The Artistic Avant-Garde in 1960s Japan

A review of Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan, William Marotti, Duke University Press, 2013.

“Dada” exists in the Japanese language as a category outside the realm of aesthetics and art history. The word “dada”, as in the expression dada wo koneru, is used to describe selfish behavior that lacks sense. It is also an idiom for “spoiling.” A kid throwing a tantrum can be called “dada”, or a teenager’s prank, or an adult acting childish. A popular theory derives the expression from Dadaism, the avant-garde art movement born in Zürich in 1916, but real etymology and kanji characters actually connect it to the Japanese language. Perhaps the false etymology is not wrong after all. Dadaism always had a special affinity with Japan. In the German language as in Japanese, the term may have derived from baby talk or child’s speak. Tristan Tzara’s affirmation “Dada means nothing” echoes the teachings of Zen masters and the Japanese concept of mu, or nothingness. The Dada artistic movement entered Japan soon after its birth in Europe during the First World War: in 1923, Mavo, a Dada group founded by Japanese artists Murayama Tomoyoshi, Yanase Masamu and others, held its first exhibition at the Sensō-ji temple in Tokyo. Japanese Dada may have been even more explosive than its European versions: the art review Mavo originally came with a firecracker attached to its cover. The poets Tsuji Jun and Takahashi Shinkichi were also pionneers of Dadaism in Japan, blending it with Taoism and Zen Buddhism. Dadaism then disappeared from the scene, only to resurface in the late 1950s as the Neo-Dada Group, an art collective featuring Akasegawa Genpei, Arakawa Shūsaku, Ariyoshi Arata, and a dozen other artists. Dada’s influence in Japan can be observed in a variety of cultural expressions such as surrealism, pop art, Fluxus, noise music, and even a monster figure in the popular TV series “Ultraman.” The kaiju character “Dada”, with distinctive cubist features, was created as an extension of Dadaism and avant-garde art and became a recurrent feature in the series.

Dada’s Not Dead

Many artistic acts and performances reviewed in Money, Trains, and Guillotines may fall under the umbrella of Dadaism, although only a minority of artists covered in this book were affiliated to the short-lived Neo-Dada movement. Printing giant 1,000-yen banknotes and getting sued for it; plotting to install a guillotine in front of the compound of the Imperial Palace; or performing art actions along the Yamanote train line: these are some of the disruptive performances that William Marotti reviews in his book, recasting a period alive with student movements, political clashes, labor struggles, and radical theorizing. More than “dada,” a moniker that characterized the period was hantai or han-, meaning “anti-.” Students demonstrated against the renewal of the US-Japan security treaty under the slogan Anpo hantai, or “down with the security treaty.” Neo-Dada artists joined them in their protests, covering their bodies with tracts and slogans, while sometimes shouting the rallying cry Anfo hantai, or “down with informal art.” The expression han-geijutsu, or “anti-art,” was coined at the time to characterize these various artistic movements. In 1960, the art critic Tōno Yoshiaki used it to describe the sculpture-object of artist Kūdo Tetsumi titled Zōshokusei rensa hannō, or “Proliferation chain reaction.” Inspired by anti-theater and anti-novel, the expression of “anti-art” led to a lively debate between art historians Miyakawa Atsushi and Takashina Shūji. Some critics, such as Kawakita Rinmei, defending the tradition of Japanese art, characterized anti-art artworks or performances as the production of demented rockabilly fans. Others, such as the surrealist poet and art critic Takiguchi Shūzō, who held a monthly column in the Yomiuri newspaper, encouraged young artists to push the limits of artistic expression and experiment with new art forms.

The Yomiuri newspaper played a key role in the emergence of this “anti-art” art scene. Newspapers in Japan are more than newspapers: they also sponsor art exhibitions, organize conferences, finance their own professional sport teams, and publish books written by their staff, among other activities. The Yomiuri, situated at the center-right of the political spectrum, was nothing but progressive and anti-establishment in its art choices during the period. Starting in 1949, it sponsored a yearly event modeled on nineteenth-century France’s Salon des indépendants, later labelled the Yomiuri Indépendant, first held at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in Ueno Park. Competing at first with the Nihon Indépendant organized by the Japan Fine Art Association in the same location, it took on a new identity in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the participation of a new generation of artists proposing increasingly puzzling and provocative objets, installations, and performance elements. In April 1961, a major exhibition titled Gendai bijutsu no jikken (“Experimentations in contemporary art”), held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and sponsored by the Yomiuri, displayed the works of sixteen new artists, among which Arakawa Shusaku, Kudō Tetsumi, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, Kikuhata Mokuma, Ochi Osamu, Yoshinaka Taizō, Motonaga Sadamasa, Tanaka Atsuko, etc. A predilection for art incorporating junk or transforming junk into increasingly enigmatic objets drew the attention of the outside world. Facing criticism, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum, the site of the Yomiuri Indépendant, issued new regulations regarding the type of works that could be displayed. Were to be forbidden “works including a mechanism producing loud or unpleasant noise, works emitting a stinking odor or using perishable material, works using sharp objects that could cause injuries, works that leave the public with an unpleasant sensation and that violate the rules of public hygiene, works using sand or gravel that could damage the floor and walls of the museum, works directly hanging from the ceiling, etc.” Faced with such restrictions, artists prepared to stage a boycott, and the Yomiuri group finally put an end to the yearly exhibition in 1964.

A crucible for artistic creativity

William Marotti devotes two chapters to the history of the Yomiuri Indépendant. Its beginnings in 1949 were unappealing: fresh out of wartime collaboration and a long labor strike, the managers of the Yomiuri Shimbun wanted to whitewash their conservative image by sponsoring the arts and encouraging democratization. The creation of the yearly exhibition in 1949 occasioned both protests and a fair degree of confusion: it bore the same name as the Nihon Indépendant organized by the Nihon bijutsukai (Japan Fine Art Association), and was far less prestigious than the official Nitten exhibition (Nihon bijutsu tenrankai), divided into its five sections of Japanese Style and Western Style Painting, Sculpture, Craft as Art, and Calligraphy. First displaying a motley crew of professional artists and amateurs, it gradually became the center of a constellation of interconnected artists and art groups. It was, according to Akasegawa Genpei, a “crucible” in which the work of young artists, including his own, could combine and coalesce to acquire a certain degree of cohesion, intensity, and purpose. The Yomiuri Anpan, as the exhibition was also known, fulfilled the original goal of its creators in fostering a vigorous, critical, and anti-conformist art scene. Avant-garde art spilled out of the museum, as in Takamatsu Jirō’s Cord series (Himo) extending out of the museum and in Ueno Park, or was expelled from in precinct when Kazakura Shō engaged in nude performances in front of onlookers. Many of the exhibits were not artworks in the traditional sense: they were created for the space and duration of the exhibition and were simply abandoned afterwards. Performance pieces were by nature time- and space-specific. The Yomiuri Indépendant nonetheless featured seminal works and performances that were memorialized and displayed in retrospective exhibitions, such as The 1960’s : a decade of change in contemporary Japanese art (1960 nendai: gendai bijutsu no tenkanki) held in 1981 at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, or Japon des avant-gardes 1910-1970 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 1988.

The early 1960s witnessed the blossoming of many art collectives. Some of them developed an art scene outside of Tokyo, with few contacts to the avant-garde mainstream but a radical impulse that acted as a harbinger of things to come. The Gutai collective, founded in 1954 in Osaka and animated by Yoshihara Jirō, was a fascinating attempt to conflate art and performance, staging its first happenings before and independently from the New York avant-garde. Considering the fact that Life magazine devoted a photo reportage to the activities of Gutai in 1956, it is well possible that the Japanese avant-garde group influenced the New York experimental art scene and not the other way around. But Gutai remained a provincial affair, and it is only in the early 1960s that its destructive impulse was picked up by young artists in Tokyo. In addition to the Neo Dada Group, avant-garde art collectives included the Time School (jikanha) of Nakazawa Ushio, Nagano Shōzō, and Tanaka Fuji, the Music Group of Tone Yasunao, Kosugi Takehisa, and Mizuno Shūkō, and the group Zero jigen (Zero Dimension) with Katō Yoshihiro. The High Red Center, formed in 1963, was composed of Takamatsu Jirō, Akasegawa Genpei, and Nakanishi Natsuyuki. The first character of each name (Taka or high, Aka=red, Naka=center) led to the name of the collective, who took as its symbol a big exclamation mark. The group weighed the publication of an aborted plan to raise a giant guillotine in the Imperial Plaza, drawing proposals for two possible alternative configurations for the guillotine. In the context of the times, this was not only empty provocation: a writer, Fukuzawa Shichirō, had been the target of a deadly right-wing attack in 1960 for publishing a short story in which the imperial family was beheaded amid joyous festivity.

Counterfeit art

But perhaps the most radical act plotted by one of these conspiratory artists emerged out of artistic banality. Akasegawa’s 1,000-yen project was a classic attempt to make enlarged copies of the Japanese banknote featuring Prince Shōtoku using crude reproduction techniques and to display the monochrome works in various formats: as work in progress, framed pictures, or wrapping material for readymade objets. First exhibited at the 1963 Yomiuri Indépendant, the art project fell under the radar screen of Japanese authorities until the arrest of a Waseda University student prompted police to search the apartment of a magazine editor, leading to the discovery of Akasegawa Genpei’s 1,000-yen series. Akasegawa’s works—monochrome, single-sided, prepared on a range of qualities of paper, and often enlarged—could hardly have been intended to pass as currency. But according to public prosecutors, the act of reproducing banknotes fell under a 1895 law controlling the imitation of currency, establishing provision for prosecuting mozō (creating something confusable with currency) and gizō (counterfeiting). What followed was a protracted judicial trial that sometimes turned the Tokyo High Court into a scene of happenings. In several articles and literary works, Akasegawa articulated a complex critique of the pseudo-reality of money, identifying it as an agent of hidden forms of domination supported by state authority and by the policing of commonsense understandings of crime, of art, and of public welfare. In a parallel case regarding the abridged translation of a Marquis de Sade novel, the court asserted the state’s right to criminalize any form of artistic expression if it was found to be injurious to the public welfare, unlimited by constitutional restrictions and based on statuses dating back to the Meiji era.

The fact that the police state and the judicial system were mobilized in a defense of the reality of money points to the potency of artistic attacks on symbolic authority. The apparent anomaly of the trial in Courtroom 701 of the Tokyo District Court, a venue for the most serious criminal cases, and the appeals up to the Supreme Court, all testify to the weigh placed on this contest. According to William Marotti, “the gap between artists’ investigations and dreams of revolution, and the state policing of art and thought, reveals the politics of culture as confrontation.” He refers to Henri Lefebvre and Jacques Rancière to articulate a critique of the everyday, based on Japanese artists’ discovery of hidden forms of domination in daily life and their attempts to expose and challenge official forms of politics and hegemony. Avant-garde artists from the early 1960s were actively engaged in transgressing boundaries of thought and social practice. Their practices appear to have arisen out of a particular local, playful art practice that used theYomiuri Indépendant as a playground for bringing artistic experimentation into direct interaction with the everyday world. The exhibition’s cancelation in 1964, the year of the Tokyo Olympics, had the effect of pushing avant-garde art into the underground and radicalizing it further. Revolutionary forms of activism and critique emerged to challenge state institutions ranging from the museum gallery to the courthouse. Art and political activism converged in the use of a common vocabulary such as “direct action” or chokusetsu kōdō. Indeed, the transliterated English term favored by Japanese artists, akushon, often synonymous with pafōmansu, was progressively replaced by the more directly palatable kōi or kōdō, evoking direct political action ranging from general strike to terrorism.

From avant-garde to angura

Artistic vocabulary also testifies of an evolution of loan words from the French to the English language. The avant-garde artists at the Yomiuri Indépendant exhibited collages and ready-made objets influenced by Marcel Duchamp and the art informel movement. The cultural cachet of French words and idiomatic expressions inspired a generation of painters and plasticiens who still dreamed of Paris as a Mecca for the arts. In a way, the worldwide reputation of the Japanese avant-garde was made in France. The art critic Michel Tapié visited Japan from August to October 1957 and wrote lavish praise about Kudō Tetsumi’s entries at the Yomiuri exhibition. His encounter with the Gutai group predated Allan Kaprow’s apology of the Osaka collective by a few months. But soon English expressions such as abstract expressionism, action painting, art performances, happenings, and angura (a contraction of “underground”) took the place of French loan words. The early 1960s was definitely a period when Japan felt the gravity center of the art world move from Paris to New York. Whereas a previous generation of artists such as Imai Toshimitsu and Dōmoto Hisao chose Paris as the base for their artistic career, Arakawa Shūsaku and Kawara On settled in New York where they contributed to the birth of conceptual art. Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage visited Japan in 1964, and their works and performances had a huge influence on young artists. The time of the avant-garde was over, and with it the possibility of revolution through art, the classical goal of an avant-garde, receded into oblivion.