Paper short abstract:

A five-year court case between Nagoya artists and the prefectural museum regarding trash art changes the city's arts landscape forever. This study analyzes how trash dominated the city's cultural discourse during the trial, leading to anarchist trash performances and a rumored artist blacklist.

Paper long abstract:

Nagoya's infamous gomi saiban - the 1970-1975 "trash trial" between NAG (New Artist Group) and the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art over the exhibition of trash art (gomi sakuhin) - had major repercussions that changed Nagoya's arts scene forever. The museum's removal of the trash sculptures sparked protests and prompted NAG to launch a censorship case against the museum. Local artists now shut out of exhibition spaces took to the streets with trash artworks in solidarity with the plaintiffs. The gomi saiban would pit area artists against local art institutions with the city of Nagoya as their arena throughout the trial's five year duration and beyond. The subsequent news coverage, public art performances and installations termed "happenings" (happuningu) ushered in a post-1970 regional movement in Nagoya dubbed the "trash dimension" (gomi jigen), where trash became the city's anarchist artistic signature.

This study introduces a little-known yet locally significant event in Japanese postwar art history for the first time in the Anglophone world. Although trash art was globally resonant in contemporary art at the time (Tomii, 2018), trash art resonated with Nagoya artists even before the gomi saiban incident but subsequently created a contentious rift between artists and conservative institutions. This study attempts to better understand how the gomi saiban politicized trash art in Nagoya via public reception and newspaper discourse, specifically the reception of the trash sculptures through news headlines such as "Is it trash? Or, is it art?". Due to their dynamic nature as a transformative object in a contested space, the trash sculptures themselves are framed as both a catalyst and agentic third party in the legal dispute via "thing power". (Bennett, 2004) This study finds that the artists' legal action against the museum and the result may have ultimately led to Nagoya, once a contemporary art hub now dubbed "Japan's most boring city", being absent from historical accounts on contemporary Japanese art.