Review

Radicalism In The Wilderness:
International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan

First published by Art Monthly, November 2016

Reiko Tomii, MIT Press, 2016

Far from presenting the pitfalls of an uncultivated and inhospitable hinterland, Reiko Tomii’s ‘wilderness’ is a complex discursive space thick with entangled stories, counter-narratives, Buddhist mind games and ephemeral gestures. At once a remarkable demonstration of art-historical erudition and an almost bardic exercise in lyrical tale-telling, this timely analysis of ‘international contemporaneity and 1960s art in Japan’ presents a novel take on the idea of the wild, figuring it as a tripartite locale for retrospective exploration.

Tomii may be known to some as a curatorial contributor to ‘Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin 1950s-1980s’, a large-scale survey held at the Queens Museum, New York in 1999 that sought to map the varied temporalities and unacknowledged synchronocities of idea-based art across the world, and for which she developed a notable body of research on the origins of dematerialised practice in postwar Japan. As a continuation of this work, her recent study begins by wryly suggesting that the wilderness could be considered to characterise the areas of artistic production that lay outside the supposed ‘centres’ of Euro-American art-historical canonicity. In turn, a refocused gaze on the peripheries delineated by such historical myopia presents more localised centre/edge binaries occurring beyond the humming neon beacons of Tokyo and Kyoto, city-hubs that occluded many rural zones of activity from the gaze of occidental scrutiny. It is, however, in the third magnification of this speculative cartography that the most interesting findings arise for Tomii’s project, in the wilderness considered in its truest sense as an unbounded ‘natural’ landscape: vast, exciting, potentially treacherous and full of possibilities for the artists who would come to circumscribe the terms of vanguard practice in the Japanese art of the 1960s.

Within these remote provinces we find Matsuzawa Yutaka and the absurdly boisterous collectives The Play and GUN (Group Ultra Niigata), artists whose works present opportunities to assess the international transmigration of conceptual discourse and the symbioses of influence that arose as a result.

Matsuzawa’s art was starkly anti-materialist, influenced as much by non-Zen Buddhism as it was the schlocky late-night paranormal talk-radio broadcasts he encountered during his time in New York in the late 1950s. The result was a formally restrained but metaphysically expansive body of works addressed to the ‘psyche of a remote viewer’ with the willingness to meditate, calligraphic provocations and elegant mandalas composed to encourage the visualisation of artworks and, ultimately, the calling into being of a new humanity focused on peace (see his wonderful Banner of Vanishing, 1966, and the performance Humans, Let’s Go, Let’s Go, Gate, Gate, Anti-Civilisation Committee). Produced in the light of the anti-Anpo protests – a popular uprising against US occupation and a call for full demilitarisation – Matsuzawa’s modest gestures pit the humility of mysticism against the ‘rationality’ of martial statecraft. Contrastingly zany in approach, The Play would court notoriety for their attempts to float a huge fibreglass egg along the Kuroshio (‘Black Current’), a peculiarly tinted tide of the sea south of mainland Japan in Voyage: Happening in an Egg, 1968, while GUN would produce perhaps one of the most stunningly overlooked land works of the decade with their Event to Change the Image of Snow, 1970, an action in which pesticide sprayers were used to blast huge quantities of brightly coloured pigment onto a frozen riverbed creating a beautiful, slushy (albeit toxic) reconfiguration of a landscape deemed threatening by its local community.

Tomii goes to great lengths to demonstrate the often stifling milieu in which these works remarkably occurred, a situation in which an idea of the ‘contemporary’ had to be actively mobilised against the strictures of conservatism, the active contrived stimulation of markets and tastes by national newspapers and the insanity of a ‘reverse chauvinism’ in which Japanese artists were compared with - and often chastised as being derivative of - their European and US contemporaries. This was partly a result of the disparity between the experiential nature of artistic practices that discovered their terms performatively, as opposed to the obsequious gate-keeping that seems to have turned critics into ventriloquists of foreign trends, a tendency Mono-ha artist Lee Ufan would come to characterise as the ‘wielding of foreign made yardsticks’.

Tomii’s methodology is simple, elegant and persuasive: by paying close attention to what she terms ‘connections’ and ‘resonances’ she is able to map cross-pollinations of thought and tendency – either through documented meetings or the synchronicity of sentiment – that bring the activities of her chosen artists into the fabric of ‘international contemporaneity’. By forfeiting the inanity of confronting one canon with another, she foregrounds the primacy of storytelling, deepening the narrative texture our readings of global art history might encounter as result.