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caveartfair · 6 years ago

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The Unknown Artists Who Made Radical Art on the Fringes of 1960s Japan

The Play, Current of Contemporary Art, 1969. Courtesy of the Japan Society.

For a few blissful minutes on February 11, 1970, four members of the Japanese art collective Group Ultra Niigata (known as GUN) dashed across a dry bank of the Shinano River in the small town of Tōkamachi, blasting bright pigments onto the snow with fertilizer sprayers. Half an hour later, fresh snowflakes reset the scene.

There was no audience present to appreciate the transformation of the dreary landscape, but the ephemeral painting performance came to be known as Event to Change the Image of Snow. We are only aware of it today because of the photojournalists Hanaga Mitsutoshi and Iso Toshikazu, who tagged along to capture the event.

Their photographs, the best of which are in spectacular technicolor, spark with an egoless sense of play, spontaneity, and grandeur—traits that characterize the artists and collectives who emerged in what art historian Reiko Tomii calls the “expanded 1960s” in Japan. During this period, spanning 1954 to 1974, a post-war spirit of freedom and experimentation in artistic production manifested far outside city centers. It’s only recently, thanks to Tomii, that some of these anti-establishment artists have received an international profile.

GUN, Event to Change the Image of Snow, 1970. Photo by Hanaga Mitsutoshi. Courtesy of the Japan Society.

At the Japan Society in New York through June 9th, “Radicalism in the Wilderness: Japanese Artists in the Global 1960s,” curated by Tomii and based on her award-winning 2016 book, presents 280 works by GUN, the collective The Play, and the artist Matsuzawa Yutaka, all of whom worked on the outskirts of the country and embraced conceptual practices to expand long-held definitions of art.

As Japanese society underwent sweeping changes following World War II, Tomii observes in the catalogue, “regional subcenters mushroomed…making the whole archipelago a space of contemporary practices.” Forget Paris or Berlin, New York or Tokyo. “Radicalism in the Wilderness” disrupts the “center-periphery,” as Tomii calls it, to invoke distinct artistic practices that are “out there”—both physically and artistically.

Yet even in the wilderness, these utterly unconventional artworks, performances, and happenings share affinities with contemporaneous developments in art—such as Conceptualism, land art, and mail art—occurring far afield. In the 1960s, parallel artistic practices emerged around the world as travel and communication technologies developed, a notion central to the exhibition that Tomii calls “international contemporaneity.” (International contemporaneity can also be seen in recent exhibitions that broaden definitions of modern art by including non-Western practitioners, such as the Walker Art Center’s expansive 2015 survey “International Pop.”)

Horikawa Michio, Zero-Yen Stamp (Satō Eisaku), 1971. Courtesy of the Japan Society.

Maeyama Tadashi, Antiwar Flag, 1970. Courtesy of the Japan Society.

To help define the stumbling interconnections that link these artists to local and global contexts, Tomii distinguishes between “connections”—actual encounters with a counterpart or their work—and “resonances”—visual or conceptual similarities often retrospectively acknowledged. Event to Change the Image of Snow, for instance, bears a close resemblance to Dennis Oppenheim’s One Hour Run (1968) and Annual Rings (1969), performances in which the American artist cut paths into fields of snow.

That similarity can be attributed to a moment of connection: GUN’s core members—Maeyama Tadashi and Horikawa Michio, in particular—were introduced to international trends like land art through magazines such as Bijutsu techō (“art notebook”), which published a lushly illustrated feature on the emerging genre, primarily practiced in the United States, entitled “New Nature: Elementalism ‘Earthworks’” in its July 1969 issue.

GUN, which Tomii considers the first vanguard collective from Niigata Prefecture (pejoratively called the “backside” of Japan), applied the performative grandiosity of land art that they saw pictured in Bijutsu techō to the cultural concerns of their locale, where heavy snow falls for six months out of the year. In this gloomy and difficult climate, the snow represents constant struggle and, due to its sheer weight, potentially fatal danger. Maeyama and Horikawa, who both lived and worked in the area, developed their premise around changing cultural attitudes; through their artwork, they sought to transform the snow into something unexpectedly happy.

Matsuzama Yutaka, Banner of Vanishing (Banner of Vanishing (Humans, Let’s Vanish, Let’s Go, Let’s Go, Gate, Gate, Anti-Civilization Committee)), c. 1966. Courtesy of the Japan Society.

Matsuzama Yutaka, Invitation to Psi Zashiki Room, 1963. Courtesy of the Japan Society.

On the other hand, the late Matsuzawa Yutaka, a prolific artist most amply represented in the show, worked mostly in isolation, conceiving of a singular, immaterial form of art. When he eventually learned of like-minded Conceptual artists in the mid-1960s, Matsuzawa connected with them through mail, telegram, and in person. His global coterie included John Baldessari, Yayoi Kusama (who was also born in his hometown of Matsumoto), Gilbert & George, On Kawara, Lawrence Weiner, and Hanne Darboven, whose collaborative efforts are featured in the show.

Like many of his peers around the globe, the horrors of the war inspired Matsuzawa to transcend the accepted boundaries of art and culture in order to question institutional thinking. But his work responds in particular to its conflicted effect on Japan, which was eager to participate in the world’s modernist project. The rampant consumerism overtaking Japanese society in the 1950s and ’60s led him on a quest to completely dematerialize his art, or create “an expression of the invisible, invisibly,” as Tomii said at the preview for the exhibition.

For over a decade, Matsuzawa developed a unique brand of immaterial conceptualism, embracing interdisciplinary practices from parapsychology to psychics to non-Zen Buddhism, all of which engaged mental faculties to picture imperceptible happenings. Between 1957 and 1964, he created the complex theory of Psi, a methodology to explore the extrasensory abilities of the mind. Works on paper from this time employ Buddhist cosmological signs and the artist’s own symbolic lexicon, but they also seem to reference the minimalist grid. On June 1, 1964, a legendary revelation commanded Matsuzawato to “vanish matter,” and pushed him to further dematerialize his work. He devised an object-less, text-based practice he called the art of kannen (meditative visualization). The work of art was thus conceived as an “apparatus,” and language—presented in the form of photocopies, lithographs, and postcards, and largely disseminated through the mail—offered an “operation manual”to understand and mentally see the works.

Matsuzawa Yutaka, Independent ’64 in the Wilderness, 1964. Courtesy of the Japan Society.

Tomii derived the phrase of “wilderness” from Matsuzawa, who, in 1964, took out a small magazine ad that advertised an imaginary exhibition called “Independent ’64 in the Wilderness.” Artists were invited to deliver a “formless emission” by “any delivery method,” which presumably encompassed telepathic and supernatural methods, according to Tomii. Revealed only in the ad, the exhibition was an invisible experience, appreciated through the mind’s eye. This psychedelic experiment might seem in line with the drug culture that unfolded in the 1960s, but reflects instead a moment of resonance; Matsuzawa intentionally turned away from chemical agents to expand the mind with more ancient Japanese sources like non-Zen Buddhism.

Like Matsuzawa, Osaka-based “happeners” The Play sought to disrupt the comfortable complacency that they saw overtaking Japanese society during the period of strong economic growth and increased modernization. Instead of protest or rebellion—youth culture’s popular modes of dissent in the 1960s—The Play chose “voyage” as their strategy as a means of disruption. For their best-known work, Current of Contemporary Art (1969), The Play embarked on a styrofoam raft shaped like an arrow from Tōnoshuma island, south of Kyoto, and rowed to Nakanoshima island in Osaka. The public-facing journey was meant to create “an image of liberation from all the material and mental restrictions imposed upon us who live in contemporary times,” the artists wrote.

This project resonates with similar experiments by Conceptual artists like Bas Jan Ader; both of their works were included in a 2016 show at the Parrish Art Museum called “Radical Seafaring.” But unlike Ader’s fateful sailing trip across the Atlantic Ocean, on which he disappeared and likely died, The Play conceived of working in landscape as an act within society, rather than in solitude.

The Play, Thunder, 1977–86. Courtesy of the Japan Society.

Yet no project by The Play has more perfect resonance than the epic, 10-year undertaking Thunder (1977), which, like Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field from the same year, was built to conduct lightning. The Play constructed a wood pyramid capped with a copper lighting rod, first placed atop Mount Jubu, while De Maria installed a grid of 400 steel poles in the New Mexico desert. (After inaugurating Thunder, The Play learned of De Maria’s Earthwork via a friend based in Germany. They wrote a letter to the American artist, but received no response.)

Despite their similarities, the two works couldn’t be more different. De Maria aimed for a sublime experience of nature, but for The Play, thunder recalled the ancient “thunder god,” a traditional subject of Japanese art. While De Maria’s installation was calibrated to be regularly lit up, The Play waited in vain for lightning to strike for several years, gathering every summer in hopes of seeing it happen. De Maria enjoyed sponsorship and hired help for his project; The Play self-financed and built it on their own. And while De Maria tightly controlled visitation to his Lightning Field, The Play used graphic posters (wonderfully designed by Sasaki Toshiaki) to invite viewers to an open, communal experience of waiting in nature.

In these expanded 1960s, artists all over the world questioned society, pushed boundaries, and shared ideas. They sought to meaningfully engage with globalism, international politics, and one another. The fact that these peripheral Japanese figures are still largely unknown despite institutional attention for other avant-garde Japanese artist groups like Gutai and Mono-ha, who worked around the same time, makes clear that an assessment of art history is woefully incomplete without an adventure into the wilderness.

from Artsy News

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worldfoodbooks · 8 years ago

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OPEN TODAY 12-7 PM. BACK IN THE BOOKSHOP: THE ANTI- MUSEUM : An Anthology (2017) The museum is constantly a target for criticism, whether it comes from artists, thinkers, curators, or even the public. From the avant-gardes of the twentieth century up until our contemporary era, the museum’s suspect position has generated countless gestures, iconoclastic actions, scathing attacks, utopias, and alternative exhibition spaces. For the first time, this anthology is devoted to the anti-museum, through anti-art, the anti-artist, anti-exhibition, as well as anti-architecture, anti-philosophy, anti-religion, anti-cinema and anti-music. This notion – unpatented but regularly reappropriated – traces the erratic, fractured, and sometimes paradoxical counter-history of the contestation of artistic institutions. From the first anti-exhibition to the first catalog retracing the history of “Closed Exhibitions,” from Dada to Noise music, from “Everything is Art” to NO!art, the Japanese avant-gardes to Lettrist cinema, and not forgetting such major protest figures as Gustav Metzger, Henry Flynt, Graciela Carnevale, and Lydia Lunch, The Anti-Museum sketches a polyphonic panorama where negation is accompanied by a powerful breath of life. Edited by Mathieu Copeland and Balthazar Lovay. Introduction by: Mathieu Copeland. Texts by: Zach Blas, Johannes Cladders, Beatriz Colomina, Henry Flynt, Kenneth Goldsmith, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Robert Morris, Bob Nickas, Sören Schmeling, Reiko Tomii, Jon Hendricks, Jean Toche, Andrea Branzi, Ettore Sottsass, Allan Wallach, Guerilla Art Action Group, Robert Morris, Gareth James and many more Features interviews/conversations with John Armleder, Robert Barry, Ben, Genesis P-Orridge, Andrea Branzi, Piero Gilardi, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and many more An incredibly refreshing, valuable, and dense (almost 800 pages) volume, published by Koenig Books and Fia Art. Copies available in the shop this weekend and via our website. #worldfoodbooks #theantimuseum (at WORLD FOOD BOOKS)

#worldfoodbooks #theantimuseum

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adrianfavell · 8 years ago

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Radicalism in the Wilderness

BOOK REVIEW

[expanded version of review published in Japan Times on 26/02/17]

Reiko Tomii (2016) Radicalism in the Wildnerness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan. Boston, MA: MIT Press, pp. xviii+293

Reiko Tomii’s profound, yet accessible, study of 1960s avant garde art from Japan offers an answer to a perennial problem in the appreciation of Japanese culture. So often international observers rely on the perception that culture from Japan is “exquisite” or “cool”, without knowing how or where to place it in international currents. Japan indeed often represents a clichéd parade of the exotic, weird and plain off-the-wall. At the same time, avant garde movements, seen to be delayed copies of trends which started in London, Paris or New York, have often been ridiculed as derivative—as infamously happended to the pioneering Gutai group of artists, when their works were first compared alongside Jackson Pollack in 1958. The apparent craziness of Japanese avant garde gestures also frequently baffles, its throaway ephemerality and “vanguard extremism” foregrounded for amusement: all those 1960s artists with a predilection for dangerous group stunts, often in the nude... The well known critic Yoshiaki Tōno once said in frustration that this was like forever equating its avant garde artists to wartime kamikaze pilots.

Reiko Tomii’s mission is to retrieve these misunderstood visionaries from the “abyss of history”. For many years, she has been the leading figure of a New York-centred network of art historians (PoNJA GenKon) working to establish the reputation of avant garde fine art from Japan in the post-war period. As an independent writer, educator and curator, she has been involved in many of the key translations of contemporary Japanese art writing, and some of the most important exhibitions in the city. In her own work and those around her, she has marshalled the flowering of understanding about Japanese art from the 1950s and 60s in particular. Radicalism in the Wildeness reads like a lifework, many years in the gestation. And, although it may seem to be on a specialised topic, its argument holds a very broad significance for the global study of culture.

Tomii cuts to the heart of the dilemma of how we are to understand what she calls the “contemporaneity” (kokusaiteki dōjisei) of Japanese works: striking and original art that was similar yet dissimilar to more renowned innovations taking place at around the same time in the US or Europe. They were neither really in advance nor behind, but with careful reconstruction of their relations, can all be placed correctly as part of global innovation, through a comparative and transnational exposure of what she calls “connections” and “resonances”. Sometimes real networks and direct translation of ideas can be found; and sometimes, rather, related discoveries of global import were being made synchronously in local places, in different parts of the world. The history she writes is of the 1960s, when events in culture and politics were momentous everywhere, with a heightened globility intensified by growing linkages. She is proposing, in effect, a model for the study of global transactions and undercurrents, which can work to decentre the Eurocentric tendencies of conventional art history, while underlining a historical lesson of understanding the global as happening at once and variously in multiple, distinct locations. At the same time, the Japanese embraced a conception of “contemporary art” (gendai bijutsu) in the 1960s, that was ahead of the notion “contemporary” being adopted in the US and Europe.

The book is built around three particular case studies of artists, among the lesser known in the pantheon of post-war Japanese art. These vivid presentations are a masterclass of art historical writing in their precise documentation and narrative unfolding. The first, Yutaka Matsuzawa, was a philosophically minded conceptualist whose purpose as an artist became clear when he had a vision about art needing to “vanish the object”. After the suspension of the famous Tokyo avant garde art show, the Yomiuri Independent Exhibition, in 1964, he went on to to staging exhibitions of invisible art works in remote locations. Next up, The Play, were a 60s collective in the Kansai region who coalesced as a group to devise a mode of working outside art instutions with absurdist performances. In a famous piece they all rode together on a styrofoam raft shaped like an arrow down river from Kyoto to Osaka. The third, GUN (Group Ultra Niigata) experimented with a Japanese variant of land art. The cover of the book shows their work in a mountainous part of Niigata, spraying colour in a snow field out of borrowed farmer’s pesticide equipment. Each of these artists and groups took their radical reaction to the constraints of mainstream society and culture out into the wildnerness of rural Japan.

This idea of “wilderness” as a key characteristic of Japanese contemporary art plays a central role in Tomii’s argumentation. It refers to those who have often worked in rural locations outside of institutionalised forms and channels of recognition, far from metropolitanTokyo. It also speaks of the wilderness of working in the absense of any viable commercial form of making a living—it is this which leads to the ephemerality and physicality of contemporary art gestures, in what Tomii calls the chronically under-commodified environment of Japan, compared to highly self-conscious performances of Euro-American conceptualism when it took a break from lucrative gallery shows. It is also the wilderness of Japan in relation to the world’s art centres and powers.

How much these artists fulfill the promise of “radicalism” in the title is sometimes harder to grasp. Unlike, say, the much celebrated Genpai Akasegawa who fell into long running conflicts with the authoriries for his work, such as his model Y1,000 note, these artists were rarely political in a direct sense. The leader of Gun, Michio Horikawa, posted a black stone to Richard Nixon in 1969 (which was politiely received), and printed fake zero en postage stamps with the prime minister’s face. But on the whole, these artists shunned the political activism of the time, and steered well clear of any grounded social engagement of the kind nowadays so widespread in Japan. Tomii sees this as a strong point: that their interventions, as art, now restored to the canon, have lasted so much longer than the futile violence of 60s and 70s radical leftists. At the same time, their absurdist gestures were accused of being “bourgeois art”.

Tomii’s writing works as handbook of contemporary art history references, but more connections might be made with the long standing post-colonial literatures in historiography, philosophy and sociology, which have long wrestled with issues of “provincialising” the West, or revealing the power of “glocal” cultural forms. Tomii, in effect, proposes an addition to these “decolonial” models and it would be good to see her work rightly placed at the heart of intense current debates on the idea of thus studying “Asia as Method”.

For all their iconoclastic edge, the 1960s pioneers were absorbed into Japanese museum presentations in the 1970s, and they have received some wider appreciation in recent years. Matsuzawa’s famous Psi Zashiki Room was recreated for visitors at the Yokohama Triennale 2014 by artist-curator Yasumasa Morimura. The Play have recreated their work in Paris, and attracted the attention of international curators such as Tom Trevor. GUN’s rural work, which remains a little more obscure, was a precuror to the Echigo-Tsumari art triennale, which takes place in the same region. Tomii’s rigorous “amplification” of these figures puts them back into a “decentred” canon, “regrouping” post-war Japanese art as among the most extraordinary production world wide.

Over-emphasising this art historical point, though, would be to limit this book to specialists. Beautifully written and structured, Radicalism in the Wilderness is a book for any culturally literate reader interested in questioning how to study regional art in its correct international context. As it is discovered, it will surely receive wide attention: as a central contribution to post-colonial work re-assessing ideas of centre and periphery, and a very-likely-to-be classic contribution to global cultural studies.

Adrian Favell

http://www.adrianfavell.com

#contemporary art #japan #1960s

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micaramel · 4 years ago

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Artist: Yutaka Matsuzawa

Venue: Yale Union, Portland

Curated By: Alan Longino, Reiko Tomii

Date: June 30 – August 18, 2019

Note: A text associated with the exhibition written by Alan Longino can be downloaded here.

Click here to view slideshow

Originally Posted: August 9th, 2019

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

from Contemporary Art Daily https://bit.ly/3khsmUD

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contemporaryartdaily · 5 years ago

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Yutaka Matsuzawa at Yale Union

#Alan Longino #Exhibitions #Portland #Reiko Tomii #United States #Yale Union #Yutaka Matsuzawa

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thefabulousfulcrum · 8 years ago

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Japan, in from the Wilderness: Reiko Tomii’s Expanded Modern-Art History

via Hyperallergic

Edward M. Gómez

The Japanese-born art historian Reiko Tomii is one of those researchers who is both passionate about her subjects and recognized among her peers for her meticulous mapping of the cultural-intellectual terrain from which they emerge. An independent scholar who has lived and worked in the United States since the mid-1980s and has been based in New York for many years, Tomii has focused on the artists and art movements of post-World War II Japan, carefully classifying their evolution and ideas, as well as their constituent parts, antecedents and relevant affinities.

Although she admits that “art history is not a precise science,” her own approach is unmistakably fine-tuned, and she is an inventive thinker. The results and revelations of her method are well showcased in her new book, Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (MIT Press).

“Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan” by Reiko Tomii (courtesy MIT Press) (click to enlarge)

In it, she takes on modern-art history’s familiar, canonical narrative, which, understandably, has long focused on the ideas, artists, movements, and milestone events that are linked to its roots territories in Europe and North America. However, Tomii does not take a crowbar to this history with the intent of forcing open its pantheon of recognized masters to make room for less well-known but attention-deserving modernists from Japan.

Instead, her objective reflects the interests of a still-evolving but ever more notable tendency among certain researchers and curators in the U.S., Europe and East Asia to examine modern art’s development with a broader, deeper, more inclusive scope.

Their new consideration of modern art’s story has brought such places as Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul, Delhi and Prague into sharper focus. (In the US, Alexandra Munroe, the senior curator of Asian art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York has been a trailblazer in this effort since the mid-1990s. More recently, such museums as Tate Modern in London, the Stedelijk in Amsterdam and the Museum of Modern Art in New York have appointed new curators or developed special research programs to pursue this new outlook.)

Tomii’s own research and curatorial work have contributed significantly to this new, so-called global view of modern art’s history. In Radicalism in the Wilderness, she describes “international contemporaneity” as “a geohistorical concept, one that liberates us from the inevitable obsession with the present inherent in ‘contemporaneity’ as used in the English construction of ‘contemporary art’ (whose basic meaning is ‘art of present times’) and helps us devise an expansive historical framework” by means of which “a multicentered world art history” may be told. She argues that an understanding of this phenomenon may make room for overlooked or ignored currents in the story of modern art as it developed in 20th-century Japan after World War II. She also puts forth the related notions of what she calls “connections” and “resonances,” the meanings of which become self-evident as her study unfolds.

However, looking back at past events and examining the “international contemporaneity” of a certain moment or era from a particular vantage point is not quite the same as taking the pulse of its Zeitgeist. Instead, keen observers like Tomii are on the lookout for similar expressions, ideas, or breakthroughs that occur in different places at more or less the same time. In this way, Tomii notes, historians aiming to construct a global history of modern art must “seek out and examine linkable ‘contact points’ of geohistory,” where they will find evidence of what she calls “connections,” or “actual interactions and other kinds of links” between artists, critics, curators and other figures in the world of art, and “resonances,” which she defines as “visual or conceptual similarities” between artists’ ideas, creations or activities, even in situations in which “few or faint links existed.”

Tomii uses the examples of one solo artist and two artists’ collectives that were active in Japan in the 1960s, and whose works can be classified as conceptual art, to illustrate her observations about “international contemporaneity.” These artists’ careers offer intentional and unwitting points of contact with artists in the US and Europe. Tomii cites Yutaka Matsuzawa, who was born in 1922 in central Japan, earned a degree in architecture in Tokyo, and returned to his native region, where he later came up with art forms that reflected his disenchantment with “material civilization.”

He spent a couple of years in the US, including a stay in New York in the late 1950s, looking at art— Jackson Pollock’s paintings, Robert Rauschenberg’s mixed-media “combines” — and learning about parapsychology. Matsuzawa was interested in physics, Buddhist thought and the idea of visualizing the invisible. Back in Japan, he developed works that invited viewer-participants to “vanish” certain subjects — to make them disappear. (He once told an audience at his university, “I don’t believe in the solidness of iron and concrete. I want to create an architecture of soul, a formless architecture, an invisible architecture.”) At the exhibition Tokyo Biennale 1970: Between Man and Matter, in which both Japanese and numerous, well-known Western artists took part — a milestone, Tomii notes in retrospect, of “international contemporaneity” — Matsuzawa offered an empty room titled “My Own Death.”

Tomii also looks at the activities of The Play, a group of “Happeners,” founded in Osaka in 1967, who devised and carried out their own versions of “Happenings,” those action-as-art events that blasted the idea of the work of art as a physical object. The Play’s message, Tomii writes, “was constructive, not destructive, as their major concern was to take a ‘voyage’ away from everyday consciousness trapped in familiar space and time.” Their provocative events included erecting a huge cross made of white fabric atop a mountain (for which they intended no specific message, although it called attention to nearby urban zones’ proximity to nature), and group member Keiichi Ikemizu’s “Homo Sapiens” performance piece of 1965, in which he stood for hours like a zoo animal in a cage. A sign identified him as a representative of the human species. In 1968, The Play created a gigantic fiberglass egg, which they released into the ocean near the southernmost tip of Japan’s main island. Ikemizu told a Japanese magazine that “Voyage: Happening in an Egg” offered “an image of liberation from all the material and mental restrictions imposed upon us who live in contemporary times.”

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9091kwan · 9 years ago

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#reiko tomii

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worldfoodbooks · 8 years ago

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NEW IN THE BOOKSHOP: THE ANTI- MUSEUM : An Anthology (2017) The museum is constantly a target for criticism, whether it comes from artists, thinkers, curators, or even the public. From the avant-gardes of the twentieth century up until our contemporary era, the museum’s suspect position has generated countless gestures, iconoclastic actions, scathing attacks, utopias, and alternative exhibition spaces. For the first time, this anthology is devoted to the anti-museum, through anti-art, the anti-artist, anti-exhibition, as well as anti-architecture, anti-philosophy, anti-religion, anti-cinema and anti-music. This notion – unpatented but regularly reappropriated – traces the erratic, fractured, and sometimes paradoxical counter-history of the contestation of artistic institutions. From the first anti-exhibition to the first catalog retracing the history of “Closed Exhibitions,” from Dada to Noise music, from “Everything is Art” to NO!art, the Japanese avant-gardes to Lettrist cinema, and not forgetting such major protest figures as Gustav Metzger, Henry Flynt, Graciela Carnevale, and Lydia Lunch, The Anti-Museum sketches a polyphonic panorama where negation is accompanied by a powerful breath of life. Edited by Mathieu Copeland and Balthazar Lovay. Introduction by: Mathieu Copeland. Texts by: Zach Blas, Johannes Cladders, Beatriz Colomina, Henry Flynt, Kenneth Goldsmith, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Robert Morris, Bob Nickas, Sören Schmeling, Reiko Tomii, Jon Hendricks, Jean Toche, Andrea Branzi, Ettore Sottsass, Allan Wallach, Guerilla Art Action Group, Robert Morris, Gareth James and many more Features interviews/conversations with John Armleder, Robert Barry, Ben, Genesis P-Orridge, Andrea Branzi, Piero Gilardi, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and many more An incredibly refreshing, valuable, and dense (almost 800 pages) volume, published by Koenig Books and Fia Art. Copies available in the shop this weekend and via our website. #worldfoodbooks #theantimuseum (at WORLD FOOD BOOKS)

#worldfoodbooks #theantimuseum

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worldfoodbooks · 8 years ago

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#worldfoodbooks #theantimuseum

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micaramel · 5 years ago

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Artist: Yutaka Matsuzawa

Venue: Yale Union, Portland

Curated By: Alan Longino, Reiko Tomii

Date: June 30 – August 18, 2019

Note: A text associated with the exhibition written by Alan Longino can be downloaded here.

Click here to view slideshow

Full gallery of images, press release, and link available after the jump.

Images:

Images courtesy of Yale Union, Portland

Press Release:

Yutaka Matsuzawa (1922–2006) was considered the father of Japanese conceptual art. Born in Shimo Suwa in central Japan, he studied architecture during the war, and upon witnessing the after effects of the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945, he proclaimed upon his graduation from school that he wished “to create an architecture of invisibility.” Once he gave up architecture, he wrote poetry, made paintings, and worked as both an artist and teacher in his hometown. In his pursuit of ways to express the invisible invisibly, Matsuzawa began to develop a unique understanding of conceptual art that both elevated and transcended the typical notions of conceptual art in the western, euro-centric art worlds. However, exhibitions and publications for Matsuzawa in the West have only occurred infrequently, and to this day his work has still not been given the same space for consideration and understanding that many others situated in the West have thus received.

In light of this history, the exhibition at Yale Union will be the first in the U.S. for the artist, and alongside the exhibition the artist’s seminal publication, QUANTUM ART MANIFESTO, from 1988, will be re-published for the first time outside of Japan in an edition of 500. During the exhibition, art historian Namiko Kunimoto will speak on the collaborative work between Yutaka Matsuzawa and the female Butoh dancer, Tsujimura Kazuko.

Alan Longino is an art historian and curator based in Cologne, Germany. His M.A. thesis in Art History from CUNY Hunter College (2017) focused on the event of telepathy within information as the source of image production. His writing has appeared in the Haunt Journal of Art, from UC Irvine.

Reiko Tomii is a New York-based scholar and curator who investigates post-1945 Japanese art as a vital element of world art history of modernisms. She organized exhibitions with Yutaka Matsuzawa until his death in 2006. Her book Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan was published by MIT Press and won the 2017 Robert Motherwell Book Award, which recognizes outstanding publications in the history and criticism of modernism in the arts. The book has recently been turned into an exhibition Radicalism in the Wilderness: Japanese Artists in the Global 1960s, currently on view at Japan Society Gallery in New York (through June 9), in which Matsuzawa is prominently featured.

Link: Yutaka Matsuzawa at Yale Union

Contemporary Art Daily is produced by Contemporary Art Group, a not-for-profit organization. We rely on our audience to help fund the publication of exhibitions that show up in this RSS feed. Please consider supporting us by making a donation today.

from Contemporary Art Daily http://bit.ly/33nYltZ

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