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Paper short abstract

What happens if we read the cataclysmic historiography of Japan's lost decades, 1990s-2000s, as a period of prolific, compelling, radical, and revolutionary women artists, who played the interdisciplinary fields of performance, installation, and media with targeted social and political objectives.

Paper long abstract

What happens if we claim that the cataclysmic historiography of Japan's lost decades of the 1990s to 2000s is a period of prolific, powerful, evocative, compelling, impassioned, risky, radical, and revolutionary women artists, who played the interdisciplinary fields of performance, installation, and media with targeted social and political objectives and actions. The Kobe Earthquake, the financial meltdown and stagnation, loss of lifetime employment (for men), the Aum cult poisoning attack, and the trial concerning homosexuality, can be placed in contrast to the private and individual deepening of the women's movement along side the developing internet/media arena. This presentation will contextualize and describe the works of several women artists who are central to this expanded historiographic archive. These women created works that refused the categories and (largely economic and male) critical conversations on art-making practices and values. Counter to the labels of "quiet theatre," "recessionary," "junk," "cool," "flat," or "lost generation," these women exploded the time-space of theatrical materiality with their bodies, acts and media, which demanded their spectators' affective social engagement. Among others I consider the early works of Shiota Chiharu's video performance art, Kisaragi Koharu's performance plays, Yubiwa Hotel Shirotama Hitsujiya's performance art, and Kurosawa Mika's butoh-dance art. I describe how the "event-moment" surrounding each artwork intersects with the style, media, place, audience, and body politics of each artist. I argue for a performance studies archive that explodes the still-life of "lost decades," cutting through the corrosive layers of patterned narratives and, in contrast, animates a mutable, unstable even volatile expedition through the "lost and found" art works of these decades of experiment women artists. This presentation is part of the Performance Archive Project: Expanded Practices through a Cooperative International Performance Studies Archive.