Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky [1st edition, First Edition] 0810935120, 9780810935129

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ART AFTER

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Performance Plate 24 YOSHIHARA Jiro floating in a boat with objects emerging from the shallow waters of the ruins of Mukogawa River, whose embankments had been

bombed during the war; performed for Life magazine photographers at the “One Day Only Outdoor Exhibition (The Ruins)” in Amagasaki,

9 April 1956.

THE

GUTAI

GROUP

119

Performance Plate 25

SHIRAGA Kazuo painting with his feet at the “2nd Gutai Art Exhibition” held at the Ohara Kaikan hall, Tokyo, October 1956.

Performance Plate 26

SHIMAMOTO Shoz6 making a painting by throwing bottles of paint, at the “2nd Gutai Art Exhibition” held at the Ohara Kaikan hall, Tokyo, October 1956.

120

THE

GUTAI

GROUP

Performance Plate 27

TANAKA Atsuko wearing Electric Dress (Denkifuku) at the “2nd Gutai Art Exhibition” held at the Ohara Kaikan hall, Tokyo, October 1956.

THE

GUTAI

GROUP

121

Performance Plate 28

SHIRAGA Kazuo performing The ModernTranscendent Sambasé (Chogendai Sambaso) in “Gutai Art on the Stage” presented at the Sankei Kaikan hall, Osaka in May and the Sankei Hall,

Tokyo in July, 1957.

Performance Plate 29

YOSHIDA Toshio performing Ceremony by Cloth: Wedding of Yoshida Toshio and Morita Kyoko (Nuno ni yoru gishiki) in “Gutai Art on the Stage” presented at the Sankei Kaikan hall, Osaka in May and the Sankei Hall, Tokyo in July, 1957. The

program notes state, “You don’t have to think of ritual as something self-important or bombastic.”

122

THE

GUTAI

GROUP

Performance Plate 30

KANAYAMA Akira performing The Giant Balloon (Kyodai bartn) in “Gutai Art on the Stage” presented at the Sankei Kaikan hall, Osaka in May and the Sankei Hall, Tokyo in July, 1957. The

balloon lay limp on the stage, then Kanayama slowly inflated it to Shimamoto’s musical accompaniment of monotonous, breath-like sounds. Once the balloon had filled the entire stage, Kanayama let the air escape as the music turned more and more shrill.

THE

GUTAI

GROUP

123

CHAPTER

7

he conflict between preserving tradi-

CIRCLE: MODERNISM TRADITION

ALEXANDRA MUNROE

AND

tion and cultivating “world relevance” has been a subject of cultural, intellectual, and political debate since the Meiji Restoration of 1868. From its inception, the ideology of Japan’s modern revolution was fundamentally ambiguous. On one hand, the Meiji leaders advocated the transformation of Japanese society by “searching for new knowledge throughout the world” and “eliminating old customs.” Yet a call to return to the mythical, prehistoric origins of Japanese nativist spirit—a value conveyed in the popular term kokutai or “national political essence’”—was also part of its campaign. The move to simulate Euro-American civilization on a material level was thus positioned within a construct of differentiation aimed at reviving and maintaining the spiritual purity of Japan’s original and indigenous culture. This polarization of national identity profoundly influenced the development of Japan’s modern social con-

cal aim of his revivalism was to create a new school of modern Nihonga (Japanese-style painting) that was based in the classical Kano school style, yet incorporated certain “modern” Western realist techniques such as depth and shading. “Victory from within,” Okakura proclaimed, “or a mighty death without.” Okakura was followed in the 1920s and thirties by art critic and philosopher Yanagi Sdetsu (1889-1961), whose Mingei folk arts movement gave official support to the study, preservation, and revival of

Japanese ceramics and other crafts.’ Writing in the July 1921 issue of the vanguard journal Shirakaba, Yanagi pro-

claimed: “It is clear that forgetting our own wisdom in order to seek truth overseas was a necessary, if roundabout,

route. However, we have now broken the

bonds of our own heritage to a sufficient

extent to be able to reflect calmly and freely on Asia. We have discovered that we ourselves have an even greater

sciousness, and the antithetical but

truth, one that has little in common

coexisting positions of adopting or refut-

with the morality, religion, and art hith-

ing the West, reviving or renouncing tra-

erto taught us by our scholars, monks,

dition, informed the course of its political

and artists.”’* Guided in part by the British potter Bernard Leach, Yanagi’s project—like Okakura’s—was to apply

history. In the realm of Japanese culture, the opposition between national and universal ideals has also been a critical issue of modern aesthetic theory, fine arts educational practice, and artistic expression.

An important figure in the early debate was the Meiji aesthete and educator Okakura Tenshin (1862-1913), author of The Ideals of the East (1903), The Awakening of Japan (1904), and The Book of Tea (1906).. According to Okakura, the only way for indigenous culture to survive “the scorching drought of modern vulgarity [that] is parching the throat of life and art” was to create a synthesis from within the tradition.' Calling for “a restoration with a difference,” he helped found the Tokyo School of Fine Arts with the American Japanologist Ernest Fenollosa in 1889. Plate 31

in the style of Heian courtiers, the practi-

Under their direction, the curriculum

contemporary Western methodology to

reformulate “tradition.” The defense of Japanese culture continued into the prewar Showa period, when various intellectual movements argued for a return to the “native place of the spirit” (Nihon kaiki). Leading intellectuals such as Watsuji Tetsuro, the folklore anthropologist Yanagida Kunio, and novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichiro reevalued the status of Japanese culture in a wide global context. Their passion for what Tanizaki called “this world of shadows which we are losing” as distinct from the capitalist, rational, and progressive West promoted Japanese tradition as an alternative model of culture to Western civilization.° The attempt to create original meaning from a complex admixture of Eastern

1967

was devoted exclusively to traditional Japanese painting, sculpture, and crafts. Despite Okakura’s eccentric regulation

work of Japan’s premier modern philoso-

(Detail of Plate 43)

that students and teachers wear uniforms

pher, Nishida Kitar6 (1870-1945). Devot-

YAGI Kazuo Circle

and Western traditions was also the life

MODERNISM

AND

TRADITION

125

7.3. UEDA Sokyi. Looking at the Blue Mountains from the Open Window (Kais6 seizan chikashi).

c. 1945-55. Ink on paper, 26% X 54%" (67 X 138 cm). Collection Takarazuka Grand Hotel

7.1. DOMON Ken. Detail of the Sitting Image of Buddha Shakamuni in the Hall of Miroku, The Murdji. 1940. Gelatin silver print, 23/4 X 16” (59.2 X 40.7 cm). The Museum of Modern Art,

New York. Gift of the photographer

7.2. NANTENBO Toji. Nanten Staff. Ink on paper, 58% X 18%" (149.2 X 47.3 cm). Private collection, Barrington, Illinois. Photo courtesy Steven Addiss

Poem reads: If you can answer/Nantenbo’s staff // If you can’t/Nantenbo’s staff. (The staff itself

serves as the last word in the poem.)

126

MODERNISM

AND

TRADITION

ed to the philosophy of religion, Nishida reflected upon the Buddhist idea of “absolute nothingness” in relation to fundamental philosophical problems drawn from such major Western thinkers as Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx,

Husserl, and Dostoevsky. In formulating his seminal concepts, “place of nothing-

ness” (mu no basho) and “absolute contradictory self-identity” (zettai mujun-teki jiko doitsu), Nishida structured the differences of Eastern and Western metaphysics by positing a rule of disparity.’ Nishida’s discourse on Zen influenced a number of Buddhist philosophers and theologians of the postwar era, including Suzuki Daisetsu (D.T. Suzuki),

the dusty road and whispered their bewil-

gated a widespread “Red Purge” in col-

derment. We were most surprised and dis-

laboration with the American Occupation

appointed by the fact that the Emperor

authorities.'' Further, in apparent violation of the 1947 constitution wherein

had spoken in a human voice. . . . How

could we believe that an august presence of such awful power had become an ordinary human being on a designated summer day?® In the immediate postwar years, modern artists and the long-repressed

left supported the “reformist” Occupation of Japan (1945-1952)—an essentially American undertaking under the command of General Douglas MacArthur

—hbecause it aimed to replace totalitarianism and emperor-worship with democ-

whom the American avant-garde revered,

racy, freedom of expression, and new

and Hisamatsu Shin’ichi, who was men-

civil rights.’ The outrage the art commu-

tor to the Bokujin-kai calligraphy society. Challenging the insularity of racial or cultural bias, Nishida’s “logic of the East” (toyd-teki ronri) offered a paradigm to rethink fundamental Japanese concepts of being (nothingness and contradiction) in universal terms. Nishida’s sophisticated synthesis of Eastern

nity felt towards the wartime regime led to its leveling of “war responsibility” charges against such prominent painters as Fujita Tsuguharu and Inokuma Gen’ichiro, who were accused of having supported the imperialist cause with war propaganda paintings.” (As a result, Fujita emigrated to France.) For the proAmerican modern art associations that proliferated after the war, any form of enshrined native culture conjured negative images of right-wing imperialism. Most efforts to preserve, revive, or transform the traditional Japanese arts were seen as arch-conservative, reactionary, or even nationalistic. After years of isola-

thought and Western methodology was a model for the postwar avant-garde, which in a similar way sought to forge a modern art of international stature founded on a “logic of the East.” THE

POSTWAR

DISCOURSE

ON

TRADITION

tion from international art movements,

eagerness for contact and exchange with ast ruin was the material casualty of

defeat in 1945. The far greater wound was a psychological shame and loathing for Japan itself. The collapse of the short-lived Japanese empire meant the exposure and deflation of nationalist ideologies and the loss of belief in national cultural values. The preeminent postwar novelist, Oe Kenzaburo (b. 1935), recalls how shocking it was to hear the voice of Emperor Hirohito—whom he had been taught to believe was divine— announcing Japan’s surrender over the radio on August 15, 1945: The adults sat around their radios and

cried. The children gathered outside in

contemporary Euro-American culture also overwhelmed any significant interest in the national arts.

;

In the 1950s, the stigma that had

Japan renounced war and its right to possess military potential, General MacArthur authorized the Japanese government in 1950 to form a National Police Reserve (now the Self-Defense Force), whose stated aim was the maintenance of internal security. Japan’s military build-up in cooperation with U.S. strategic operations in the Pacific was yet another reminder of Japan’s rapid Amer-

icanization that both postwar governments fostered—a program that threatened at times to overwhelm the nation’s independence and integrity. Increasing government control over individual civil rights culminated in 1952 with the passing of the controversial Subversive Activities Prevention Law, which

liberal intellectuals vehemently opposed as an infringement of artistic freedom of expression.” Artists, intellectuals, and political

agitators who had earlier supported

American reforms in Japan now joined in opposition to the conservative shift. As Bert Winther explains in a comprehensive analysis of Japan’s cultural tensions in the early 1950s, reaction against the Diet’s indiscriminate pro-American orientation caused the leftist opposition to be “drawn towards the political semantics of traditional culture.”" Among liberals, opposition took on “a form of nationalism” which made certain elements of tradition the focus of their recommendations for postwar modernization. More radical Communists and

been attached to traditional culture in

leftist intellectuals believed that full

the early postwar years lifted. Though

national independence also required an

American policy in the early Occupation

dismantling of the military, the rising menace of the Cold War heightened by the outbreak of the Korean conflict in 1950 led to a “reverse course” policy that

emphasis on tradition—“which at times led them to a paradoxically conservative position of deprecating Western modern culture in their rush to foreground a uniquely Japanese premodern culture.” The movement to revive traditional

enforced an anti-labor, anti-Communist,

culture was further stimulated by an

and remilitarization agenda. Exploiting

evolving critique of the canon of Japan-

the threat of Chinese and North Korean agression, the conservative government of Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru insti-

ese art history, the contrived legacy of the Meiji educators. With the defeat of

era fostered social liberalization and the

MODERNISM

AND

TRADITION

127

Japanese imperialism, the propagandistic notion of what constituted “Japanese

art” was now obsolete. At the forefront of this attack was the artist and critic Okamoto Taro (b. 1911), who, in a series of books and articles, decried the subjec-

tion of Japanese tradition to an “antiquated reality” so remote and elite that “the younger generation tries to distance itself from tradition and even despises it.” According to Okamoto, the term “dento” (tradition) was coined by the

Meiji bureaucracy in an effort to establish the difference between premodern (“traditional”) and modern (“Western-

ized”) Japanese civilization. By equating their Buddhist/Shinto heritage with the West’s Greece and Rome, and their rich Momoyama period (1573-1615) with

Hurope’s Renaissance, the Meiji educa-

tors created an “artificial formulation of dento” according to Western ideals." -

Another object of Okamoto’s criticism

Muro-ji Temple treasures in Nara, but rather as an artist’s investigation into the power of classical culture to serve a modernist idiom (figure 7.1). Isamu Noguchi made extended visits to Japan during 1950-52 to explore many of these same issues. The mutual influence between this Japanese-American sculptor and the Japanese avant-garde was historic in their respective quests for new concepts and forms that could integrate modernism and tradition. Their encounter also confirms that the relationship between artists working in the traditional arts and those pursuing more international styles was, contrary to myth, remarkably interdependent and collaborative. Arising from this discourse, several arts groups founded between the late 1940s and mid-fifties strove to create modernist art forms based upon radically new concepts of Japanese tradition.

was the “feudal morality” which govy-

Foremost among them were the Bokujin-

erned the rarified practice of the tradi-

kai calligraphy society; the Sddeisha

tional arts in Japanese society. Opposing

ceramic artists; and the Panreal group of

the craft guilds and grand-master system

ty. “Tradition,” Okamoto proposed,

avant-garde Nihonga painters. Coinciding with their activities was the prominent influence of the “Japan Style,” a syncretic modernist architectural style incorporating traditional design elements expounded by such acclaimed architects

“should breathe in our lives and in our

as Taniguchi Yoshiro, Tange Kenzo, and

work. . . . Only then can tradition be rel-

Maekawa Kunio. This period also saw the rise of the Ohara and Sdgetsu schools of experimental ikebana, as well as the proliferation of contemporary craft and design groups. The Art Life section

(iemoto seido) that perpetuated hierarchical, stylized, and academic conven-

tions, Okamoto called for the liberation of tradition from the shackles of authori-

evant today.” A revived interest in the preservation of Japan’s cultural past was also part of this broad-based progressive movement. Poet and critic Takiguchi Shiiz6 undertook a photographic documentation of the cultural properties of Kyoto and Nara, and Domon

Ken

(1909-1990), one of Japan’s leading photographers, embarked on the first of sev-

eral books devoted to early Japanese Buddhist architecture and sculpture." What distinguished these and similar projects was an interest in reinterpreting

the past in a modernist context by repre-

senting ancient images as vital abstract forms. Domon’s photograph of the folds in the seated Buddha Shakyamuni’s lap was not meant as a document of the

128

MODERNISM

AND

TRADITION

(Seikatsu Bijutsu) of the vanguard Modern Art Association (Modan Ato Kyokai), for example, was founded in 1954 by artists who willfully transgressed the lines between “art” and “craft.” These various activities are significant for the study of postwar Japanese art history because

they reveal that the search to identify the creative role of tradition for modern culture continued unabated in the postwar decades, despite the perceived dominance of Euro-American styles. The avant-garde artists working in traditional media shared certain strategies. Just as the Taisho avant-garde rebelled against the yoga oil-painting

academies, the postwar avant-garde traditionalists operated outside of the established guild systems that were the legacy of the Edo period (1603—1868)—masterdisciple relationships, factional school lineages (ryiigi), and the hierarchy determined by technical proficiency (geigoto). Their common purpose was to liberate tradition from rigid orthodoxies, and to universalize modern art—which was mired in staid Eurocentricism—with an infusion from the East. In contrast to

their more radical political counterparts, however, the new groups did not reject the West on ideological grounds. Rather, they sought to integrate Western notions of modernism with Japanese forms of culture in order to achieve an international art of “world relevance” (sekai-sei). During the 1950s and sixties, the Ségetsu Art Center under the direction of Teshigahara Soft (figure 7.9) and his son, Hiroshi, became an active forum not only for the research and display of avantgarde ikebana, but also for concerts, leetures, and demonstrations by visiting artists including John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Yoko Ono. Central to the concept of “world relevance” was the belief that modern abstract art expressed a universal and transcendent image free of aesthetic, national, or cultural programming and was thus international by nature and by credo. In pursuit of cultural identity, the avant-garde traditionalists applied Jomon, Shinto, indigenous folk, Zen, and

Chinese literati aesthetics to the modern abstract tradition. Primitivism inspired a | return to nature through communion

with elemental life forces, while the traditional arts based in Zen Buddhist, Taoist,

and Confucian practice taught rigorous self-analysis and refinement of the soul. According to lijima Tsutomu, the principal theorist of avant-garde calligraphy, liberating tradition was ultimately a means to purge oneself of moral falsehoods and so attain the purity of “a naked human being” (ikko no hadaka no ningen)."” Demoralized by modern history, the Japanese avant-garde found in reexamining tradition an occasion for

self-critique and cultural regeneration.

THE

BOKUJIN-KAI

CALLIGRAPHY

SOCIETY

mong the most influential and innovative of the postwar avant-garde traditional arts groups was Bokujin-kai (Ink Human Society) which was founded in 1952 by five Kyoto-area calligraphers including Morita Shiryt (b. 1912, Plate

34) and Inoue Yuichi (Yu-Ichi, 1916-

1985, Plates 32 and 33).” Acknowledging calligraphy (sho) as the foundation of Far Eastern religion, philosophy, and poetry, the Bokujin-kai society sought to reconceptualize calligraphy as a form of contemporary expressionist painting. It was not an easy task. In the prewar Japanese art world, it was believed that calligraphy, by its fundamental commitment to brush, ink, paper, and the semantic meaning of Chinese characters, was incapable of “modernization.” Nor could writing be a “fine art” in the imported Western sense. At the same time, some

Meiji calligraphers shunned any association with the “technical” painting arts (yoga and Nihonga), holding that calligraphy—which had evolved over three millennia—was a superior, even divine art form. Calligraphy’s anomalous position in the context of prewar Japanese modernism continued until 1948, when it

was included for the first time in official salon exhibitions.” The potential for a modernist, experimental calligraphy was first expounded by Hidai Tenrai (1872-1933). His disciples founded the independent Calligraphy Art Society (Shod6 Geijutsusha) in 1933 which eventually evolved into the postwar avant-garde calligraphy

movement. Because the brushstroke is understood in the Far Eastern tradition as “an imprint of the mind”—a sign of the artist’s intellectual, psychological, and spiritual state of being—and, like modern abstract art, represents a formal and conceptual rather than real or descriptive image, the basis for practicing calligraphy as a form of modern art was arguably already in place. Hidai con-

neither on traditional painting methods nor the literal reading of Chinese characters. Hidai and his principle disciples— his nephew, Hidai Nankoku (b. 1912) and Ueda Sokya (1899-1968)—established the notion that calligraphy was an expression of individuality whose creative form was governed by certain restrictions (the character’s essential structure). Ueda, who embraced modern European art, formed his own calligraphy society in 1940, called Keisei-kai. He sought to dissolve the character as a symbol in order to reconstruct it freely as abstract line and form, and encouraged experimentation with various non-traditional materials (figure 7.3). But it was Hidai Nankoku’s Variation on “Lightning” of 1945 (figure 7.4) that went the farthest in its expressive “deformation” of a character. With this work,

hitsui—the artist’s brush intention—

achieved full independence from the constraints of written language, opening the possibilities for a new genre of avantgarde calligraphy. The founding members of the Bokujin-kai society were disciples of Ueda Sokyu.” Morita Shiryi, editor of the influential arts and literary journal,

Ink Art (Bokubi), served as the group’s leader.” Morita, along with his close colleague Yoshihara Jird who founded the Gutai Art Association in 1954, was

involved with the Contemporary Art Discussion Group (Gendai Bijutsu Kondankai) that was active in Osaka in 1951-56. For both Morita and Yoshihara, the Dis-

cussion Group was a crucial influence in

shaping their respective visions of postwar Japanese art by serving as a forum for artists of diverse genres—ceramicists, painters, dancers, ikebana artists, and

calligraphers—who were considering new ways to integrate modern and traditional, Eastern and Western art and thought. They discussed the Zen monk-artists Hakuin Ekaku and Nantembo Toja (figure 7.2) in comparison to Jackson Pollock and Pierre Soulages; and the Sh6és6-in Treasures, Nijinsky’s dance,

ceived of sho as “an art of the line,” an

children’s art, and Henri Michaux’s écri-

autonomous configuration of brushstrokes whose expressive power relied

ture were all regarded as models for study and emulation.

Exposure to international painting

led Morita to foster exchange between

Bokujin-kai and several contemporary Western artists, such as Georges Mathieu and William Stanley-Hayter, who were looking to Far Eastern calligraphy for inspiration. Calligraphers and painters alike, he believed, were seeking a com-

mon universal language based in gestural abstraction. In expanding his network overseas, Morita collaborated with the

artist, writer, and occasional calligraph-

er, Hasegawa Saburo (1906-1957, figure 7.5), who had written on the affinities between modern art and calligraphy as early as 1939. A scholar of Western aesthetics who had travelled widely abroad—including two years in Paris where he was active in founding the influential Abstraction-Création group in 193 1—Hasegawa was devoted to comparative art-historical analysis in an effort to formulate an all-embracing concept of art. As a frequent contributor to Morita’s journal, he would relate the line in Pollock’s drip paintings, for example, to the ky6s6 or “crazy grass” style of calligraphic script, the freest form of selfexpression in Far Eastern art. At Hasegawa’s recommendation, Morita featured a calligraphic Franz Kline painting on the cover of Bokubi’s first issue (figure 15.4). Morita’s efforts culminated in 1955 in a collaboration with the visiting Belgian COBRA artist Pierre Alechinsky on the film “Calligraphie japonaise,” which explored the affinities between Art Informel and sho.” Morita’s concept of calligraphy was thus informed by a range of contemporary art theories and practices, and resembled Yoshihara’s Gutai art in its emphasis on exploring to extremes new methods and materials.” The Bokujinkai calligraphers experimented with cardboard, sticks, and broom-size brush-

es; tried mineral pigments, oil paint, enamel, and lacquer in place of sumi ink; and used canvas, wood, ceramic, and

even glass for a surface other than paper. Yet in contrast to Yoshihara, whom Mori-

ta criticized for pursuing “novelty for the sake of novelty,””* the Bokujin-kai artists

MODERNISM

AND

TRADITION

129

7.5. HASEGAWA Saburo. Numbers One to Ten.

c. 1954. Lithograph, 63% X 44/4" (162 X 112 cm). Konan Gakuen School, Kobe. Photo courtesy O Art Museum, Tokyo

7.4. HIDAI Nankoku. Variation on “Lightning.” 1945. Ink on paper, 16/4 X 24%" (42 X 63 cm). Chiba City Art Museum. Photo courtesy O Art Museum, Tokyo

7.6. SUGAI Kumi. Gray. 1963. Oil on canvas,

63% X 51%" (161.5 X 130 cm). The Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, Kobe

7.7. INOUE Yuichi. Work A. 1955. Enamel on paper, 34% X 45%" (87.6 X 115.2 cm). The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto. © UNAC Tokyo

130

MODERNISM

AND

TRADITION

:,

never aspired to an art that begins from a tabula rasa. Rather, they pursued a rig-

orous reevaluation of the fundamentals of ancient calligraphy from a contemporary, global point of view. In the first issue of Bokubi, Morita stated the mis-

sion of the contemporary calligrapher:

1. To research the aesthetic and philosophic expression of calligraphy; 2. To see calligraphy in the context of the whole life

dent calligraphers such as Teshigahara

of a human being; 3. To establish calligraphy on the basis of modern art and theoretical ideas; 4. To see calligraphy in the

Yuichi, the use of characters limited his

larger perspective of all the arts; 5. To expand calligraphy to a global scale; 6. To reexamine and rediscover the classics; 7. To elevate the social standing

of calligraphy.”

Despite its eclectic interests, Bokujin-kai’s extensive theoretical writings on calligraphy were chiefly based in modern Zen philosophy. Two frequent contributors to the Bokubi journal were the Kyoto scholars, lijima Tsutomu, a leading

philosopher of aesthetics, and Hisamatsu Shin’ichi, a disciple of Nishida Kitaro and author of Zen and the Fine Arts (1957).** Both were influenced by Nishi-

7.8. Inoue writing Bone, 1959, now in the collection of The National Museum of Modern Art,

Tokyo. © UNAC Tokyo

whose logical source lay in the Buddhist concepts of reality that are so fundamental to Far Eastern culture. The relationship between the artist’s “brush force” (hissei) and his reliance— if any—on the “bones” of the Chinese character was a central issue for the Bokujin-kai members as well as indepen-

da’s project to transcend the subjective and objective bifurcation of reality by positing instead “a place of nothingness” wherein both subject and object exist and consciousness itself is established. In this domain of absolute nothingness, “the form of the formless is seen and the sound of the soundless is heard.”” In similar terms, Bokujin-kai conceived of calligraphy as a metaphysical act which uses the character as a “site” (basho) to manifest “the dynamic movement of life” (inochi no yakudé)—the ultimate rhythm of “absolute nothingness” beyond intellect, emotion, or ego.” In Hisamatsu’s

words: “What is directly manifest here is that that which is written is also that which writes; that, instead of form pro-

ducing form, form is produced by what is without form.”*' The challenge for avantgarde calligraphers was thus to compose forms that could be appreciated in terms of international gestural abstraction yet

Sofa (1900-1979, Plate 35) and Shinoda Toko (b. 1913, Plate 36). For Inoue

freedom of expression. In 1955, he seized a fat brush he made himself by binding dried reeds together, immersed it in a bucket of black enamel paint, and—bent naked over a large sheet of kraft paper laid out on the bare floor—he made works of explosive wild strokes that were free of reference to any Chinese character (figure 7.7). Writing in his journal (before the landlord evicted him for the

mess he had made), Inoue proclaimed: Turn your body and soul into a brush. . . NO to everything! The hell with it! Paint with all your strength—anything, anyhow! Spread your enamel and let it gush out! Splash it in the faces of the respectable teachers of calligraphy. Sweep away all those phonies who defer to calligraphy with a capital C . . . I will bore my way through, I will cut my way open. The break is total.”

The critic Takiguchi Shiiz6 was intrigued by the new movement, but he questioned whether calligraphy, which by definition is an art of visual and mental communication via the pictorial Chinese ideogram, could actually negate the quality of characters (moji-set) and still function as “calligraphy.” He predicted (wrongly) that most of the contemporary avant-garde calligraphers would eventually become painters: Inoue returned to characters in 1956.* Painting and calligraphy, it would be proven, are not mutually exclusive. Shinoda Toko, a calligrapher of Japanese waka poetry who showed as a painter at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York from 1965 to 1977, exemplified further possibilities for avant-garde sho. MODERNISM

AND

TRADITION

131

Using sumi ink and precious pigments on

a genuine new culture will grow where a

grounds of silver or gold paper (or some-

new morality will invigorate our lives. As the young artists of this era, we wish to

times on canvas), she achieved a new

formal balance between painting and calligraphy. New York critic James Johnson Sweeney's praise for Shinoda is instructive: “What Toko Shinoda pro-

vides . . . is a visual poetry, achieved by holding in proper balance the extra-

pictorial associations of her expression and a strict formal base; a controlled sensuousness; the painting of a mood rather than a fact; a sign rather than a description; in sum, the quality in painting which derives from content and form, subtly fused.” Other artists who throughout their careers explored the edge between calligraphy and painting were Sugai Kumi (figure 7.6), Tsukata Waichi, Kenzo Okada (Plate 170), and Minoru Kawabata (Plate 182).

Long since overlooked, avant-garde

Japanese calligraphy during the 1950s and sixties achieved its goal of “world relevance” by identifying the abstract, conceptual, and spiritual essence of Far Eastern calligraphy with the defiant force and modern transcendental premise that generated the cult of “the spontaneous gesture” known as Euro-American action painting.*® Simultaneously, it remained true to its original project of forging an “anti-modern modernity.”*°

broaden our experience by departing from the limited ideological viewpoints defended by ceramic artists of the past. We chose to observe the trends both inside and outside of the art community and hence aim to found this group on the basis of amore profound recognition of society.* These young potters shared strategies with the avant-garde movements that were developing among artists working in both modern and traditional media. Freedom from regulation, the celebration

of artistic individuality, and hunger for contemporaneity (d6jidai-sei) with the Euro-American modernism that had been denied them during the isolationist totalitarian regime guided Sddeisha’s experiments in clay, symbol of the elemental reality that had survived the scorching fires of war. A poet, composer, and photographer, Yagi Kazuo (1918-1979, Plates 41 to 44) emerged as Sédeisha’s most innovative ceramic artist.” Yagi achieved a rey-

the emphasis on materiality in contemporary Art Informel painting. “The combination of the new and the classic, this is

my intention,” Yagi wrote. “My work seeks a way to harmonize the modern painting of Picasso and Klee with the particular refinement of what the Japanese potter’s wheel has produced.”” Yagi also praised the bold, abstract clay objects of sculptors Tsuji Shindo (figure 7.11) and Isamu Noguchi. Of Noguchi’s ceramics produced and exhibited in Japan in 1950 and 1952, Yagi commented: “There was a brilliance to the ancient Japanese temperament Noguchi © had splendidly brought to life in this most modern appearance.” Yagi’s description of Noguchi’s “ancient Japanese temperament” referred to something different from the familiar rustic tradition of medieval Japanese ceramics cultivated by the arts of tea (such as Shigaraki, Karatsu, Iga,

and Oribe wares). What was startling about Noguchi’s work at the time in Japan was his conscious appropriation of long-neglected prehistoric

JOmon vessels and terra-cotta haniwa figurines. These forms became the source for many of

olution of the revered Japanese ceramic tradition with his corpus of nonutilitarian, non-vessel clay objects. In his hands, clay became an expressionist medium for abstract modeling and the wheel was merely a machine that aids, rather than determines, the sculptural process.“ Mr. Samsa’s Walk (1954), whose title refers to the protagonist of

his clay objects, including the totemic masterpiece, Even the Centipede (Plate 45). “From the start,” Noguchi’s pottery master Kita6dji Rosanjin remarked, “he was fortunate enough to ignore tradi-

nother group dedicated to the transformation of a traditional medium

Franz Kafka’s existentialist novella, The

was Sddeisha, a Kyoto association of progressive ceramic artists that was founded

projecting pipe-like segments resembling

cation of Okamoto Taro’s Thoughts on Jomon (Jomon doki-ron), a vehement critique of the passive, overly-refined aesthetics at the center of Japanese art history versus the “primitivism” (genshisei) represented in vessels of the Mesolithic Jomon period—flaming coiled forms with exuberant pressed-cord patterns.“ “JOmon-style earthenware,” he wrote, “exudes the smell of Japanese soil and groans under its weight. So robust and relentless—it is tense because it is holding back its explosive energy. Its beauty is almost terrifying.”* As Tahiti inspired Paul Gauguin and African sculpture served Picasso, Okamoto’s

SODEISHA OKAMOTO’S

AND JOMON

REVIVAL

in 1948 by Yagi Kazuo, Suzuki Osamu, and Yamada Hikaru, among others.” All three were founding members of the short-lived Young Ceramicists Group (Seinen Sakutoka Shudan), whose 1947 manifesto stated:

We, the young people, have turned our backs on the old morality which has lost its purpose in this period of flux and profound change. A new era will be born and

132

MODERNISM

AND

TRADITION

Metamorphosis, is a circular slab with

a headless walking spider whose body is an empty sphere. In this and other monochrome, biomorphic abstract sculptures,

Yagi strove “to liberate” ceramics from its age-old “restrictions” by incorporating modernist sensibilities. His approach was based on the concept of creating an “object” that drew its force from the “materiality” of clay itself. He often cited the modern European masters as inspirational to his quest for universal form, and compared his interest in the “physiology of material” (busshitsu no seiri) to

tion, study the primitive, and believe

in nature.”* Noguchi’s use of prehistoric Japanese forms coincided with the 1952 publi-

attraction to Jomon represented a revolt against artistic refinement and “Japonisme” in favor of bold and primal nature. The magico-religious significance of the Jémon wares also interested Okamoto. He saw their purpose to communicate

through abstract design with the spirits of the dead as a model for the contemporary avant-garde which also must confront the “invisible realities” of nuclear holocaust, the Cold War, and existential

despair. Okamoto’s outrage at the stagnation of tradition was in fact an alibi for his call to destroy the numb “shell” of the postwar psyche and recover the core of Japanese identity. In Yagi’s Wall of 1963 (Plate 44), a magnificent unglazed urn made of slabs of writhing intestinelike coils, Okamoto’s answer is given _ vital form. The tea ceramics of artist and mystic Deguchi Onisabur6 (1871-1948) aspired to yet another kind of archaism. Deguchi, whom the militarists imprisoned from 1935 until 1942 for his involvement in the unorthodox neo-Shinto religious organization Oomoto, taught that art is

the means “to capture the truth of the Realm of the Spirit, a world unseen by the eyes, unheard by the ears, and

unimagined by the human mind.” Emerging from prison at age seventy-one, he reflected on a life of creation and persecution: “I have never pretended to be a sage. I find it a nuisance to be regarded as some kind of god. All I want is to be a true man and to speak and act as a free and plain man.” In the last two years of

his retired life, the shamanistic Deguchi became obsessed with making tea bowls. He called his highly individual style of Raku-type form which were built by the coil method, “bowls of paradise” or “scintillating bowls” (yowan). In a radical departure from the usual austere taste in tea ceramics, Deguchi painted his yowan in a sun-drenched Impressionist palette with a lyrical evocation of nature in bloom. The eclectic spirit of Oomoto, which drew on Shinto, Buddhist, and

Christian fied world Deguchi’s spirit and

elements in its vision of a unireligion, was embodied in celebration of both the human clay of the earth.

NOGUCHI

IN

JAPAN

of the ancient capital cities, Kyoto and Nara. He also read widely. Hasegawa

[ 1950, the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi traveled to Japan “in search of the spirit of the East.” The son of a prominent Japanese poet and American teacher, Noguchi saw himself as the fated heir to a dual cultural heritage, and felt that “if Icould offer a continuation of that bridge which is the common language of art, I will have offered my part to the human outlook that must one day find all people together.” Immersing himself in the study of Japanese art, Noguchi sought to absorb certain structures of primitive and traditional Japanese culture into his evolving notion of modern form.” His quest was inspired in part by the Japanism trend in

Saburo, who was involved in Morita’s

avant-garde calligraphy movement,

became Noguchi’s guide, interpreter, and intellectual partner. Together, they pur-

sued three areas of research into Japanese culture: philosophy and aesthetics, classic forms, and traditional materials.

contemporary American arts and design,

Drawing on Buddhist metaphysics and the Zennist poetry of the Edo-period monk-artists, Rydkan and Basho, Noguchi studied the meaning of mu (in Sanskrit, shunyata), the concept of emptiness or void so central to the Mahayana Buddhist system of belief. According to early Buddhist teaching, the world perceived through the senses, the phenomenal world as we know it, is “empty” because all such phenomena

whereby Bruno Taut’s celebrated study

arise from causes and conditions, are in a

of Katsura Detached Palace, Okakura

lific writings on Zen and Japanese culture were cherished for their teachings in minimalist and transcendental abstraction. Coincidentally, Noguchi influenced the parallel, revisionist movement in Japan that aimed at reclaiming and reinterpreting Asia’s great cultural past. As a passionate defender of traditional Japan, Noguchi mourned the effects of American materialism, and supported the growing reaction against the Occupation and what the art community lamented as Japan’s appearance of becoming “a cultural colony.”*' Although he was never officially accepted as a Japanese artist because of his American background and nationality, Noguchi’s collaboration on several major Japanese projects with leading figures of the local art community, his profound contribution to the ongoing dis-

state of constant flux, and are destined to change and pass away in time. Emptiness is thus the essential unifying character of both the phenomenal and absolute worlds. In Mahayana (including Zen) Buddhism, this concept of emptiness or nonduality led to the assertion that samsara, the ordinary world of suffering and cyclical birth and death, is identical with the world of nirvana, and that earthly existence holds potential for enlightenment.” Noguchi demonstrated his interest in this positive concept by titling his first major public commission in Japan Mu (figure 7.12). A large, sandstone, biomorphic sculpture, Mu was conceived as part of the overall architectural scheme of the Shin-Banraisha faculty lounge that Noguchi designed at Keid University in memory of his father, who had taught there. Positioned outdoors in such a way that the light of the setting sun would illu-

Tenshin’s Book of Tea, and Suzuki’s pro-

course of modernism and tradition, and

minate its central void form, Mu culmi-

his vast production of sculptures made at his studios in Japan from the early 1950s

nated Noguchi’s early efforts to integrate “an absolutely abstract non-referential

until his death in 1989, establish him

art ” 53 with thematics culled from

nonetheless as a preeminent figure in

Zen philosophy. The interior of the Shin-Banraisha lounge, which Noguchi designed with architect Taniguchi Yoshiro, reflected another interest of Noguchi’s: the aesthetics of rustic poverty cultivated by Sen

postwar Japanese art history.

For Noguchi, tradition embodied “the ever new and the ever old.” As if embarking on a pilgrimage, he devoted several months in 1950-51 to exploring the temples, gardens, and art collections

MODERNISM

AND

TRADITION

133

7.9. Teshigahara demonstrating experimental ikebana at the Sdgetsu Hall, Tokyo, 1965. Photo courtesy The Sdgetsu-kai Foundation

no Rikywi’s wabi tea ceremony tradition. In the room’s minimal design, monochromatic palette, and predominance of traditional country materials such as wood,

of black granite, glowing at the base from a light beyond and below. The feet of this ominous weight descended underground through the box which formed its anchor-

rope, and rattan, Noguchi cultivated the

age. To be seen between heavy pillars was a granite box cantilevered out from the wall, in which were to be placed the names of the world’s first atomic dead.”

aesthetic ideal of poverty (hin), suggesting extreme simplicity, age-old essence, and economy of means. Noguchi wrote of his experiments, articulated in part as a critique of materialism,” during this time: “Indeed, when all the possibilities of modern technologies are lost, one returns once more to basic things, to basic materials, to basic thoughts.”* Noguchi also made designs for architect Tange Kenzo’s Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, including the concrete bridge railings leading to the park entitled To Build and To Depart (1952); and the monumental but unrealized Memorial for the Dead at Hiroshima (figure 7.13). In both of these designs, Noguchi confronted the central issue of the avant-garde traditionalists’ debate: the problem of “form-creation” (zdkei). As Hasegawa wrote in Bokubi, “The essence of having form-creation is when shape, line, point, image, and their overall arrangement are ultimately connected by a spiritual value.” Just as Cézanne’s analysis of “form-creation” was the foundation for the development of abstraction in modern European art, it was believed that the analysis of traditional Japanese zokei would yield a logical structure for modern Japanese abstraction. In Noguchi’s program for the cenotaph, he created a colossal form appropriated from prehistoric Japanese motifs such as

7.10. Yagi in his Kyoto studio, 1954

AND

TRADITION

the Japanese avant-garde in the final stage of the Occupation era, Noguchi’s massive black granite arch poignantly symbolizes the question at the heart of the modernism and tradition discourse: What is the form of Japan’s cultural identity after Japan itself has been practically annihilated?

|Bes the innovative theory and practice of avant-garde traditional arts groups in the postwar period, they have ultimately remained excluded from the international modern art canon because they were perceived as being “traditional” and therefore “antimodern” and “anti-Western.” As literary critic Karatani K6jin points out, however, such misperception arises from a typical conceptual conflation of the “modern” and the “Western.” Since, in the West as well as Asia, the modern and

terra-cotta haniwa that were buried around the ancient imperial tombs as a symbol of human sacrifice, and the beanshaped magatama bead, one of Shinto’s three sacred regalia. Noguchi wrote:

premodern are distinct from one another,

which we all return). It was to be the place of solace of the bereaved—suggestive still further of the womb of generations still unborn who would in time replace the dead. . . . It was to be a mass MODERNISM

social, political, and cultural concerns of

the ceremonial bronze détaku bell, the

The requirements specified that the core, or repository of names, should be underground. A cave beneath the earth (to

134

Although finally rejected because it was deemed inappropriate for an American to design the national memorial to those who died by the nuclear bomb, Dore Ashton claims that the cenotaph “takes its place among the few great twentieth-century monuments, even in its unrealized state.’”** Culminating the

modernity is a concept separate from

Westernness. But since the “origin” of modernity is Western, the two cannot be easily separated.” The purpose of presenting the postwar traditional arts movements within the context of this study of Japanese avant-garde art is to question this outdated assertion, and to reconsider the expression of essentially modernist notions of self, freedom, and

cultural critique through radical forms of traditional, non-Western art.

NOTES: I am grateful to the following individuals and insti-

9. Following Japan’s acceptance of the Potsdam

17. For Domon Ken’s influential photography

Declaration, the Occupation of Japan formally

books devoted to

commenced after the surrender was signed on 2

and art, see Mur6-ji (1954), Koji junrei (Pilgrim-

Japanese temple architecture

tutions for sharing their materials and expertise:

September 1945. The Occupation was adminis-

ages to Ancient Temples; in four volumes,

Amano Kazuo, Deguchi Kydtar6 and The Oomoto

tered by the Supreme Commander for the Allied

1963-71), Taishi no midera: T6-ji (1965), and

Foundation, Haryu Ichiro, Inui Yoshiaki, the

Powers (SCAP), a post initially held by MacArthur

Todai-ji (1973). See also John Szarkowski and

Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum, Morita Shiryi,

until he was replaced by General Matthew Ridge-

Yamagishi Shoji, New Japanese Photography,

Okazaki Kenjiro, Osaki Shin’ichiro, Shinoda

way in April 1951. The implementation of the San

exh. cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art,

Toko, Uchiyama Takeo, Unagami Masaomi, Bert

Francisco Peace Treaty in April 1952 brought the

1974), pp. 18-27.

Winther, and Eric Zetterquest.

Occupation to an end.

Unless otherwise noted, all translations from

10. Several of Japan’s leading artists made war

Kyokai) was founded in September 1950 by Arai

Japanese material are by the author.

propaganda paintings, including

Tatsuo, Murai Masanarai, Yamaguchi Kaoru, Ueki

1. Okakura Kakuz6 (Tenshin), The Ideals of the

East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan (reprinted; Rutland, Vt. and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1970), p. 244.

2. Ibid.

3. Yanagi Sdetsu founded the Japanese Folk Craft Association (Nihon Mingei Kyokai) in 1926 with

the potters Hamada Shdji and Kawai Kanjiré. The so-called Mingei movement which ensued during

the 1930s included these three plus the British potter Bernard Leach and the Japanese potter Tomi-

moto Kenkichi. Their efforts led to the founding of

18. The Modern Art Association (Modan Ato

Fukuzawa Ichiro,

Miyamoto Saburé, Nakamura Ken’ichir6, Saté

Shigeru and others who had left the Free Artists

Kei, Yamashita Kikuji, and Uchida Iwao. Fujita

Association (Jiyi Bijutsuka Kyokai) to explore the

was singled out because of his closeness to the

possibilities of abstract art. Originally devoted

army and exceptional fame as a war artist. The

exclusively to painting and sculpture, in 1954 it

American Occupation forces confiscated 153 war

added the “life art” (seikatsu bijutsu) and photog-

paintings, which are now stored at The National

raphy sections. For the postwar craft art move-

Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. See Reconstruc-

ments, see 1960-nendai no kégei: Koyo-suru

tions: Avant-Garde Art in Japan 1945-1965,

atarashii z0kei/Forms in Aggression: Formative

exh. cat. (Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, 1985),

Uprising of the 1960s, exh. cat. (Tokyo: The

p- 11, and Showa no kaiga dai 2-bu: Sens6 to

National Museum of Modern Art, 1987).

bijutsu/Paintings from the Showa Era (19261989): Part 2, Art and War, exh. cat. (Sendai: The

Miyagi Museum of Art, 1991).

The Japan Folk Crafts Museum in Tokyo in 1936.

11. Thousands of Japan Communist Party mem-

See The Japan Folk Crafts Museum, ed., Mingei:

bers and their supposed sympathizers, including

Masterpieces of Japanese Folkcraft (Tokyo:

1200 in government service, were purged in an ill-

Kodansha International, 1991).

screened operation which effectively reduced the

4. Elisabeth Frolet, “Mingei: The Word and the Movement” in ibid., p. 13.

5. Yanagi’s theory of folk crafts was informed by the thought of William Morris, William Blake, Walt Whitman, and Henri Bergson. See ibid.,

pp. 13-15, 22.

JCP influence in the Diet and in the labor movement, where it had been dominant.

in Bokujin 40-nen (Forty Years of Bokujin), (Gifu: Bokujin-kai, 1991), p. 199.

20. The five founding members of Bokujin-kai who had broken away from Keisei-kai were Inoue Yuichi, Morita Shirya, Eguchi Sdgen, Sekiya Yoshimichi, and Nakamura Bokushi. See ibid. and

Morita Shiryi to “Bokubi” (Morita Shiryt' and

12. In June 1952, the art journal Bijutsu hihyo

Bokubi), exh. cat. (Kobe: The Hyégo Prefectural

published a forum of opposition to this law that

Museum of Modern Art, 1992).

included comments by several prominent members of the art community, including Abe Nobuya, Okamoto Taro, and Takiguchi Shido. See “Nenpyo:

6. For the intellectual movements of this period,

Gendai bijutsu no 50-nen, j6, 1916-1960”

see

(Chronology: Fifty Years of Contemporary Art

J. Thomas Rimer, ed., Culture and Identity:

19. Sekiya Yoshimichi, “Bokujin no shokais6” (The Several Classes of Bokujin), 1967; reprinted

21. Amano Kazuo, “Jobun” (Introduction) in Sho

to kaiga no atsuki jidai, 1945-1969/Calligraphy and Painting, the Passionate Age: 1945-1969,

exh. cat. (Tokyo: O Art Museum, 1992), p. 6.

Japanese Intellectuals During the War Years

Part 1, 1916-1960), comp. by Akatsuka Yukio,

22. For Ueda Sokyi’s influence in the development

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

Yasunao Tone, and Hikosaka Nayoshi, Bijutsu

of Bokujin-kai, see Bokujin 40-nen, pp. 44-45.

Tanizaki’s celebrated essay on Japanese aesthetics,

techo (April 1972), pp. 170-75.

“Tn’ei raisan” (In Praise of Shadows) was pub-

lished in 1933-34, and first appeared in English translation in 1942.

23. In 1948, Morita became founding editor of a

13. Bert Winther, “Isamu Noguchi: Conflicts of

journal of experimental calligraphy, Sho no bi

Japanese Culture in the Early Postwar Years”

(The Beauty of Calligraphy), which was the fore-

(Ph. D. diss., New York University, 1992), pp.

runner of Bokubi (Ink Art). He was also involved

88-89. This is an excellent study of the intellectual

in Bokujin, the organ of Bokujin-kai, which began

and the Religious Worldview, trans. with an intro-

and political trends that shaped Isamu Noguchi’s

publicaton in 1952.

duction by David A. Dilworth (Honolulu: Univer-

extended visits to

7. See Nishida Kitard, Last Writings: Nothingness

sity of Hawaii Press, 1987). 8. Oe Kenzaburé, Teach Us to Outgrow Our Mad-

Japan from 1950 to 1952.

24. Isamu Noguchi introduced the work of Franz

14. Okamoto Tard, “Dentd to wa nanika?” (What

Kline to Hasegawa, who in turn recommended it to

Is Tradition?) in Watashi no gendai bijutsu (My

Morita. Alechinsky’s film was completed in 1956,

ness, trans. with an introduction by John Nathan

Contemporary Art), (Tokyo: Shinchd-sha, 1963),

and was produced as a means to explore the affini-

(New York: Grove Press, 1977), p. xiv.

p- 108. Translation by Reiko Tomii. For more

ties between Japanese calligraphy and contempo-

complete translation, see Chapter 15.

rary abstract painting.

15. Ibid., p. 111. 16. Ibid., pp. 112-13.

MODERNISM

AND

TRADITION

135

7.11. TSUJI Shindo. Han-shan. 1961. Ceramic

sculpture, 38% X 35% X 5%" (97 X 90 X 13 cm). The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto

7.12. Isamu NOGUCHI.

Mu. 1950-51. Sandstone,

74' (228 cm) high. Keio University, Tokyo. Photo courtesy The Isamu Noguchi Foundation, Inc.,

Long Island City

7.13. Isamu NOGUCHI. Memorial to the Dead of Hiroshima. 1952. Composite photograph of

plaster model for an unrealized project; proposed height above ground 20" (610 cm). Lost. Photo courtesy The Isamu Noguchi Foundation, Inc.,

Long Island City

136

MODERNISM

AND

TRADITION

25. The influence between Yoshihara and Morita

35. Gary Snyder, “On the Road with D.T. Suzuki”

was mutual. For Yoshihara’s involvement with cal-

in A Zen Life: D.T. Suzuki Remembered, ed. by

ligraphy, see Osaki Shin’ichiro, “Yoshihara Jird

Masao Abe (New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill,

49. Noguchi, 1952; quoted in ibid., p. 172.

50. See Dore Ashton, Noguchi East and West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), pp. 95-141 for a

to sho” (Yoshihara Jird and Calligraphy) in

1986), p. 208. For the exchange between Japanese

Yoshihara Jiré-ten/Jir6é Yoshihara, exh. cat.

calligraphers and Euro-American artists of this

(Ashiya: Ashiya City Museum of Art and History,

period, see Morita Shiryt to “Bokubi” and Sho to

1992), pp. 179-84.

kaiga no atsuki jidai.

51. Hasegawa, quoted in Bokujin 40-nen, p. 51.

26. Morita, quoted in Bokujin 40-nen, p.84.

36. Amano, p. 13.

52. The Lotus Sutra, trans. by Burton Watson

27. Bokubi, no. 1 (June 1951). See ibid. for a sum-

37. The most important founding members of

mary of contents for each of the Bokubi issues.

Sddeisha were Kumakura Junkichi, Kano Tetsuo,

sensitive account of Noguchi’s artistic and spiritual

quest in Japan during the early 1950s.

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. xv.

Matsui Yoshisuke, Suzuki Osamu, Yagi Kazuo, and

53. Quoted from an unpublished text by Noguchi

Yamada Hikaru.

in Ashton, p. 120.

and the Fine Arts was first published in English in

38. Quoted in Nakanodd Kazunobu, “The Passage

54. For Noguchi’s comments on Mu, see Isamu

1971.

Towards the Creation of Objects—With the Sddei-

Noguchi: A Sculptor’s World (New York: Harper

sha as the Central Theme” in Forms in Aggression,

and Row, 1968), pp. 163-64.

28. For the influence of Iijima and Hisamatsu on

Bokujin-kai, see ibid., pp. 44-49. Hisamatsu’s Zen

29. Nishida Kitar6, An Inquiry into the Good,

trans. by Masao Abe and Christopher Ives (New

p- 39. Translation adapted by author.

Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990)

39. See Yagi Kazuo-ten/Kazuo Yagi (Kyoto: The

pp. vii-xxvii.

National Museum of Modern Art, 1981); Inui

30. See Morita Shiryi, “Watashi no mezashite-iru sho” (The Calligraphy I’ve Endeavered to

Achieve) in Sho to kaiga no atsuki jidai, pp. 136-37. 31. Hisamatsu Shin’ichi, Zen and the Fine Arts,

trans. by Gishin Tokiwa (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1982), p. 69.

Yoshiaki, ed., Yagi Kazuo, Gendai Nihon togei

zenshu/A Pageant of Modern Japanese Ceramics, vol. 14 (Tokyo: Shiei-sha, 1981); and Frederick Baekeland and Robert Moes, Modern Japanese

40. Yagi has written on technique: “I used to believe that an artist’s success or failure depended heart. This was a difficult way of thinking that relied on the arbitrary fact of whether someone

Museum of Modern Art, 1989), unpaged. See also

was good or bad at handling the potter’s wheel,

Yiichi Vivant, videotape, 20 minutes, produced by

that is to say, whether he was adept or not physi-

Unagami Masaomi, UNAC Tokyo, 1993. Inoue’s

cally. But I completely stopped this way of think-

inscription for Plate 33 recounts the artist’s memo-

ing, and came to consider the potter’s wheel simply

ry of the American air force bombing raid on the

as a physical means.” Quoted in Nakanodo

Koto-ku section of Tokyo on the night of 10 March

Kazunobu, p. 43. Translation adapted by author.

School. “The town plunged into darkness is transis a hell fire,” he begins. “A thousand refugees have no shelter and there is no exit.” Buried all

43. Kitadji Rosanjin, quoted and trans. in

ibid., p. 298. 44. See Chapter 8 for a more complete account of Okamoto’s art and life.

33. Takiguchi Shuzo, “Sho to gendai kaiga ni

45. Okamoto, p. 123.

(Tokyo: Misuzu Shobo, 1963), pp. 133-41.

46. Deguchi Onisaburo, “Geijutsu wa shiky6 no haha nari” (Art Is the Mother of Religion), 1924;

in The Oomoto School of Traditional Japanese

34. James Johnson Sweeney, 1969; reprinted in

Arts, ed. by Okazaki Hiroaki (Kameoka: The

Shinoda Toko: Toki to katachi/Toko Shinoda Ret-

Oomoto Foundation, 1980), p. 58.

rospective, exh. cat. (Gifu: The Museum of Fine Arts, 1992), p. 115.

1993), pp. 191-93.

42. Yagi, quoted and trans. in Winther, p. 300.

dawn, the fire is out. Silence is all. No cries.”

ing), 1955; reprinted in Takiguchi, Ten (Point),

(Durham and London: Duke University Press,

41. Yagi, quoted in Inui Yoshiaki, pp. 87-88.

night in a heap of corpses, Inoue concludes, “At

tsuite” (On Calligraphy and Contemporary Paint-

58. Ashton, p. 131.

Bary, The Origins of Modern Japanese Literature

ten/Yu-Ichi Works

formed into an incandescent sea. . . . All Koto-ku

57. Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World, p. 164.

59. Karatani Kojin, trans. and ed. by Brett de

on whether he understood the potter’s wheel by

1945, when he was trapped in the fires along with a

56. Hasegawa, 1951; in Bokujin 40-nen, p. 50.

Ceramics in American Collections (New York:

dition and Yi-Ichi Today” in Okina Inoue Yiiichi-

thousand refugees at the Yokokawa National

(November 1950), pp. 24-27.

Japan Society, 1993).

32. Unagami Masanomi, “The Act of Writing: Tra1955-85 (Kyoto: The National

55. Isamu Noguchi, Arts & Architecture, no. 67

47. Deguchi, c. 1942; quoted in Frederick Franck,

An Encounter with Oomoto (West Nyack, N.Y.:

Cross Currents Paperback), p. 40. 48. Noguchi, 1952; quoted in Winther, p. 247.

MODERNISM

AND

TRADITION

137

Plate 32

INOUE Yuichi Blank (Muga)

1956 Ink on paper mounted on panel

72% X 56%" (185 X 142.5 em) The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto

138

MODERNISM

AND

TRADITION

Plate 33

INOUE Yiichi Ah! Yokokawa National School (Ah! Yokokawa

kokumin gakk6) 1978

Ink on paper 57 X 96" (145 X 244 em)

Unac Tokyo, Inc.

MODERNISM

AND

TRADITION

139

Plate 34

MORITA Shirya Offing (Okitsu)

1965 Four-panel screen, pigment and lacquer on goldleafed paper

Plate 35 TESHIGAHARA Soft

65% X 122%” (166 X 312 em)

White Clouds Come and Go (Hakuun kyorai)

Kiyoshikojin Seichd-ji Temple

1958 Six-panel screen, ink on gold-leafed silk

68% X 126” (175 X 320 em) The Sdgetsu Art Museum, Tokyo

140

MODERNISM

AND

TRADITION

Plate 36

SHINODA Toko Distant

1964. Ink and silver paint on canvas

108 X 71%” (273.9 X 182.4 em) Collection the artist

MODERNISM

AND

TRADITION

141

Plate 37

DEGUCHI Onisabur6 Yukie 1947-48

Ceramic water jug

Th X 5% X 3%" (19.5 X 14.5 X 9.7 em) The Oomoto Foundation, Kameoka

Plate 38

DEGUCHI Onisaburé Miroku

1947-48 Ceramic tea bowl

34 X4% X 4%" (8.8 X 11 X 11 cm) The Oomoto Foundation, Kameoka

Plate 39 DEGUCHI

Onisabur6é

Kiyoko 1947-48 Ceramic tea bowl

3% X3% X 3%" (8.5 X 9.7 X 9.7 em) Private collection

Plate 40

DEGUCHI Onisaburé

Mizugaki 194748

Ceramic tea bowl

4% X 3% X 3%" (10.8 X 9 X Oem) Private collection

142

MODERNISM

AND

TRADITION

ie

onbee:

Plate 41

YAGI Kazuo Untitled (Black Ware)

1958 Ceramic on wooden pedestal

5A X 44 X 9" (14.5 X 11.5 X 22.8 cm) Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art Plate 42

YAGI Kazuo Work No. 52 (The Eye at Rest)

1959 Unglazed ceramic on wooden pedestal 8% X 5% X 6%" (22 X 13 X 17.4 cm)

Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art Plate 43 YAGI Kazuo

Circle (Wa)

1967 Ceramic 12 X 12 X 3%” (30.5 X 30.5 X 10 cm)

The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo

MODERNISM

AND

TRADITION

143

Plate 44

YAGI Kazuo Wall (Kabe) 1963

Ceramic 20% X 15% X 3%" (52 X 38.5 X 9.5 em) Private collection

144

MODERNISM

AND

TRADITION

Plate 45

Isamu NOGUCHI

Even the Centipede 1952

’

=

Kasama ware in eleven pieces, each approximately

18” (46 cm) wide, mounted on wooden pole 14’ (425 em) high The Museum of Modern Art, New York. A. Conger

Goodyear Fund. Photo © 1994 The Museum of Modern Art, New York

MODERNISM

AND

TRADITION

145

Plate 46 Isamu NOGUCHI

Mortality 1959-62

Bronze

75% X 15% X 12%" (190.5 X 40 X 31 em) Yokohama Museum of Art

146

MODERNISM

AND

TRADITION

Plate 47

Isamu NOGUCHI

The Sun at Midnight 1970-89 Granite 86% X 39 X 46%" (220.6 X 99 X 119.2 cm)

Yokohama Museum of Art

MODERNISM

AND

TRADITION

147

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CHAPTER

8

MORPHOLOGY OF REVENGE: THE YOMIURI INDEDEPENDANT ARTISTS AND SOCIAL PROTEST TENDENCIES IN THE 1960s

ALEXANDRA MUNROE

etween 1909, when novelist Mori

break with the “Old Left,” and, most

Ogai published his translation of

concretely, a quest for alternatives to modernist orthodoxies. Rejecting the fallacies of Japanese imperialism and Western humanism, this new generation faced the task of rebuilding Japanese modern identity from the charred ruins of postatomic history. As photographer Tomatsu Shomei (b. 1930) wrote of the war generation that came of age during this tumultuous era, “defeat and the experience of starvation in 1945 had such great influence that they have determined our way of living ever since.”' Cultivating methods and images intended to shock and revolt the status quo, artists led culture from the hallowed halls of museums and theaters into the streets, shopping centers, and train stations of Tokyo, striving to make art that would be defined by

Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism” (just three months after it first appeared in Le Figaro), and 1929, when Murayama

Tomoyoshi’s Dadaist group MAVO disbanded, performative, expressionist, and

anti-art tendencies within the Japanese avant-garde were established. Mori and Murayama were among several artists and intellectuals who returned from European capitals to transmit the modernist canon to a growing community of rebels, misfits, poets, and visionaries.

From these revolutionary beginnings that were nearly contemporaneous with European movements, certain conditions for advanced art in Japan continued to mature through early Showa: the role of the artist as iconoclast and agitator in society; the practice of mixing literary, visual, and performance art forms to create new genres; and the free adaptation of traditional culture to serve a contemporary idiom. After a decade of wartime suppression, these ideas were passionate-

ly reclaimed and provided the foundation for Japanese art of the sixties— undoubtedly the most creative outburst of anarchistic, subversive, and riotous

tendencies in the history of modern Japanese culture. Beneath the veneer of its spectacular postwar economic reconstruction,

Japan of the late 1950s was beset by social and political turmoil. Leftist

demands to revise the unpopular U.S.Japan Security Treaty that gave the United States the right to use Japan as a military base in the expanding Cold War arena in East Asia caused a succession of massive strikes and violent demonstrations culminating in a national crisis in

1960. From this period of unprecedented upheaval simultaneously emerged junk art, underground theater, New Wave

cinema, Ankoku Butoh, and the postwar

school of photography, creating an artis-

Plate 48 AKASEGAWA Genpei

tic revolution that challenged obsolete authoritarian dictates. The artists and intellectuals who participated in these

1968

cultural and political movements were spurred by disillusionment with postwar

(Detail of Plate 70)

Japanese democratic institutions, a

Morphology of Revenge

THE

experience rather than medium, author,

or commercial value. Essentially expressionistic, these artists dealt foremost with

the problems of the “individual” in a quest for self-identity, reflecting a preoccupation with overt self-expression that was central to Japanese avant-garde culture of the sixties. At the forefront of these movements were several artists and short-lived groups that emerged from the Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibitions (Yomiuri andepandan-ten). Sponsored by the Yomiuri newspaper and held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum annually from 1949 until 1963, the Yomiuri Indépendant was an unjuried exhibition open to artists who were not affiliated with any official, academic salon.” With its backing by the media network, the Yomiuri Indépendant

attracted artists, offering them possible

recognition in the press and use of the media itself to make art into an event. Initially a showcase for prominent modernist painters, the Yomiuri Indépendant exhibition began to change in 1955, with the participation of increasing numbers of younger, unknown artists, many of whom were still students. As art historian Kashiwagi Tomoo has related, the emergence of the so-called “Yomiuri

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

149

9th exhibition in 1957, when there was

gressed, they began to use more solid objects. First, nails appeared, then rice

an unprecedented display of gestural

scoopers, cloth, rope, bottles, even tires.

abstract painting in the manner of

What was supposed to be the canvas of a painting now had objects thrusting out from it... until the surfaces of works hung on the wall could no longer support the protrusions and they fell onto the

Indépendant artists” dated from the

Art Informel.* With the so-called “Informel whirlwind,” the Fauvist-style painting that

had earlier dominated the Yomiuri Indépendant retreated as more and more radical kinds of painting, assemblages, environments,

and events

floor with a thud.’

took over.

that obligatory submissions by members of the established art associations are almost gone.”* The exhibition, Takiguchi wrote, had “produced a new group of young talent that was. . . struggling to develop its own world of expression.” He associated the “expressionist tendency _ seen among the younger artists, a tendency to use raw colors in combination with black (often an unrestrained use of enamel)” with the dominance of Informel painting, but argued that Art Informel was not the only stimulus. Rather, the

machine had been dismantled, her war-

torn economy revived, and a democratic form of government established. At the same time, the United States faced the

threat of growing militant Communism in

Reviewing the 1957 show, critic and Yomiuri exhibition advisor Takiguchi Shizo wrote: “With the exhibition now in its 9th holding, my strong impression is

avenged their former silence and compliance with a unified pledge to speak out— their slogan was “Never Again!” By 1951, the goals of the Occupation had been achieved: Japan’s military

For these artists who lacked gallery, museum, or private support—Japan did not yet have an art system in place to

sponsor contemporary art—the Yomiuri Indépendant offered the one and only chance each year to show their decidedly unconventional works. Among the numerous groups that emerged from or became associated with the Yomiuri Indépendant exhibitions after 1958 were Kyishi-ha, Neo-Dada Organizers, Group Ongaku, Zero-Dimension group, Time School (Jikan-ha), and Hi Red Center. Obsessed with ruins and destruction, they advocat-

ed making junk art and violent demonstrations to protest the conventional practice of art. In a messy and anarchistic riot they experimented with forms

the Far East with the victory of Mao Zedong in 1949 and the Communist offensive in Korea in 1950. In this volatile political atmosphere, the U.S.Japan Security Treaty claimed for the U.S. the right to station 100,000 troops on Japanese soil for the alleged purpose of defending Japan; in fact, it was conceived largely as a defensive Cold War military strategy. Ratified without deliberation in the last months of the Occupation, the treaty sparked controversy and opposition from its beginning. As George R. Packard has written in a comprehensive history of the Security Treaty crisis, at the time of the treaty’s signing in 1951 the Japanese were experiencing “a period of shock, tragedy, and of struggle for survival.” This deep sense of uncertainty helped stimulate the revival of prewar leftist sentiments and

was still in search of direction; Informel

of art and performance that parodied and critiqued the social establishment, while liberating themselves from the oppressive wartime legacy. In so doing,

served only as a cue.”

they created a counterculture that was

Marxist-oriented opposition comprising

unique to their

the pro-Soviet

work of the new Yomiuri Indépendant artists reflected “a direct outpouring into

action of pent-up creative energy that

With the 10th exhibition in 1958,

Japanese generation.

the Yomiuri Indépendant became the forum for artists who, in Hi Red Center

artist Akasegawa Genpei’s words, “strove for the extreme.” Appropriating Art Informel’s approach to material and action, and flaunting a bold and optimistic disregard for any cultural authority whatsoever, the new Yomiuri Indépendant artists reveled in what Group Ongaku member Yasunao Tone remembers as “the euphoria of apathy.”® Akasegawa has described their practice of producing radical “objets” made of urban debris, food, dead animals, and other cheap, available, nonart materials:

At first artists began timidly to mix sand or stones with paint which they spread on their canvases. As the trend pro150

THE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

THE

1960

ANPO

CRISIS

he U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (Nichi-Bei anzen hosh6 joyaku, known as Anpo) was signed in 1951 as part of the conclusion of the peace settlement between Japan and the U.S. The socalled “Anpo crisis” surrounding the first renewal of the treaty in 1960 brought into sharp focus Japan’s complex relationship to America—its dominant foreign “other” that represented conflicting extremes of democracy and imperialism, international culture and gross materialism. The upheaval was also remarkable because of the significant role played by artists and intellectuals. Not since World War I had the intelligentsia been so involved in a national political event. In 1960, they ARTISTS i

led to the formation of a broad-based,

Japan Communist Party (JCP); the Socialists, with powerful union support; and a newly-emerged group known as the “progressive intellectuals” (kashushin interi)—anti-conservative artists, writers, theater people, and underground agitators who regarded themselves as guardians of the “new democracy.” Another important political force that appeared was a nationwide student organization united under the umbrella of the JCP as the All-Federation of Student Self-Governing Councils (Zen Nihon Gakusei Jichikai Sorengo, abbreviated to Zengakuren). All four groups were united by their loathing of militarism and imperialism, and opposed any compromise to Article IX of the postwar Constitution, which prohibited Japan from rearmament.

To the leftist art critics associated with the new opposition, the decorative sentimentality of most modern Japanese painting was irrelevant to the urgent realities of postwar Japan; they advocated instead the growing trend toward Sur-

realist-style Social Realism. Responding to the grotesque horrors of war and the political problems of contemporary Japanese society, this genre of leftist “Reportage Painting” (Ruporutaju kaiga) developed in the early 1950s.’ Dedicated to recording the terrors of imperialism, nuclear holocaust, and social injustice, Reportage Painting was partly instigated by the JCP, which sent artists to rural villages, industrial zones, and the areas

surrounding American military bases to depict instances of “class struggle” and “imperialism.” Among the most important Reportage painters was Yamashita Kikuji (b. 1919), whose loyalty to the Communist Party and obsession with ghoulish and perverse allegories of postwar Japan inspired a series of mural-like narratives depicting such subjects as the keloidal sears of atomic-bomb victims, the crass behavior of American GI’s, and incidents

of feudal injustice. In The Tale of Akebono Village (figure 8.2), Yamashita illustrated a real story of a village revolt in rural Japan against the abusive treatment of a landowner. Interweaving sever-

was determined to be an active and outspoken participant in the politics and art of new Japan.” The leftist artistic and intellectual trends of the 1950s may have represented a “reactive nationalism” as well as a form of “anti-Americanism.” Tired of postwar defeatism and anxious to apply their newly discovered socialist concepts, the Japanese advocated a political “neutrality” tied to neither the Soviet nor the Western bloc, thus asserting Japan’s independence as a power. During the fifties, this “new postwar nationalism” was increasingly bolstered by the nation’s rapid economic growth and rising political prestige.” Fears of U.S. motives in East Asia and a desire to escape the over-

whelming political and cultural influence of the U.S. further contributed to a growing opposition against the ten-year renewal of the treaty, slated for 1960.

Considerable pressure from the left to change or cancel the treaty mounted

tures of Japanese society led many to a state of introspective pessimism. In 1960,

the Yomiuri Indépendant artist Kudo Tetsumi (1935-1990) embarked on a morbid series, The Philosophy of Impotence, in which he filled entire galleries with arrangements of black, castrated penis— like objects, symbolizing “the loss

of wholistic communication” and the pathetic despair of human efforts." Several New Wave directors made films about Anpo and the complex politics that characterized the postwar era. Oshima Nagisa’s Night and Fog in Japan (1960), for instance, dealt explicitly with the Security Treaty crisis as illustrative of the collapse of revolutionary ideals and Japan’s ineffectual attempts to prevent the return of feudalistic values and imperialistic aims. The film’s content was so politically charged that it was pulled from distribution on its fourth day of release.'* Central to Oshima’s interpretation of Anpo events was the alienation of

steadily in the late 1950s. Anti-militarist sentiments and fear of involvement with American military activities intensified. In the spring of 1960, the announcement

the self, which was seen as the charac-

of the pro-American government of Prime Minister Kishi Shinsuke that it would renew the treaty with minimum

tion upon the meaning of Anpo and the identity of Japanese youth, pervaded much of sixties counterculture. The second expression of the socalled “Anpo spirit” dismissed political ideology altogether and celebrated anar-

revision ignited nation-wide resentment

leading to mass popular protests, strikes,

and demonstrations. The most violent

al events that occurred over time, the

clash occurred on June 15, when riot

painting depicts an old woman dangling from a suicide noose, with a fox, representing her granddaughter, eating the mucous that falls from her nostrils. Lying in a river of blood beyond her is the body of the Communist agitator who was sent to the village to support the revolt. Painting with house paint on unstitched jute pea bags, Yamashita strove for a style of illustration that recalled billboards and Socialist Realist propaganda paintings. Yamashita has attributed the political insistence of his fifties work to a sense of guilt over his passive failure to protest against Japanese atrocities he observed during his military service in southern China and Taiwan from 1939 to 1942. He

police wielding wooden clubs counterattacked a mob of students who had invaded the Diet building (figures 8.3 and 8.4). Hundreds of students and police were injured, 196 arrests were made, and a

twenty-year-old female student, Kamba Michiko, was crushed to death—becom-

ing the opposition’s martyr. Despite the severe public outcry, the treaty’s renewal was automatically ratified on June 19. Kishi immediately resigned and the opposition movement, which came to be

known as the “Old Left,” was defeated.

The failure of the radicals affected Japanese artists, many of whom participated in the protests, in either of two

ways. The collapse of faith in liberal humanism and Communism to penetrate

ters’ alienation from each other and from their culture at large. This self-critical pessimism, intended to encourage reflec-

chististic revel. Several members of NeoDada Organizers, founded in April of 1960, participated actively in the Anpo demonstrations, mixing up slogans of “Down with Anpo!” with “Down with Anfo!” (Informel painting). According to Tono Yoshiaki, the group’s leading critic, it is believed that Neo-Dada Organizer artist Shisaku Arakawa threw the brick at a police trooper that triggered the bloodiest of the riots. To announce the opening of their third exhibition the members paraded through the streets, one masked and bandaged like a mummy in paper Neo-Dada posters and another wrapped in a string of light bulbs (figure 8.9). As Ushio Shinohara has recorded in his memoir of Neo-Dada Organizers, The Avant Garde Road (Zen’ei no michi,

the authoritarian and conservative strucTHE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

151

1968), once inside the gallery Kazekura Sho stuck his face into a bucket of water,

made bubbling sounds, and then started

shouting, “The War! The War! The Third World War!”" As beer bottles were

smashed and chairs split by karate chops, Akasegawa Genpei calmly read aloud the group’s manifesto. On June 18, the eve of the treaty’s ratification, they organized the “Anpo Episode Event” at member Yoshimura Masunobu’s studio, the site for many of the group’s rebellious shows and Happenings. The members stripped naked, some with bags tied over their heads, and danced wildly. Yoshimu-

ra attached a giant erect penis made of crushed paper bound with string to his loins, and painted his stomach with a gaping red diamond-shape of intestines— as if he had just committed harakiri— and marked the rest of his body with

8.1. Okamoto in his Tokyo studio before The Law

white arrows. These and other events

of the Jungle, 1950

staged by Neo-Dada Organizers, while

teeming with the spirit of revolt, were intentionally empty of any specific ideol-

ogy. Anarchism prevailed. At the center of the Anpo crisis was the conflicting response of the Japanese people to the cultural and political Americanization of Japan. They recoiled from the horrors inflicted by the detonation of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and yet were drawn in their

state of starvation and impoverishment to the world of plenty that Occupation culture represented, including jazz and Hol-

lywood films. Tomatsu Shomei, who emerged as one of the leading figures in what became known as the “postwar school” (Sengo-ha) of Japanese photography, chronicled the images of Americanization in the series 11:02 Nagasaki (Plates 53 to 56), which recorded the freakish keloidal burns and physical deformities caused by A-bomb radiation, and Chewing Gum and Chocolate (Plate 58), a portrait of the American bases in Japan. Writing on his theme, “Japan Under Occupation,” Tomatsu stated, “If

I were to characterize postwar Japanese history in one word I would answer without hesitation: ‘Americanization.’””” In these and other series Tomatsu captured the ruins and refuse of post-atomic’ 152

THE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

8.2. YAMASHITA Kikuji. The Tale of Akebono Village. 1953. Oil on jute, 53% X 844" (137 X 214 cm). Collection Gallery Nippon, Tokyo

8.4. Confrontation ofthe riot police and antiAnpo demonstrators, 15 June 1960. © Asahi Shimbun

8.3. Demonstrators protesting against the U.S.Japan Security Treaty

(Anpo) and surrounding

the Diet building, 18 June 1960.

© Asahi Shimbun

8.5. Japanese representatives marching at the

opening ceremony of the Tokyo Olympics, 10 October 1964. Photo courtesy Kyodo News Service, Tokyo

8.6. NAKANISHI Natsuyuki. Clothespins Assert

Churning Action, shown at the “15th Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition,” Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, 1963. Photo courtesy the artist

THE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

153

as

civilization, focusing on what critic Otto Breicha describes as “all sorts of war

By the mid-1950s, the didactic nature of leftist Social Realism was

relics, boots stuck into mire, walls soiled

already being challenged in contemporary criticism. Concern over the danger

by many hands, dead rats. . . . the neurosis of an overwhelmed presence, Occupation forces with their fences and fighter planes.” Other photographers who explored similar socio-political themes were Moriyama Daido (figure 8.17) and Kawada Kikuji (figure 8.18). With its emphasis on fringe and perverse elements of contemporary Japan, the postwar school of Japanese photography captured the nation in a decade of doomed revolt.

THE YOMIURI INDEPENDANT

GROUPS

he various groups that emerged from the Yomiuri Indépendant exhibitions from 1957 through 1963 represented both a reaction against and a transformation

of the dominant avant-garde practices of postwar Japanese art. As the third generation of postwar artists, the Yomiuri

Indépendant groups inherited the lessons of Surrealism, practiced in the late for-

ties by the first generation including Abe Nobuya, Fukuzawa Ichird, and Okamoto Tard—whose paintings depicted such fantastic horrors of war as skeletal corpses lying in the sand or piled in a heap before a demonic landscape—which taught the necessity for art to function as a violent assault on the complacency of mundane consciousness. They also inherited the Social Realism of the second postwar generation, transforming its

essential “realism” from one that served -a Marxist dogma to one that embraced the detritus produced by mass capitalism. The Reportage painters’ belief in art as a non-elite activity that is an integral part of social reality provided a foundation for the Yomiuri Indépendant groups. Further, the Reportage painters’

preference for large-scale works made of non-art materials and heroic disregard for permanence, expressed by the artists’ frequent destruction of their works influenced the Yomiuri Indépendant artists’ approach to art as part “found object” and part “event.”

of artists’ dependence on subject matter prompted Haryt Ichiro (b. 1925), a leading left-wing critic and member of the JCP, to criticize the Nihon Indépendant exhibition of 1953 that concentrated on Social Realism for lacking originality and formal innovation, despite his wellknown ideological sympathies with the movement. To the Yomiuri Indépendant artists who had witnessed the failure of Japanese Communism, Reportage painting was a form of “art as propaganda” no different in its authoritarian righteousness from the war paintings that many Japanese artists had produced under

THE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

8.7. Shinohara’s boxing painting, Twist Dango, 1962, shown at the “14th Yomiuri Indépendant

Exhibition,” Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, 1962. Photo by Sakai Yoshiyuki; ©Bijutsu Shuppan-sha, Ltd.

coercion a decade earlier. Further, the

weakening of the “Old Left” exposed the futility of subjecting oneself to any organized political cause, leading the Yomiuri Indépendant artists to embrace unfettered individualism instead. The catalyst for a new approach to the problems of self-expression and identity was provided by Okamoto Taro (b. 1911) who, in a series of influential books and essays, advocated the progressive regeneration of Japanese culture.” In his best-selling Art of Today (Konnichi no geijutsu, 1954), Okamoto stated that “Postwar Japan must peel off the heavy shell of the past and forge a new young culture as if being reborn, and venture out into the world,” and called upon young artists to overthrow the “authority blackened with age [that] still presses down stiflingly over our lives.” Believing that modern art was a universal property belonging neither to the East nor West, he advocated using its language to communicate the particular realities of contemporary Japan—but realities that went beyond the “isolation, helplessness, and bitter struggle” documented by the Social Realists. Okamoto called for young artists to make strident efforts to “destroy everything with monstrous energy. . . in order to reconstruct the Japanese art world.” Significantly, the purpose of such activism was to communicate the raw power of contemporary Japan to a

154

as o N a ai

8.8. Members of Neo-Dada Organizers at the group’s first exhibition at Ginza Gallery, Tokyo,

1960 (sitting in the front, Ueno Noriz6; standing from left, Yoshimura, Shinohara, Kazekura Shé,

Toyoshima Séroku, and Arakawa; standing in the

back, Akasegawa). Photo by Kobayashi Masanori

8.9. Yoshimura advertising the third exhibition of Neo-Dada Organizers in the streets of Tokyo,

1960. Photo by Ishimatsu Takeo; courtesy the artist

Western audience—which was still,

Okamoto lamented, mired in a romantic and misconstrued projection of Japonisme. “That which is muddied in the struggle of Japanese soil must be thrust

before them [the West] as is,” Okamoto wrote. “The strike must be made.” Okamoto’s revolutionary call for a new art that implied a physical engagement

archipelago.” Founded in 1957, when the group published the first issue of its journal, Kyiishi-ha included in its fluctuating membership artists, poets, and Socialists gathered around Sakurai Takami (b. 1928), Ochi Osamu (b. 1936), Matano Mamoru

bordering on violence, his desire to

forge a challenging Japanese art that would be contemporaneous with Western modernism, and his belief that art

should communicate the realities indige-

nous to contemporary Japan became the guiding principles of the Yomiuri Indépendant groups. Okamoto encouraged art that was not aesthetically pleasing, not technically skillful, and not complacent in any way.

(b. 1914), and Ishibashi Yasu-

yuki (b. 1930). Advocating at first gestural abstract painting in the manner of Art Informel (figure 8.12), the members of Kyishi-ha always believed in the importance of instilling their art with social causes. But unlike their Tokyo counterparts, they were concerned with issues that related specifically to Kyushu and its rural realities—leading them to

incorporate into their work allusions to the contemporary struggles of coal-

destroy by their obstinate refusal to

accommodate traditional definitions of

art, and by their brazen transgression of the accepted division between art and life. Referring to Nakanishi Natsuyuki’s Clothespins Assert Churning Action (Plates 62-1 to 62-3, figure 8.6)—a multiple-panel relief composed of underwear and hundreds of tin clothespins attached to burned canvases— Akasegawa reflected: “In the knowledge that this was not paint but simple, everyday objects, had we not discovered the minimum separation between painting

and real life?””’ In 1960, the trend toward appropriating junk into high-relief or freestanding forms at the Yomiuri

eternal beauty,” also advocated the

Genealogy of Slaves (Plate 78), two tele-

Indépendant exhibitions was termed “Anti-Art” (Han-geijutsu) by Tono, who had recently returned from a trip abroad where he had been in contact with the neo-Dada movement and the corresponding revival of the term “anti-art” in art critical discourse.” Responding in part to the publication of Robert Motherwell’s The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (1951), the American neoDada movement opposed the institutionalization of modern art and rejected the sublimity of Abstract Expressionism in favor of everyday imagery. Coined in 1958, “neo-Dada” referred to Jasper Johns’s paintings of targets, numbers,

urgent necessity for Japanese artists to “produce an original Tokyo style” that could be presented to the international art world “with pride.” He identified as sources for the new art the noisy and brightly-lit pachinko pinball machine parlors that had become ubiquitous sights in Japanese cities since the war; Akasaka, Tokyo’s burgeoning entertainment center; and the “spirit of Tokyo” itself, “packed with people and all their

phone poles, one symbolizing the male

and maps, and to Robert Rauschenberg’s

and the other the female, recline on a

“combine paintings.”” Fluxus founder George Maciunas, in one of his early pro-

mining and agriculture.”

Members of Kytisht-ha began show-

ing at the Yomiuri Indépendant exhibition in 1957, and participated every year thereafter. Increasingly, their works dis-

Art, Okamoto declared, must be “‘dis-

agreeable.” In The Law of the Jungle (1950, figure 8.1), Okamoto depicted a

monstrous creature in the form of a zippered change-purse devouring a human being and terrifying a host of surrealistic

played a tendency towards totemic structures made of debris such as discarded tires, broken bits of metal machinery, old

creatures. The confrontationalism of

bicycles, weathered wooden scraps of

Okamoto’s absurdist image would become the hallmark of the Yomiuri Indépendant artists, many of whom regarded Okamoto as their mentor. Shi-

farmers’ tools, and piles of cigarette butts. Kyisht-ha’s subversive critique of technological modernization and high modernism as a system took the form of ritualistic agrarian primitivism in the work of Kikuhata Mokuma (b. 1935). In

nohara, who considered himself among

those who had “rejected the pursuit of

confused energy.” One of the earliest groups that became identified with the tendencies that were to dominate the Yomiuri Indépendant exhibitions was Kytshi-ha (literally, “Kytshii School”), a group of avant-garde artists based in Fukuoka on the southernmost island of the Japanese

156

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platform made of common red bricks.

The surface of the male timber was hammered with hundreds of five-yen coins and displayed a phallus rising from its center; the female timber was encased

with twisted ropes made from shreds of old cloth, evoking the tools and labor of rural women. Tono Yoshiaki commented on the Shintdist symbolism of this work when he wrote of Kikuhata’s “posts like wayside kami (gods) over which were spread offering coins.””° By the late 1950s, the term objet had come to designate an art form similar to the American proto-Pop combine and assemblage. To make objets was to confound the art system that the young Yomiuri Indépendant rebels aimed to

grammatic statements, “Neo-Dada in Music, Theater, Poetry and Art,” also

attempted to cast his intermedia movement in the iconoclastic tradition of “concrete...non-art,

anti-art, nature,

reality.”*’ Tono’s application of the term “anti-art” to Kud6’s Proliferating Chain

Reaction—an ameoba-like work composed of scrub brushes enmeshed in a string web and attached to an iron frame—reflected the vanguard’s growing sense of contemporaneity with and participation in the international art scene, a markedly different attitude from the for-

mer Social Realists’ isolationist and regionalist identity. As part of this trend,

a few galleries became active in promoting contemporary art from abroad in the early sixties. Foremost among them was

Minami Gallery, which became the international center of the Tokyo avant-garde under its founding director Shimizu Kusuo (figure 8.16).*! Tono’s interest in the Anti-Art trend at the 12th Yomiuri Indépendant show in

had been bottles melted into distortion from fire bombs, pieces of roof-beams found in the ashes. Now, their shows were full of these junk-flowers, with their queer blossoms. . . .*

saw each opportunity to exhibit. As in Gutai art, physical interaction of body and material, and reliance on viewer or

media participation to complete each “event” was fundamental to their strat-

1960 focused on the works of Kudo,

pleased, for it was not “anti-art” but an

egy. Because the artists approached artmaking as a theatrical act, their junk objects were destined to become themselves temporary and discarded: Almost no original Neo-Dada Organizer objects

Arakawa, and Shinohara—all of whom

expansion of the very definition of art

are extant today.

were affiliated with the newly-founded group, Neo-Dada Organizers, gathered under the charismatic leadership of Yoshimura Masunobu (b. 1932) and Ushio Shinohara (b. 1933). (Kudd and Miki Tomio were never officially members of the group, but participated in several of its events.) For that year’s

that they sought.” For Tokyo’s Neo-Dada

Yomiuri Indépendant, Shinohara made a version of Mathieu’s “action painting” by dipping his boxing mitts wrapped in cloth rags into buckets of Japanese rice glue mixed with sumi ink and then punching his way with large black splats across the surface of a makeshift canvas of discarded packaging; a similar work was exhibited in 1962 (figure 8.7).* Other group members included Akasegawa Genpei and Kazekura Sho, who were later active in Hi Red Center, and Shiisaku Arakawa

(b. 1936), who had made his debut at

the Yomiuri Indépendant in 1958 with a series of coffin-like wooden boxes. Inside each of these boxes, which the viewer

was invited to open, was entombed a congealed mass of cement whose surface was corrupted with odd bits of organic

fur or hair. Each concrete form lay embedded in a cloth-lined case, conjuring a feeling of melted flesh deformed by atomic radiation and left to petrify in a casket (Plate 79).*' Tono later reflected on his encounter with the NeoDada Organizers:

Their exhibits reflected the immense junkyard of the teeming city of Tokyo. The junk which they first saw, which influenced their way offeeling objects, was the junk of the burned ruins of the city during the war. The blasted city had been their playground: their first toys

Despite certain affinities, Tono’s term Anti-Art did not sit well with the artists. Shinohara especially was dis-

Although the Neo-Dada Organizers

Organizers, art was an extension of life

disbanded within a year, members con-

and a discovery of the shocking grit of

tinued to be active in the Tokyo avant-

everyday, found materials spawned by the devastation of postwar Japan and contemporary urban reality. “One by

garde until the mid-1960s. Anticipating

one,” Akasegawa recalls, “unobtrusive

tique on the meaning of Pop Art, Shinohara embarked in 1963-64 on a series which he promoted as “Imitation Art.” These were copies of masterworks by leading American Pop artists, such as Johns’ Three Flags and Rauschenberg’s

postmodernist “appropriation art” by several years and offering an ironic cri-

articles of daily life became redolent with

new secrets... .as | clambered up these mountains of rubbish I began to find in them objects which had an unmistakable quality of their own.” Exactly contemporaneous with the French Nouveaux Réalistes, whose manifesto by critic Pierre Restany is dated to April 16, 1960, Tokyo’s Neo-Dada Organizers embraced the mass waste emitted by the rampantly materialistic and overly-Americanized cities of the postwar industrialized world.” Both groups legitimized their radical departure from abstract painting toward assemblages made of junk by associating their activities with the Dada heritage (the title of the first Nouveaux Réalistes’ Paris show in 1961 was “40° au-dessus du Dada’), and both owed to Surrealism their practice of assembling found objects by fragmentation, juxtaposition, or accumulation. Unlike American

Coca-Cola Plan (figure 8.11). Prompted in part by Rauschenberg’s visit to Tokyo in November, 1964—when he demonstrated the construction of a work, Gold Standard (figure 8.10), at an open forum held in Sogetsu Hall—Shinohara was inverting the common foreign view that modern Japanese art lacks originality. What was prescient in Shinohara’s idea was that contemporary culture had reached such a level of simultaneity, commodification, and mass reproduction that

works of art no longer held any authentic or unique value: They were reduced, in

Baudrillard’s terms, to “simulacra.”

Eschewing the modernist conceit that avant-garde art must always create some-

Pop Art, it was not the directness, dead-

thing new and original, Shinohara pro-

pan banality, and commercial anonymity

claimed, “I think imitation is something

of urban reality that appealed to the Paris and Tokyo groups, but rather the “hitherto unrecognized strangeness latent in every object, old or new.”” Yet where

ultimate in our age.”

Arman, for instance, selected junk such

offensive to viewers” by issuing a set of

as smashed violins to make permanent objects that still functioned as “art” in

pendant show. Nonetheless, artists con-

the traditional sense, the Neo-Dada Or-

tinued to provoke profound consternation.

ganizers used junk to create impermanent

When museum guards found Kazekura

The Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum attempted to exclude the increasing

number of works it decreed “markedly regulations for the 1962 Yomiuri Indé-

manifestations of their chaotic environ-

Sho standing naked in a gallery, they

ment within the context of Happening-

threatened to call the police and asked,

like performances—which is how they THE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

157

8.10. Robert Rauschenberg creating Gold Standard at Ségetsu Art Center, 28 November

1964. Photo by Sekiya Masaaki; courtesy The Sdgetsu-kai Foundation 8.11. Ushio SHINOHARA.

Coca-Cola Plan. 1964.

Mixed media, 28% X 25% X 24%" (71.5 X 65.5 X

6.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, Toyama

8.13. KIKUHATA

Mokuma. Roulette: No. 5. 1964.

Assemblage: Wood boards, sheet metal with circular cutouts, cans, iron pipe, baseball, pencil,

enamel paint, etc.; 42% X 25% X 84" (107 X 64.5 X 21.6 cm). The Museum of Modern Art,

New York. Daphne Hellman Shih Fund 4

8.14. Hataraki Tadashi performing at the

“Kyushi-ha Exhibition” at the Shinten Kaikan hall,

Fukuoka, 1963. Photo courtesy the artist

and Fukuoka Art Museum

8.12. “Kyiisht-ha 2nd Street Exhibition— Informel Outdoor Exhibition,” November 1957.

Photo courtesy Kikuhata Mokuma and Fukuoka Art Museum

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YOMIURI

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“Where is your work and what is its title?” Kazekura replied, “It’s me right here. It’s called The Real Thing (Jitsubutsu).”*” Not surprisingly, in early 1964 the Yomiuri Newspapers announced that their annual exhibition would be discontinued, citing that its initial goal of fostering new talent had been achieved. The move to control riotous tendencies reflected the government and media’s exploitation of the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympics as an occasion to usher in a positive “beyond postwar era” defined by the exemplary twin miracles of high economic growth and a vast, prosperous middle class (figure 8.5). Unruliness had no place in this official image of Japan. Yet despite the loss of the Yomiuri Indépendant as a venue, the Tokyo avant-garde continued to stage activities and stimulate critical debate on the nature of Anti-Art.* At the forefront of the post—-Yomiuri Indépendant avantgarde were the artists Takamatsu Jir6 (b. 1936), Akasegawa Genpei (b. 1937), and Nakanishi Natsuyuki (b. 1935), who in May 1963 formed the group Hi Red Center—an acronym composed of the English for the first character of each of its members’ names.“ What connected these artists (who had been collaborating together for several months) was their conception of objet as the focus of “events” that would go beyond the walls of the museum or gallery, as well as their informed leftist concern for the social inequities of modern Japan. In the Yamanote Line Event of October 1962,

Nakanishi rode Tokyo’s busiest trainline carrying an egg-shaped “compact object” composed of junk set in polyester (Plate 63), while Takamatsu dragged around a long black string attached to various everyday objects (Plate 67). With his face painted white, Nakanishi crouched ona station platform and licked his egg, then calmly boarded a train where he hung it from the hand straps and observed people’s reactions with a flashlight.” According to Akasegawa, Nakanishi and Takamatsu’s purpose for using the train as a site for their event was to destroy the hierarchical status of art by bringing it

into the “space of daily activities.” Taking their cue from Okamoto, who stated in 1955 that “Utter nonsense may have more power to change social reality than

fake. Akasegawa lost the case and appealed twice; it was finally closed in 1970 when the Supreme Court pronounced the artist guilty of contravening

seriousness,’ Hi Red Center used satiri-

the law. Akasegawa responded to his first sentence by making an oversize replica of a thousand-yen note, Morphology of Revenge (Plate 70); at the end, he produced a zero-yen note printed with the words, “Legal Art—Genuine Article” which he sold for 300 yen.

cal performances staged in public spaces to critique the mechanical banality and covert authoritarianism underlying Japan’s mass capitalist society (Performance Plates 72 to 76). The group’s cooperative exploration of the inherent relationship of art to daily life attracted the attention of visiting Fluxus artists Nam June Paik and Yoko Ono—both of whom participated in the Shelter Plan

ulminating the passionate anarchism

event of January 1964 (Performance Plates 72 and 73)—which led to the reenactment of two Hi Red Center events in New York by Fluxus artists (figure 8.12)." “Utter nonsense” collided with “social reality” in January 1964, when police authorities accused Akasegawa of counterfeiting currency, for which he was indicted in November 1965. Their evidence was Akasegawa’s series of works (impounded by the police) in which the

that had animated the Yomiuri Indépendant phenomenon, the defeat of the radical artist by the conservative forces of bureaucracy in Akasegawa’s famous case symbolized a death similar to that of the “Old Left” in 1960, when

demonstrations failed to affect the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. Like the figures in contemporary writer Oe Kenzaburd’s (b. 1935) novels who like “a fuck rife with ignomy,” the Yomiuri Indépendant artists practiced bacchanalian revel, public satire, and terrorist

artist had used monochrome, one-sided prints of a thousand-yen note to wrap common objects such as a fan and an attaché case. Akesegawa had used the same “bill” as an invitation to his solo show at Shinjuku Dai-Ichi Gallery in February 1963 (Plates 68 and 69). Brought to court in August 1966, the spectacular series of public trials that followed are legendary in the annals of Japanese art. To demonstrate the definition of “event” and “Happening,” Hi Red Center re-staged some of their most notorious works in the courtroom, insisting

all the while that their accompanying

objets d’art (which to the prosecutors looked like strange junk) be treated with museum-quality care. Critics Takiguchi,

fantasies—like blowing-up the Tokyo Metroplitan Art Museum“—as a means to

subvert and escape from the faceless socio-political system of the postwar world. Ultimately, however, they are left

powerless. All they can do is cultivate what authority deems “perversions,”

which will hopefully liberate them from “the territory” of society.” What is true of Oe’s protagonists applies as well to the Yomiuri Indépendant artists: Raised amid the rubble of Japan’s catastrophic defeat and witness to the collapse of national myths, they reflected the gestalt of the postwar Japanese psyche— absolute loss and absolute freedom.

Haryu, and Nakahara; artists Nakanishi, Takamatsu and Ikeda Tatsuo; and

Kyoto Museum of Modern Art director Imaizumi Yoshihiko all joined in Akasegawa’s defense, which centered on the question, “What is, or is not, art?”

Akesegawa claimed that a “copy” is not a “fake” of the real object, but rather a “model” which denies the hierarchical relationship between the real and the THE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

159

NOTES: In preparing this chapter, I am greatly indebted to my colleague, Kashiwagi Tomoo, Assistant Curator of the Yokohama Museum of Art, who wrote on this subject for the Japanese version of Japanese

Art After 1945: Scream Against Sky. I have drawn upon his insightful comments and pertinent quota-

tions, and am grateful for his scholarly input. I

6. Yasunao Tone, interview with author, New York

where in spite of his success he always felt acutely

City, 21 January 1993.

aware of being an “outsider,” came to an end with

7. Akasegawa, Imaya akushon aru nomi! Yomiuri

andependan to iu gensho (Now There Is Only Action! The Yomiuri Indépendant Phenomenon), (Tokyo: Chikuma Shob6, 1985), pp. 67-69. Trans-

lated by Robert Reed in Kashiwagi, adapted by the author.

also wish to acknowledge the following individuals

8. George R. Packard III, Protest in Tokyo: The

for their contributions to my study of Japanese art

Security Treaty Crisis of 1960 (Westport, Conn.:

of the 1960s: Akasegawa Genpei, Haryti Ichiro,

Greenwood Press, 1966), p. 11.

Isozaki Arata, the late Kaidd Hideo, Kuroda

Raiji, Kusama Yayoi, Nakahara Yusuke, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, Nakamura Keiji, John Nathan,

Oshima Nagisa, Leo Rubinfine, Donald Richie, Sakurai Takumi, Ushio Shinohara, Takamatsu

9. Among the most prominent Reportage painters

Japanese material are by the author. For further information on the groups and events described in this chapter, see Glossary.

Shomei Tomatsu: Japan 1952-1981, exh. cat. (Graz, Austria: Forum Stadtpark et al.,

1984), p. 62.

Nihon Indépendant Exhibition, was organized by

the Japan Art Association (Nihon Bijutsu Kyokai) and inaugurated in 1947. Based on democratic

ideals, it was revolutionary as a new type of open submissions exhibition without a jury. It became associated with Social Realism.

20. Okamoto Tard, 1954; quoted and trans. in

Winther, p. 113. 21. Okamoto, c. 1948; quoted and trans. in Kaido,

Reconstructions, p. 14.

Winther, “Isamu Noguchi: Conflicts of Japanese

in Japan 1945-1965, exh. cat. (Oxford: Museum

Culture in the Early Postwar Years” (Ph.D. diss.,

of Modern Art, 1985).

New York University, 1992),

pp. 116-17.

Avant-Garde in Postwar Japan” in ibid., p. 18.

23. Shinohara, pp. 108-9.

11. Packard, pp. 338-43.

24. Isolated in rural Kyishi, the group was highly

12. This term was discussed by Maruyama Masao

critical of the Tokyo-based art establishment

(gadan) and positioned itself as “anti-Tokyo” (han-Tokyo) and “anti-central” (han-chiio). Not

13. Kudo Tetsumi quoted in Nakahara Yusuke,

surprisingly, their attacks were rebuffed by most

“Erosu no geijutsuka-tachi 4: Kudé Tetsumi.

Tokyo critics as a limited “local avant-garde”

Denki jidai no sei” (Artists of Eros 4: Kudo Tetsu-

(dozoku-teki zen’ei). From 1962, Kyushu-ha art-

mi. Sex in the Age of Electricity), Bijutsu techo,

ists increasingly staged Happening-like events such

no. 297 (May 1968), pp. 143-44.

2. The other unjuried annual exhibition, the

translations of Okamoto’s seminal writings.

22. Okamoto, 1954; quoted and trans. in Bert

in 1950; ibid., p. 30.

1. Tomatsu Shomei, “Japan Under Occupation” in

1956) and Watahi no gendai geijutsu (My Contem-

porary Art, 1963). See Chapter 15 for further

ma Kojin. See Reconstructions: Avant-Garde Art

10. Kazu Kaido, “Reconstruction: The Role of the

Unless otherwise noted, all translations from

tions are Nihon no dento (Traditions of Japan,

are Nakatani Tai, Nakamura Hiroshi, and Toneya-

Jird, Yasunao Tone, Tono Yoshiaki, Yuri Tsuzuki,

Yamagishi Koko, and Yokoo Tadanori.

the war; he was forced to return to Japan and enlist in the military. His other important publica-

14. Referring to Anpo’s “martyrs” Kamba Michiko

and Asanuma Inejiré (the chairman of the Japan-

as Hataraki Tadashi’s 1963 performance (figure 8.14). See Kyiishii-ha-ten/Group Kyishi-ha, exh. cat. (Fukuoka: Fukuoka Art Museum, 1988).

ese Socialist Party who was assassinated by a

25. While they supported the Anpo demonstra-

rightist), Oshima claimed that the “massacre” of

tions, they were more closely involved with

his film was clearly “political oppression,” and

Kytshii’s massive coal mining strikes of the late

decried: “I really think that what killed Night and

1950s and the consequent murder of a laborer by a

3. Kashiwagi Tomoo, trans. by Robert Reed,

Fog in Japan is the same thing that killed Kamba

right-wing thug at the Mitsui Miike coal mine in

“Fukusht no keitaigaku: Yomiuri andepandanto

Michiko and Asanuma Inejiro, and I protest with

1959. This incident made Miike the symbolic site of

to 1960-nendai no shakai-teki purotesto/Morpholo-

unrelenting anger.” See Oshima Nagisa, Cinema,

the defeat of the postwar labor movements. Re-

gy of Revenge: The Yomiuri Indépendant Artists

Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa

sponding to this local crisis, many of the Kyushu-

and Social Protest Tendencies in the 1960s,”

Oshima, 1956-1978 (Cambridge, Mass. and Lon-

ha artists began using asphalt and coal tar in their

in Sengo Nihon no zen’ei bijutsu/ Japanese Art

don: MIT Press, 1992), p. 57.

works as a means of communicating their identity

After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, exh. cat.

15. Téno Yoshiaki, “Japan” in Artforum 5, no. 5

(Yokohama: Yokohama Museum of Art,

(January 1967), p. 53.

1994), p. 189. 4. Takiguchi Shizo, “Hydgen no kiki: Dai 9-kai

Yomiuri andepandan-ten” (The Crisis of Expression: The 9th Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition),

1957; reprinted in Takiguchi Shazo, Ten (Point), (Tokyo: Misuzu Shobo, 1963), pp. 299-300. Translated by Robert Reed in ibid., adapted

by the author.

5. Akasegawa Genpei. Tokyo mikisa keikaku: Hai reddo senta chokusetsu kod6 no kiroku (Tokyo Mixer Plans: Documents of Hi Red Center’s Direct Actions), (Tokyo: PARCO Co., 1984), p. 6.

cal issues that informed Kyashut-ha, see ibid.,

pp. 10-13.

1968), p. 58

INDEPENDANT

(August 1962), p. 173.

18. Otto Breicha, ““Not to Be Passed Over” in

27. Akasegawa, quoted and trans. in John Clark,

Shomei Tomatsu, p. 6.

“The 1960s: The Art Which Destroyed Itself: An

19. Okamoto lived in Paris from 1929 to 1940. Early in his career, he believed in abstract art as

the new international language and in 1933 became the youngest member of the Parisian Abstraction-

Création group. Later, he developed a fantasy

ARTISTS

26. Tono, “Exhibition Review,” Bijutsu techo

17. Tomatsu, p. 62.

Breton helped organize. His career in Europe,

YOMIURI

the government bureaucracy. For the socio-politi-

Garde Road), (Tokyo: Bijutsu Shuppan-sha,

internationale du surréalisme of 1938 that André

THE

the all-out modernization program instigated by

16. Ushio Shinohara, Zen’ei no michi (The Avant-

Surrealist style and was included in the Exposition

160

with the labor movement and their protest against

Intimate Account” in Reconstructions, p. 86.

8.15. Installation view of the “Room as Alibi” exhibition at Naiqua Gallery, Tokyo, 1963. The

photograph shows Akasegawa’s wrapped objects in the center, Takamatsu’s tied-up table on the left, and Shimizu Akira’s bed with a protruding

8.16. “Jasper Johns Exhibition,” Minami Gallery,

stuffed bird in the corner. Photo courtesy

Tokyo, 1965. Photo courtesy the Publication

Akasegawa Genpei

Committee of Shimizu Kusuo and Minami Gallery

8.17. MORIYAMA Daido. Gambling in the Dressing Room, Tokyo (Hanafuda) from Nippon

Theater. 1966. Gelatin silver print, 13 X 18%" (33.1 X 47.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art,

New York. Gift of the photographer

8.18. KAWADA Kikuji. The Japanese National Flag. 1960. Gelatin silver print, 9% X 7" (24.8 X 17.8 cm). The Museum of Modern Art,

New York. Gift of Armand P. Bartos

THE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

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161

8.19. Three views of Takamatsu’s 1000-Meter String, shown at the “15th Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition,” Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum,

1963. The string started in the exhibition gallery, unwound through the lobby of the museum, traversed Ueno Park and ended up at the train station. Photo courtesy Akasegawa Genpei

8.21. Hi Red Center’s Be Clean! event, performed by members of Fluxus at Grand Army Plaza, New

162

THE

8.20. Nakanishi covered with clothespins for

York City, 11 June 1966. Photo by George

Hi Red Center’s 6th Mixer Plan, Tokyo, 28 May

Maciunas; courtesy The Gilbert and Lila

1963. Photo courtesy the artist

Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

28. Tono first used “anti-art” to describe a work

42. This anecdote is recorded in Akasegawa,

by Kudo in a review of the 12th Yomiuri Indépen-

Tokyo mikisé keikaku, pp. 48-49.

dant that was published in the Yomiuri Shimbun.

43. Aside from several solo exhibitions held pri-

See Tono, “Neo-Dada et anti-art” in Japon des avant-gardes 1910-1970, exh. cat. (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1986), p. 329.

marily at Tokyo’s Naiqua Gallery, the following exhibitions were influential in the careers of Yomiuri Indépendant artists. In 1963: “Fuzai no heya”

29. The term neo-Dada was first applied to the

(The Room as Alibi) organized by Nakahara

work of

Yusuke at Naiqua Gallery; “Group Sweet” at

Johns, Rauschenberg, Allan Kaprow, and

Cy Twombley in an unattributed comment in the

Kawasumi Gallery, Shinjuku Dai-Ichi Gallery, and

January 1958 issue of Artnews.

Lunami Gallery. In 1964: “Young Seven” organized by Tono Yoshiaki at Minami Gallery; “Off

30. For George Maciunas, “Neo-Dada in Music,

Theater, Poetry, and Music,” see In the Spirit of

Fluxus, pp. 156-57.

Museum” and “Left Hook” at Tsubaki Gallery. In

1965: “Big Fight” at Tsubaki Gallery. A public forum, “Anti-Art, Like It or Not” was held at the

31. The leading galleries for contemporary art in

Bridgestone Museum in January 1964. Moderated

Tokyo were Nantenshi Gallery (founded 1960) and

by Tono, panelists included Harya Ichiro, Ichiyanagi Toshi, Isozaki Arata, Sugiura Kohei,

Minami Gallery (founded 1956, closed 1979). 32. The group’s name was derived from the American neo-Dada movement, which they learned of

Ikeda Tatsuo, and Miki Tomio. For the critical discourse surrounding this panel discussion, see

Chapter 15 and Kashiwagi, pp. 189-90.

through Tono.

44. Takamatsu (high pine), Akasegawa (red rapids

33. Shinohara produced several versions of his

“boxing painting.” One such performance was doc-

river), and Nakanishi (center west).

45. Akasegawa, Tokyo Mikisa keikaku, pp. 12-18.

umented by the visiting photographer William Klein. See William Klein, intro. by Maurice Pin-

guit, Tokyo (New York: Crown Publishers, 1964). 34. The young architect Isozaki Arata (b. 1931),

46. Okamoto, 1955; quoted and trans. in Kaid6, p.

20).

47. New York-based Fluxus artists staged versions

who designed Yoshimura’s atelier (dubbed the

of Shelter Plan (at the Waldorf-Astoria), and Be

“White House”), the center of the group’s activi-

Clean! in New York. Information about Hi Red

ties, was also associated with Neo-Dada Organiz-

Center’s activities was made available through the

ers. The August 15, 1962 event “Something

poster, Bundle of Events (Plate 77).

Happens” was held at Isozaki’s atelier. See Iso-

48. See Yoshimura Masunobu, “Neo-Dada Orga-

zaki’s Essay in this book.

nizers” in “Hyakka seih6 60-nendai shoki” (Let

35. Tono, “Japan,” p. 53.

One Hundred Flowers Bloom: The Early 1960s),

Bijutsu techo (October 1971), p. 56.

36. For Shinohara’s response to “Anti-Art,” see Chapter 15.

49, See John Nathan, “Introduction” in Oe

37. Akesagawa in Reconstructions, p. 87.

Kenzabur6, trans. by John Nathan, Teach Us

to Outgrow Our Madness (New York: Grove

38. See 1960 Les Nouveaux Réalistes, exh. cat.

(Paris: MAM/Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de

Press, 1977).

Paris, 1986).

39. Lucy R. Lippard, Pop Art (New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 176. 40. According to Tono, the series began in 1963;

the first use of the term “imitation” in a title of a work was at the “Left Hook” exhibition held at

Tsubaki Gallery in December 1964. See Shinohara Ushio-ten/Ushio Shinonara, exh. cat. (Hiroshima:

Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art et

al., 1992). 41. Shinohara, p. 141.

:

s

THE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

163

Plate 49

TOMATS

Shomei

Aftermath of aTyphoon, Nagoya, 1959 From the series

Nippon (1967)

Gelatin silver print, 6 X 10%” (40.5 X 27.3 em)

Collection the artist

Plate 50 TOMATSU

Shomei

Home of an Old Family—Kitchen Sink, Kytishit, 1959 From the series Nippon (1967)

Gelatin silver print, 12 X 15” (30.3 X 38.1 cm) Collection the artist

Plate 51 TOMATSU

Shomei

Psychic Medium, Aomori, 1959

From the series Nippon (1967) Gelatin silver print, 114 X 15%" (28.2 XK 38.7 em) Collection the artist

Plate 52 TOMATSU

Shomei

Sandwich Man, Tokyo, 1961

From the series Nippon (1967) Gelatin silver print, 104 X 15%" (26.6 X 41.0 cm)

Collection the artist

164

THE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

-

Plate 53 TOMATSU

Shomei

Girl Who Had Experienced the Atomic-Bomb Explosion While Still in Her Mother’s Womb, 1961

From the series ]]:02—Nagasaki (1966) Gelatin silver print, 12 X 15” (30.4 X 38.3 em) Collection the artist

Plate 54 TOMATSU

Shomei

Woman with Keloidal Scars, 1961 From the series 1] :02—Nagasaki (1966) Gelatin silver print, 11% X 16” (28.5 X 40.5 em)

Collection the artist

Plate 55 TOMATSU Shomei

Hull of Japanese Ship, 1963 From the series 11 :02—Nagasaki (1966)

Gelatin silver print, 16 X 10%" (40.5 X 27.4 cm) Collection the artist

Plate 56

TOMATSU Shomei Man with Keloidal Scars, 1962 From the series 11 :02—Nagasaki (1966)

Gelatin silver print, 16% X 10%" (40.6 X 27.4 cm) Collection the artist THE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

165

Plate 57-1

Plate 57-2

TOMATSU Shomei

TOMATSU Shomei

Protest, Tokyo

Protest, Tokyo

1969

1969

From the series Oh! Shinjuku (1969)

From the series Oh! Shinjuku (1969)

Gelatin silver print

Gelatin silver print

11% X 16” (28.7 X 40.5 em)

11% X 16” (28.7 X 40.5 em)

Collection the artist

Collection the artist

166

THE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

Plate 58

TOMATSU Shomei American Sailors, Yokosuka

1966 From the series Chewing Gum and Chocolate (1966)

Gelatin silver print

11% X 16” (28.7 X 40.5 cm) Collection the artist

Plate 59

TOMATSU Shomei Eros

1969 From the series Oh! Shinjuku (1969)

Gelatin silver print

12 X 15” (30.5 X 38.1 cm) Collection the artist

Plate 60

TOMATSU Shomei Woman Screaming 1969

From the series Oh! Shinjuku (1969)

Gelatin silver print

11% X 16” (28.2 X 40.5 em) Collection the artist

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YOMIURI

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ARTISTS

167

Plate 61

Takahiko IIMURA DADA 62 1962

Video (original 16mm film), B/W, silent, 10 minutes

Collection the artist

This film was taken in part at the “14th Yomiuri

Indépendant Exhibition” at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum,

168

THE

1962.

YOMIURI

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ARTISTS

Plate 62-1

NAKANISHI Natsuyuki A panel of Clothespins Assert Churning Action (Sentaku basami wa kakuhan kéd6 o shuch6 suru) 1963/1993

THE

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ARTISTS

169

Plates 62-1 to 62-3 NAKANISHI Natsuyuki

Clothespins Assert Churning Action (Sentaku basami wa kakuhan kéd6 o shuché suru)

1963/1993

Plate 63

Metal clothespins clipped on burned cloth,

NAKANISHI Natsuyuki

attached to wooden strecher, three of five panels

Compact Object (Egg)

Two panels, 464 X 35%” (117. 0 X 91 cm);

1962

one panel, 16% X 12%” (40.9 X 31.8 cm)

Objects set in polyester resin

Collection the artist. Original work in the

5% X9% X 5%" (15 X 25 X 15 cm)

collection of Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum

Yokohama Museum of Art

170

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Plate 64 NAKANISHI Natsuyuki Rhyme

1959 Lacquer, enamel, and sand on plywood

44% X 36%" (113.5 X 92 cm) The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo Plate 65 NAKANISHI Natsuyuki Rhyme 1960

Lacquer, enamel, and sand on plywood

57% X 44%" (145.5 X 112.5 em) The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo

Plate 66 aS NAKANISHI Natsuyuki Rhyme ’63 1963

Two pieces, lacquer and enamel on plaster

6 X 9% X 6" (15 X 25 X 15 cm) each

Collection Fujioka Kotaro -

THE

YOMIURI

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ARTISTS

171

Plate 67

TAKAMATSU Jiro String: Black (Himo: Kuro) 1962

Objects wrapped in fabric and rope 118” (300 cm) long Collection the artist

172

THE

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ARTISTS

‘Plate 68

Impounded Object—Bottle (Oshthin—bin)

Impounded Object—Hanger (Oshthin—hanga)

AKASEGAWA Genpei

Paper, string, and bottle

Paper, string, and hanger

One-Thousand-Yen-Note Trial Impounded

9% X 3% X 2%" (25 X 10 X 6 em)

5% X 16% X 1%" (15 X 43 X 3cm)

dshthin)

Impounded Object—Suitcase (Oshithin—kaban)

Impounded Object—Hammer (Oshithin—

1963

Paper, string, and suitcase

kanazuchi)

Collection the artist

11% X 15% X 3%" (30 X 40 X 8 cm)

Paper, string, and hammer

Objects (Seized Works) (Sen-en satsu saiban

9% X 2% X 1%" (25 X 7 X 4 cm) Impounded Object—Scissors (Oshithin—hasami) Paper, string, and scissors

10% X 31% X %" (27 X 8 X 2 em)

THE

YOMIURI

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ARTISTS

173

ONE THOUSAND-YEN NOTET CATALOGUE OF SEIZED WORKS WIFE)

ALERT

De. ieo- we. OM

MFO. ©PARLOR RENCE 2PkoMHe WILT, Leone SREPESN REET AER

Ret Lil) Bee

Lneenwabresre sche, The works ol Gemprh Alusranwe te thepsemdyre ontemefel mad ame compornitians mith it,whichbe fends dering the year 16L from Jemeary to December. ware vient fe N06 beytheMecropatican Potlen Bawrd pad thr Pebtie Prosrewter's OMliee of Toba. They orn wow stored i the second tasawrct of the TobyeDhetrbet

Core ORIGINAL

COPPER-PLATE

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Cotmadetof 1, 000p0e cute

Benides the 2peers show presen”

ace séleed 6 pieces pe ail af Hinds wang 4ilfeteet cokers wad

ONE THOUSAND-YEN

NOTES

(eaters cutting) wach shoot (3 pieces) 2020

cease"

PSYCHE JOURNAL AUGUST 1967 *O0NIS ===

Plate 69 AKASEGAWA Genpei One-Thousand-Yen-Note Trial Catalogue of Seized Works (Sen-en satsu saiban 6shihin mokuroku)

1967 Poster

30 X 24” (76.2 X 61 cm) Collection the artist

174

THE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

SIZE)

Plate 70

AKASEGAWA Genpei Morphology of Revenge (Fukushi no keitaigaku)

1968 Gouache on paper, mounted on panel

35% X 71%" (90 X 180 cm) Collection the artist

THE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

175

Plate 71 HI RED CENTER ! 1964 Fluxus Edition; cloth with grommets

19% X 19%" (50 X 50 cm) The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit

176

THE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

—

The Imperial Hotel Physical (Shelter Plan)

Performance Plate 72-1

Performance Plate 72-2

(Teikoku hoteru no nikutai: Sheruta puran) was

HI RED CENTER

HI RED CENTER

held at the Imperial Hotel, Tokyo on 26-27

Measurement documentation of, from left to right,

Relics of the Shelter Plan event including

January 1964. Guests were invited to the Hi Red-

Akasegawa, Nakanishi, and Izumi

development plan for Nam June Paik’s shelter

Center suite where their bodies were measured one

Three blueprints

box, invitation card, Hi Red Center’s name card,

by one for personal custom-built bomb shelters.

78% X 31%" (200 X 80 cm) each

registration card and measurement record for

1964

each visitor, instruction card, notes for vistors,

Private collection

hotel receipt, and “cosmic can.” 1964 Private collection

THE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

177

Performance Plate 73 JONOUCHI

Motoharu

Shelter Plan 1964 Video (original 16mm film), B/W, silent, 21 minutes

Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum

Performance Plate 74

HI RED CENTER The Ochanomizu Drop (Dropping Event) was performed in and around the Ochanomizu section

of downtown Tokyo on 10 October 1964. From left to right, Takamatsu, Akasegawa, Izumi, and

Kazekura dropped old clothes and everyday objects from the roof of Ikenobo Kaikan hall and

watched them fall and land on the street below. They then packed the dropped things in a suitcase, placed it in a public locker, and sent the locker

key to a name they picked at random from the phone book.

178

THE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

Performance Plate 75

HI RED CENTER Movement to Promote the Cleanup of the Metropolitan Area (Be Clean!) was performed in

Tokyo on 16 October 1964. Dressed in surgical

masks and gowns bearing Hi Red Center “!” armbands, the group scrubbed the Ginza pavements that had recently been “spruced up”

for the Tokyo Olympics.

Performance Plate 76

HI RED CENTER The One-Thousand-Yen-Note Trial (Sen-en satsu

saiban) began on 8 October 1966 in the Tokyo District Court. Akasegawa was accused of

contravening the Law on Counterfeiting Securities and Currency and was brought to trial. The

defense protested against the law’s “definite judgement” of what constitutes art and

demonstrated art’s “infinite brilliance” with Takamatsu’s string event, in which he wrapped string all around the courtroom, and relics of

Hi Red Center’s Shelter Plan event, in which reams of blueprints showing the artists naked were

unfolded at the prosecutor’s stand. Akasegawa was found guilty; the verdict was appealed to the High

and Supreme Courts, but upheld in 1970.

THE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

179

‘SUinjtkw Dajichi gallery, 5 G 1000 couatertet bill priptes as imvilation and

= expects Akavegamaofmaking (he counterlelt 1000 ¥ bil ey

‘15Aug.1963, "Roe-Rogy" onroa! roolof i Bi)iNe-shiAl pan Co.

the counterfeit 1000¥bill, \\ Hamar bowevent atimperial Hotel, rosesne,340

\\ a. trvitation required visitors (ocome withnecktie,

]) glowes asdbagorpackage.

>|

:

2. Visitors were given instructions is hate! lobby.

‘©whilewaiting in lobby loebserve neighboers breathing ardexhale 25heinhales,, inhale asheexhales 4 to being1000 ¥billaspassport forentryinteroom. 1arem 340visitors: y f) hadtheir1000¥ stamped withHiRedCentersymbols Naas: Sec 2 basnee)peers ceereae = fingerprint was registered ona card,

© photosolfront,back,sides,top,aadbetlom weretaken ol eachvisitor, © body ofeachvisitor wasmeasumed, weighed aod oudlice drawn. ‘)volume measured ofeachvisitorbyfamersien Into2 taht Nled withwater, Reread, weight andvolume Y/2oF1/4scalecould

Plate 77 Hi Red Center Poster

1965 Fluxus printing. Edited by Shigeko Kubota and designed by George Maciunas One sheet printed on both sides

22% X 17" (56.2 X 43.2 cm) Collection Jon and Joanne Hendricks, New York

180

THE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

.

Plate 78 KIKUHATA Mokuma

Slave Genealogy (Dorei keizu) 1961/1983 Wood, bricks, fabric, metal, five-yen coins, and

candles

177% X 78% X 53%" (450 X 200 X 135 cm) Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum

THE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

181

Plate 79

Shisaku ARAKAWA Untitled Endurance I

1958 Cement, cloth, cotton, and wooden box

84 X 36 X 5%” (213.3 X 91.5 X 15 em) Takamatsu City Museum of Art

182

THE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

Plate 80

Ushio SHINOHARA Drink More

1964

Fluorescent paint, lacquer, plaster, and Coca-Cola bottles on canvas 254 X 18% X 94" (64.7 X 46.8 X 24 cm)

Yokohama Museum of Art

THE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

183

Plate 81

Ushio SHINOHARA Doll Festival (Onna no matsuri)

1966 Fluorescent paint, lacquer, and colored plastic

on canvas 75 X 51% X 1%" (193 X 130 X 3 cm) The Hydgo Prerfectural Museum of Modern Art, Kobe

184

THE

YOMIURI

INDEPENDANT

ARTISTS

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