Avant-Garde Art and Non-Dominant Thought in Postwar Japan

Image, Matter, Separation

K. Yoshida

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000217445
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Asian Art

This book offers a reassessment of how "matter" – in the context of art history, criticism, and architecture – pursued a radical definition of "multiplicity", against the dominant and hierarchical tendencies underwriting post-fascist Japan.

Through theoretical analysis of works by artists and critics such as Okamoto Taro, Hanada Kiyoteru, Kawara On, Isozaki Arata, Kawaguchi Tatsuo, and Nakahira Takuma, this highly illustrated text identifies formal oppositions frequently evoked in the Japanese avant-garde, between cognition and image, self and other, human and thing, and one and many, in mediums ranging from painting and photography, to sculpture and architecture. In addition to an "aesthetics of separation" which refuses the integrationist implications of the human, the author proposes the "anthropofugal" – meaning fleeing the human – as an original concept through which to understand matter in the epistemic universe of the postwar Japanese avant-garde. Chapters in this publication offer critical insights into how artists and critics grounded their work in active disengagement, to advance an ethics of nondominance.

Avant-Garde Art and Nondominant Thought in Postwar Japan will appeal to students and scholars of Japanese studies, art history, and visual cultures more widely.

1
ON SEVERANCE

Taikyokushugi

“The society we live in has deviated from evolution [shinka] and now finds itself in a state of revolution [kakumei ],” critic Hanada Kiyoteru reflects on the prospects of the postwar, “and this has to be assumed as the basic premise of our cause.”¹ From beneath the organic time of continuation ideologically motoring the linear progress of development, the inorganic and discontinuous time of revolution riddled with “dark regions” and “ambivalence” offered another criterion for selection and becoming.² He called this epistemic break tenkeiki (period of transformation), a term he coined in slight opposition to the reformist-sounding tenkanki (period of transition). Avant-garde painter Okamoto Tarō echoes this urgency in his characterization of the defeat in 1945 as a missed opportunity for actual change:

Postwar Japan did appear to be reborn. Political prisoners might have been released, ‘democracy’ might have been proclaimed, and ‘respect for individuality’ and ‘freedom’ might have replaced feudalistic morality—but these were mere alterations of labels. The same old authority remained firmly in place.³

Amid the political continuity, oppositional antagonism was not going to naturally occur through the shifting ideological landscape of power caused by defeat. An epistemological break, then, had to be deliberately induced and realized against the overwhelming reversion to the “as they were.” Artists and critics tried to break from the dominant episteme (associated with fascism, nationalism, solipsism, transcendence, and subjectivism) by conceptualizing the many over and against the one. This was how they broached the aesthetic and ethical question of nondominance.

As the status quo realigned the present to the past, Okamoto’s refusal of dialectical reconciliation of opposites exalted irresolvable clashes. He partially derived this image of ceaseless contradiction from philosopher Alexandre Kojève—whose lectures on Hegel he attended at the Sorbonne, where many soon-to-be luminary figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, and Hannah Arendt were also in attendance—but not without the mediation of Georges Bataille, whom he befriended during his sojourn in Paris that began in 1928.⁴ Okamoto left Abstraction-Création, a loose collective of artists, after his encounter with Bataille and joined Collège de Sociologie founded by Bataille, Roger Caillois, and Pierre Klossowski, among others.⁵ If abstraction could be seen as a synthesis or synesthesia of senses, color, and motion despite its ostensibly fragmentary aesthetics we see in Wassily Kandinsky, the thinking Okamoto acquired through the unruly dialecticians was about two, not one—how thesis and antithesis repel each other and stay apart. In other words, the notion Okamoto would come to call taikyokushugi replaced the conclusive reconciliation of conventional dialectics with a riskier philosophy of permanent contradiction and fracture. Maurice Blanchot, whose work Okamoto could not have been unaware given Blanchot’s proximity to Bataille, offers a concise formulation of this demand:

why should not man, supposing that the discontinuous is proper to him and is his work, reveal that the ground of things—to which he must surely in some way belong—has as much to do with the demand of discontinuity as it does with that of unity?⁶

The postwar discourse of taikyokushugi signified extreme dissonance (fukyōwaon) of opposites that decentered and perpetually deferred the reconciliation programmed into the modern and rational deployment of concentric dialectics. Though Bataille’s notion of “scissiparity”—a movement of persistent splitting—undeniably initiated this conversation, there is nothing less interesting than reducing this thought to its European provenance. While Okamoto did draw on Bataille, it must also be acknowledged that Okamoto’s demand for fragmentation confronted postwar Japan’s effort to rebuild its national identity after the blunder of colonial advancement into Asia.⁷ The refusal of the heterogeneous parts to be unified into a single identity was not merely an aesthetic imagination Okamoto brought back from abroad, but a social allegory precisely catered to the contrarian promises of the democratic many breaking off into multiple trajectories. As I will discuss below, the clear and distinct painterly forms for which Okamoto is known cannot be read in isolation from this theoretical premise.

The Japan Okamoto reencountered upon repatriating from France in 1940 after the Nazi occupation was a starkly different place than the world he knew in Paris. Not only was avant-garde art relatively absent, the political situation had grown so culturally intolerant that even a discussion of the French art world in an article would have earned Okamoto the label of “unpatriotic citizen” (hikokumin). Painters who had been trained overseas—including Fujita Tsuguharu, whose stay in Paris coincided with Okamoto’s—were producing paintings in support of the imperial state upon their return.⁸ The Japanese administration also perceived surrealism as a threat for its ideological link to Communism, an alleged association for which the surrealist critic Takiguchi Shūzō and painter Fukuzawa Ichirō were detained for eight months in prison.⁹ Okamoto opened his exhibition in November 1941 amid this tense and paranoiac atmosphere. Though he was not arrested for his work, he was drafted and sent to the front.¹⁰

Soon after the war had ended, Okamoto came across Hanada Kiyoteru’s book, Sakuran no ronri (The Logic of Chaos) at his friend’s house. This encounter led to a friendship that would leave lasting impacts on the course of postwar avant-garde.¹¹ Hanada and Okamoto formed Yoru no kai (the Night Society) with Haniya Yukata, Sasaki Kiichi, Shiina Rinzō, and Nakano Hideto (Abe Kōbō as an unofficial member) in 1948, to pursue a new artistic paradigm appropriate for postwar Japan. The group was named after Okamoto’s Yoru (Night, 1947)—painted in reference to the ritual organized by members of Collège de Sociologie in the forest of San Germain-en-Laye from 1937 to 1939—hanging in front of his studio where they convened their first meeting.¹² Yoru no kai subsequently met at a café called Monami (or Mon Ami) in East Nakano and was open to anyone interested in listening to the conversation.¹³ The introduction to Atarashii geijutsu no tankyū (New Investigations into the Arts, 1949), an anthology of essays written by the members, acted as their manifesto. Their incendiary language represents a typical avant-garde gesture of breaking from the past:

At this place of creation, we will not be taken in by the exaltation of old familiar art in the name of enlightening the masses or permit the imitation of new art in advanced nations under the pretense of formal investigation. We must destroy everything and create everything.¹⁴

In addition to being a regenerative search into expression prefaced by destruction, taikyokushugi was a product of dialogue, a friendship, an image of duality, twoness.¹⁵ As mentioned above, it defined Okamoto’s way of perceiving the world as a “torn wound” (hikisakareta kizuguchi) against rational reconciliation.¹⁶ Taikyokushugi pit logos against pathos, inorganic against organic, abstraction against concrete figuration, love against hate, generating discord, dissonance, and disharmony, without resolving the antagonism.¹⁷ His preference for permanent schism stemmed from his suspicion of synthesis, which he perceived as the outcome of an uneven structure of power. He felt that rational reconciliation eventually tipped in favor of one; equality, therefore, must be founded on refusing such pacifying settlement. Okamoto writes: “the more you separate them, the attraction between the poles increase, deepening the tense opposition.”¹⁸ The Hegelian implication of slave–master conflict informs this logic and aesthetics as art becomes an act of confronting the void that ontologically ungrounds the subject: “It’s all darkness ahead, there is nothing in front of the self. It is extremely difficult but, in order to survive, this is a problem that the whole being of the self must confront by struggling against the void (kyomu) to create something new.” He poses a fundamental question to put his identity and his art on the line: “what is painting?” (kaiga towa nanzoya).¹⁹ Profound doubt, not affirmation, animates his aesthetics of discontinuity.

Contradictions do not settle on a “golden means” like a “gentleman” who prefers harmony (chōwa), Hanada remarks, “because contrarian terms confront each other with equal strength,” leading to “a standstill [kōchaku] at a battlefront.”²⁰ The painter’s method of cutting, at least on the abstract level of thought, reminds Hanada of the “anti-loggia” of Greek skeptic Pyrrho whose conception of the dialectic, according to the accounts of Sextus Empiricus, never reached a settlement like that of Hegel.²¹ “Missing from the believers of idealistic dialectics who hastily sought unification [tōitsu] and harmony [chōwa],” Hanada writes, praising Okamoto’s rejection of reason as the aim of expression and thought, “are procedures of distinction [kubetsu], comparison [hikaku], and classification [bunrui] for they seemed to have forgotten the fact that recognition, even in the dialectics so emphatically treated in Hegel, must begin from distinction[…].”²² Oppositional thinking or severance (danzetsu) does not presuppose an eventual harmony but calls for persistent and irresolvable divisions. The knife the female figure holds behind her back in Yoru recalls the sacrificial killing Bataille once famously tried to conduct at the forest of San Germain-en-Laye as well as signifies an instrument for lacerating the one into the many. The menacing tree is not...