from our side of the painting. Is the woman in the painting a stand-in for the viewer? This trompe l’oeil curtain, too, has an inverted correlate rendered in blue within the inset painting. The composition is unusually complex, involving the depiction of multiple mirrored images, and its significance will perhaps be best grasped when considering a series of sketches Takamatsu created for the work produced the year before (fig. 45). In the final work, we count two pairs of shadows forming four distinct planes—five if we include the viewer’s own shadow—existing as reflections of each other. This rapport between planes immediately calls attention to the relationship between the painted scene and extrapictorial space, as does the incorporation of entirely exterior elements, such as the head of the Venus de Milo and the curtain. In other works as well, Takamatsu relied on repetition through the use of inset images, but here this ruse is presented somewhat jarringly, in two related but separate instances. The first of these is the incorporation of the inset painting that reverses the original composition, and the switch occurring through the (doubled) trompe l’oeil that serves as its backdrop. The second instance is found in the repeating versions of the Venus de Milo. The Venus heads above the inset painting appear as the object in differing states—each of the elements casts its own shadow. Takamatsu referred to these figures in his November 10 study as the actual plaster cast (the actual object), its detailed sketch (a representation), the shadow of the object (what could be called “Absence 1”), and a hole in the shape of the object (perhaps a purer “Absence 2).” These four states of the object have an inverted correlate within the inset painting, each casting their own projection in white. Takamatsu suggestively referred to these as “negative shadows.” For example, an annotation on the sketch reads, “The space behind the drawn curtain (make the shadows into negatives) → behind the image” [kyozō].59 In Shadow of a Woman, Takamatsu laid claim to the discourse of the fine arts. This occured not only in his reference to education through verisimilitude—the plaster cast having played a key role in the education of the artist through the idea of emulation—but also by directly addressing the notion of the tableau. Here

Fig. 45 Takamatsu Jirō, Shadow (study for Shadow of a Woman Opening a Curtain), November 10, 1965. Pencil and sumi ink on paper, 25.9 × 17.9 cm. National Museum of Art, Osaka. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Jiro Takamatsu. Photo: National Museum of Art Osaka /

Absence

DNPartcom.

Takamatsu connected the depiction of shadows, his exploration of absence, to the problem of painting. The tableau is the window through which the woman—standing in for the artist, who is absent—watches history. Arakawa similarly focused on the image of the window in a number of his canvases. For example, in the central panel of At the Window (1968), an incomplete diagram shows a window as it cracks open, revealing a prismatic line beyond (fig. 46). The panels on the left depict first a broken grid, traversed by seven lines of color, leading to the central panel. On the right, inversions of such lines—the silhouettes of lengths of string—cut across the panels and converge in a bundle. Cut off on the top right corner, a clock appears to mark a segment of time. From the window the viewer takes in a ravishing New York scene: the Empire State Building, the sky, the park, a mailbox, a garbage can, a tree, the sun, a woman, a man, a dog, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. This whole exists only as an

Fig. 46 Arakawa Shūsaku, At the Window, 1968. Oil on canvas, five panels: 244 × 829.9 cm overall. Sezon Museum of Modern Art. © 2021 Estate of Madeline Gins. Reproduced with permission of the Estate of Madeline Gins.

aggregation of parts: phantasmatic stimuli (sound, air, smell), images and words, brought together and unified as meaning in the mind. A sequence of white silhouettes—circular shapes, then squares—rushes across the five panels. The shadow runs parallel to what the canvas depicts—barely there, not quite perceptible. Maybe an absent object is in fact present: in Arakawa’s canvases, the absent object returns ultimately to presence as latency. In the theory of multiple universes that Arakawa cited, the fact that an object is absent in this dimension does not necessarily mean it may not be present in another—that is, if absence were to be understood as a possible state of the object. Takamatsu, on the other hand, envisioned possibility as a state of contradiction, and he suggested that he could only strive toward—or rather, indicate—absence. Absence unto itself cannot be hypostatized without incurring a fundamental conflict, or without generating a presence that negates absence. For Takamatsu, absence appeared to be something more akin to an ethical position or imperative, rather than an ontological state. This fundamental contradiction seems to be part of what informed the reception of his work by Miyakawa. For Miyakawa, Takamatsu’s (and by extension, Arakawa’s) attempts at presenting absence, and absenting presence, appeared to be—classically—impossible.

Shadows Stolen

Cast Shadows

Photography, too, connects—elliptically—Takamatsu’s and Arakawa’s practices. In Arakawa’s early diagrammatic canvases, and in the later works collected within The Mechanism of Meaning, photographs served as source material. He dissected and recomposed them in order to highlight specific formal qualities, such as rhythm and movement; to evoke the ghostly reality of images; and to provide a reflection on iconicity and the formation of the visual through the sensorium and its passage

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into the mind. Photographs were source material for Takamatsu as well: the mechanism through which he stole from his sitters the shadows that he later replicated on a surface in order to (fail to) hypostatize absence. There is a difference here in the sense that, at least at an operational level, Takamatsu appeared to latch onto the often remarked-upon analogical qualities of the medium, whereas in Arakawa’s work the elaboration on the photographic resides (at least on the surface) at the level of iconicity. Beyond such operative use, however, photography informs how these artists approach the ambivalent nature of presence and absence at a deeper, conceptual level. For Arakawa, the relationship to photography initially appeared entirely denotative, but it actually played a rather crucial role, as was recognized by those who initially wrote about it. Tōno referred to the diagrams themselves as rentogen shashin (Roentgen photography, i.e., X-rays). What he described as “objects whose shadows have been stolen”—their souls—appeared on the canvas through their shadowy substitutes, much like a photograph instantiates an absent object through the image. Takamatsu’s canvases are highly mediated manifestations of absence: they are themselves the shadows of photographs. The reason this relationship to photography appears so slippery, so elusive— what renders this reliance on the codes of photography so difficult to see—is that in both Arakawa’s and Takamatsu’s work photography makes itself present (and at once absent) through the negative, that is, not as the immediately graspable, positive image but rather as shadows and their inversion. The use of shadows suggests not only a convergence of painting and photography but also the possibility of thinking photography through the negative’s distinctive relationship to objects. The negative is the photosensitized surface on which light casts itself as shadow. It connects, almost magically, not to the image but to the realm of objects. This reliance on shadows thus entails a paradoxical return to materiality: by underscoring the material preconditions of the image, and, ultimately, the material basis of concept, shadows dislodge both notions from a discourse of the vanishing in art. Over a period of some two years, from 1972 to 1974, Takamatsu briefly worked on a series titled Photograph of Photograph. As in the Shadow series, Takamatsu mined material that was most proximate to him, relying on domestic, banal scenes captured during trips and family reunions that he rephotographed on the surface of tables, walls, and floors (fig. 47). Characteristically, Takamatsu appeared enthralled by the sheen of the photographic surface, which often interferes with the intelligibility of the image on the paper. In one work, four women line up for a commemorative picture: the glare reflected on the gelatin coating the photographic paper obliterates the middle section and edge of the crumpled picture, producing a portrait of the women in the process of vanishing. Similarly, some of these works show photographs in the developing bath: one such photograph of a photograph captures the minute in which the image of a boat docked on a pier imperfectly manifests

Fig. 47 Takamatsu Jirō, Photograph of Photograph, 1974. Gelatin silver print, 116 × 95.8 cm. Estate of Jiro Takamatsu. Image courtesy of Yumiko Chiba Associates.

Cast Shadows

on the photographic paper—and part of it, overexposed, begins, like the women’s presence, to burn away and disappear. Another such work presents an immense interchange dotted by streetlamps and traversed by cars. The cityscape vanishes under the glare of light, which produces a white, negative shadow. All that is left is a rectangular form, within which we are invited to imagine an absent line cutting across the plane (plate 16). The object vanishes—but does it, really? Arakawa Shūsaku and Takamatsu Jirō are usually associated with the hermetic turn leading to the rise of a Japanese variant of Conceptualism: one that, confusingly enough, was birthed and circulated beyond the arbitrary boundaries of Japanese art.60 And yet, this exploration of presence and absence—or rather presenting and absenting, as verb forms—evinced an eminently concrete and material form of thinking. Here I propose, rather simply, that the vanishing object exists as its own category of obuje. A utopian attempt to create an impossible existence, it highlights the ambiguity of presence and absence, of which photography became a paramount model for emulation. Clearly, the object is not lost in the proceedings; rather, in a melancholic turn, it reasserts its presence as an uncanny absence that enables the possible passages between object and idea, thus positing a new potential for political affect.

Fig. 48 Ōtsuji Kiyoji, A Pair of Mineral Ore Samples That Are Always on My Desk, 1974. Gelatin silver print, 17.6 × 17.7 cm. Musashino Art University Museum and Library.

Such is stone. I cannot lean on it without admitting it is unfathomable. This abyss of plenitude—night as it veils eternal light—is to me quintessentially the real. —Yves Bonnefoy, “Les tombeaux de Ravenne” (1953)

Conclusion On the Return to Things Stones In Stones and Numbers (Ishi to sūji; 1969), Takamatsu Jirō descended to the riverbanks of the Tamagawa, where he proceeded to paint numbers on stone after stone, using an idiosyncratically devised system. He marked each stone sequentially with a decimal fraction, equal to less than one; once he ran out of decimals, he moved to the centesimal range and continued inscribing stones in the same manner, recording increasingly small variations in quantity. Takamatsu halted the project, apparently, after inscribing around 282 stones.1 Animating the work was the idea of systematizing the relationship of part to whole—in this case, a fraction to an integer (and presumably, a stone to its riverbed). In order to do so, Takamatsu relied on a logical but arbitrary system. Relating it to other works he produced during this period for which he relied on words and characters, he noted, “Latching on to endlessly proliferating systems, I probed the possibility of expanding these to the infinite.”2 Takamatsu’s retrospective account of this work provides a fine explanation for his immediate motive, but why did he find it necessary to draw this abstract system on stones? If it were a question of probing infinity through a literal instantiation of the Heraclitean principle of the one and the many, conceivably he could have drawn

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numbers on a series of canvases, or as a sequence in a binder (as artist Kawara On had done). Alternatively, he could have infinitely subdivided matter, like he did in works beginning in 1970. Yet even as Takamatsu continued to probe part and whole, the specific task of inscribing a sequence of numbers that rendered the logical scaffolding of the work visible and concrete was not repeated on any other support. He did so only in this instance—and for some reason it had to be on stones. A year later, the critic Hariu Ichirō, in an excoriating review of the controversial state festival Expo ’70 in Osaka, noted how one particular stone became the object of popular fervor. Amid numerous image-based exhibitions, one of the most visited sites at Expo ’70 was the US Pavilion, which showcased as its main attraction a moon rock brought back to Earth by the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. “In reality, the reason that so many spectators cram themselves up inside the American Pavilion, with its moon rock and artificial satellites, or in the Soviet Pavilion with its displays of everything from Anton Chekhov’s diary to space exploration, is not merely because of their admiration and curiosity concerning these superpowers. It is because a material impression of the world that cannot be turned into mere information hides beneath these real objects.”3 For Hariu, the proliferation of images indicated a fundamental shift in relations of production and, consequently, the structure of domination. Images were the new fetish in the dematerialized, information-based economy that Expo ’70 celebrated, and yet in this context the moon rock, which was at once image and object, appeared to give form to something older, perhaps even more fundamental than commodity fetishism. As advanced economies around the world inched ever closer to peak industrialization, Hariu intuited a nascent longing for an increasingly elusive reality. As simple as it was, this stone held another world within it, quite literally, and it provided viewers access to this world through its irreducibly material facticity, which far exceeded the disembodied “information” with which Expo visitors were bombarded at its many corporate and state-sponsored pavilions.

Fragment, Image, and Absence

The Obuje Is at Once Thing and Idea, Presence and Absence The main question considered in this book is that of how the object, as both material and concept, impacted what art became in 1960s Japan. Focusing on an exemplary group of artists and works, I have located this change in an investment in fragments, the querying of the ambiguity of the image, and, later on, a growing concern with absence as different expressions or states of the object. While some of the artists addressed here worked together, others developed independent careers. This unusual configuration has allowed me to demonstrate that this generation developed a fairly cohesive set of aesthetic concerns that cut across varied practices and

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theoretical positions and arose as a response to the specific political and cultural conditions of post-Anpo Japan. To summarize: For artists associated with the generation who became active at the cusp of the 1960s, obuje reemerged as a preferred mode of engagement. Works by Arakawa Shūsaku and their critical reception suggested connections between this sensibility and deep-seated questions in Surrealist theory regarding the relationship between thing and idea as well as the conditions of presence and absence. Through Kudō Tetsumi and Miki Tomio, the implications of obuje, especially its (re)introduction of an aesthetics of fragmentation and its concomitant denial of totality, became clearer. Art critic Takiguchi Shūzō’s theory of the image allowed obuje to serve as a springboard for a theorization of the specific plasticity of photography that enabled the medium to engage the duality of presence and absence. Such ambiguity informed the concern with objects in the work of Ōtsuji Kiyoji, and that concern resonated in the practice of the postwar photographic avant-garde. In works by Kawada Kikuji and Hosoe Eikoh, obuje helped enable a consideration of the material conditions of the image, which photographers explored as a type of wayward object. Tōmatsu Shōmei’s attempts at estranging the landscape form revealed a more counterintuitive expression of the obuje—that is, in its vanishing state—in “objectified” visual signifiers of absence, especially the horizon line and the vanishing point. Similar visualizations of absence in Arakawa’s and Takamatsu Jirō’s post-paintings allowed them to consider the impossibility of art and politics in the contemporary moment. The critic Miyakawa Atsushi had already, in the early 1960s, intuited in the turn to obuje a reflection on such a state of impossibility; he first discussed the significance of the return of materiality to art in his breakthrough essay “After l’Informel” (1963). Miyakawa argued that some critics misrecognized the significance of a shift evinced by the incorporation of nonpainterly materials and the turn to obuje (obujeka) by the so-called Anti-Art or Neo-Dada trend. Many had assumed, incorrectly, that this was simply some sort of opposition to Art Informel—that this shift was, in other words, a style-driven return to subject matter. But such views simply reinscribed the development within a history of modern painting, as a type of Oedipal reaction, and rehashed the debate in the tired terms of figuration versus abstraction. Rather than seeing Anti-Art as marking a wishful return to reality, or simply indicating a change of means of expression, Miyakawa interpreted this generation’s negation of expressivity and their concern with the everyday as reflecting a deeper shift in values that continued the investigation Art Informel had inaugurated in the late 1940s. The incorporation of preexisting things as obuje served as an expedient and well-established example. This ostensible shift in style—a formal shift—thus ultimately indicated a much more fundamental change with aesthetic as well as epistemological consequences. It pointed to an indictment of the category of the human.4

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Despite its shortcomings,5 Miyakawa’s essay was a milestone that represented a paradigm shift in art criticism in Japan. Moving beyond the debate on narrowly defined styles, Miyakawa provided a more extended periodization in his discussion of the significance of Anti-Art, mapping it as part of the passage from representational form to material, and that of modernity into contemporaneity (from kindai into gendai). Thus, he provided a structure that both historicized and connected developments at home to an international configuration of artists who similarly interrogated the very possibility of art and the limits of humanism. Crucially, Miyakawa centered the problem of materiality as a key question for the art of the decade, which contrasted from strictly formalist and zeitgeist-based interpretations alike. With Miyakawa I argue that the shift in practices in the Indépendant generation entailed a significant turning point: away from the modernist logic of expressivity and, through a reframed notion of materiality, toward an attempt at grappling with the conditions of impossibility that characterized the contemporaneous moment. We could likewise extend Miyakawa’s periodization into the developments of the following decade, so as to provide an alternative account of the changes seen in the practice of artists later broadly associated with the so-called Mono-ha, or School of Things. In so doing, we would note continuities in that trend’s rediscovery of the duality of presence and absence, and the melancholic insistence on the need for “not making” as a precondition for the encounter with the object. Indeed, I would contend that the concept of mono (things) is but the logical extension of “obuje ideology” that Mono-ha theorist Lee Ufan decried. For, just as artists would later attempt in the 1970s, the turn to obuje had similarly indexed a shift to exteriority. Anti-Art had sought to undermine the division of art and life, renouncing subjectivity and finding in thingly agency a means to recover the world of objects. Their concern with materials mediated into the 1970s a reversal of agency similar to that found in the historical practice of obuje and extended its seeping antihumanism. The artists who displayed minimally manipulated materials and sought to engineer a new encounter with the world likewise sought to overcome the subject-object dichotomy and deprivilege human experience. They, too, were haunted by the object’s promised absence—its undoing in the night of materiality. I would therefore characterize the Mono-ha’s rediscovery of the sensible world not as a reaction to Anti-Art and the later turn to “concepts” in art, but as part of a continuous development: it was a passage rather than a dialectical leap. However, a question remains: a passage from what, to what? In structural terms, I have described this shift as a slippage from the hysterical language of negation to a type of melancholic repetition that literalizes a search for confirmation of the object. We witness such a slippage, for example, in Miki Tomio’s discovery that, through its repetition, the ear ceased to be merely a “stupid joke,” a blunt weapon that could be wielded against the institutions of art and society; instead, the antihuman ear became a wholly exterior and unknowable god, whose onerous demands

the artist continued to seek by continuously, painfully, molding matter into the coiling shape of an ear. In the process, the obuje was discovered to be at once thing and concept, presence and absence. As the French poet Yves Bonnefoy noted, “At the same time that it is present, the object ceaselessly disappears. . . . But as it disappears it reasserts and reclaims its presence. If it remains present, it is as if a reign began . . . if it dies, it opens up to the union in absence that is its spiritual promise, where it becomes complete.”6 Bonnefoy—whose essay Miyakawa cited in “After l’Informel”—usefully illuminates the object’s location at the threshold of death. The artists of this time nurtured and recovered the object as presence-absence—just at the moment of art’s alleged dematerialization. Their unconscious yet insistent querying of the object signals the place of a ghost as it reemerges from its crypt. “Mark me,” it says. In psychoanalytic terms, the reemergence of the ghost enables a recovery of pleasure in fantastic completion, allowing the subject to maintain an unaltered psychic topography in spite of loss—in other words, to retain an impossible love. But such pleasure will not undo the pain upon encountering, yet again, the rotting face of art.

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Obuje and the Discovery of Unpleasure

Conclusion

Lee Ufan was scathing about Takamatsu’s reliance on stones in order to advance his conceptual exploration. In an essay that later opened his foundational collection, In Search of an Encounter (1970), he wrote, “One day, an artist entered the world of those countless stones that exist on the riverbanks of the Tamagawa and inscribed them with a predetermined set of numbers. By positioning the numbers that were the artist’s intended information, the stones’ appearance and words were limited, and they became the face of these predetermined numbers. . . . I can only see that the stones are ‘stone’ as mere canvas, a blackboard for the artist.”7 Takamatsu’s inscription of stones was typical in his imposition of concept upon thing, a procedure Lee closely associated with the notion of obuje, which he believed it was imperative to surpass. Later characterizing Takamatsu’s work, he postulated that the only possible way to surpass such a reification of the world would be as a move from cognition to perception—a return from concepts and back to things. Lee Ufan’s book became a crucial milestone for artistic discourse as it transitioned into the new decade with a resolute call for a new sensibility. His essays criticized what he deemed to be the colonization of objects by artistic intentionality and concepts and instead advocated for the idea of artists facilitating encounters with the world as is—in other words, calling for a negation of making (tsukuru koto no hitei). Lee, in more ways than one, appeared to extend some of the ideas associated with obuje as a practice: a belief in the projective, almost vitalistic quality of things, the subversion of the subject-object dichotomy, and the liberation of the

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world of materials from domination by humans. Yet in encountering his solution, we face a conundrum, for the ethos of not making signals the exact opposite—a negation of making confirms an identification with the desire to make. This time, however, it is no longer a question of the avant-garde’s potential perverse identification with art as an institution; rather, it points to a melancholic identification with the impossibility of not making. The drive toward not making—the insistence on encountering things as they are—is in many ways utopian. At the same time, we must underscore the difficulty of this task, because the unpleasure to be found in these insistent returns is predicated on failure: an artist knows that not making is impossible. For example, in a 1975 serialized essay, Ōtsuji Kiyoji mused on the possibility of a photograph actually accessing things. He proposed a thought experiment, starting from the following premise: “What is reflected in a photograph is the semblance of a thing. . . . Neither beauty, nor passion, nor spirit, just a thing’s state and its appearance does a photograph reflect. Even as it captures things in extreme detail, it only does that and not truly anything else.”8 So, logically, it follows that it should be possible to isolate that thing in front of the camera. First, of course, it would be necessary to choose an apt object for this experiment. I began first by considering what a thingly thing is. All around me are things. Among all of these things, which one is the thingliest? It must be one of the many un-special things. . . . The light that falls on the desk is fine. That place—the same desk—is fine. The camera should be at eye level. Its definition, the sharpness of the image, should be like that of a real eye’s pan focus. The position of the thing may have to be changed yet again, but we must seek to stay as far as possible from all pretentiousness. But even in this case, it is impossible to capture nature as is— we must figure out a way to do so. A limited interest (miryoku) . . . will do. . . . Now that I have completed the photograph, I can conclude that as much as I tried to come up with a method to capture it, the thing will not appear as just a thing, aside from all meaning. . . . Is it that I failed at figuring out a method, or is it that it has always been impossible to do so? It appears to me that it is the latter. And yet, but a thing—even if we were to be not so strict about it, what really is a thing?9 The difficulty here is that the fact of photography already calls into question the very possibility of accessing the real. And, although minimized through mechanization, the intentionality behind the photographic act is undeniable. But so is the

photographed thing, which appears at once as its promise and its failure. Ōtsuji’s essay was accompanied by a series of photographs that expanded and illustrated his thoughts and that spoke to these entwined conundrums. The first of these were plainly shot mineral ore samples, placed on his table—two stones inscribed with consecutive numbers (fig. 48). Part of what I have attempted to do in this book is to probe parallel developments and intersections between experimental art and photography. In this case, this convergence is most keenly felt in a shared interest in the possibility of reaching into the world of things. Photography, whose history as a medium is marked by the engagement of conditions of presence and absence, became an important point of reference in the ultimately impossible task of recovering the world of things.

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Recursivity and Desire: The Avant-Garde Must Fail Trying

Conclusion

I have identified in the avant-garde’s return to repeating failures throughout the 1960s the latent presence of a melancholic structure, which became fully manifest at the end of the decade. Like Miyakawa, we must first note that the generation of artists who became active in Japan around 1960 built their program for a “descent into the everyday” upon an already existing realization: that of the failure of the category of the human in the aftermath of the war. This failure became painfully evident when, once again, the limits of collective action were laid bare by the Anpo crisis. The Anti-Art generation had examined the category of the human and dissected it through obuje; through the recognition of thingly agency, the artists protested art and its institutions and, in doing so, subverted its underlying humanist beliefs. But, eventually, the introduction of obuje would point to the failure of making itself—the capacity to shape matter into art, which is already signified as human. This crisis anticipated the recognition of the imperative not to make. Yet it was an impossible position to be in, for how can the artist engage the object without making? Without making, how can one aspire to access the object? Ōtsuji demonstrated both the slippage from an interrogation of the object and how an object can be accessed, if it can be at all. On reading his notes, we see that Ōtsuji may have failed to capture the thing in photographs. But in his insistence on the need to do so, there is still a sense of yearning. This is a yearning that derives from the realization of the sheer impossibility of accessing the world as is. It is both a desire to return to a moment prior to the photograph and the click of the camera’s shutter, and human experience. There is love to be found in the recognition of this impossible task, to which the photographer continuously returns, and that can be seen as the medium’s most redeeming quality. Such is the paradoxical unpleasure now to be found in art. Focusing on a shift from the structure of hysteria to that of melancholia has helped me reframe the classical problem of the temporal disjunctures of

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avant-gardism and its contested implications. Peter Bürger famously defined the prewar (European) avant-garde in terms of its relentless attack on the status of art in bourgeois society, through a denial of the core ideas of nonpurposiveness, disinterestedness, and detachment from the social. The avant-garde’s negation of the autonomy of art sought to resolve the opposition between art and life. But its experiments were doomed to fail, as they ultimately reified such a distinction. Bürger dismissed attempts at a recovery of avant-gardism at the hands of the postwar neo-avant-garde. He felt this reflected, at best, a willful naïveté and, at worst, a self-interested move by artists who sought to capitalize on the institutionalization of avant-gardism within the modernist museum.10 Hal Foster has countered that Bürger presents an overly reductive view of both of these phenomena. In the postwar neo-avant-garde, Foster first recovered an attempt at institutionalizing the avant-garde itself. In a second, later phase—which coincides with the end of the 1960s, the moment I have discussed above in my excursus on stones—he found a nascent metacritique of the avant-garde as an institution. Foster noted, as I do, the condition of repetition and belatedness (Nachträglichkeit) of the neoavant-garde, which he associated with a condition of critical potential that he saw as predicated on its historical failures.11 There is an argument to be made for the specificity of avant-gardism in its historical dimension, and the contextual elements that led to its recovery in the postwar period. For example, in the conclusion to her foundational study of the prewar group Mavo, Gennifer Weisenfeld noted the attempts at providing a historicization of avant-gardism in Japan, which began taking place at the end of the 1950s. Weisenfeld discussed the process of historicization of the prewar avantgarde, highlighting first the often-observed break effected by the war that resulted in “collective and individual lapses in memory and lost information” among its few surviving artists. Noting the role of art critics and historians who reclaimed the fragmentary record of prewar modernism beginning as early as the late 1950s, she observed avant-gardism’s varied valences in the postwar context. Even as its postwar interpreters repeatedly acknowledged the distinct historical situations in which these phenomena arose, there was an active attempt to position prewar experiences as grounding a postwar tradition of the new. Some of this had to do with specific political agendas: the prewar experiments appeared to provide an expedient manner of recasting prewar cultural space in the context of Japan’s postwar resurgence; it justified current practices as a source for painterly abstraction in the context of the Cold War’s politics of style; and it functioned as a precedent that coded contemporaneous artistic experiments as a type of political nonconformism whose roots stretched back to the prewar period. While these various attempts recovered the important role of prewar art movements, Weisenfeld noted, they also problematically reduced the phenomenon of avant-gardism to a transhistorical category.12 Similarly, they spoke to the progressive institutionalization of modernism in the

context of Japan, which likewise connects to Bürger’s observations on the co-optation of avant-gardism within official culture. Ultimately, I have sought in this book to argue for a connection between these moments while retaining the undeniable fact of their difference. The connection, I argue, is based on recurrence as an expression of desire. This recurrence itself raises the question of neo-avant-gardism as a fundamentally distinct phenomenon. This can be seen at its limits, when we recognize the fundamental slippage that happened in this period from a structure of desire that sought, through art’s repudiation, a secret identification with the Other—accepting the division between art and non-art that they had ostensibly denounced—to one in which the aim appears to be a paradoxical unpleasure sought in the constant revisiting of the scene of loss. This structure of desire adheres in a recognition of the contemporary as a state of impossibility, of not being, where the options are either to abandon the whole artistic enterprise or to continue nurturing its ever-failing promise in a perpetual act of melancholic return.

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Notes

Introduction 1. This corresponds to a rough characterization of a Kantian position. A more thorough discussion of the doctrine of significant form and its import in the development of modernism can be found in Sam Rose, Art and Form: From Roger Fry to Global Modernism (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2019). 2. Simon Partner, Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 3. Marilyn Ivy, “Formations of Mass Culture,” in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 239–58. 4. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (exposé of 1939), in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 14–26. 5. A full discussion of the genesis and significance of the Yomiuri Indépendant is found in William Marotti’s excellent Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). 6. Shima Atsuhiko, Nakai Yasuyuki, and Masuda Tomohiro, Anata no shōzō: Kudō Tetsumi kaikōten = Your Portrait: A Tetsumi Kudo Retrospective (Tokyo: National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, 2013), 58. 7. Art historian Reiko Tomii has situated the debate on Anti-Art at the origins of the discussion on contemporaneity in art in Japan. Reiko Tomii, Radicalism in the Wilderness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 1–44. 8. The impact of Jean-Paul Sartre in the visual arts and literature in postwar Japan cannot be overstated. Sartre’s voice was, however, only one within a much broader debate in modernist aesthetics on the capacities and limitations of art to effect social change. For an

overview of the French debate on commitment (engagement), see especially Suzanne Guerlac, Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 9. Some of the figures most closely associated with the initial mediation of Surrealism into the Japanese context in the 1920s and 1930s—such as the poet Kitasono Katsue, the painter Fukuzawa Ichirō, the photographer and painter Ei-Q, and the poet and critic Takiguchi Shūzō—survived the war and played an important role in the reemergence of the avant-garde in its aftermath. It is a tragic fact, however, that the younger generation that came of age in the early 1930s and would logically have engaged Surrealism most fruitfully in its full theoretical potential was lost to the repressive conditions attending the rise of militarism. Many of these artists were drafted into the war effort. Some did not make it back from the front lines, like Ai-Mitsu, while others endured horrific experiences during demobilization. Still others who were not drafted suffered loss of life and property during the firebombing campaign at the close of the war. The most important account of the violent fate of the prewar avant-garde in Japan remains Kozawa Setsuko’s Avangyarudo no sensō taiken: Matsumoto Shunsuke, Takiguchi Shūzō soshite gagakuseitachi (The wartime experience of the avant-garde: Matsumoto Shunsuke, Takiguchi Shūzō, and the art students) (Tokyo: Aoki Shoten, 1994). 10. The term “afterwardsness” (or après-coup) was famously introduced by psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche through his elaboration of Nachträglichkeit in Freudian theory. The term developed out of Laplanche’s sustained investigation of the phenomenon of deferred temporality in traumatic events. For an overview of the concept, see Jean Laplanche,

Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works (1914–1916) (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953–74), 14:237– 58. Henceforth referred to as Standard Edition. 14. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “Deuil ou mélancolie: Introjecter-incorporer,” in L’écorce et le noyau (Paris: Flammarion, 1987), 259–75. 15. Ibid., 260. 16. “Perhaps one might imagine the following figure in the transfer of Surrealist thought from one culture to another: one notices that the contents of a package are different at the time of their opening from the time of their packing—what we seek, then, are hints about the process of change undergone by the contents of the package during transit.” Miryam Sas, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 9.

Part 1 1. Takamatsu Jirō, note dated “A day in October 1962,” in Sekai kakudai keikaku (Plan

for the expansion of the world) (Tokyo: Suiseisha, 2003), 116.

Chapter 1 1. Currently in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the work is known in Japanese as Kōsei busshitsu to shiin ni hasamareta Ainshutain. While the English-language title listed on the museum’s record is “Einstein Between Matter’s Structure and Faintest Sound,” this appears to be a mistranslation; a closer rendering would be “Einstein, trapped by antibiotics and consonants.” 2. Tōno Yoshiaki, “Tenrankai senhyō: Arakawa Shūsaku koten” (Exhibition reviews: Arakawa Shūsaku individual show), Bijutsu Techō, no. 181 (November 1960): 161. 3. Arakawa was expelled from the group because his solo activity ran counter to its collective ethos. The most comprehensive source for Arakawa’s early activities remains Okada Takahiko’s chronology for Arakawa’s exhibition at the Tōkō Museum in 1989, updated and reprinted in a special 1996 issue of the journal Gendai shisō, dedicated to the work of Arakawa and Madeline Gins. Okada Takahiko, “Arakawa Shūsaku nenpu” (Arakawa Shūsaku

chronology), Gendai shisō 24, no. 10 (August 1996): 439–45. 4. In a 2009 interview, Arakawa provided, in further biographical details, a plausible reason for his grim choice of subject matter: apparently, his sporadically employed father had worked at some point as an undertaker. Arakawa, interview with Tsukahara Fumi (2009), reproduced in Tsukahara Fumi, Arakawa Shūsaku no kiseki to kiseki (Miracle and trace of Arakawa Shūsaku) (Tokyo: NTT Shuppan, 2009), 20. 5. Artist Shinohara Ushio related in his classic Zen’ei no michi his first visit with a “clearly neurotic” (noirōze ni kakatte ita) Arakawa, who clutched his head and heaved in excitement at the visual effect of the cast shadows that Shinohara, Akasegawa Genpei, and Kazakura Shō projected on his studio’s walls using a contraption of Arakawa’s devising. In this anecdote, Shinohara follows Tōno’s characterization of Arakawa as a “fou,” or madman; see Shinohara Ushio, Zen’ei no michi (The way of the avant-garde) (Tokyo: Bijutsu

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“Notes on Afterwardsness,” in Essays on Otherness (London: Routledge, 1999). See also Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968); and Jean Laplanche, Vie et mort en psychanalyse (Paris: Flammarion, 1989). 11. Laplanche, Vie et mort en psychanalyse, 25. 12. Here I closely follow art historian Kristine Stiles in her discussion of performance in art. Kristine Stiles, “Performance,” in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 75–97. 13. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al., On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement,

Notes to Pages 16–21

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Shuppansha, 2006). The extent to which these anecdotes are reliable is highly dubious; they connect to longstanding modernist tropes of the artist as genius. However, in his interview with Tsukahara, Arakawa himself discussed the period up to 1962 as one during which he suffered repeated bouts of depression (utsu). Is it possible to consider these elements productively in interpretation, beyond biography? A discussion of obsessional categories is developed further in the second chapter. 6. Arakawa, interview with Tsukahara Fumi. 7. My translation. Takiguchi Shūzō, “Naze no chōkoku” (Why sculpture), in Arakawa Shūsaku 1.23–31, 1961 (Tokyo: Mudo Garō, 1961), n.p. Reprinted with a translation by the poet in Takiguchi Shūzō, Yohaku ni kaku = Marginalia (Tokyo: Mizuzu Shobō, 1966). 8. André Breton, L’amour fou (1938), in Œuvres complètes, ed. Marguerite Bonnet (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1992), 2:700. 9. This is a reference to Freud’s definition of the dream as wish fulfillment; see Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. Joyce Crick (London: Oxford University Press, 2008). 10. “Sur le passage du surréalisme se produit une crise fondamentale de l’objet. Seul l’examen très attentif des nombreuses spéculations auxquelles cet objet a publiquement donné lieu peut permettre de saisir dans toute sa portée la tentation actuelle du surréalisme.” André Breton and Paul Éluard, “Objet,” in Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme (Paris: Galerie des Beaux-Arts, 1938), 18–19. Ebara Jun published a Japanese translation of the dictionary in 1958. 11. Salvador Dalí, “Objets surréalistes,” in Dictionnaire de l’objet surréaliste, ed. Didier Ottinger (Paris: Éditions Gallimard and Centre Pompidou, 2013), 283. Originally published in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 3 (December 1931): 16–17. 12. The objet’s capacity to condense such dichotomies is alluded to early on in Breton’s writings, but such interest becomes particularly pronounced in L’amour fou, and later Arcane 17 (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1971).

13. For a typology of objets and a discussion of each, see the aforementioned Surrealist Dictionary produced for the famed Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts in 1938. André Breton and Paul Éluard, “Objet.” 14. See, in particular, the concluding section of Breton’s Prague lecture of 1935: André Breton, “Situation surréaliste de l’objet,” in Manifestes du Surréalisme: Édition complète (Paris: J. J. Pauvert éditions, 1962), 269–94. 15. Breton understood his method as a materialist version of the dialectic. See, for instance, the Second Manifesto, in which he notes, “Le surréalisme . . . présente avec le matérialisme historique . . . qu’il part de l’ ‘avortement colossale’ du système hégelien. . . . Sous sa forme hégelienne la dialéctique était inapplicable. Il y allait de la nécéssité d’en finir avec l’idéalisme.” André Breton, “Second Manifesto,” in Manifestes du Surréalisme, 148. 16. Georges Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance informe (Paris: Éditions Macula, 2019), 235. 17. Georges Bataille, “Informe,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. Denis Hollier (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1970), 1:217. 18. For example, the cabinet’s economic growth plan of 1961 was presented by then–Prime Minister Ikeda Hayato as an “income-doubling program” (kokumin shotoku baizō keikaku). See also William Marotti’s discussion of Akasegawa Genpei’s work in relation to the question of police in Money, Trains, and Guillotines, 15–36. 19. While his role in mediating Surrealism was of undeniable importance, it is crucial to note that Takiguchi’s translation of Breton marks the endpoint of a first stage of the transfer of Surrealism. Awareness of Surrealism in Japan had occurred almost contemporaneously as Breton’s group became active in Paris in the mid1920s. The absorption of these ideas occurred in stages and led to a fairly idiosyncratic understanding of the material. The literature on Surrealism in Japan is vast. Among critical studies, Miryam Sas’s sophisticated discussion of Surrealist transfer in Japan is noteworthy; see Sas, Fault Lines. For an overview of the early history of Surrealism’s reception in the Japanese

on re-presentation (metaphor) to connection (metonymy).” Kristine Stiles, “Uncorrupted Joy: International Art Actions,” in Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949–1979, ed. Paul Schimmel (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998), 227. 27. Nakahara Yūsuke, “Obuje nitsuite (tōron)” (Concerning objets [Discussion]), Mizue 626 (July 1957): 23–30. 28. Kitazawa Noriaki notes that in the post-Occupation period, the failure of the imperialist and nationalist projects in the war, and the bankruptcy of their ideas about culture, generated a space for reenvisioning what tradition might mean in a newly democratic society. Kitazawa Noriaki “Dentō ronsō—60-nendai avangyarudo eno airo” (The tradition debate—a narrow path to the 1960s avant-garde), in Bijutsu hihyō to sengo bijutsu (Art criticism and postwar art in Japan), ed. Mizusawa Tsutomu (Tokyo: Buryukke, 2007), 103–22. 29. Tōno, “Tenrankai senhyō,” 161. 30. Nakahara Yūsuke, “Arakawa Shūsaku koten” (Arakawa Shūsaku exhibition), Yomiuri Shinbun (evening edition), January 27, 1961. 31. Ebara Jun, “Kyoki ni uchikatsu sakka” (An artist triumphs over madness), in Arakawa Shūsaku 1.23–31, 1961, n.p. 32. Nakahara, “Arakawa Shūsaku koten.” 33. Mitsuda Yuri, “Hai Reddo Sentā to obuje/basho/tetsuzuki/shashin soshite ana” (Hi-Red Center and obuje, place, procedure, photography, and holes), in Hai Reddo Sentā: Chokusetsu kōdō no kiroku-ten (Hi-Red Center: Documents of direct action) (Tokyo and Nagoya: Shibuya Shōtō Art Museum and Nagoya City Art Museum, 2013), 194–99. See also Akasegawa Genpei, Tōkyō mikisā keikaku: Hai Reddo Sentā Chokusetsu kōdō no kiroku (Tokyo mixer plan: Hi-Red Center, a record of direct action) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1994). 34. Nakanishi Natsuyuki, “Urobon to konpakuto obuje no deai” (Urobon’s encounter with the compact obuje), Gendai no me = Newsletter of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo 102 (May 1963): 4–5. 35. Nakanishi, “Urobon to konpakuto obuje no deai,” 5. 36. Marotti offers an extended discussion of the political significance of the “Yamanote

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art scene, see Hayami Yutaka, Shururearizumu kaiga to Nihon—Imēji no juyō to sōzō (Surrealist painting and Japan: The reception and creation of images) (Tokyo: NHK Books, 2009); and especially the lengthy study by Ōtani Shōgo, Gekidōki no avangyarudo: Shururearisumu to Nihon no kaiga, 1928–1953 (The avant-garde in turbulent times: Surrealism and painting in Japan, 1929–1953) (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 2016), whose findings are reprised in Chinghsin Wu’s recent study Parallel Modernism: Koga Harue and Avant-Garde Art in Modern Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019). 20. Takiguchi’s essay draws heavily from the special issue on the objet by the magazine Cahiers d’art 11 nos. 1–2 (January 1936); and, in particular, Breton’s Prague lecture of 1935 (Breton, “Situation surréaliste de l’objet”). Takiguchi Shūzō, “Buttai no ichi” (Situation of the object) in Kindai geijutsu (Modern art) (1938), facsimile copy reprinted in Korekushon Nihon no shūrurearisumu (Collection surrealism in Japan), ed. Sawa Masahiro and Wada Hirofumi, vol. 5, Takiguchi Shūzō: Buruton tono kōtsū (Takiguchi Shūzō: Exchanges with Breton) (Tokyo: Hon no Tomosha, 2000). 21. Ebara refers here to Rimbaud’s celebrated formula, in his letter to his former teacher Georges Izambard, in which he states, “J’est un autre.” 22. Ebara Jun, “Kenja no bigaku, obuje” (Visionary aesthetics and the objet), Mizue 626 (July 1957): 8. 23. Hariu Ichirō, “Obuje no shisō-teki igi” (The objet’s philosophical significance), Mizue 626 (July 1957): 14. 24. Ibid., 14. 25. Ibid., 20. 26. This position, I argue, can be best understood in relation to current art-historical discussions of the subversion of the subject-object dichotomy in performance, and particularly the insistent thought on intersubjectivity developed by artists working with actions in art. Referring to the relationship between objects and art actions, art historian Kristine Stiles has noted that “actions in art have shifted the conventional subject-object relations instantiated in traditional viewing conditions away from their sole dependence

Notes to Pages 30–35

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Festival” and more generally the turn to action among artists in the context of post-Anpo repression and the rise of right-wing terrorism. William Marotti, Money, Trains, and Guillotines, 207–44. 37. Reiko Tomii discusses Matsuzawa’s work in the context of the development of Conceptual art practices in Japan in Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 45–71. 38. This recalls Gilles Deleuze’s observations regarding the transformation of the (baroque) object in Leibniz, which he distinguished from the objective fixity of Cartesian theory: “The object is no longer defined by an essential form, but rather achieves a pure functionality. . . . Such new status of the object no longer is attached to that of a spatial molding, or a relationship between form and matter; rather it is a temporal modulation involving a continuous variation of matter as well as a continuous development of form.” Gilles Deleuze, Le pli: Leibniz et le Baroque (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1988), 26. My translation. 39. Stiles, “Performance,” 75–97. 40. A discussion of Arakawa’s turn to diagrammatic painting is developed in chapter 6. 41. Quoted in Reiko Tomii, “Geijutsu on Their Minds: Memorable Words on Anti-Art,” in Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan, 1950–1970, ed. Reiko Tomii, Rika Iezumi Hiro, and Charles Merewether (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007), 38. 42. Kudō Tetsumi, “Stimulus → Reaction → Objectification” (1961), in Tetsumi Kudo: Garden of Metamorphosis, ed. Doryun Chong (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2008), 84. 43. The full title of the work is Philosophy of Impotence, or Distribution Map of Impotence and the Appearance of Protective Domes at the Points of Saturation. Shima Atsuhiko, Nakai Yasuyuki, and Masuda Tomohiro, Anata no shōzō: Kudō Tetsumi kaikōten = Your Portrait: A Tetsumi Kudo Retrospective (Osaka: Kokuritsu Kokusai Bijutsukan, 2013), 85. 44. See, for example, Tsurumi Shunsuke, “Futari no tetsugakusha” (Two philosophers), in Senkōsha-tachi (Predecessors), vol. 2 of Tsurumi

Shunsuke-shū (Tsurumi Shunsuke: Collected works) (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1992), 247–87. 45. Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1961), 162–63. 46. Kudō Hiroko has likened the inclusion of these photographs to the “ejaculation of social phenomena of the time.” Kudō Hiroko, “Chronology of Selected Works,” in Tetsumi Kudo, 214. An annotation on the lower left corner of the preparatory sketch (plate 3) listing these images suggests the photographs of protestors were included at a later date. 47. Allan Kaprow, Assemblages, Environments and Happenings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966), 234–35. 48. In his schema of sexual neuroses, KrafftEbing lists masturbation as a major cause of impotence through paralysis caused by damage to nervous receptors, or inhibition among neuropathic individuals. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis: Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der conträren Sexualempfindung (Psychopathia sexualis: With special consideration of the contrary sexual instincts) (Stuttgart: Verlag von Ferdinand Enke, 1890), 24. 49. Fae Brauer, “Rationalizing Eros: The ‘Plague of Onan,’ The Procreative Imperative and Duchamp’s Sexual Automatons,” in Marcel Duchamp and Eroticism, ed. Marc Décimo (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007). 50. A discussion of Duchamp’s work in relation to public anxieties over sexual reproduction can be found in Brauer, “Rationalizing Eros.” 51. Gennifer Weisenfeld, Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 243. 52. Kaprow described his demeanor as that of a mystical “sex priest.” Doryun Chong takes issue with this portrayal as counter to the intention of the artist. Doryun Chong, “When the Body Changes into New Forms: Tracing Tetsumi Kudo,” in Tetsumi Kudo, 31. 53. Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, “On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication” (1893), in Standard Edition, 2:13. See also Georges Didi-Huberman’s classic The Invention of

castration. The theoretical importance of the notion of castration in psychoanalysis grew, once Freud reformulated the Oedipal complex as its main account of the fantastic process through which the notion of individual completion and autonomy is generated in the subject. For an overview of the development of the term, see especially “Complexe de castration,” in Laplanche and Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, 74–79. 60. Pierre Restany, “The Nouveaux Réalistes Declaration of Intention” (1960), in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 306. 61. Alain Jouffroy, “Les objecteurs,” Quadrum 19 (1965): 22. 62. Jouffroy, “Les objecteurs,” 23. 63. Nakahara Yūsuke, “Obuje-ya nitsuite” (On the peddler of obuje), Bijutsu techō 265 (April 1966): 11–12. 64. Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (1905 [1901]), in Standard Edition 7, 1–122. 65. Alois Riegl, “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin,” Oppositions, no. 25 (Fall 1982): 23. 66. Quoted in Chong, “When the Body Turns into New Forms,” 36. 67. In discussing his view of inoperativeness (inoperosità), Agamben turn to the Aristotelian dyad of act and potency. “Of the two modes in which, according to Aristotle, every potentiality is articulated, the decisive one is that which the philosopher calls ‘the potentiality to not-be’ (dynamis me einai) or also impotence (adynamia). For it is true that whatever being always has a potential character, it is equally certain that it is not capable of only this or that specific act, nor is it therefore simply incapable, lacking in power, nor even less is it indifferently capable of everything, all-powerful: The being that is properly whatever is able to not-be; it is capable of its own impotence.” Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 35. 68. Quoted in Chong, “When the Body Changes into New Forms,” 36.

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Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 54. Hariu later portrayed Anti-Art as a tantrum-like fit, positing its work as belonging to a transitional category: the pseudo-avantgarde (giji zen’ei), part of a history of an avant-garde always already in decline. Hariu Ichirō, “‘Han’ to ‘Jiritsu’ to no aida” (Between “Anti” and “Autonomy”), Nihon Dokusho Shinbun, February 17, 1964. 55. Tōno Yoshiaki, “Garakuta no hangeijutsu” (Anti-art made of trash), Yomiuri Shinbun (evening edition), March 2, 1960. 56. Tōno, quoted in Miyakawa Atsushi, “Hangeijutsu—sono nichijōsei eno kakō” (Anti-art—its descent into the everyday), Bijutsu Techō, no. 234 (April 1964): 53. See also Tōno Yoshiaki, “Isetsu ‘Hangeijutsu’—Miyakawa Atsushi igo” (Anti-Art: An alternative account—After Miyakawa Atsushi), Bijutsu Techō, no. 236 (May 1964): 46–49. 57. Miyakawa Atsushi, “Fukanōsei no bigaku” (The aesthetics of impossibility), in Miyakawa Atsushi Chosakushū (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1980), 2:174–75. Miyakawa’s notion of impossibility and absence in the artwork— indebted to the work of French critic Maurice Blanchot—is discussed in detail in chapter 6. 58. This is what Jacques Lacan refers to in his account of the mirror stage as a hallucinatory experience of the “body in pieces,” or corps morcelé. Jacques Lacan, “Le stade du miroir,” in Écrits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 93–100. 59. The figure of castration has been often misunderstood in the popular reception of the theory as relating to either the presence or absence of—or, the desire for—an actual, anatomical penis. But psychoanalysis articulates the phallus as a symbolic function, i.e., as a representation. The castration complex is first described by Freud in relation to childhood fantasies that seek to address the existence or not of a phallus in the (m)other. The child’s “empirical” observations simply reinforce fantasies such as the fear of potential dismemberment—for example, at the hands of the Other, or through one’s own acts—and likewise displace such fear onto other types of potential harm to the self. The phallus matters only as the object of

Notes to Pages 44–53

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Chapter 2 1. Seo Noriaki, “Kare wa mimi o erabi, soshite tsukuritsuzuketa” (He chose to make ears, and continued making them), in Miki Tomio Tokubetsuten (Tokyo: Shibuya Kuritsu Shōtō Bijutsukan, 1992), 15–19. 2. Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations II: Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (Paris: Gallimard, 1948). 3. Sigmund Freud, “Negation” (1925), in Standard Edition, 19:236. 4. Here I closely follow Georges DidiHuberman’s discussion of Bataille’s Hegel: “Une dialectique ‘négative,’ ou comment ouvrir la philosophie,” in La ressemblance informe, 241–61. 5. The term is famously introduced in Freud’s “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”; see Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), in Standard Edition, 18:1–64. A comprehensive discussion of the death drive can be found in Laplanche, Vie et mort en psychanalyse; see also Laplanche and Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse. 6. See Seo Noriaki, “Nenpu” (Chronology), in Miki Tomio Tokubetsuten, 132–40. 7. Miki Tomio, “Kowase, soshite sagase” (Destroy and seek), Geijutsu Shinchō 11, no. 7 (July 1960): 203. 8. Seo, “Kare wa mimi o erabi,” 15. 9. Tōno Yoshiaki, “Shinjin Tōjō: Miki Tomio” (A newcomer’s arrival: Miki Tomio), Bijutsu Techō, no. 228 (November 1963): 83. 10. Tōno, “Shinjin Tōjō: Miki Tomio,” 82. 11. Seo, “Kare wa mimi,” n4. See also Minemura Toshiaki, “Miki Tomio-ron Daiisshō: ‘Naze mimi na noka to tou maeni’” (On Miki Tomio—Chapter 1: “Before asking why the ear”), in Hikikomisen: Dai ikkai Tokorozawa Biennāre = The 1st Tokorozawa Biennial of Contemporary Art Railroad Siding 2009, ed. Shiina Setsu, Sakagami Shinobu, and Hoya Kaori (Sayama: Tokorozawa Biennāre Jimukyoku, 2009), 361. 12. Hariu Ichirō, “Sengo bijutsu: ‘Gōri’ to ‘shinpi’ no kangeki (zadankai)” (Postwar art: Between “reason” and “mystery” [roundtable]), Bijutsu jānaru 56 (January 1966): 12. 13. In the second delivery of an exhaustive study of Miki, Minemura Toshiaki provided an extensive discussion of Tōno’s role

in introducing Miki’s work. Minemura, “Miki Tomio-ron Dai-isshō: ‘Naze mimi na noka to tou maeni,’” 352–68. 14. On artist emigration during the 1960s, see Suga Akira, “Yoshimura Masunobu no kikoku to Banpaku no kensō” (Yoshimura Masunobu’s return to Japan and the Expo ’70 controversy), in Neo-Dada Japan, 1958–1998 (Oita: Art Plaza, 1998), 128. 15. Minemura, “Miki Tomio-ron Dai-isshō: ‘Naze mimi na noka to tou maeni,’” 361. 16. Tōno Yoshiaki, “Han-geijutsu no chanpion-tachi” (The champions of Anti-Art), in Pasupōto No. 328309 (Tokyo: Sansaisha, 1962), 100–102. 17. Tōno Yoshiaki, “Yangu sebun zatsuroku” (Notes on Young Seven), in Yangu sebun-ten (Young Seven) (Tokyo: Minami Gallery, 1964), n.p. 18. Miyakawa covered a symposium titled “Anti-Art: For or Against,” organized in conjunction with Tōno’s exhibition, and wrote a controversial review of it titled “Descent into the Everyday.” He thus sparked a protracted argument with Tōno on the nature of Anti-Art, which played out in the pages of the journal Bijutsu Techō. See Miyakawa Atsushi, “Hangeijutsu—sono nichijōsei eno kakō” (Anti-Art—Its descent into the everyday), Bijutsu Techō, no. 234 (April 1964): 48–57. On the impact of this debate on the emergent discussion of contemporaneity (gendaisei) in Japanese art, see especially Reiko Tomii, “Historicizing ‘Contemporary Art’: Some Discursive Practices in Gendai Bijutsu in Japan,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 12, no. 3 (Winter 2004): 611–41. 19. The artist Ikeda Tatsuo evoked such similarities during the symposium. His account of it can be found in Ikeda Tatsuo, Geijutsu avangyarudo no senaka (The back of the artistic avant-garde) (Tokyo: Chūsekisha, 2001), 99. 20. Miki Tomio, “Gendai sakka no hatsugen—Nihon no sen’ei-tachi” (Statements by contemporary artists—Japan’s radicals), Mizue 707 (January 1964): 33. Reprinted in Miki Tomio Tokubetsuten, 130. 21. Miki, “Gendai sakka no hatsugen,” 33. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid.

Artist: The Historiography of a Concept (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 36. My emphasis. Giovanni Morelli, Kunstkritische Studien über italienische Malerei: Die Galerien Borghese und Doria Panfili in Rom (Art critical studies of Italian painters: The Galleries Borghese and Doria Panfili in Rome) (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1890), 99. 37. Tōno, “Shinjin tōjō,” 83. 38. Searing critiques of the Van Gogh myth are advanced by Griselda Pollock and Fred Orton in Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1996), as well as in Pollock’s Avant-Garde Gambits, 1888–1893: Gender and the Colour of Art History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992). 39. Kobayashi’s essays were originally published in the art journal Geijutsu Shinchō and later reissued as a volume titled Van Gogh’s Letters (Gohho no tegami) in the late 1950s. Kobayashi Hideo, “Gohho no tegami” (Van Gogh’s letters), in Kobayashi Hideo Zensakuhin (Complete works of Kobayashi Hideo) (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2004) 20:11–177. 40. Kobayashi Hideo, “Gohho no byoki” (Van Gogh’s illness), in Kobayashi Hideo Zensakuhin, 22:291–305. 41. A discussion of the symposium can be found in Harry Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). See also Takeuchi Yoshimi, What Is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi, trans. Richard Calichman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 42. Georges Bataille, “La mutilation sacrificielle et l’oreille coupée de Vincent Van Gogh,” in Œuvres complètes, 1:269. 43. Shibusawa’s translation appeared as part of Anma (The masseur, 1968), a deluxe portfolio containing texts and original print works by a number of figures associated with the artistic underground. The portfolio was designed by Tanaka Ikkō and published privately in a limited edition of two hundred copies by butoh dancer Hijikata Tatsumi. Miki provided two prints for this project. Hijikata Tatsumi Dance Experience no Kai, Anma: Aiyoku o sasaeru gekijō no hanashi (The masseur: A tale of theater that supports desire) (Tokyo: n.p., 1968).

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Notes to Pages 54–59

24. Miki Tomio, “Sakka no kotae” (Artist’s response), Bijutsu Techō, no. 258 (October 1965): 14. Reprinted as “Ankēto ni taisuru kaitō” (Response to a survey) in Miki Tomio Tokubetsuten, 130. 25. Miki, “Sakka no kotae,”14. 26. Sartre’s argument on being and essence can be found in Being and Nothingness (New York: Washington Square Press, 1993). Sartre later developed his program for an aesthetics of commitment in Situations II. 27. Kitazawa Noriaki, “Miki Tomio Mizumizushii shibutsu” (Miki Tomio’s youthful corpses), Bijutsu Techō, no. 592 (March 1988): 101. 28. Tanaka Shintarō, “Mimi no shūen” (The end of the ear), Bijutsu Techō, no. 433 (May 1978): 21. 29. The claim first appears in an interview with Okada Takahiko in 1976 and later is reproduced in the pamphlet for his last exhibition at the Tokyo gallery Green Collections in 1977. See Okada Takahiko, “Miki Tomio to kataru: Naze mimi nanoka” (A discussion with Miki Tomio: Why the ear?), Mizue 851 (February 1976): 86. 30. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 123. 31. I have chosen to render this “woman” and not “women” (in the plural, Frauen), as this refers to an allegorical figure. On womanas-sign, see Griselda Pollock’s foundational “Vision, Voice and Power,” in Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 2006), 25–69. 32. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 33. Ibid., 5. Emphasis original. 34. In the afterword to one issue, the editor’s note reads: “We are not bored we are lucid / we are not desperate we are full of vigour . . . we are the young Zarathustra.” “Henshū kōki,” Bara majutsu gakusetsu (Rose magic theory) 2, no. 1 (January 1928): n.p. 35. Such ideas have been critiqued by Michael Baxandall in Patterns of Intention (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Relating to the mobilization of artwork as evidence and its reduction in the genre of artistic biography, see especially Catherine Soussloff, The Absolute

Notes to Pages 59–75

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44. Georges Bataille, “Le Bas materialisme et la gnose,” in Œuvres complètes, 1:225. Originally printed in the journal Documents 2, no. 1 (1930): 7. 45. Bataille, “Le Bas materialisme et la gnose,” 225 [6]. 46. Tanaka, “Mimi no shūen,” 21. 47. Hariu, “Sengo bijutsu: ‘Gōri’ to ‘shinpi’ no kangeki,” 10. 48. Miki, “Gendai sakka no hatsugen,” 33. 49. Miki, “Sakka no kotae,” 14. 50. Emphasis original. Okada, “Miki Tomio to kataru—naze mimi nanoka,” 79. 51. Tatehata Akira, “Gaibu no mimi” (The outer ear), Miki Tomio Tokubetsuten, 11. 52. Quoted and annotated by Akatsuka Yukio, “Miki Tomio-ron” (On Miki Tomio), Gendai Bijutsu 8 (1966): 45. 53. Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 54. Bataille, “Le Bas materialisme et la gnose,” 225 [6]. 55. Fujieda Teruo, “Atorie hōmon” (Studio visit), Bijutsu Techō, no. 285 (July 1967): 97. 56. Hariu Ichiro [Hariu Ichirō], “Tomio Miki,” 34 Esposizione Biennale d’Arte Venezia: Tomio Miki, Kumi Sugai, Jiro Takamatsu, Katsuhiro Yamaguchi (Venice: n.p., 1968), n.p. 57. Miki Tomio, “Sakuhin to sakka no kotoba—Venechia Biennāre ni shuppin suru yonin no sakka” (Works and words by the artists: The four artists exhibiting at the Venice Biennale), Bijutsu Techō, no. 297 (May 1968): 13. 58. Minemura Toshiaki, “Miki Tomio-ron Dai goshō (renzai dai rokkai): ‘Suihei’ no ujō” (On Miki Tomio—Chapter 5: The emergence of “horizontality”), in Hikikomisen 2017 = Railroad Siding 2017, ed. Sakurai Hiroshi (Tokorozawa: Hikikomisen Jikkō Iinkai, 2017), n.p. 59. Tatehata refers to the obsessional qualities of Miki’s work in his contribution to the Shōtō Museum’s monograph. The category “obsessional art” is developed further in Alexandra Munroe’s landmark exhibition Scream Against the Sky, which grouped together the work of the Yomiuri Indépendant generation and the

theatrical underground, and even extended to Kusama Yayoi. Tatehata, “Gaibu no mimi,” 11; Alexandra Munroe and Yokohama Bijutsukan, Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994). 60. Ultimately Freud’s concern with “wild analysis” is that it hampers the correct identification of the psychic structures at play and impedes the cure by tampering with the analysand’s working-through of resistance within transference. Sigmund Freud, “‘Wild’ PsychoAnalysis” (1910), in Standard Edition, 11:225. 61. Okada Takahiko, “Zō—Daigokai Pari seinen bijutsuka biennāre-ten de nyūshō shita Miki Tomio” (Portrait: Miki Tomio, awardee at the fifth Paris Youth Biennial), SD = Supēsu Dezain 92 (December 1967): 102. 62. Miki, “Gendai sakka no hatsugen,” 33. 63. Hariu, “Sengo bijutsu: ‘Gōri’ to ‘shinpi’ no kangeki,” 8. 64. Laplanche, Vie et mort en psychanalyse, 48. 65. This is entirely in accordance with psychoanalytic accounts of masochism; see ibid. For a feminist revision of this question, see Kaja Silverman’s classic Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992). 66. Tanaka, “Mimi no shūen,” 20–21. 67. Minemura Toshiaki, “Miki Tomio-ron Dai yonshō –‘Danpō, bubun, zentai’ no mondaikei e” (On Miki Tomio—Chapter 4: Toward a problematization of “Fragment, part, and whole”), in Hikikomisen 2015 = Railroad Siding 2015, ed. Sakurai Hiroshi (Tokorozawa: Hikikomisen Jikkō Iinkai, 2015), 408–59. 68. Akita is a nom de plume assumed by Kant specialist Kikuchi Kenzō. Akita Yoshitoshi, “Miki Tomio no metamorufōze” (Miki Tomio’s metamorphosis), Bijutsu Techō, no. 539 (February 1985): 179. 69. Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny” (1919), in Standard Edition, 17:217–56. 70. Sigmund Freud introduces the concept in his later work. Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle.” 71. Laplanche and Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, 16.

Part 2 1. Natori Yōnosuke, “Atarashii shashin no tanjō” (Birth of a new photography), Asahi

Camera 45, no. 10 (October 1960): 147–49. For a discussion of the episode, see also Nakahara

Japanese Photography, ed. Anne Tucker (New Haven: Yale University Press in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2003), 210–25. 6. Despite its conservative undertone, Daniel Boorstin’s critique of contemporary image culture in The Image (1962) provided a basis for a problematization of kyozō, or “false image,” that proved influential among artists and critics. Daniel Boorstin, The Image, or What Happened to the American Dream (New York: Atheneum, 1962). 7. On photographic indexicality and the subversion of signs, see Rosalind Krauss, “Photography in the Service of Surrealism,” in Rosalind Krauss, Jane Livingstone, and Dawn Adès, L’Amour fou: Photography & Surrealism (New York: Abbeville Press in association with the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1985), 13–42. See also, especially, Georges Didi-Huberman, Ressemblance informe.

Chapter 3 1. Takiguchi Shūzō, “Hakushi no shūhen” (Margins of the blank page), Mizue 697 (March 1963): 69. 2. Takiguchi received the autograph from Marcel Duchamp, who licensed it for his use. Takiguchi originally planned to open what he called an obuje-ya—a shop selling obuje—for whose metallic signboard he would use Rrose Sélavy’s signature. The signboard is currently part of the Takiguchi Collection at the Toyama Prefectural Art Museum. Takiguchi Shūzō, “Rrose Sélavy kō,” in Maruseru Dushan goroku (Collected words of Marcel Duchamp) (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1968), 100. 3. The study appears to have reached a point of crisis in the years prior to Takiguchi’s passing; his wife, Ayako, recounts in her supplement to Takiguchi’s “Self-Chronology” that the couple had to build a prefabricated six-mat add-on in the garden area adjoining the original study in order to accommodate the increasing amount of stuff that took over the bureau as the critic prepared to publish his last monograph, dedicated to the painter Joan Miró. Takiguchi Ayako, “Nenpu hoki” (Supplement to the chronology), in Takiguchi Shūzō (Tokyo: Gendai Shichō-sha, 1985), 253.

4. Takiguchi Shūzō, “Hakushi no shūhen,” 69. 5. “Jōtōku o jointo to suru tagui no bunshō ga kakenai, isshū no shitsugo jōtai”; emphasis added. Okada Takahiko, “Shaba de mita Takiguchi Shūzō” (Takiguchi Shūzō seen in this world), in Kiki no kesshō—Gendai bijutsu oboegaki (The crystallization of crisis—notes on contemporary art) (Tokyo: Izara shobō, 1970), 305. 6. Mitsuda Yuri, “Takiguchi Shūzō: Zōkeiteki jikken no kiseki” (Takiguchi Shūzō: Traces of his visual experiments), in Takiguchi Shūzō no zōkeiteki jikken = Shuzo Takiguchi Plastic Experiments (Toyama-shi and Tokyo: Toyama Kenritsu Kindai Bijutsukan and Shibuya Kuritsu Shōtō Bijutsukan, 2001), 37. 7. Takiguchi Shūzō, “Monomono hikae” (Notes on things), Bijutsu Techō, no. 251 (April 1965): 5. 8. An even starker contrast is evident when considering François-René Roland’s photographic documentation of Takiguchi’s “first re-encounter” with André Breton in 1958, at the French writer’s fabled bureau in Paris. Compared to Breton’s orderly museum of ethnographic curiosities, Ōtsuji presented

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Notes to Pages 75–82

Atsuyuki, “Tōmatsu Shōmei—sono 50 nen no kiseki” (Tōmatsu Shōmei—a fifty-year-long trajectory) in Nihon Rettō Kuronikuru (Tokyo: Asahi Shumbun, 2000), 167–76. 2. Tōmatsu Shōmei, “Senryo” (Occupation), Asahi Camera 45, no. 1 (January 1960): 83. 3. Tōmatsu Shōmei, “Boku wa Natori-shi ni hanron suru” (I disagree with Mr. Natori), Asahi Camera 45, no. 11 (November 1960): 156–57. 4. Tōmatsu took part in the exhibition series Eyes of Ten organized by critic Fukushima Tatsuo between 1957 and 1959, which featured many of the names most closely associated with this turn, among them Hosoe Eikoh, Kawada Kikuji, and Narahara Ikkō, whom Tōmatsu joined in the short-lived photographic agency VIVO. 5. Nishii Kazuo, Shashin toiu media (The medium called photography) (Tokyo: Tokisha, 1982). See also Iizawa Kōtarō, “The Evolution of Postwar Photography,” in The History of

Notes to Pages 82–87

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Takiguchi’s desk as a cornucopia—a carefully crafted and abundant mess. 9. The collage’s back reads in English: “Three similar figures / three similar phenomena in France, Sweden, Japan.” The postcard is in the Takiguchi Archives at Keio University Art Center, Tokyo. 10. Of the Garbo-image, Roland Barthes noted, “C’est sans doute un admirable visageobjet. . . . La tentation du masque total . . . implique peut-être moins le thème du secret . . . que celui d’un archétype du visage humaine.” Roland Barthes, “Mythologies” (1957), in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993), 1:604–5. 11. Ōtsuji Kiyoji, “Natsukashii shosai” (That longed-for studio), in Ōtsuji Kiyoji no shashin: Deai to koraborēshon = Ōtsuji Kiyoji: Photographs as collaboration, ed. Mitsuda Yuri and Obinata Kin’ichi (Tokyo: Shibuya Kuritsu Shōtō Bijutsukan, 2007), 241. 12. Takiguchi, “Rrose Sélavy kō,”100. 13. Ōtsuji, “Natsukashii shosai,” 241. 14. On the 1970 Tokyo Biennale’s key role in reenvisioning Japanese artists’ relationship to the international avant-garde, see Reiko Tomii, “Toward Tokyo Biennale 1970: Shapes of the International in the Age of ‘International Contemporaneity,’” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 23 (2011): 191–210. 15. Originally published as the third installment of Ōtsuji Kiyoji’s Laboratory, a yearlong series prepared for the photography journal Asahi Camera. 16. Ōtsuji Kiyoji, “Ōtsuji Kiyoji Jikkenshitsu 3: Sore ga soko ni aru” (Ōtsuji Kiyoji’s laboratory, part 3: That is over there), in Ōtsuji Kiyoji no shashin, 120–25. 17. Ōtsuji Kiyoji, “Takiguchi Shūzō ate shishin shitagaki” (A draft letter to Takiguchi Shūzō), in Ōtsuji Kiyoji no shashin, 33–34. 18. Ōtsuji Kiyoji, “Takiguchi-san to shashin” (Takiguchi-san and photography), Gendaishi Techō 17, no. 11 (April 1974): 278–81. 19. Takiguchi did in fact publish on photographers and photography periodically in the postwar period. Indeed, he published enough material to fill up the sixth volume of his posthumously published collected works, which is dedicated to his discussions of the image. It is true, however, that these essays do not directly

engage the question of photographic ontology and seem to move progressively toward the realm of subjective appreciation. The essays appeared sporadically and were directed to a general readership, rather than being published in the specialized press. Takiguchi Shūzō, Eizōron, vol. 6 of Korekushon Takiguchi Shūzō (Tokyo: Mizuzu Shobō, 1991). 20. The episode in question—based on Takiguchi’s Kindheitserinnerung, his childhood recollection—will be discussed later in this chapter. 21. In a later essay, Ōtsuji suggests that Takiguchi had in fact recognized in photography that perfect analogon that could reflect a reality in excess of what is visible and capture what is inscribed over it—chōgenjitsu = le sur-réel. Otsuji Kiyoji, “Takiguchi Shūzō to shashin,” Tsukuba Daigaku Geijutsu Nenpō (1983): 36–37. André Breton’s reflections on photography can be found in iconic volumes such as Nadja (1928) and L’amour fou. On Surrealism’s relationship to photography, see especially Krauss, Livingstone, and Adès, Amour fou: Photography & Surrealism; see also Clément Cheroux, La subversion des images: Surréalisme, photographie, film (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2009). 22. Takiguchi Shūzō, “Buttai to shashin: Toku ni shururearizumu no obuje nitsuite” (Object and photography: Especially regarding the surrealist objet), facsimile in Takeba Jō, ed., Shūrurearisumu no shashin to hihyō: Korekushon Nihon no Shūrurearisumu (Collection surrealism in Japan) (Tokyo: Hon no Tomo-sha, 2001), 3:213. 23. Japan’s trajectory in those years was marked by the country’s escalating aggression in the Asian continent. 24. The Photo Times was published between March 1924 and December 1940. See Shirayama Mari, “Major Photography Magazines,” in Tucker, History of Japanese Photography, 380. 25. Along with the painter Fukuzawa Ichirō, Takiguchi was detained as part of an investigation on the relationship of Surrealism to international communism. One cannot help but note an element of tragic irony in this episode, for the Tokkō (Special Higher Police) seemed to grasp—perversely and reductively—that avant-gardism is indeed a political and aesthetic

32. Takiguchi, “Shashin to zōkeisei no saikentō,” 527. 33. Otsuji Kiyoji, “Zen’ei shashin nitsuite” (On avant-garde photography), Tsukue 5 (1954): 8. 34. Fukushima refers here to Domon’s call for a “second period of realism” (rearizumu no dainiki) during a lecture delivered at the Bridgestone Museum in 1954 (the text for the lecture was published in Asahi Camera in 1955). Fukushima Tatsuo “Naze ‘10 nin no me’ de atta ka” (Why was it called ‘Eyes of 10’?), in ‘10 nin no me’, VIVO no jidai (‘Eyes of Ten,’ the times of VIVO), vol. 2 of Fukushima Tatsuo Hyōronshū (Tokyo: Mado-sha, 2011), 18. 35. That is, even in the more avant-gardist iterations of calligraphic practice produced by the likes of Morita Shiryū or Teshigahara Sōfū and promoted in the postwar period in the journal Bokubi. 36. Despite his reticence to label these attempts “artwork,” Takiguchi was persuaded to introduce his visual experiments publicly in an exhibition venue in 1961. Pages were torn from various scrapbooks and exhibited on the walls of the Nantenshi gallery to predictably favorable acclaim. 37. Takiguchi, “Jihitsu nenpu,” 248. 38. Takiguchi Shūzō, “Watashi mo kaku” (I too paint), Geijutsu Shinchō 12, no. 5 (May 1961): 55. 39. Mitsuda Yuri suggests that Takiguchi’s wife, Ayako, may have introduced the poet to the technique. An accomplished painter who exhibited under her maiden name, Suzuki Ayako, before the war, she was a founding member of the Shinzōkei Bijutsu Kyōkai (New Plastic Arts Group), one of the first groups to show Surrealist paintings at public exhibitions; a few of her works are reproduced in Breton and Éluard’s Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme (1938). Tragically, her work was destroyed in the firebombing campaign that closed the war; she did not go back to making art, instead supporting her husband in his activities in the postwar period. Mitsuda, “Takiguchi Shūzō: Zōkeiteki jikken no kiseki,” 38. 40. Takiguchi translated an essay on this topic, which he published in the prewar art journal Āto. Andore Buruton (André Breton),

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Notes to Pages 87–95

position. Takiguchi Shūzō, “Jihitsu nenpu” (Self-chronology), Takiguchi Shūzō (Tokyo: Gendai Shichō-sha, 1985), 244. 26. Breton famously notes in L’amour fou (1938) the conditions of what he deems “convulsive beauty” by referring to a series of apparent contradictions, or pairs of opposites: “La beauté convulsive sera érotique-voilée, explosante fixe, magique circonstancielle ou ne sera pas.” He illustrates this notion by including Man Ray’s photograph of a Spanish dancer kicking up her skirt: her contours are indefinite, and she has become an objet. Breton, L’amour fou, in Œuvres complètes, 2:687. 27. Emphasized in the original. Takiguchi, “Buttai to shashin,” 213. 28. Observations on the sympathetic magic of the photograph are ubiquitous in early commentary on photography. André Bazin picks up this tradition in “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” the essay that serves as introduction to his classic book Qu’est-ce que le cinéma (What is cinema?), in which he discusses in a note the legendary impression Christ left on the shroud in which he was buried as a means of explaining the photographic image’s indexicality, or what he calls its transfer of reality through reproduction: “Signalons seulement que le Saint Suaire de Turin réalise la synthèse de la relique et de la photographie.” André Bazin, “Ontologie de l’image photographique” (1945), in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1958), 14n1. More recently, art historian and critic Kaja Silverman has focused on photographic indexicality in the first volume of her revisionist history of photography, The Miracle of Analogy, or, The History of Photography (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015). 29. Takiguchi, “Buttai to shashin,” 213. 30. Takiguchi reviewed Cocteau’s films (including Le sang d’un poète) in a 1949 essay originally published in the journal Fotogurafi. Takiguchi Shūzō, “Jan Kokutō,” in Eizōron. 31. Emphasis added. “Painting” and “Picture” appear in English in the original. Takiguchi Shūzō, “Shashin to zōkeisei no saikentō” (A reconsideration of photography and plasticity) (1940), facsimile in Takeba, Shūrurearisumu no shashin to hihyō, 3:527.

Notes to Pages 96–106

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“Taishō no yosō sarenai dekarukomanī nitsuite,” Āto 15 (1936[?]): 6. Mitsuda reports that Takiguchi experimented with the technique in the prewar period; one of these décalcomanies is reproduced as the cover for the magazine Mizue’s special issue on international surrealism (vols. 387–88, May 1937). Mitsuda, “Takiguchi Shūzō: Zōkeiteki jikken no kiseki,” 24. 41. Takiguchi Shūzō, “Kōjo” (Opening words, 1971), in Daigokai Omāju Takiguchi Shūzō-ten–Takiguchi Shūzō (The Fifth Homage Takiguchi Shūzō exhibition) (Tokyo: Satani Garō, 1985), 53. 42. Takiguchi, “Watashi mo kaku,” 56. 43. Takiguchi Shūzō, “Eizōnin no kotoba,” Bijutsu Techō, no. 203 (April 1962): 2. 44. By contrast, see art critic Hariu Ichirō’s pointed observations on the proliferation of moving and still image-based exhibitions during Expo ’70, which he connected to a progressive dematerialization of the commodity form under late capitalism. Hariu Ichirō, “Expo ’70 as the Ruins of Culture” (1970), Review of Japanese Culture and Society 23 (December 2011): 44–56. 45. In Book 7 of The Republic, Plato famously analogizes the sensible world to shadows cast by light. Humans can only know the world through shadows, and not the essence of things, for looking straight at the source of light—the sun; in other words, truth—would render them blind. It is only the acquisition of

understanding, or logos, that can allow them to see truth. Takiguchi, by contrast, appears much more concerned with the logic of the image itself as shadow. G. R. F. Ferrari, ed. Plato: “The Republic,” trans. Tom Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 220–27. 46. Takiguchi thought this episode was sufficiently significant to select it for inclusion in his “Self-Chronology.” Takiguchi, “Jihitsu nenpu,” 238. 47. Takiguchi, “Eizōnin no kotoba,” 2. 48. Kawada took part in all three versions of Fukushima’s foundational Eyes of 10 exhibition, as well as the landmark show NON. Together with Hosoe Eikoh, Tōmatsu Shōmei, Narahara Ikkō, and Satō Akira, he formed the short-lived independent photographic agency VIVO. “Ryakunenpu” (Abridged chronology), in Kawada Kikuji: Sekai gekijō = Kikuji Kawada: Theatrum Mundi (Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 2003), 231–33. 49. Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, “Kabe no shimi to hyumanitī no umeki: Shashinshū ‘Chizu’” (The wall’s stains and humanity’s groan: On the photobook “The Map”), in Kawada Kikuji: Sekai gekijō, 219. Originally published in SD = Supēsu Dezain (December 1965), 126–28. 50. Ōe Kenzaburō, “MAP,” in Chizu (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppansha, 1965), n.p. 51. Shibusawa, “Kabe no shimi to hyumanitī no umeki,” 219. 52. Takiguchi, “Eizōnin no kotoba,” 3.

Chapter 4 1. That is to say, baroque in the Deleuzian sense: “The Baroque does not refer to an essence; rather it is an operational function or characteristic [une fonction opératoire ou trait]. . . . The characteristic feature of the Baroque is the fold that folds to the infinite.” This definition is key to this chapter’s argument: Barakei similarly foregrounds fluidity as form, in its endless folding and unfolding of the subject-object dichotomy. Gilles Deleuze, Le pli, 5. 2. It is not a coincidence that in 1961, the year that Hosoe began shooting Barakei, Mishima published a short novel titled Star, which condenses some of the novelist’s ideas about celebrity.

3. Catherine M. Soussloff, The Absolute Artist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 24. 4. Mishima Yukio, “Hosoe Eikoh josetsu” (Prologue for Hosoe Eikoh), in Hosoe Eikoh no Shashin 1950–2000 = Eikoh Hosoe: Photographs 1950–2000 (Tokyo: Kyōdō and Yamagata Museum of Art, 2002), 237. 5. The title is a neologism that has been rendered in English editions as “Killed by roses” and “Ordeal by roses.” A more accurate translation would be “Punishment by roses”— however, this is rather inconsequential, for the nature of the scenes portrayed is never made explicit.

10. Mitsuda Yuri, “Shashin no arika—Hosoe Eikoh orijinaru purinto to minigurafu” (Photography’s place—Hosoe Eikoh’s original prints and minigraphs), in Hosoe Eikoh no Shashin, 227–31. 11. Hosoe, “Barakei seisaku nōto,” 240. 12. The book is organized in five chapters: “Prelude,” “A Citizen’s Everyday Life,” “The Laughing Clock, Or The Careless Witness,” “Various Capital Sins” (Samazamana Tokusei), and “Punishment by Roses” (Barakei). For each of these, as well as specific scenes, Mishima chose epigraphs from texts, including the Code of Manu and the Upanishads, that set the work in relation to Mishima’s interest in sacred law, impurity, expiation, and cyclical time. 13. Hosoe had met Hijikata through the latter’s wife, the dancer Motofuji Akiko. Motofuji Akiko, Hijikata Tatsumi to tomoni (My life with Hijikata Tatsumi) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1990). 14. Fukushima Tatsuo, “Hosoe Eikoh no sōzōryoku” (Hosoe Eikoh’s creativity), in Hosoe Eikoh no Shashin, 14. 15. Kawakami Yōko, Mishima Yukio– Hyōmen no shisō (Mishima Yukio—a philosophy of surface) (Tokyo: Suiseisha, 2013). 16. Hosoe, “Sutētomento 2000” (Statement 2000), in Hosoe Eikoh no Shashin, 8. 17. “All artists depict themselves.” Frank Zöllner has associated the notion of automimesis to the emergence of a discourse on maniera or individual style in sixteenth-century Italy. Frank Zöllner, “‘Ogni Pittore Dipinge Sé’: Leonardo Da Vinci and Automimesis,” in Künstler über sich in seinem Werk: Internationales Symposium der Bibliotheca Herziana, Rom, ed. Matthias Winner (Weinheim: VCH Acta Humaniora, 1992), 137–60. 18. Kawakami, Mishima Yukio, 30–31. 19. Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask, trans. Meredith Weatherby (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1994), 40–41. The original has been reprinted as Mishima Yukio, “Kamen no kokuhaku,” in Mishima Yukio zenshū: Ketteiban (Complete works of Mishima Yukio: Definitive edition) (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2000), 1: 173–364. 20. “Je vis pour l’amour de moi, pour l’amour du moi.” Emphasis added. Laplanche, Vie et mort en psychanalyse, 129.

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Notes to Pages 106–111

6. Previously, Hosoe had worked with Hijikata and his dance group in his first major investigation of nude portraiture, which later he published as the photobook Otoko to onna (Man and woman; 1960). Mishima may first have encountered Hosoe’s photographs reproduced in the program for a 1960 performance of Hijikata’s 260 Dance Experience Society (260 Dansu ekusuperiensu no kai), although it is also possible that he may have seen the photographer’s individual show held at the Konishiroku Gallery in Ginza later that year. Mishima first met Hijikata in 1959, at the performance of a work based on Mishima’s Kinjiki (Forbidden colors, 1951), a novel notorious for its portrayal of the homosexual demimonde of Tokyo under the Occupation. See Mitsuda Yuri, “Nenpu” (Chronology) in Hosoe Eikoh no Shashin 1950– 2000, 250–58; and Morishita Takashi, “Hijikata Tatsumi nenpū” (Hijikata Tatsumi chronology), in Kawasaki-shi Okamoto Tarō Bijutsukan and Keiō Gijuku Daigaku Āto Sentā, Hijikata Tatsumi no butō—nikutai no shururearizumu, shintai no ontorojī = Tatsumi Hijikata’s Butoh: Surrealism of the Flesh, Ontology of the “Body” (Tokyo: Keiō Gijuku Daigaku Shuppankai, 2004), 174–86. 7. Hosoe claims that he was not acquainted with the author before this project and thus was extremely surprised when he received a phone call from the publisher Kōdansha conveying to him Mishima’s request. Hosoe Eikoh, “Barakei seisaku nōto” (Notes on Barakei’s production), in Hosoe Eikoh no Shashin, 240. 8. This distinction is typically used in Ryūichi Kaneko et al., Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ’70s (New York: Aperture, 2009). 9. One of postwar Japan’s foremost graphic designers, Sugiura had been involved in a series of high-profile projects. In addition to his groundbreaking work for architectural magazines of this period, he participated in the World Design Conference of 1960 and the development of the visual identity for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. After his collaboration with Hosoe, Sugiura undertook the layout of another one of the most iconic photobooks of the decade: Kawada Kikuji’s The Map (1965), discussed in chapter 3.

Notes to Pages 111–115

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21. An idea Freud develops, significantly enough, in his study of Leonardo da Vinci. Sigmund Freud, “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood” (1910), in Standard Edition, 11: 57–137. An overview of the genesis of narcissism in psychoanalysis can be found in Laplanche and Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, 261–63. See especially Jean Laplanche, “Le moi et le narcissisme,” in Vie et mort en psychanalyse, 103–29. 22. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism—An Introduction” (1914), in Standard Edition, 14:73. 23. Jean Laplanche remarked that Lacan’s parable was often reduced (it still is!) to a child’s actual encounter with a mirror. This entirely disregards Lacan’s argument concerning the place of mimesis in individuation. 24. Laplanche noted the fundamental role of narcissistic impulses in the self-preservation of individuals. Departing somewhat from his teacher Jacques Lacan’s emphasis on fantasy, Laplanche finds in Freud’s schema two conceptions of self (moi) derived from the surface that is the body’s skin: a biological, living individual and a metaphoric entity or projection. These are imbricated in a complex manner. Narcissism accounts for how the individual manages to process the intromission of the “real” within the psychic apparatus through the imaginary, which facilitates the reception and inscription of external stimuli as partly phantasmatic. Laplanche, Vie et mort en psychanalyse, 128. 25. “Ainsi cette discordance primordiale entre le Moi et l’être serait la note fondamentale qui irait retentir en toute une gamme harmonique à travers les phases de l’histoire psychique dont la fonction serait de la résoudre en la développant. Toute résolution de cette discordance par une coïncidence illusoire de la réalité avec l’idéal résonnerait jusqu’aux profondeurs du noeud imaginaire de l’agression suicidaire narcissique.” Lacan, “Propos sur la causalité psychique,” in Écrits, 187. 26. Mishima Yukio, “Taiyō to tetsu” (Sun and steel), in Mishima Yukio zenshū: Ketteiban (Complete works of Mishima Yukio: Definitive edition) (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2003), 33:506. 27. In 1968, Mishima replayed the part of Sebastian in a photo series taken by Shinoyama Kishin for Shibusawa Tatsuhiko’s underground

magazine Blood and Roses (Chi to bara); moreover, that same year, and inspired by D’Annunzio’s framing of the martyrdom scene, he wrote a new version of a nineteenth-century Kabuki play titled Chinsetsu yumi harizuki, which was first performed in November 1969. 28. During the séance Kawasaki channels an excoriating critique of postwar Japanese society: the angry spirits decry a peace that subjects Japan to colonialism, a postwar humanism whose false virtuosity hides the greed of the society of mass consumption and whose pollution disregards the sanctity of the land. The choir concludes with the famous rhetorical question, “Why did His Majesty have to become human?” (Kakaru hini / nadote sumerogi wa hito to naritamaishi). The conditions for Japan’s postwar decay are predicated on a formerly divine emperor (sumerogi) having become human—a reference to Hirohito’s radio address in the spring of 1946, in which he renounced the divinity of his position. Mishima Yukio, “Eirei no koe” (Voices of heroic spirits), in Mishima Yukio zenshū: Ketteiban (Complete works of Mishima Yukio: Definitive edition) (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2002), 20:465, 472. 29. The first two works published by Mishima were the novella Yūkoku (Patriotism; completed in October 1960 and published in 1961) and the play Tōka no kiku (The chrysanthemum of the tenth day; first performed in 1961). 30. The incident and its ramifications are discussed extensively in Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: Harper Collins, 2000). See also Watanabe Naomi, Fukei bungaku-ron josetsu (An introduction to lèse-majesté in literature) (Tokyo: Ōta Shuppan, 1999). 31. Mishima, “Eirei no koe,” 481. 32. Chigusa Kimura-Steven, Mishima Yukio to teroru no rinri (Mishima Yukio and the ethics of terror) (Tokyo: Sakuhinsha, 2005). 33. Gavin Walker, “The Double Scission of Mishima Yukio: Limits and Anxieties in the Autofictional Machine,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 18, no. 1 (2010): 150. 34. Ibid. 35. See Keith Vincent’s important essay on the conflation of sexual and political perversion

In her classic essay on the “Sickness of Mourning” psychoanalyst Maria Torok argues for a distinction between incorporation and introjection, two easily confused concepts. Whereas in the first, a subject relies on an external object in order to compensate for a loss, introjection relates to a process of growth and affirmation of the ego. “Introjection, according to Ferenczi, reserves the object . . . a role as mediator with regards to the unconscious. Operating to and fro between ‘the narcissistic and the objectal,’ between autoerotism and heteroerotism, introjection transforms the incitement of the instincts into desire and its phantasms and, in such way, enables them to receive a name and belonging and to take part in the objectal game.” Maria Torok, “Maladie du deuil et fantasme du cadavre exquis,” in Abraham and Torok, Écorce et le noyau, 236. 47. On the central role of the emperor as mythical figure, see, for example, his “Defense of Culture” (1967). Mishima Yukio, “Bunka bōeiron” (Defense of culture), in Mishima Yukio Zenshū: Ketteiban (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 2003) 35: 15–51. Mishima further explicated this ideal version of the emperor as absolute Other in a heated debate with the radical student activists of the Zenkyōtō who occupied Tokyo University in 1969. Mishima Yukio and Tōdai Zenkyōtō, Bi to kyōdōtai to Tōdai Tōsō (Beauty and community, and the Tokyo University protests) (Tokyo: Kadokawa Bunkō, 2006). 48. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “L’objet perdu—moi,” in Abraham and Torok, Écorce et le noyau, 295–317. 49. Maria Torok notes that such a phantasmatic object allows the melancholic subject to leave her post-traumatic psychic topography intact—hence the injunction against speaking its name. Maria Torok, “Maladie du deuil et fantasme du cadavre exquis,” 229–51 . 50. Jean-Luc Nancy, Le regard du portrait (Paris: Galilée, 2006), 74. 51. I have rendered manqué as “failed” in order to highlight its connection to the psychoanalytic notion of acte manqué, or parapraxis—i.e., the Freudian slip. However, the expression un rendez-vous manqué could also be translated as “a missed encounter.” With its associations to belatedness and return, the

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as “homofascism” in postwar Japan. Keith Vincent (Kīsu Vinsento), “Mishima Yukio to Ōe Kenzaburō ni okeru homofashizumu to sono fuman” (Homofascism and its discontents in the work of Mishima Yukio and Ōe Kenzaburō), Hihyō Kūkan (The critical space) 2, no. 16 (1998): 129–54. 36. Mishima, “Hosoe Eikoh josetsu,” 237. 37. Ibid. 38. Mitsuda Yuri notes that Hosoe came into contact with the Democratic Arts Association (Demokurāto Bijutsu Kyōkai)—a postwar art group led by the visionary painter and photographer Ei-Q—when he was only nineteen years old. His experience with the Demokurāto group informed his approach to photography and his identity as an artist, as seen in his distance from the objectivist agenda advanced by prominent figures in photojournalism, such as Domon Ken. Mitsuda Yuri, “Shashin no arika,” 227. 39. Etō claimed Mishima’s words “feel cold, like brick cladding” and that his was a “narcissistic writing” (narushishizumu no buntai) that was closed off to the world. Cited in Kawakami, Mishima Yukio, 15–18. 40. Freud, “On Narcissism,” 100–2. 41. “Stupid boy, chasing after a fleeting image! What you seek is nowhere; what you love once you turn shall vanish.” Note that “image” (simulacrum) could also be rendered “ghost.” Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.430–31. 42. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 237–58. 43. Abraham and Torok, “Deuil ou mélancolie,” 259–75. 44. Elsewhere I have noted that Mishima, while aware of psychoanalytic theory, appeared to equivocate in his understanding of Freud’s Todestrieb, reducing it to its expression as deathwish. At the core of this misreading is again the difference between manifest and latent content. Ignacio Adriasola, “Modernity and Its Doubles: Uncanny Spaces of Modern Japan,” October 151 (Winter 2015): 108–27. 45. Further, we must note here Mishima’s involvement in the creation of a film version of his novella Patriotism—for which he served as producer, scriptwriter, and lead actor. 46. In its persistent obsession with loss, Barakei comes closest to the notion of introjection.

“missed encounter” further highlights the ghostly potential of the portrait through reference to deferral and returning temporality.

Notes to Pages 121–132

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Part 3 1. Nakahara Yūsuke, Fuzai no heya = Room in Alibi (Tokyo: Naika Gallery, 2013), n.p. 2. Nakahara Yūsuke, Nansensu no bigaku (The aesthetics of nansensu) (Tokyo: Sansaisha, 1962), 213–14. 3. Ibid., 221–22.

Chapter 5 1. Published in the photobook of the same name in 1975. 2. Notably, Hubert Damisch’s critical reevaluation of the idea of symbolic form in Panofsky’s classical study on the Origins of Perspective: Hubert Damisch, L’origine de la perspective (Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 1987). Some of these ideas had been already explored in Merleau-Ponty’s L’œil et l’ésprit, which was translated into Japanese in 1964: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’œil et l’esprit (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1964). 3. “Grandissima opera del pittore è l’istoria.” Leon Battista Alberti, Della pittura (Milan: Società tipografica de’classici italiani, 1804), 50. There is a question surrounding the meaning of istoria here, compounded by the existence of diverging versions and translations of the text—is it merely a question of subjectmatter, or an allusion to something else altogether? In his 1972 translation, for example, Cecil Grayson renders the Latin term “historia” the painting’s “story”; Rocco Sinisgalli, in contrast, leaves the term historia in italics; he thus lends support to the idea that historia/istoria possibly points to the notion of history itself. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Rocco Sinisgalli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 4. Coinciding with the redrawn borders of post-Occupation Japan. Unlike the Ryūkyū islands, Amami was devolved in 1952; Okinawa was only restored to Japanese sovereignty in 1972. 5. “‘Japan’—that general condition of our reality” (‘Nihon’—wareware no genjitsu no sōtai). Fukushima Tatsuo, “Tōmatsu



52. Nancy, Le regard du portrait, 85.

4. See, for instance, Suzuki Katsuo, “Fuzai no ruikeigaku—Nihon ni okeru gainentekina geijutsu no keifu (1)” (The typology of absence: The lineage of concept-based art in Japan [1]), Tōkyō Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan Kenkyū Kiyō = Bulletin of the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo 18 (2014): 64–81. Shōmei,” Fukushima Tatsuo shashin hyōronshū (Fukushima Tatsuo collected photographic criticism) (Tokyo: Madosha, 2012), 3:12. 6. Tōmatsu published several photographs of such combines between 1960 and 1963. 7. These developments added on to the post-Occupation reality of US bases in Japan that permanently rendered significant areas of the coast off-limits. Particularly poignant was (and still is) the case of Okinawa; the cover of Tōmatsu’s famous photobook Okinawa, Okinawa, Okinawa (1969) states relentlessly, “It is not that there are bases in Okinawa: Okinawa is itself a base.” Tōmatsu Shōmei, Okinawa, Okinawa, Okinawa (Tokyo: Shaken, 1969). 8. Critics like Fukushima remarked upon Tōmatsu’s investment in the sea and its relationship to national allegory; to current commentators it remains a fairly compelling argument. For example, in an essay accompanying her foundational survey of Tōmatsu’s photographic work, curator Sandra Phillips writes, “Japan’s identity is inseparable from its status as an island nation—one reliant on the sea for both nourishment and commerce—and thus the journey that Tōmatsu set for himself amounts to an investigation of the country itself.” Sandra Phillips, “Currents in Photography in Postwar Japan,” in Tōmatsu Shōmei et al., Shomei Tomatsu: Skin of the Nation (New Haven: Yale University Press in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 42. See also Imafuku Ryūta, “Mizu no junrei—Tōmatsu Shōmei o meguru umi” (A pilgrimage on water—the sea around Tōmatsu

Shōmei), Camera Mainichi 13, no. 8 (August 1966): 14. 14. Fukushima quoted in Taki, “Eizō no genten,” 108. 15. Fukushima had a long-standing association with the photographer, having championed his work as early as the mid-1950s. Tōmatsu later participated in Eyes of Ten (1957–59) and NON (1962), exhibitions that Fukushima organized at the Konishiroku Gallery, which heralded a new approach to photography beyond neo-objectivism. 16. Taki, “Eizō no genten,” 109. 17. Ibid., 112. 18. Taki here appears to draw directly from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. Compare this passage, for example, with the discussion of perception and consciousness of the world in Le visible et l’invisible (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2001), 69–71. 19. Dōgai, “‘Warera o meguru umi’ no ai o kataru,” 14. 20. Tōmatsu Shōmei, “Zahyōten P o motomete” (In search of point P), Camera Mainichi (December 1966): 193. 21. Taki, “Eizō no genten,” 108. 22. Fukushima Tatsuo, “Shizen, fūkei, mufūkei” (Nature, landscape, nonlandscape), in Fukushima Tatsuo hyōronshū (Fukushima Tatsuo collected photographic criticism). (Tokyo: Madosha, 2011), 2:210. 23. My emphasis. Tōmatsu Shōmei, “Zahyōten P o motomete,” Camera Mainichi (December 1966): 193. 24. Contrasting the ambivalence of The Sea Around Us with Hamaya Hiroshi’s photobook Nihon Rettō (Landscape of Japan; 1964), Taki identifies in the latter an absolute objective gaze. Taki relates such objectivism to a desire for certainty in the aftermath of the failure of the Anpo struggle. 25. Tōmatsu Shōmei, “Suiheisen” (Horizon line) Camera Mainichi (December 1966): 47. 26. Arthur Rimbaud, “L’Éternité,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. André Guyaux and Aurélia Cervoni (Paris: Gallimard Éditions 2009), 215. 27. “Là pas d’éspérance. Nul orietur,” in Œuvres complètes. The use of orietur, Latin for “It shall rise,” may well be a reference to Isaiah 58:10, “Orietur in tenebris lux tua.”

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Shōmei), Gendai Shisō 41, no. 6 (May 2013): 99–111. 9. Most recently, Jonathan Reynolds has relied on the notion of national allegory to address Tōmatsu’s oeuvre in Allegories of Time and Space (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015); the theme also serves as backbone to the abovementioned exhibition Skin of the Nation (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2004) and the landmark survey Nippon Rettō Kuronikuru (Chronicle of the Japanese archipelago) (Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 1999). 10. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 57–85. 11. I Am a King was serialized from July to December 1964 in the New Left magazine Gendai no me. (This left-leaning general-interest magazine, published monthly by Gendai hyōronsha through 1983, is different from the similarly titled Gendai no me still published by the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.) Tōmatsu later included the series in a selection of his work from the 1960s as part of the photobook I Am a King (Tokyo: Shashin hyōronsha, 1972). See especially Tōmatsu Shōmei, Nakahara Atsuyuki, Sumiyo Mitsuhashi, Nippon Rettō kuronikuru—Tōmatsu Shōmei no 50nen = TRACES—50 Years of Tomatsu’s Works (Toyohashi and Tokyo: Toyohashi Bijutsu Hakubutsukan and Asahi Shinbunsha, 2000), 208. See also Leo Rubinfein, “Shomei Tomatsu: Skin of the Nation” in Tōmatsu Shōmei et al., Shomei Tomatsu: Skin of the Nation, 32n75. 12. Taki Kōji, “Eizō no genten: Tōmatsu Shōmei ‘Warera o meguru umi’ no bigaku” (Origins of the image: The aesthetics of Tōmatsu Shōmei’s “The Sea Around Us”), Dezain Hihyō 2 (March 1967): 106. 13. Addressing this experiment as a whole for the first time, Tōmatsu claimed, “To be honest, it’s been only upon completing this eighth shoot that I finally feel as if I were done with the prologue and now were standing at the start line.” Dōgai Kyōko, “‘Warera o meguru umi’ no ai o kataru—Tōmatsu Shōmei-shi” (Discussing love in “The Sea Around Us”—Tōmatsu

Notes to Pages 137–140

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28. Fukushima, “Shizen, fūkei, mufūkei,” 210. 29. Cited in ibid. 30. A similar point is raised by art historian Ann Bermingham, who has investigated the landscape painting tradition in Britain and its relationship to the enclosure movement and the beginnings of the industrial revolution. Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 31. Domon Ken, de facto leader of the neo-objectivist movement in postwar photography, ran a monthly column in the journal Camera in which he critiqued amateur submissions. On Domon and his role as promoter of photographic realism, see especially Julia Adeney Thomas, “Power Made Visible: Photography and Postwar Japan’s Elusive Reality,” Journal of Asian Studies 67, no. 2 (May 2008): 365–94. 32. See, for example, Jonathan Reynolds’s discussion of Hamaya Hiroshi’s depictions of snow country in Allegories of Time and Space, 32–84. Reynolds detects in Hamaya a type of primitivizing thrust present in the depiction of the countryside as originary past. It is important to note, as well, that agrarianism is a deeply contradictory discourse that has served to justify disparate political positions since the Meiji period. Agrarianist theories of social relations, in particular the invocation of the village as social type, became a cornerstone of prewar politics, serving as a cipher for the cohesion of national community and a condensation of anxieties surrounding urbanization. Further, a particular strand also served to justify Japanese imperialism, through the notion of a pan-Asian culture of rice cultivation (inasaku). In the postwar period, such discourse served to ground the notion of an autonomous development, continuity, and homogeneity of the Japanese people since prehistoric times, which in turn informed a discourse of “ethnic independence” opposed to US imperialism. On agrarianism, see especially Carol Gluck, Japan’s Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). On village society as origin, see Marilyn Ivy, Discourses of the Vanishing: Modernity, Phantasms, Japan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

33. Kari Shepherdson-Scott, for example, has discussed rural landscapes as a trope in colonial photography in Manchuria and its subversion at the hand of modernist photographers. Kari Shepherdson-Scott, “Fuchigami Hakuyō’s Evening Sun: Manchuria, Memory, and the Aesthetic Abstraction of War,” in Art and War in Japan and Its Empire, 1931–1960 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 275–91. 34. Some of Matsuda’s essays were originally published in the journal Camera Mainichi and accompanied by photographs taken by Tōmatsu. 35. Yuriko Furuhata, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). 36. Nakahira Takuma, “Miburi toshite no eizō—bure boke wa yōshiki dewa nakatta” (The image as gesture—bure boke was not a style), in Mitsuzukeru hate ni hi ga . . . : Hihyō shūsei 1965–1977 (There is fire on the horizon . . . : Collected criticism, 1965–1977) (Tokyo: Oshirisu, 2007), 385–93. A discussion of Nakahira’s engagement of landscape as a notion can be found in Franz Prichard, Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). 37. Critic Bernhard Siegert in turn associates the grid with Heidegger’s Gestellen, or enframing: the operation essential to the formation of “a world of objects imagined by a subject.” Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 38. Nakahira Takuma, “Fūkei eno hanran— mitsuzukeru hate ni hi ga” (The revolt against landscape—there is fire on the horizon], in Mitsuzukeru hate ni hi ga, 28. 39. Ibid., 29. 40. Takanashi later republished “Tōkyō-jin” as a discrete insert within the photobook Toshi e (Toward the city) (Tokyo: Izara Shobō, 1974). The essay became an important precedent for his later activities with the Provoke group and his continued engagement of the idea of the city thereafter. Takanashi Yutaka, “Tōkyō-jin,” Camera Mainichi 13, no. 1 (January 1966): 18–26.

taken up by some painters; however, the term is used exclusively in relation to monochrome ink works in the continental style (kara-e). Before the introduction of the fine arts system, the terminology used to refer to spatial representation differed according to the origin, style, format, and function of the works. Sōami, Kundaikan sōchōki (Tokyo: Teishitsu Hakubutsukan, 1932); Kanō Eino and Hiyama Yoshichika, Honchō gashi (Tokyo: Kokusho kankōkai, 1974). On the development of a premodern systematization of “painting” at the hands of the Kanō school, see Yukio Lippit, Paintings of the Realm (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012). 49. In this regard, Usami is correct. As categories of spatial representation, both “landscape painting” and “mountain and water pictures” were terms introduced in the Meiji period as part of a broader repertory of practices and concepts pertaining to the systematization and institutionalization of the fine arts framework. 50. Usami lays the blame on Ernest Fenollosa. A foreign specialist at the service of the Meiji government, Fenollosa taught aesthetics at Tokyo Imperial University and became an important interlocutor for Japanese scholars and bureaucrats, such as Okakura Tenshin, who were laying the groundwork for the institutionalization of fine arts discourse. He later became the first curator of East Asian art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 51. Usami, “‘Sansuiga’ ni zetsubō o miru,” 134. 52. Karatani pointedly noted in the afterword to the 1993 English translation of this essay that such a “discovery of landscape” coincides with the colonization of Hokkaidō. Karatani Kōjin, “The Discovery of Landscape,” in Origins of Modern Japanese Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 22. 53. A totality produced by the coherence of the frame; the epigraph reads in Italian: “La prima cosa nel dipingere una superficie, io vi disegno un quadrangolo, di angoli retti grande quanto a me piace, il quale mi serve per un’ aperta finestra dalla quale si abbia a veder l’istoria.” Leon Battista Alberti, Della Pittura, 28. 54. Isozaki Arata, “Shinpan eno maegaki” (Foreword to the new edition), Kenchiku no kaitai: 1968 nen no kenchiku jōkyō (The

201

Notes to Pages 140–146

41. Mitsuda Yuri, Takamatsu Jirō kotoba to mono: Nihon no gendai bijutsu 1961–72 (Takamatsu Jirō, words and things: Contemporary art in Japan, 1961–72) (Tokyo: Suiseisha, 2011). 42. For a problematization of “tricky art” in relation to the question of the image, see, for example, Ono Masaharu, “‘Torikkusu ando vijon nusumareta me’ ten nitsuite” (About the exhibition ‘Tricks and vision—the stolen eye’), in Takamatsu Jirō o yomu (Reading Takamatsu Jirō) (Tokyo: Suiseisha, 2014), 75–93. 43. On the anti-Expo (hanpaku) movement, see, for example, Yasufumi Nakamori, “Criticism of Expo ’70 in Print: Journals Ken, Bijutsu Techō, and Dezain Hihyō,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society 23 (2011): 132–44. 44. Hayashi Michio, Matsuura Hisao, and Okazaki Kanjirō, “Usami Keiji Intābyū,” Art Trace Press 2 (January 2013): 106–9. 45. For a comprehensive discussion of the student movement and the problem of “student violence” (in Japanese gebaruto, from the German Gewalt), see especially William Marotti, “Japan 1968: The Performance of Violence and the Theater of Protest,” American Historical Review 114, no. 1 (February 2009): 97–135. 46. “Une fiction qui n’a rien de spéculaire, ni de passif, mais qui est constitutive, au registre de la représentation, de l’ordre et du sens des choses, et d’abord, du ‘monde des objets.’” Damisch, Origine de la perspective, 26. 47. Usami Keiji, “‘Sansuiga’ ni zetsubō o miru” (Finding despair in “landscape”), Gendai shisō 5, no. 5 (May 1977): 126–34. 48. The history of spatial representation in the Japanese archipelago is infinitely more complex than what Usami’s rather schematic distinction between premodern and modern approaches to representation suggests. While references to traditional “views” are present both in the breakdown of subject matter in the prologue to Kanō Einō’s Honchō gashi (History of painting of the realm, 1679) and the Muromachi period Kundaikan sōchōki—a connoisseurial manual compiled by the San’ami painters employed at the service of the Ashikaga Shogun at the turn of the sixteenth century—neither of them offer a working definition of what this categorization might mean. The Ashikaga manual does indeed list sansui among the subjects

deconstruction of architecture: Architecture’s situation in 1968) (Tokyo: Kajima Shuppan, 1997), i–viii.

Notes to Pages 146–150

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Chapter 6 1. Arakawa produced a number of other works containing this same sentence, including Still Life (1967), a drawing in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum; a print included in Takiguchi’s edition of the Collected Words of Marcel Duchamp (Maruseru Dushan goroku, 1968); and another painting that later made it into Arakawa and Gins’s landmark collaborative book, Mechanismus der Bedeutung (Werk im Entstehen: 1963–1971) (The mechanism of meaning [Work in progress: 1963–1971]) (München: F. Bruckmann KG, 1971). Madeline Gins later wrote of the line: “A prismatic line has split open. Above it are words articulating the cracked-out-into-the-open destiny of line. All this breaks at the center and straight across and through a horizontally oriented rectangle, dividing it in half. . . . The line envelops the area it transverses then stretches out within that again.” Madeline Gins, Helen Keller or Arakawa (New York: East-West Cultural Studies), 156. 2. Photographic documentation confirms that Arakawa’s Landscape was reworked after completion. At some point, the artist retouched sections of the blank ground, adding highlights on some of the stains and applying heavy impasto on the lower right quadrant; he further added an off-white line that traverses the center of the prismatic line. Intriguingly, the label on the color slide’s sleeve has been written over: the title is scratched out and now reads “Still Life.” At a later date, Landscape underwent one further significant transformation: Arakawa added, with graphite, a grid on the surface of the canvas. 3. Madeline Gins, “Arakawa: From Diagram to Model,” in Arakawa Shūsaku-ten: Kaiga nitsuite no kotoba to imēji (Arakawa Shūsaku exhibition: Words and images about painting) (Tokyo: Seibu Bijutsukan and Asahi Shinbun, 1979), n.p. 4. Specifically, support from the Rockefeller Foundation. 5. It is important to note that many of the works then entering public collections were not

55. Isozaki Arata, The Island Nation Aesthetic (London: Academy, 1996), 24.

purchases but were donated to institutions by the artists themselves. 6. With two successful individual shows organized within a year, Arakawa had hit the ceiling for an up-and-coming artist. By all accounts, the young Arakawa was very ambitious. Asked to weigh in on the Anti-Art controversy at a roundtable organized by the journal Bijutsu Techō, for example, while entertaining the possibility of pursuing abolishing art (bijutsu o haigyō suru) as suggested by his colleague Nakanishi Natsuyuki, he cockily added, “I’m an artist, so I will make great art.” (At the time, Arakawa had just turned twenty-five.) Ebara Jun, “‘Wakai bōken-ha’ ga kataru” (The ‘young adventurers’ speak), Bijutsu Techō, no. 192 (August 1961): 7–17; see also Tsukahara, Arakawa Shūsaku no kiseki to kiseki, 40–41. 7. This runs counter to the sense of serendipitous “effortlessness” Arakawa conveyed in interviews; his response to questions about the circumstances of his move to New York during interviews with Tsukahara Fumi, and later with Midori Yoshimoto and Reiko Tomii for the Oral History Archives of Japanese Art project, are typical. Arakawa did not come from a moneyed background, and hence financing his move to New York was complex. See Arakawa Shūsaku, interview with Yoshimoto Midori and Tomii Reiko, April 4, 2009, Oral History Archives of Japanese Art, http://‌www‌.oralarthistory‌.org ‌/archives‌/arakawa‌_shusaku‌/interview‌_01‌.php. 8. Arakawa mostly showed in Europe throughout the early years he was based in New York. Starting in 1963, he exhibited at major art galleries including the Galerie Alfred Schmela in Düsseldorf, the Galerie Maeght in Paris, and the Galleria Antonio Schwarz in Milan. 9. The art journalist Kaitō Hideo introduced Arakawa to the Idemitsu family, who appear to have facilitated the means for his relocation to New York at the end of 1961 (i.e., they purchased a ticket for him). The critic Takiguchi Shūzō, an early supporter, furnished an introduction to Marcel Duchamp, with whom

Molderings, “Objects of Modern Skepticism,” in The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, ed. Thierry de Duve (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 255. 19. In his notes for the White Box Duchamp wrote “À rapprocher probablement des notes de perspective 4 dmslle. / Après la mariée . . . faire un tableau des ombres portées.” Marcel Duchamp, “Ombres portées,” in Duchamp du signe (Paris: Flammarion, 2013), 110. First published as notes in the Surrealist periodical Instead (February 1948). 20. André Breton included a suite of twelve photographs taken by Man Ray of models made out of plaster and wire found at the Institut Henri-Poincaré in Paris, in the 1936 special issue of the magazine Cahiers d’Art dedicated to the the objet. Such models had fallen into disuse by the early part of the twentieth century. The suite of photographs appears between an essay on mathematics and abstract painting by Christian Zervos and Breton’s landmark essay “Crise de l’objet.” See especially Didier Ottinger, Dictionnaire de l’objet surréaliste (Paris: Gallimard and Centre Pompidou, 2013). 21. The homology of dimensions also resonates with André Breton’s Les vases communicants (1932), which referred to Freud’s conception of the conscious-unconscious system as a type of hydraulic model. Arakawa alluded directly to Breton’s work in Communicating Vases, a series of canvases produced in 1964–65. 22. Tōno “Arakawa Shūsaku no kinsaku,” 16. 23. Tōno’s is a rather reductive characterization of Freud’s account of the dreamwork in The Interpretation of Dreams. 24. Tōno, “Arakawa Shūsaku no kinsaku,” 18–19. 25. This was the readymade Comb (1916; Philadelphia Museum of Art). Duchamp’s wordplay, “Classer les peignes par le nombre de leurs dents” (Classify the combs by the number of their teeth), is referenced in Tōno’s review. Marcel Duchamp, “Le voile de la mariée,” in Duchamp du signe, 108. 26. Tōno, “Arakawa Shūsaku no kinsaku,” 19. 27. Willoughby Sharp, “Shusaku Arakawa,” Quadrum 19 (1965): 148.

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Notes to Pages 150–156

Arakawa corresponded, and whom he met shortly after his arrival to New York; Arakawa maintained a close relationship with Takiguchi, frequently corresponding with him until the critic’s death in 1979. Part of this correspondence can be found in the Takiguchi Shūzō Archive at Keio University Art Center. 10. In an essay, Takiguchi mentions diagrams on canvas and photographic paper he appears to have created prior to his departure. “Arakawa Shūsaku eno shojō” (Brief preface for Arakawa Shūsaku), Arakawa Shūsaku-ten: Kaiga nitsuite no kotoba to imēji, n.p. 11. A list of submitted work and a catalogue for the show can be found in the Dwan Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, series 1, box 1, folder 47. Dwan later opened a second location in New York, eventually closing the Los Angeles gallery in the late 1960s. 12. Emphasis original. Tōno Yoshiaki, “Gendai sakka no hatsugen-Nihon no sen’ei-tachi” (Statements by contemporary artists), Mizue 707 (January 1964): 27. 13. Madeline Gins, “Arakawa.” 14. The obuje, which was destroyed circa 1965 and rebuilt at the time of Arakawa and Gins’s retrospective at the Guggenheim in 1997, is a direct precedent for the experiential, immersive work that they started developing in the 1980s. Arakawa Shūsaku and Madeline Gins, Reversible Destiny: Arakawa/Gins (New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1997). 15. “Mudai” (Untitled), in Nagoya-shi Bijutsukan, Arakawa Shūsaku o kaidoku suru = Analyzing the Art of Arakawa Shūsaku (Nagoya: Nagoya-shi Bijutsukan, 2005), 14. 16. Tōno, “Gendai sakka no hatsugen— Nihon no sen’ei-tachi,” 27. 17. Cited in Tōno Yoshiaki, “Arakawa Shūsaku no kinsaku” (Recent works by Arakawa Shūsaku), Gendai Bijutsu 2 (February 1965): 8. 18. The art historian Herbert Molderings writes, “One of the theoretical axes, if not the theoretical axis, on which Duchamp’s writings and works are structured is the thought of the world as a projection problem. . . . All objects are images of other invisible objects, which are themselves again images. . . . In Duchamp’s view, the world is an endless tunnel comprised of mirrors, projections, and illusions.” Herbert

Notes to Pages 156–162

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28. Thierry de Duve suggests that Duchamp’s “painterly celibacy” (i.e., his abandonment of painting) represented a strategic distanciation of tradition—defined here as both the institutions of fine arts and also the avant-garde, in the form of the Cubist establishment that had repudiated him. De Duve characterizes this act of distanciation in Oedipal terms: “surtout loin Picasso, loin Cézanne, loin la ‘loi du père.’” Thierry de Duve, Nominalisme pictural: Marcel Duchamp, la peinture et la modernité (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1984), 55. 29. Miyakawa Atsushi, “Arakawa Shūsaku,” Bijutsu Techō, no. 262 (January 1966): 32. 30. For example, in an essay published later in 1966, Miyakawa wrote, “Therefore does art no longer exist? If that were the case it would be easy. Nevertheless, the condition of today’s art after ‘Anti-Art’ is such that art has not disappeared. . . . Art exists not as a possibility that it exists, but as an impossibility that it does not exist.” Miyakawa, “Fukanōsei no bigaku,” 174– 75. Original in Tōmatsu Shōmei “Nihon no shizen—chūzuri no sono sugata” (Japan’s nature suspended in midair), Camera Mainichi 14, no. 7 (July 1967), 168–69. Cited in Fukushima Tatsuo, “Shizen, fūkei, mufūkei,” 210. 31. The exhibition was suspended after its 1963 version. The expression “taihei mūdo” (quiet mood) was first used by critic Ogawa Masataka in Bijutsu Techō’s art annual for 1965. Ogawa Masataka, “Bijutsu taihei-ki” (Chronicles of quiet art) Bijutsu Techō, no. 165 (December 1964): 65–70. 32. The pamphlet included texts by Joseph Love (a Jesuit priest and art historian at Sophia University in Tokyo), the critics Hariu Ichirō and Nakahara Yūsuke, the composer Ichiyanagi Toshi, and the architect Isozaki Arata. Tōno Yoshiaki, who curated the exhibition, also presented a text. Arakawa Shūsaku-ten (Arakawa Shūsaku: Exhibition) (Tokyo: Minami Gallery, 1965). 33. Tōno in Arakawa Shūsaku-ten, n.p. Emphasis original. 34. The reader will surely note the ironic reversal of Plato, for what the prisoners perceive in his allegory of the cave are shadows—that is, representations—and not the idea, which can only be accessed through reason.

35. Hariu Ichirō in Arakawa Shūsaku-ten, n.p. 36. Ibid. 37. Nakahara Yūsuke in Arakawa Shūsaku -ten, n.p. 38. Ibid. 39. Nakahara Yūsuke, “Kage to shinpi no gakatachi” (The artists of shadow and mystery), Bijutsu Techō, no. 257 (September 1965): 21. 40. Nakahara Yūsuke, “Maboroshi no kage o shitaite” (In pursuit of a longed-for shadow), in Takamatsu Jirō o yomu (Reading Takamatsu Jirō) (Tokyo: Suiseisha, 2014), 56; see also Mitsuda Yuri, Takamatsu Jirō—Kotoba to mono (Takamatsu Jirō, words and things: Contemporary art in Japan, 1961–1972) (Tokyo: Suiseisha, 2011), 140. 41. Nakahara Yūsuke, “Kage ni kansuru sanjū nana no mondai” (Thirty-seven questions about a shadow), cited in Mitsuda, Takamatsu Jirō, 149. 42. Art historian and critic Mitsuda Yuri notes an inconsistency in how Nakahara related the question of the image to painting and the actual process of creation of Arakawa’s and Takamatsu’s paintings. Mitsuda reduces Nakahara’s discussion by reference to two basic semiotic concepts: the icon and index. Icons, to which Nakahara refers, exist independently from actual, material objects, but by evoking shadows, Arakawa and Takamatsu naturally were relying on an indexical logic, furthered in the material fact of the painterly trace. Mitsuda, Takamatsu Jirō, 140–46. 43. Miyakawa Atsushi, “Geppyō” (Monthly reviews), Bijutsu Techō, no. 258 (October 1965). Cited in Mitsuda, Takamatsu Jirō, 134. 44. Miyakawa Atsushi, “Kaiga to sono kage” (Painting and its shadow), Miyakawa Atsushi chosakusū, 2:138–39. Originally published in Me 6 (November 1965). 45. Miyakawa Atsushi, “Kage no shinnyū” (The invasion of shadows), Bijutsu Techō, no. 261 (January 1966): 73. 46. “Quand Orphée descend vers Eurydice, l’art est la puissance par laquelle s’ouvre la nuit. . . . Eurydice est pour lui, l’extrême que l’art puisse atteindre . . . le point profondément obscur vers lequel l’art, le désir, la mort, la nuit

semblent tendre.” Maurice Blanchot, L’espace littéraire (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1968), 227. 47. “Il l’a vu invisible, il l’a touchée intacte, dans son absence d’ombre.” Emphasis added. Blanchot, Espace littéraire, 229. 48. “Mais ce désir et Eurydice perdue et Orphée dispersé sont nécessaires au chant, comme est nécessaire à l’œuvre l’épreuve du désœuvrement éternel.” Emphasis original. Blanchot, Espace littéraire, 230. 49. Miyakawa, “Kage no shinnyū,” 73. 50. Ibid., 74. Emphasis added. 51. Ibid., 75. 52. Ibid., 76. 53. Periodization for the series is somewhat complex. While Takamatsu began his Shadow works in 1962 and continued producing them until late in his life, he engaged with them most prolifically in the period from 1964 to 1966. A comprehensive overview of Takamatsu’s work can be found in Nakanishi Hiroyuki, ed., Takamatsu Jirō: Seisaku no kiseki = Jiro Takamatsu: Trajectory of Work (Tokyo: National Museum of Art; Osaka: Osaka and Suiseisha, 2013). 54. From a technical standpoint, the rendering of the shadows’ edges is truly striking. Takamatsu took great care in conveying the penumbral effect of the figures through keen attention to transitional value and color variation. Takamatsu used a range of paint media in his Shadow series, from oil and acrylic to lacquer. In addition to paintings, he also produced printed works, most notably a pamphlet produced in collaboration with designer Sugiura Kōhei, for his ambitious proto-environment Identification (1965). Masuda Tomohiro, Kuraya Mika, and Hosaka Kenjiro, eds. Takamatsu Jirō: Mysteries (Tokyo: Tōkyō Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan, 2014), 155. 55. Takamatsu Jirō, “Sekai kakudai keikaku: Fuzaisei nitsuite no shiron” (Plan for the

totality), in Fuzai eno toi (Questions to absence) (Tokyo: Suiseisha, 2003), 268. 3. Hariu Ichirō, “Expo ’70 as the Ruins of Culture” (1970), Review of Japanese Culture and Society 23 (December 2011): 54.

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Notes to Pages 162–174

Conclusion 1. Mitsuda, Takamatsu Jirō, 160–258; see also Masuda, Kuraya, and Hosaka, Takamatsu Jirō: Mysteries, 186–87. 2. Takamatsu Jirō, “Mu to zentaisei no dorama” (The drama of nothingness and

expansion of the world: A preliminary discussion of absence), in Sekai kakudai keikaku, 17. 56. Takamatsu Jirō, “Fuzai-sei no tameni” (For absence), in Sekai kakudai keikaku, 28. Emphasis original. 57. A Japanese translation appeared as the twelfth volume of the collected works of Sartre, published as Sōzōryoku no mondai in 1955, while Takamatsu was still a student. The connection to ideas in L’imaginaire is explored at some length in essays by Masuda Tomohiro and Kuraya Mika in the catalogue for the exhibition Takamatsu Jirō: Mysteries. 58. Rather than Sartre’s nothingness, then, this second, purer absence would perhaps come closest to Martin Heidegger’s notion of Nichtheit (or notness) in Sein und Zeit: “Existential nullity by no means has the character of a privation, of a lack as compared with an ideal which is set up but is not attained in Dasein; rather the being of this being is already null as project before everything that it can project and usually attains.” Heidegger proceeds to critique negation in dialectics as presupposing that the “not” is a mere inversion of a positive existence. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 274. 59. From the study for Shadow of a Woman Opening a Curtain, dated November 10, 1965. Masuda, Kuraya, and Hosaka, Takamatsu Jiro: Mysteries, 147. 60. Unlike Arakawa, Takamatsu developed his entire career in Tokyo, but his work was exhibited internationally throughout his life. He was invited to represent Japan at the Paris Biennale de la Jeunesse (1967 and 1969), the Venice Biennale (1968, where he was awarded the Carlo Caldazzo Prize), and the Bienal de São Paulo (1973, where he showed his photographic work), and he also submitted his artwork to Kassel’s Documenta in 1977.

Notes to Pages 175–180

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4. Miyakawa Atsushi, “Anforumeru igo” (After l’Informel), in Bijutsushi to sono gensetsu (Art history and its discourse) (Tokyo: Suiseisha, 2002), 44–45. 5. Ozaki Shin’ichirō pointedly notes that Miyakawa’s investment in theory is not matched by an equal interest in the work of some of his contemporaries (notably, the Gutai group). Ozaki Shin’ichirō, “Anforumeru” (L’informel), in Bijutsu hihyō to sengo bijutsu (Art criticism and postwar art), ed. Mizusawa Tsutomu (Tokyo: Buryukke, 2007). 6. Yves Bonnefoy, L’improbable (Paris: Mercure de France, 1993), 23–24.

7. Lee Ufan, Deai o motomete (In search of an encounter) (Tokyo: Tabata shobō, 1977), 10. Originally published 1971. 8. Ōtsuji Kiyoji, “Tannaru mono” (A mere thing), in Ōtsuji Kiyoji no shashin, 111. Emphasis original. 9. Ibid., 112. Emphasis original. 10. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 11. Hal Foster, “What’s Neo About the NeoAvant-Garde?” October 70 (Autumn 1994): 5–32. 12. Weisenfeld, Mavo, 260–61.

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Index

Page numbers in italics denote illustrations. A-Bomb Dome, Ceiling Stain, The (Kawada), 100 Abraham, Nicolas, 7–8 action and Kudō (akushon), 35, 41–42 limits of, 45 mediation through objet, 21, 23–25 and Miki, 46, 54, 57–58, 68 and Mishima, 113–14, 118–20 notion of, 31–32 obuje in, 25–31 and photography, 109 activation, 18, 25, 30, 32, 42, 151 aesthetics, 21–25, 36, 126, 134, 144 “Aesthetics of Impossibility, The” (Miyakawa), 36 Aesthetics of Nansensu / Nansensu no bigaku, The (Nakahara), 126 afterwardsness (après-coup / Nachträglichkeit), 6, 180, 182n10 Agamben, Giorgio, 41, 187n67 agrarianism, 200n32 Akasegawa Genpei, 125, 163, 183n5 Akatsuka Yukio, 64 Akita Yoshitoshi (Kikuchi Kenzō), 71, 190n68 Alberti, Leon Battista, 105–6, 128, 131, 139, 145 Allegories of Time and Space (Reynolds), 199n9, 200n32 All-Japan Students Federation (Zengakuren), 3 Amami, Japan, 131, 198n4 ambivalence, 5–9 Animal Locomotion (Muybridge), 153 Another Graveyard / Mō hitotsu no hakaba (Arakawa), 15 Anpo crisis of 1960, 3–5, 33, 41, 99, 113, 179, 199n24 See also post-Anpo anti-art about, 158, 179, 182n7 “Anti-Art: For or Against” (exhibition, Miyakawa), 188n18

anti-art made of junk (garakuta no hangeijutsu), 5, 31, 36 and anti-humanist movement, 23 and Arakawa, 155, 157, 202n6 and avant-garde approaches, 18 departure from or aftermath, 127, 162 Hariu on, 187n54 main artists and exhibitions, 51, 163 and Miyakawa, 157, 162, 175–76, 188n18, 204n30 and negation of art, 36–37, 45 and Tōno, 31, 36–37, 50–52, 188n18 See also Neo-Dadaism Aquarium Within an Aquarium No. 2 (Usami), 142, plate 14 Arakawa Shūsaku about, 8, 11, 14, 15–16, 149, 202n7 and absence, 175 and anti-art, 155, 157, 202n6 and Ebara Jun, 27 exhibition at Tōkō Museum, 183n3 exhibitions, 150, 202n8 expelled from Neo-Dadaism Organizers, 15–16, 183n3 and Freud, 155–56 and Hariu, 158–59, 204n32 mental state of, 16, 27, 183n5 move to New York, 148–50, 202n7, 202n9 and Nakahara, 159–60 photograph of, 150 relationship to photography, 170 subject matter of his art, 16, 183n4 success of, 149, 202n6 and Surrealism, 17, 151, 154, 175 and Takamatsu, 164, 168–71 and Takiguchi, 27, 203n9, 203n10 and Tōno, 26, 150, 154–56, 158, 170, 204n32 —works Another Graveyard / Mo hitotsu no hakaba, 15 Asanaga Shin’ichiro in the Midst of Supermanytime, 16 Bottomless, 151–54, 152, 203n14

Index

220

Arakawa Shūsaku —works (continued) Boxes, 150 Coffin series (kan’oke shirīzu), 15, 25–26, 148 collage of portraits of Duchamp, Garbo, and Takiguchi, 82 Communicating Vases (series), 203n21 Container of Sand, 26 Diagram with Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass as a Minor Detail, 155–56 Dieagrams, 155, 156 Doctor Oparin’s Prayer, 16 Einstein Between Matter’s Structure and Faintest Sound, 15, 183n1, plate 1 Landscape, 147–48, 148, 202n2 Mechanism of Meaning, The (with Gins), 26, 152, 169–70, 202n1 Recollections of Madame Curie, 16 Still Life, 202n1 Untitled, 152, 153, 157 At the Window, 168, 169 Work, plate 15 Young Seven (Tōno), 48, 51, 150 Arcane 17 (Breton), 184n12 Aristotle, 187n67 Artaud, Antonin, Héliogabale, 59 Art Brut movement, 101 Art Informel (Anforumeru), 5, 24, 158, 175 Asahi Camera (journal), 75, 84, 192n15 Asphalt / Asufaruto (Tōmatsu), 128, 129 Atomic Dome, Hiroshima, 98, 99, 101 Attack of Beauty, The / Bi no kōgeki (Mishima), 106, 195n7 At the Window (Arakawa), 168, 169 autofictionalization, 109, 114, 118 automimesis, 109, 195n17 avant-garde approaches about, 4–5, 92, 204n28 as alternative to representational practice, 42 and art as an institution, 178 and calligraphy, 193n35 and cinema, 139 decline of, 187n54 and failure, 179–81 by Japanese artists in New York, 148 legacies of, 76 and masturbation, 35 neo-avant-gardism, 37, 180–81 and Ōtsuji, 175 and Surrealism, 21–25, 126, 182n9, 192n25 See also anti-art; Miki Tomio; Takiguchi Shūzō

Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed (Pollock and Orton), 189n38 Barakei (Hosoe), 103–22 about, 10, 76, 106, 194n2 as baroque, 103, 105, 194n1 as collaboration, 108, 195n12 and death/desire, 117 and fluidity as form, 103, 194n1 and loss, 120, 197n46 Mishima’s child, 103 Mishima’s theory of photography, 115 and Other, 121 photographs of, 104, 107, 110, 117, plate 8, plate 9 as portrait of Mishima, 105 as stage, 110 and surfaces, 121–22 Bataille, Georges, 19–20, 25, 45, 58–59, 64 Bazin, André, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 193n28 beauté convulsive (convulsive beauty), 17, 193n26 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 166, 189n26 Benjamin, Walter, 2–4 Between Man and Matter (exhibition, Nakahara), 83 “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (Freud), 190n70 biennales, 65–66, 70, 83–84, 205n60 Bijutsu Techō (magazine), 53, 157, 188n18, 202n6, 204n31 Black protestors, 142 Blanchot, Maurice, 162 Blossfeldt, Karl, 88, 91 Bonnefoy, Yves, 177 Bottle Molten by Heat Rays and Fire (Tōmatsu Shōmei), 74 Bottomless (Arakawa), 151–54, 152, 203n14 Boxes (Arakawa), 150 Brauer, Fae, 35 Breton, André and Bataille, 19–20, 25 mark-making method, 95–97, 102 materialistic version of the dialectic, 184n15 May Ray photographs, 203n20 objet onirique, 22 and Surrealism, 17–19, 154 and Takiguchi, 86, 191n8 —works Arcane 17, 184n12 “Crise de l’objet,” 203n20

Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme (with Éluard), 184n10, 193n39 Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité, 18 L’amour fou, 184n12, 193n26 Les pas perdus, 18 Les vases communicants, 203n21 Second Manifesto, 19–20 Bürger, Peter, 180–81 calligraphy, 93, 193n35 Camera Mainichi (journal), 131, 200n31, 200n34 Carson, Rachel, The Sea Around Us, 133 castration complex, 41, 187n59 Chairs and Table in Perspective (Takamatsu), 140 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 35 “Child Is Being Beaten, A” (Freud), 68 Chinsetsu yumi harizuki (Mishima), 196n27 chrysanthemum of the tenth day, The / Tōka no kiku (Mishima), 119, 196n29 Cocteau, Jean, 89, 193n30 Coffin series / kan’oke shirīzu (Arakawa), 15, 25–26, 148 Collected Words of Marcel Duchamp / Maruseru Dushan goroku (Takiguchi), 202n1 Comb (Duchamp), 155, 203n25 Communicating Vases (series, Arakawa), 203n21 Compact Obuje (Nakanishi), 27 conceptual ears (kannentekina mimi), 59, 62, 70 Conceptualism, 9, 127, 171 Confessions of a Mask / Kamen no kokuhaku (Mishima), 110–12 Container of Sand (Arakawa), 26 contemporaneity (gendai), 36, 176, 182n7, 188n18 Continuous Mirror / Miroir ininterrompu (Takiguchi), 95 convulsive beauty (beauté convulsive), 17, 193n26 “Crise de l’objet” (Breton), 203n20 cybernetics, 2, 31–33, 97

ears by Miki, 43–73 See also Miki Tomio

221

Index

Dadaism, 13, 23, 35, 46 See also Neo-Dadaism Dalí, Salvador, 19, 22, 52, 57, 71 Damisch, Hubert, 142–43, 198n2 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, Le Martyre de St. Sébastien, 112, 196n27 death drive/wish, 45, 112–13, 118, 119, 188n5, 197n44 décalcomanies (dekarukomanī), 95–96, 109 “Defense of Culture, The” (Mishima), 118 Deleuze, Gilles, 103, 186n38, 194n1

De Pictura (Alberti), 131 “Descent into the Everyday” (Miyakawa), 157, 188n18 Diagram with Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass as a Minor Detail (Arakawa), 155–56 Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme (Breton and Éluard), 184n10, 193n39 Dieagrams (Arakawa), 155, 156 “Discovery of Landscape, The” (Karatani), 145, 201n52 Distribution Map of Impotence (Kudō), 32–33, 34, 34, 35, 37, 186n43, plate 3 Doctor Oparin’s Prayer (Arakawa), 16 documentary (kirokusei), 87, 115–16 Documents (magazine), 19–20 Domínguez, Óscar Rafael, 95–96 Domon Ken, 76, 92, 138, 193n34, 200n31 double scission, 114–15 Drawing (Sketchbook 27: On Anti-Existence in Relation to a Boston Bag) (Takamatsu), 28 Dream of courtly elegance, A / Fūryū mutan (Fukasawa), 113–14 dreams as wish fulfillment, 17, 184n9 Duchamp, Marcel and Arakawa, 30–31, 151, 154–56, 202n9 and Breton, 18–19 mentions, 38, 48, 64 and obuje as procedure, 22 painterly celibacy of, 156, 204n28 references to masturbation, 35 and Rose Sélavy’s autograph, 79, 191n2 and subjectivity, 126 and Takiguchi, 80–83, 191n2, 202n9 —works by or about Collected Words of Marcel Duchamp (Takiguchi), 202n1 Comb, 155, 203n25 Diagram with Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass as a Minor Detail (Arakawa), 155–56 Large Glass, 155–56 Portrait of Rrose Sélavy Based on the WilsonLincoln System (with Takiguchi), 83 To and From Rrose Sélavy: Collected Wordss of Marcel Duchamp (Takiguchi), 82 Tu m’, 155 White Box, The (Duchamp), 154, 203n19 Dwan, Virginia, 150–51, 155, 203n11

Index

222

Ebara Jun, 21–22, 24, 27, 184n10, 185n21 Einstein Between Matter’s Structure and Faintest Sound / Kōsei busshitsu to shiin ni hasamareta Ainshutain (Arakawa), 15, 183n1, plate 1 Ei-Q, 182n9, 197n38 Electric Labyrinth (Isozaki), 145–46 Éluard, Paul, Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme (with Breton), 184n10, 193n39 emperor, 113–14, 119–20, 196n28, 197n47 “Eternity” (Rimbaud), 137 Etō Jun, 118, 197n39 Expo ’70, Osaka, Japan, 43–44, 141, 174, 194n44 Extinction of Landscape, The / Fūkei no metsubō (Matsuda), 138 Eyes of Ten (exhibition, Fukushima), 191n4, 194n48, 199n15 Fault Lines (Sas), 183n16 fetishes about, 4, 22 Arakawa’s coffins as, 17 images as, 174 Nakahara on, 39 obuje as, 30 and sexuality, 112 Takiguchi on, 81 void as, 120 50 Fragments of Ear (Miki), 65 “Finding Despair in Landscapes” / Sansuiga ni zetsubō o miru (Usami), 143 Forbidden colors / Kinjiki (Mishima), 195n6 Foto Taimusu (Photo Times, The), 87, 192n24 Freud, Sigmund afterwardsness (après-coup / Nachträglichkeit), 6, 180, 182n10 and Arakawa, 154–56, 203n21 and castration complex, 41, 187n59 conscious-unconscious system, 203n21 on da Vinci, 196n21 death drive/wish, 45, 112–13, 119, 188n5, 197n44 dreams as wish fulfillment, 17, 184n9 and ego, 6–8, 120 and narcissism, 111–12 and negation, 45 Oedipal complex, 37, 175, 187n59 and the uncanny, 71–72, 190n70 wild analysis, 68, 71, 190n60 Zwangshandlung, 71

—works by “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” 190n70 “Child Is Being Beaten, A,” 68 Interpretation of Dreams, The, 203n21 “On Narcissism” (Freud), 118 Fröhliche Wissenschaft (Nietzsche), 56 Fukasawa Shichirō, Fūryū mutan /A dream of courtly elegance, 113–14 Fukushima Tatsuo, 98, 131, 133–35, 137, 193n34, 198n8, 199n15 Fukuzawa Ichirō, 182n9, 192n25 “fundamental crisis of the object” (une crise fondamentale de l’objet), 18, 184n10 Fuzai no heya = Room in Alibi (Nakahara), 125 Galerie Alfred Schmela, Dusseldorf, 202n8 Galerie Maeght, Paris, 202n8 Galleria Antonion Schwarz, Milan, 202n8 Garbo, Greta, 82, 191n10 Geijutsu Shinchō (art journal), 189n39 gendai (contemporaneity), 36, 176, 182n7, 188n18 Gendai Bijutsu (magazine), 155 Gendai no me (magazine), 199n9, 199n11 Gendai Shisō (periodical), 143, 183n3 Gestellen (Heidegger), 200n37 Gins, Madeline about, 82, 148, 149, 202n1 on Bottomless, 151–52, 203n14 in Gendai shisō (journal), 183n3 Mechanism of Meaning, The (with Arakawa), 26, 152, 169–70, 202n1 Godard, Jean-Luc, Pierrot Le Fou, 137 Hamaya Hiroshi, 138, 199n24, 200n32 happenings (hapuningu), 32, 34–35 Hariu Ichirō and anti-art, 36, 52, 187n54 and Arakawa, 158–59, 204n32 and Expo ’70, 174, 194n44 and humanism, 22–24 and Miki, 68–69 and Surrealism, 24 and thingly agency, 21 Tokyo Biennial commissioner, 65–66 Hateruma Island, Okinawa (Tōmatsu), 130 Heidegger, Martin, 132, 200n37, 205n58 Héliogabale (Artaud), 59 Hijikata Tatsumi, 103, 109, 189n43, 195n6, 195n13 Hinomaru, Tokyo (Kawada), plate 7 Hi-Red Center, 27, 29, 125, 163

Hirohito, 113–14, 196n28 Hiroshima, Japan, 1, 98, 99, 101, 137, 146 historia / istoria, 131, 198n3 History of painting of the realm / Honchō gashi (Kanō), 201n48 Hōdō shashin (Photojournalism), 87 homosexuality, 110–12, 118, 195n6 Horizon Line (Tōmatsu), plate 11 Hosoe Eikoh Democratic Arts Association (Demokurāto Bijutsu Kyōkai), 197n38 Eyes of Ten (exhibition, Fukushima), 191n4, 194n48, 199n15 and Hijikata, 109, 195n13 material conditions of the image, 175 and Mishima’s first request for a cover, 106, 195n7 Otoko to onna / Man and woman, 108, 195n6 and Takiguchi, 86 work with Hijikata and dance group, 195n6 See also Barakei (Hosoe) humanism, 22–23, 44, 140, 196n28 hysteria, 35–36, 73, 179

223

Japan Amami, Japan, 131, 198n4 Anpo crisis of 1960, 3–5, 33, 41, 99, 113, 179, 199n24 Expo ’70, Osaka, Japan, 43–44, 141, 174, 194n44 Heian period, 143 Hiroshima, 1, 98, 99, 101, 137, 146 Hiroshima, Japan, 1, 137, 146 industrialization of, 132 Liberal Democratic Party, Japan, 3 Mount Nokogiri, Japan, 40–41 Nagasaki, Japan, 1, 76, 137, 146 National Mobilization Law (Kokka sōdōin hō), 22 Okinawa, Japan, 131, 198n4, 198n7 Oral History Archives of Japanese Art, 202n7 post-Anpo, 9, 31, 42, 44, 139, 141, 165, 185n36 three regalia (sanju no jingi): refrigerator, washing machine, and television set, 4 US-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security, 3, 41 in war time, 87, 192n23 See also Tokyo, Japan Japan (Tōmatsu), 131 Johns, Jasper, 33, 48, 50–51, 160 Jouffroy, Alain, 38–39 Kafka, Metamorphosis, The, 126 Kanō Einō, Honchō gashi / History of painting of the realm, 201n48 Karatani Kōjin, “Discovery of Landscape, The,” 145, 201n52 Katsushika, One Hundred Ghosts, 146 Kawada Kikuji A-Bomb Dome, Ceiling Stain, The, 100 Eyes of Ten (exhibition, Fukushima), 191n4, 194n48, 199n15 Hinomaru, Tokyo, plate 7 Lucky Strike, 99 Map, The / Chizu, 98–102, 100, 195n9 material conditions of the image, 175 Kawakami Yōko, 110, 118 Kazan, Watanabe, Myriad Mountains and Rivers /Senzan bansui-zu, 144

Index

I Am a King (Tōmatsu), 131, 132, 199n11 Ichiyanagi Toshi, 146, 204n32 Idemitsu family, 202n9 Identification (Takamatsu), 164, 165, 165 Ikeda Hayato, 3, 184n18 Ikeda Tatsuo, 23, 52, 188n19 impotence (adynamia) Agamben on, 187n67 Distribution Map of Impotence (Kudō), 32–33, 34, 34, 35, 37, 186n43, plate 3 fukakai as form of, 59 the hysteric obuje, 35–39 Kudō’s iconography of, 40–41 and masturbation, 186n48 and Miki’s ear, 47 of the obuje, 31–35 Philosophy of Impotence or Distribution Map of Impotence and the Appearance of Protective Domes at the Points of Saturation (Kudō), 32–33, 34, 34, 35, 37, 186n43, plate 3 indexes, 98 ink painting, 143–44 In Search of an Encounter (Lee), 177 Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud), 203n21 intersubjectivity, 104, 111, 185n26

Introduction au discours sur le peu de réalité (Breton), 18 “Invasion of Shadows, The” (Miyakawa), 162 Isozaki Arata, 145–46, 204n32 istoria / historia, 131, 198n3

Index

224

Kikuchi Kenzō (Akita Yoshitoshi), 71, 190n68 Kitazawa Noriaki, 54, 185n28 Kobayashi Hideo, 57–58, 189n39 Konishiroku Gallery, Ginza, 195n6, 199n15 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, Psychopathia Sexualis, 35 Kudō Tetsumi and action (akushon), 35, 41–42 and aesthetics of fragmentation, 175 classmates, 163 iconography of impotence, 40–41 obuje as type of procedure, 9, 14, 31–34 —works by Monument to Metamorphosis, 40, 40–42 Philosophy of Impotence or Distribution Map of Impotence and the Appearance of Protective Domes at the Points of Saturation, 32–33, 34, 34, 35, 37, 186n43, plate 3 Proliferating Chain Reaction B, 5 Proliferating Chain Reaction in X-Style Basic Substance, 31, plate 2 Relationship of Marmots / Marumotto no kankei, 37 Smell of 110 Volts, 37, 38 Votre Portrait, 37–39 Young Seven (Tōno), 48, 51, 150 Your Idol / Anata no gushō, 37 Lacan, Jacques, 71, 112, 187n58, 196n23, 196n24 La jalousie (Robbe-Grillet), 157 L’amour fou (Breton), 184n12, 193n26 Landscape (Arakawa), 147–48, 148, 202n2 landscapes, 128–46 about, 1, 2, 8, 11, 131 “Discovery of Landscape, The” (Karatani), 145, 201n52 Extinction of Landscape, The / Fūkei no metsubō (Matsuda), 138 “Finding Despair in Landscapes” (Usami), 143 landscape debate (fūkei-ron), 138–45 landscape painting, 200n30, 201n49 Monument to Metamorphosis (Kudō), 40, 40–42 Nihon Rettō / Landscape of Japan (Hamaya), 199n24 See also Tōmatsu Shōmei Laplanche, Jean, 69, 111, 182n10, 196n23, 196n24 Large Glass (Duchamp), 155–56

Lebel, Jean-Jacques, To Conjure the Spirit of Catastrophe, 34, 35 Lee Ufan, In Search of an Encounter, 176–77 Le Martyre de St. Sébastien (D’Annunzio), 112 Le regard du portrait (Nancy), 121 Le sang d’un poète (Cocteau), 89, 193n30 Les pas perdus (Breton), 18 Les vases communicants (Breton), 203n21 Liberal Democratic Party, Japan, 3 L’imaginaire (Sartre), 166, 205n57 Literary World (Bungakukai, journal), 58 Lucky Strike (Kawada), 99 Maar, Dora, Père Ubu, 15 Man and woman / Otoko to onna (Hosoe), 108, 195n6 Manchuria, 138, 200n33 Man Ray, 83, 91, 193n26, 203n20 Man Who Has Finished Piling Up Coal, A (Ōtsuji), 84, 85 Man Who Hasn’t Finished Piling Up Wood Shavings, A (Ōtsuji), 84, 85 Map, The / Chizu (Kawada), 98–101, 100, 195n9 “Margins of the Blank Page” (Takiguchi), 78, 80 mark-making method, 95–97, 102 Marxism, 20, 138 masochism, 69, 72, 120, 190n65 masturbation, 33–35, 186n48 materialism, 20, 30, 59 Matsuda Masao, 138, 139, 200n34 Mechanism of Meaning, The / Mechanismus der Bedeutung (Arakawa and Gins), 26, 152, 169–70, 202n1 melancholia, 7–11, 72, 119, 179, 197n49 Metamorphosis, The (Kafka), 126 Miki Tomio about, 43–46 and aesthetics of fragmentation, 175 aluminum ears, 61 and choice, 46–54, 69 conceptual ears (kannentekina mimi), 59, 62, 70 and existentialism, 54 feelings toward the ear, 59 and fragmentation, 70, 72 fragmentation within the work, 65 and impotence, 47 introduction of aluminum, 48, 50 and making of corpses, 55, 189n29 meaninglessness of his work, 52–53, 59

Yūkoku / Patriotism, 113–14, 119, 196n29, 197n45 Mitsuda Yuri, 81, 193n39, 197n38, 204n42 Miyakawa Atsushi “Aesthetics of Impossibility, The” (Miyakawa), 36 “After l’Informel,” 175 and anti-art, 36–37, 157, 162, 175–76, 188n18, 204n30 “Anti-Art: For or Against,” 188n18 “Invasion of Shadows, The,” 162 and Nakahara, 161 and Takamatsu, 169 Mizue (magazine), 21–22, 24, 52, 79, 154, 194n40 modernism (dentō ronsō), 25, 72, 135, 144, 180– 81, 200n33 modernity (kindai), 9, 36, 58, 66, 122, 176 Modern Painting / Kindai kaiga (Takiguchi), 21 Mono-ha, or School of Things, 176 mononoke (animism), 25, 81 Monument to Metamorphosis (Kudō), 40, 40–42 Moriyama Daidō, 139–40 “mountain and water pictures,” or sansuiga, 143–44, 201n49 Mount Nokogiri, Japan, 40–41 Munroe, Alexandra, Scream Against the Sky, 190n59 Mute Song / Mugon no uta (Ōtsuji), 85 Muybridge, Eadweard, Animal Locomotion, 153 Myriad Mountains and Rivers /Senzan bansui-zu (Kazan), 144 Nachträglichkeit / afterwardsness, 6, 180, 182n10 Nagasaki (Tōmatsu), 131 Nagasaki, Japan, 1, 76, 137, 146 Naika Gallery, Tokyo, 47–48, 54, 125 Nakahara Yūsuke and Arakawa, 26, 159–60, 204n32, 204n42 on fetishes, 39 and Kudō, 39 and Miyakawa, 161 and Surrealism, 21, 24 and Takamatsu, 160 —works by Aesthetics of Nansensu / Nansensu no bigaku, The, 126–27 Fuzai no heya = Room in Alibi, 125 Between Man and Matter (exhibition), 83 Tricks and Visions (exhibition, with Ishiko), 127, 140 Nakahira Takuma, 138, 139–40

225

Index

modelling and casting, 50, 64 numbers of ears, 48 obsessional qualities, 8, 68, 71, 190n59 prints for Anma, 189n43 and repetition of the ear, 176–77 serial production, 54, 65 titles of works, 50 and Tōno, 47–52, 66–67, 188n13 use of aluminum, 64 —works of EAR, 47, 49, 55 EAR No. 104, 60, 61 EAR No. 201, 61, 63 Ear of Roses / Bara no mimi, 46–47, 52, plate 4 50 Fragments of Ear, 65 Orecchio-Specchio / Ear-Mirror, 66 Seven Floors, 70 Untitled (Ear Production Plan), 67 Untitled (Ears), 61, 62 Untitled (I Do Not Make Ear), 70, 71 Your Insurance / Anata no hoken, 47, 61 Minami Gallery, Tokyo, 49, 61, 64–67, 150, 158, 164 Minemura Toshiaki, 48, 53, 69, 188n13 Miracle of Analogy, The (Silverman), 193n28 mirror stage, 71, 112, 187n58, 196n23 Mishima Yukio and cover from Hosoe, 106, 195n7 death of, 105 and Hijikata, 195n6 and Kawabata, 58 philosophy of surface (hyōmen no shisō), 118 quote, 103 as Sebastian, 113, 196n27 theory of photography, 115 See also Barakei (Hosoe) —works by Attack of Beauty, The / Bi no kōgeki, 106 Chinsetsu yumi harizuki, 196n27 chrysanthemum of the tenth day, The / Tōka no kiku, 119, 196n29 Confessions of a Mask / Kamen no kokuhaku, 110–12 “Defense of Culture, The,” 118 Kinjiki / Forbidden colors, 195n6 Patriotism / Yūkoku, 113–14, 119, 196n29, 197n45 Star (novel), 194n2 “Sun and Steel,” 112, 114, 118 Voices of Heroic Spirits / Eirei no koe, 113–14, 119

Index

226

Nakajima Hōji, 113–14 Nakanishi Natsuyuki about, 29–30, 51, 83, 163, 202n6 Compact Obuje (Nakanishi), 27, 125 Narahara Ikkō, 86, 191n4, 194n48 narcissism, 111–12, 118, 196n24 Narcissus, myth of, 105–6, 119 Narita, Katsuhiko, Sumi, 84 Natori Yōnosuke, 75, 76 Nausea (Sartre), 53 negation (Verneinung), 36–37, 45–46, 68, 73 See also anti-art neo-avant-gardism, 37, 180–81 Neo-Dadaism, 15–16, 46, 50, 175, 183n3 neo-objectivism, 76, 142, 199n15 Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), 87, 92 New Japanese Painting and Sculpture, The (exhibition, MoMA), 61 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 43, 44–45, 56 Nihon Kamera (magazine), 98 Nihon Rettō / Landscape of Japan (Hamaya), 199n24 Nippon Rettō Kuronijuru, 199n9 NON (exhibition), 194n48, 199n15 “Notes on Things” / Monomono-hikae (Takiguchi), 81–82 nothingness, 121, 166, 189n26, 205n58 Nouveaux Réalistes, 5, 36, 38, 47 “Object and Photography” / “Buttai to shashin” (Takiguchi), 87–89 objet à fonctionnement symbolique (Dalí), 19 objet onirique (an objet existing only in dreams), 22, 30 objet surréaliste, 18–20 obuje, 15–73 in action, 25–31 fundamental types of, 22 the hysteric obuje, 35–39 impotence of, 31–35 manipulable (kadō-teki obuje), 27 as method of estrangement, 18, 22 and political meaning, 22 as practice, 177 prewar period, 9 as ruin, 39–42 the surrealist objet, 18–20 Takamatsu Jirō on, 13–14 turning objets into, 21–25 See also Arakawa Shūsaku

Occupation (Tōmatsu), 75 Oedipal complex, 37, 175, 187n59 Ōe Kenzaburō, 98, 101–2 Okada Takahiko, 81, 138, 183n3, 189n29 Okinawa, Japan, 131, 198n4, 198n7 Okinawa, Okinawa, Okinawa (Tōmatsu), 198n7 On Anti-Existence in Relation to a Curtain (Takamatsu), 12 On Anti-Existence in Relation to a Desk Drawer (Room of Absense) / Tsukue no hikidashi ni okeru han-jitsuzonsei nitsuite (Takamatsu), 124, 125 One Hundred Ghosts (Katsushika), 146 “On Narcissism” (Freud), 118 “Ontology of the Photographic Image” (Bazin), 193n28 Oral History Archives of Japanese Art, 202n7 Orecchio-Specchio (Ear-Mirror, Miki), 66 orgasm, 34 Origins of Perspective (Damisch), 198n2 Other, 37, 45, 55, 58–59, 110–12, 120–21, 181, 197n47 Ōtsuji Kiyoji on photography and things, 178–79 and postwar photographic avant-garde, 175 and Takiguchi, 10, 76, 85–87 “Takiguchi-san and Photography,” 86, 92 Tokyo Biennale, 83–84 —works by Laboratory series, 84, 192n15 Man Who Has Finished Piling Up Coal, A, 84, 85 Man Who Hasn’t Finished Piling Up Wood Shavings, A (Ōtsuji), 84, 85 Mute Song / Mugon no uta, 85 Pair of Mineral Ore Samples That Are Always on My Desk, 172 Takiguchi Shuzo and His Wife, 82 Takiguchi Shūzō’s Study, 79–82, 80, 88, 191n8, plate 5 That is over there, 84 “Overcoming Modernity” (symposium), 58 Pair of Mineral Ore Samples That Are Always on My Desk, A (Ōtsuji), 172 Paris Biennale de la Jeunesse, 205n60 passion play, 105, 109, 113, 116–18, 120 Patriotism / Yūkoku (Mishima), 113–14, 119, 196n29, 197n45 Pencil of the Sun /Taiyō no enpitsu (Tōmatsu), 128

penises, 33, 37, 40–42, 51, 187n59 See also phallus/phalli Père Ubu (Maar), 15 Perspective (Takamatsu), plate 13 phallus/phalli, 33–34, 37, 39, 187n59 See also penises phantasmagoria, 116, 122, 135, 169, 197n49 phenomenology, 138, 162, 199n18 Philosophy of Impotence or Distribution Map of Impotence and the Appearance of Protective Domes at the Points of Saturation (Kudō), 32–33, 34, 34, 35, 37, 186n43, plate 3 Photograph of Photograph (Takamatsu), 171, plate 16 photography as autonomous art practice, 75 and avante-garde approaches, 98, 102 avante-garde approach to (zen’ei shashin or avangyarudo shashin), 86–87, 91 and painting, 116–17 postwar, 200n31 as second mirror, 89, 92 snapshots, 76, 90 subjective appreciation of, 192n19 techniques of, 90 without the frame, 139–40 “Photography’s Mythical Sense” (Takiguchi), 97 photojournalism, 75, 87, 90–91 Photo Times, The (Foto Taimusu), 87, 192n24 Pierrot Le Fou (film, Godard), 137 Plankton (2) (Tōmatsu), plate 10 Plato, 158, 194n45, 204n34 Portrait of Rrose Sélavy Based on the WilsonLincoln System / Uiruson-Rinkan shisutemu ni yoru Rōzu Seravi (Takiguchi and Duchamp), 83 portraiture, 105, 109, 121, 195n6 post-Anpo, 31, 42, 44, 139, 141, 165, 185n36 See also Anpo crisis of 1960 postmodernism, 9, 146 potency, 21, 32, 35, 41, 54, 187n67 Proliferating Chain Reaction B (Kudō), 5 Proliferating Chain Reaction in X-Style Basic Substance (Kudō), 31, plate 2 Provoke (magazine), 138, 140, 200n40 Psychopathia Sexualis (Krafft-Ebing), 35

sadism, 68, 112, 118 Saint Sebastian, 112–13 Saint Sebastian (Reni), 109, 116 sansui tradition, 143–45, 201n48 Sartre, Jean-Paul philosophies of, 44, 53–54, 182n8, 189n26, 205n58 Being and Nothingness, 166, 189n26 L’imaginaire, 166, 205n57 Nausea, 53 Situations II, 189n26 Sas, Miryam, 10, 183n16, 184n19 Scream Against the Sky (Munroe), 190n59 Sea Around Us, The (Carson), 133 Sea Around Us, The / Warera o meguru umi (Tōmatsu), 130–31, 132–33, 135, 199n24 séance, 113, 196n28 Second Manifesto (Breton), 19–20 Sélavy, Rrose, 79 See also Duchamp, Marcel Seo Noriaki, 43, 48 Seven Floors (Miki), 70 sexuality and desire, 22 homosexuality, 110–12, 115, 118, 195n6 masturbation, 33–35, 186n48 orgasm, 34 pansexuality, 106 sex priests, 35, 186n52

227

Index

Quadrum (magazine), 156 quiet mood (taihei mūdo), 157, 204n31

realism (rearizumu), 75–76, 77 Recollections of Madame Curie (Arakawa), 16 “Reconsideration of Photography and Plasticity, A” / Shashin to zōkeisei no saikentō (Takiguchi), 89–90, 97, 193n31 Reiko Tomii, 182n7, 202n7 Relationship of Marmots / Marumotto no kankei (Kudō), 37 Reni, Guido, 109, 110, 116 Republic, The (Plato), 194n45 Re-Ruined Hiroshima / Futatabi haikyo to natta Hiroshima (Isozaki), 146 Reynolds, Jonathan, Allegories of Time and Space, 199n9, 200n32 Rimbaud, Arthur, “Eternity,” 137, 185n21 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, La jalousie, 157 Room in Alibi (exhibition), 124, 125–27 Rope-Obuje / Himo-jō obuje (Takamatsu), 27, 28 Rose Magic Theory (Surrealist journal), 57 roses, 38, 46–47, 52–53, 79, 117, 120, 194n5

Index

228

shadows, 147–72 and absence, 160, 163–69 versus images, 161 “Invasion of Shadows, The” (Miyakawa), 162 shadow debate (kage ronsō), 158–63, 165–66 shadows stolen, 169–72 and Takamatsu, 11, 147, 163–67, 168, 205n53, 205n54 and Takiguchi, 102 See also Arakawa Shūsaku Shibusawa Tatsuhiko, 59, 101–2, 189n43, 196n27 Shinohara Ushio, 46, 183n5 Shinzōkei Bijutsu Kyōkai (New Plastic Arts Group), 193n39 “Sickness of Mourning” (Torok), 197n46 Silverman, Kaja, Miracle of Analogy, The, 193n28 Situations II (Sartre), 189n26 Sketchbook No. 1 (Takiguchi), 92, 93 Skin of the Nation (Tōmatsu), 199n9 skin of the object, 10, 83, 86, 88, 91 Smell of 110 Volts (Kudō), 37, 38 snapshots, 76, 90 Star (novel, Mishima), 194n2 Stiles, Kristine, 183n12, 185n26 Still Life (Arakawa), 202n1 Stones and Numbers / Ishi to sūji (Takamatsu), 173–74 Structuralism, 97, 138 subject-object dichotomy, 21–22, 24, 112, 177– 78, 185n26 Sugiura Kōhei, 98, 108, 146, 165, 195n9 Sumi (Narita), 84 “Sun and Steel” (Mishima), 112, 114, 118 Surrealism afterwardsness, 6, 180, 182n10 and Arakawa, 17, 151, 154, 175 arrival in Japan, 25 automatism, 93 and avant-garde approaches, 21–25, 126, 182n9, 192n25 and Breton, 17–19, 154 and contestation of art, 13 and international communism, 192n25 legacies of, 6, 14, 31 and materiality, 21 and mathematical objects, 155 Mizue special issue on, 21, 24, 194n40 and Nakahara, 21, 24 and objet (1930s France), 8 and photography, 76–77, 80, 87–88, 91

and representation, 23 Rose Magic Theory (Surrealist journal), 57 Sas’s discussion of, 10 See also obuje; Takiguchi Shūzō Takamatsu Jirō about, 163, 205n60 and absence (fuzai), 8, 165, 175 and Arakawa, 164, 168–71 Hi-Red Center, 27, 29, 125, 163 Nakahara on, 160 on obuje and art, 13–14 and painting, 30, 140 relationship to photography, 170 and shadows, 147, 165–67 and stones, 177 at Venice Biennale, 65 —works by On Anti-Existence in Relation to a Curtain, 12 On Anti-Existence in Relation to a Desk Drawer (Room of Absense), 124, 125 Chairs and Table in Perspective, 140 Drawing (Sketchbook 27: On Anti-Existence in Relation to a Boston Bag), 28 Identification, 164, 165, 165 Perspective, plate 13 Photograph of Photograph series, 170–71, 171, plate 16 Rope-Obuje / Himo-jō obuje, 27, 28 Shadow (study for Shadow of a Woman Opening a Curtain), 168 Shadow series, 11, 164, 168, 205n53, 205n54 Stones and Numbers / Ishi to sūji, 173–74 Takamatsu Jirō: Mysteries (exhibition), 205n57 Takanashi Yutaka about, 138 Tokyoites / Tōkyō-jin, 140, 141, 200n40, plate 12 Takiguchi Ayako, 82, 191n3, 193n39 Takiguchi Shūzō about, 10 and Arakawa, 16–17, 27, 150, 203n9, 203n10 arrest of, 87, 192n25 and Breton, 86, 191n8 childhood of, 86, 97, 192n19, 194n46 collage of portraits of Duchamp, Garbo, and Takiguchi (Arakawa), 82 décalcomanies (dekarukomanī), 95–96, 194n40 and Duchamp, 80–83, 202n9 and Hosoe, 86

testimony (shōgensei), 115–16 That is over there (Ōtsuji), 84 thingly agency, 14, 21–25, 83, 176, 178, 179 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 56 Tinguely, Jean, 36, 47 To and From Rrose Sélavy: Collected Sayings of Marcel Duchamp (Takiguchi), 82 To Conjure the Spirit of Catastrophe (Lebel), 34 Tōei (film studio), 163 Tōhaku’s Pine Grove, 144 Tokkō—the Special Higher Police, 87, 192n25 Tōkō Museum, 183n3 Tokyo, Japan homosexual demimonde of, 195n6 Tokyo Biennial, 65, 83–84 Tokyo Imperial University, 201n50 Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, 4–5, 33, 47, 83 Tokyo National Museum, 143 Tokyo Olympics (1964), 195n9 Tokyo University, 197n47 Tokyoites / Tōkyō-jin (Takanashi), 140, 141, 200n40, plate 12 Tōmatsu Shōmei about, 128–31, 138 essay on final installment of The Sea Around Us, 135 estranging of the landscape form, 175 and Matsuda, 200n34 and petrochemical combines, 132, 198n6 —works by Asphalt / Asufaruto, 128 Bottle Molten by Heat Rays and Fire, 74 Electric Labyrinth (Isozaki), 145–46 Eyes of Ten (exhibition, Fukushima), 191n4, 194n48, 199n15 Hateruma Island, Okinawa, 130 Horizon Line, plate 11 I Am a King, 131, 132, 199n11 Occupation, 75 Okinawa, Okinawa, Okinawa, 198n7 Pencil of the Sun /Taiyō no enpitsu, 128 Plankton (2), plate 10 Sea Around Us, The / Warera o meguru umi, 130–31, 132–33, 135, 199n24 Skin of the Nation, 199n9 Tōno Yoshiaki and anti-art, 31, 36–37, 50–52, 157 and Arakawa, 26, 150, 154–56, 158, 170, 204n32 on art of post-war generation, 5

229

Index

monomania/fetishism, 81 and Ōtsuji, 76 in panel discussion, 21, 24–25 on photographic ontology, 86–87, 192n19, 192n21 photo of, 79 and Rose Sélavy’s autograph, 79, 191n2 and Surrealism, 86–87, 182n9 theory of the image, 175 translation as stage in transfer of Surrealism, 184n19 translation of Breton’s method, 95, 193n40 visual experiments, 94–95, 193n36 —works by “Buttai to shashin” / “Object and Photography,” 87–89 Collected Words of Marcel Duchamp / Maruseru Dushan goroku, 202n1 Kindai kaiga / Modern Painting, 21 “Margins of the Blank Page,” 78, 80 Miroir ininterrompu / Continuous Mirror, 95 Modern Painting (Kindai kaiga), 21–22, 185n20 “Notes on Things” / Monomono-hikae, 81–82 “Object and Photography” / “Buttai to shashin,” 87–89 “Photography’s Mythical Sense,” 97 Portrait of Rrose Sélavy Based on the WilsonLincoln System / Uiruson-Rinkan shisutemu ni yoru Rōzu Seravi (with Duchamp), 83 “Reconsideration of Photography and Plasticity, A” / Shashin to zōkeisei no saikentō, 89–90, 97, 193n31 To and From Rrose Sélavy: Collected Wordsof Marcel Duchamp, 82 Sketchbook No. 1, 92, 93 “Takiguchi-san and Photography” (Ōtsuji), 86, 92 Takiguchi Shuzo and His Wife (Ōtsuji), 82 Takiguchi Shūzō’s Study (Ōtsuji), 80, 81–82, plate 5 Takiguchi’s study, 78–86, 191n3 Untitled (Décalcomanie), 94, 95, plate 6 “Watashi mo kaku,” 95 “Words from an Image-Man” / Eizōnin no kotoba, 96 Taki Kōji, 132, 133–35, 138, 199n18 Tanaka Ikkō, 189n43 Tanaka Shintarō, 59, 69 Tatehata Akira, 61, 71, 190n59

230

Tōno Yoshiaki (continued) on the Coffin series, 15, 26 and Miki, 47–52, 57, 66–67, 188n13 in panel discussion, 21, 24 on realism, 51 Young Seven, 48, 51, 150 Torok, Maria, 7–8, 197n46, 197n49 Toyama Prefectural Art Museum, 191n2 Tricks and Visions (exhibition, Nakahara and Ishiko), 127, 140 Tsukahara Fumi, 184n5, 202n7 Tu m’ (Duchamp), 155 260 Dance Experience Society / 260 Dansu ekusuperiensu no kai, 195n6 Untitled (Arakawa), 152, 153, 157 Untitled (Décalcomanie) (Takiguchi), 94, 95, plate 6 untitled works by Miki, 61, 62, 67, 70, 71 Urobon K. See Nakanishi Natsuyuki Usami Keiji about, 141–42, 143, 144, 201n50 Aquarium Within an Aquarium No. 2, 142, plate 14 “Finding Despair in Landscapes” / Sansuiga ni zetsubō o miru, 143 US-Japan treaties, 3, 41

Index

van Gogh, Vincent, 57–59, 189n38

“Van Gogh’s Illness” (Kobayashi), 57 Venice Biennale, 65, 66, 205n60 VIVO (photographic agency), 191n4, 194n48 Voices of Heroic Spirits / Eirei no koe (Mishima), 113–14, 119 Votre Portrait (Kudō), 37, 39 Walker, Gavin, 114–15 “Watashi mo kaku” (Takiguchi), 95 Weston, Edward, 88, 91 White Box, The (Duchamp), 154, 203n19 Wiener, Norbert, 32–33, 97 wild analysis, 68, 71, 190n60 woman (die Frauen), 56, 189n31 “Words from an Image-Man” / Eizōnin no kotoba (Takiguchi), 96 Work (Arakawa), plate 15 Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, 65, 76 Yamanote Line Incident (Yamanote-sen jiken), 27–28, 185–86n36 Yomiuri Newspaper Company, 51 Young Seven (Tōno), 48, 51, 150 Your Idol / Anata no gushō (Kudō), 37 Your Insurance / Anata no hoken (Miki), 47, 61 Yūkoku / Patriotism (Mishima), 113–14, 119, 196n29, 197n45 Zarathustra, 56–57, 189n34

(A Series Edited By) Jonathan Eburne Refiguring Modernism features cutting-edge interdisciplinary approaches to the study of art, literature, science, and cultural history. With an eye to the different modernisms emerging throughout the world during the twentieth century and beyond, we seek to publish scholarship that engages creatively with canonical and eccentric works alike, bringing fresh concepts and original research to bear on modernist cultural production, whether aesthetic, social, or epistemological. What does it mean to study modernism in a global context characterized at once by decolonization and nation-building; international cooperation and conflict; changing ideas about subjectivity and identity; new understandings of language, religion, poetics, and myth; and new paradigms for science, politics, and religion? What did modernism offer artists, writers, and intellectuals? How do we theorize and historicize modernism? How do we rethink its forms, its past, and its futures? (Other Books in the Series) David Peters Corbett The World in Paint: Modern Art and Visuality in England, 1848–1914

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