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- Convenors:
-
Francesco Campagnola
(University of Lisbon)
Genta Okamoto (Kokugakuin University)
Ayako Ikeno (Aoyama Gakuin University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Section:
- Intellectual History and Philosophy
- Location:
- Lokaal 0.3
- Sessions:
- Sunday 20 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels
Short Abstract:
This panel analyses the theoretical and aesthetical roots of Japanese postwar avant-garde art and its contribution to the cultural discourse following the Second World War. We focus on Hanada Kiyoteru, Takiguchi Shūzō, and Okamoto Tarō, exploring their transdisciplinary and transnational background.
Long Abstract:
The proposed panel analyses the theoretical and aesthetical roots of Japanese postwar avant-garde art. Our aim is to explore this important intellectual and artistic phenomenon, which remains understudied in scholarship outside of Japan thus far.
Focusing on three of the protagonists of Japanese avant-garde, Hanada Kiyoteru [Seiki], Takiguchi Shūzō, and Okamoto Tarō, we highlight how their intellectual and aesthetic contribution to the Japanese postwar milieu fostered a critical debate over some of the dominant discursive landmarks of that period, such as progress, modernity, renaissance, human being, and subjectivity.
The avant-garde movement offered an alternative model of art both in its making and in its fruition since it fostered a collaborative methodology and called for a stronger, more reciprocal and proactive relationship with its audience. This idea of a non-individualistic, transdisciplinary and grassroot artistic experience/experimentation also mirrored a specific view of how postwar society should have developed. Avant-garde intellectuals often embraced communism—although maintaining a critical attitude towards the Japanese Communist Party—and flirted with Marxism. They criticised the rationalistic and progressive recipe for postwar reconstruction that liberal intellectuals, as well as relevant political and social actors, had devised. This new approach to the arts and politics carried with it a different perspective on the nation–humanity polarity. The unconscious elements of local traditions as well as the immediate, pre-subjective, experience of the masses were mobilised to create a narrative running counter such modern tropes. This is evident in Okamoto’s work, which, on the one hand, unearthed the local and ancient roots of forgotten civilisations (e.g.: Jōmon craftmanship) not belonging to the national mythology, and, on the other, depicted the history of humanity’s spiritual development in conceptual continuity with evolution rather than by the idea of progress (the Tower of Sun). Such avant-garde attitude towards modernity also meant a different representation of historicity and historical subjectivity, which emerges clearly in Takiguchi’s and Hanada’s intertwined discourses on reality/surreality (Kindai geijutsu) and renaissance (Fukkōki no seishin).
Inquiring into this complexity of Japanese postwar avant-garde’s discourse, the panel also contextualises it in its global environment (the Russian avant-garde, Picasso, John Cage, etc.)
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Sunday 20 August, 2023, -Genta Okamoto (Kokugakuin University)
Paper short abstract:
The proposed paper examines the concept of experimentation in post-war Japanese avant-garde art, focusing on the poet Takiguchi Shūzō and the group of artists he supported, the Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop).
Paper long abstract:
The proposed paper examines the concept of experimentation in post-war Japanese avant-garde art, focusing on the poet Takiguchi Shūzō and the group of artists he supported, the Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop).
In post-war avant-garde art, under the concept of experimentation, new techniques, media and materials were often introduced and new genre-crossing expressions were attempted. For example, John Cage and Experiments in Art & Technology (E.A.T.), as well as Asger Jorn come to mind. In Japan in the 1950s, the Jikken Kōbō was in activity. The group brought together young artists from various genres under the direction of Takiguchi Shūzō, such as composer Takemitsu Tōru and multimedia artist Yamaguchi Katsuhiro. Thus, they formed an artistic space and network in post-war Japan that differed from academism, and anticipated later trends in 'intermedia'.
However, while experimenting with the use of new technologies and cross-disciplinary collaboration, Jikken Kōbō also criticised modern civilisation and its dedication to progress. Their experiments aimed to return to universal origins, not limited to particular traditions or peoples, by using brand new technologies that had not yet been incorporated into any cultural traditions. Their concept of experimentation in pursuit of regression rather than progress probably originated with Takiguchi, a poet who led the Surrealist movement in Japan in the 1930s and who, in the 1950s, alongside Hanada Kiyoteru [Seiki] and Okamoto Tarō, became one of the most influential avant-garde theorists of post-war Japan. For Takiguchi, art was nothing more than an experiment that radically transformed our perception of reality.
By comparing the concept of experimentation shared by Takiguchi and the Jikken Kōbō with international trends in experimental art of that time, this paper aims at shedding light on the link between technology and a return to the origins in post-war Japanese avant-garde art.
Francesco Campagnola (University of Lisbon)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores Japanese avant-garde's godfather Hanada Kiyoteru and his contribution to the national postwar debate on renaissance/reconstruction and subjectivity/humanism. I focus in particular on his use of zoological, biological, and environmental metaphors and their transnational sources.
Paper long abstract:
In postwar Japan, “Renaissance” became a catchword for political, moral, and economic reconstruction. In this context, works on the Renaissance which had been conceived before or during the war, such as Hayashi Tatsuo’s Bungei fukkō (1933) or Watanabe Kazuo’s Runesansu no hitobito and Furansu Runesansu Danshō (1949; 1950), became guiding lights for moral and social reconstruction. These essays could be read as part of a more general trend in the reaffirmation of subjectivity as a human (citizen’s) prerogative.
However, there was one voice which stood out of the crowd. One of the main postwar works on Renaissance’s imaginary was Hanada Kiyoteru’s Fukkōki no seishin (1946). The book was a collection of essays, mostly penned during the war. In the early 1940s, Hanada had developed an ambiguous but critical relationship with the militarist regime. After the war, he became a leader of the avant-garde movement in Japan and developed a form of dialectic materialism, which he named mineralism (kōbutsuchūshinshugi). His mineralism preached the unity of contraries left in their irreducible difference, and the equal respect of all things, beyond humanism, including inanimate matter. This anti-humanistic perspective was consubstantial to Hanada’s original anti-Renaissance as expressed in Fukkōki no seishin. Hanada made clear that Renaissance is but another face of death, the natural return of what has reached its own end, not an emancipation of man from nature.
The proposed paper explores the transformation of Hanada’s renaissance as expressed in Fukkōki no seishin, from its embryonal form, when he was linked to Nakano Seigo’s fascist national revival, up to his last work and extensive contribution on the concept of “renaissance,” Nihon no Runesansujin (1974). In particular, I will try to trace the sources which provided Hanada with his powerful toolbox of biological and environmental images, such as that of the clavelina – a tunicate which reverts to embryonic stage and returns again to a developed status in order to adapt to environmental changes, and which, in Hanada’s mind, is a symbol of the limitedness of Renaissance-inspired humanism – or the recurring image of the desert with its hidden microbial, vegetable and animal life.
Ayako Ikeno (Aoyama Gakuin University)
Paper short abstract:
Okamoto Tarō is known as one of the most prominent avant-garde artists in postwar Japan. He is also considered as a pioneer who revaluated prehistoric Jōmon pottery. In this proposed paper, I will review how Okamoto contrasts Jōmon pottery with conventional “Japanese-style tradition”.
Paper long abstract:
Okamoto Tarō (1911-1996), who formed Yoru no Kai (Night Society) with Hanada Kiyoteru and other artists and intellectuals, is known as one of the most prominent avant-garde artists in postwar Japan. He is also considered as a pioneer who revaluated prehistoric Jōmon pottery, which had been neglected until then in Japanese art history. He was first impressed by it when visiting the Tokyo National Museum. Then, he wrote “Jōmon doki-ron: Yojigen to no taiwa (On Jōmon earthenware: A dialogue with the Fourth Dimension)” for the art magazine Mizue in 1952, in which he praised the aesthetic value of Jōmon pottery, since then studied only as archeological artifacts—he especially appreciated the vitality and dynamism of the “Flame-rimmed” pottery in the middle Jōmon period.
This discovery of Jōmon pottery by Okamoto Tarō was probably influenced by his acquaintance with Marcel Mausse (1872-1950)’ and Georges Bataille(1897-1962)’s ethnology—he had frequented both scholars during his stay in Paris. The revaluation of Jōmon pottery was the first step in Okamoto’s work on such theme. With Nihon no dentou (Tradition of Japan)(1956) and other writings, Okamoto started to study the local customs and rituals rooted in various regions of Japan, such as Okinawa and Tohoku, and tried to highlight the cultural diversity in Japan instead of its unified image as a nation-state.
In this context, scholarship focuses on Okamoto as a theoretician, while insufficient attention has been paid yet to the aesthetic and artistic value he sought to express through Jōmon pottery. In fact, Okamoto’s perspective was based on a critical reading of Western avant-gardes, as his rediscover of Jōmon pottery seemed to be consciously based on that of l’art-nègre by Pablo Picasso(1881-1973). In this proposed paper, by analyzing not only Okamoto’s texts but also his artworks and the photographs that he took himself, I will review how Okamoto contrasts Jōmon pottery with conventional “Japanese-style tradition”. Through these considerations, I aim to reveal his controversial view of art, which, steeped in avant-garde as well as a radical anti-modernist principles, is a thorough critique of the idea of progress.