Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan

City, Body, Memory

P. Eckersall

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137017376
• eBook ISBN: 9781137017383
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

Performativity and Event in 1960s Japan considers the artists and events in 1960s Japan. In response to the social upheavals of the 1960s, it shows how art interacted with society in unique and transformational ways, nterweaving arguments about the critical role of performance as an artistic medium and as a social dramaturgy.

1

Zero Jigen’s Pre-expressive Utopian Body: Ritual Theory and Urban Transformation

Performance gets naked/performance as anti-art

The performance maker and counterculture activist Julian Beck’s memorable comment, ‘Why do you worry about taking your clothes off when we have to wipe out imperialism’ (Julian Beck, in Schechner, 1973: 87), is relevant to consider in light of the work of the 1960s vanguard performance group Zero Jigen (Zero Dimension). Beck, who together with Judith Malina established the Living Theatre in the United States of America in 1947, was a pioneer in the movement of countercultural anti-art performance that evolved in the 1960s. By the 1960s, the Living Theatre was a largely itinerant group, a communal band of performer-protestors exploring new ways of living and attempting to blend art and life into a single revolutionary act. The group became known for making participatory performances in the 1960s that incorporated street theatre, mass action, naked rituals, and performative anarchism. Its work influenced 1960s thinking about theatre and politics, and Beck’s question points to the central place of nudity as a point of contention and spirit of activism in the debates about politics in the era. These debates have tended to bypass Japan, where the local context of quite remarkable performance art has tended to be overlooked in the international historical accounts. This is an oversight, as the diversity of performances made by Zero Jigen and butoh companies (butoh is discussed in the following chapter) will show. Questions about nudity and a time when performance became literally and symbolically naked are also very important to consider in Japan’s 1960s experience.

This chapter discusses how we might theorise the wild, naked, and corporeally extended bodies seen in Japanese performances in the 1960s. I aim to show the mindset of a utopian understanding of the body in a fluid state of action and in relation to the city whereupon artists hoped that their actions would enable transformational experiences of space, time, and existence. In this guise the body of the performer is imagined as something porous and mutable. It is a vessel for an experiential form of engagement with the world. It is contingent and might be theorised as being in a state of becoming, although this conceptual vocabulary from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari was developed after the 1960s (but arose from their interest in the formation of alternative political perspectives in that era; see Deleuze and Guattari, 1988). I also hope to show how the open and speculative nature of the discourses associated with this work were positioned against the tendency to construct images of the body as orientalist and/or uniquely Japanese or Asian. In fact, in contrast to many angura (underground) theatre practices of the era (see Goodman, 1988; Eckersall, 2006a; Ikeuchi, 2006), this work connects to cosmopolitan lineages and takes Japanese performance into questions of international influence and comparisons with other art forms. Scholars of visual arts in Japan such as Havens (2006) and Tomii (2009) have considered this complex relationship in some detail, pointing to the productive exchange of ideas and practices. Tomii’s work is relevant here in giving a specific context to the study of contemporary art in Japan; she writes:

‘Contemporaneity’ is a key term that has recently entered the theoretical discourse on ‘contemporary art.’ Its theoretical postulation has an intriguing precedent in 1960s Japan, where the area of practice called gendai bijutsu – literally, ‘contemporary art’ – was firmly established, in part prompted by a heightened sense of kokusaiteki dōjisei, or ‘international contemporaneity.’ As a historical concept, ‘international contemporaneity’ concerns not so much an objective reality or a theoretical construct as a ‘shared perception’ informed by a given locale’s interface with the outside world. (Tomii, 2009: 123)

One important question about the contemporary art of the 1960s is about the overexpressive body politics (theorised below as a politics of excess) and how this related to the highly significant and visible contemporary genre of anti-art (han geijutsu).¹ One of the complicating factors of han geijutsu is that everything is both a statement of material fact and a subjective experience inviting individual interpretation. To address this paradox, we can ask, how do these pre-expressive utopian bodies – that is, bodies re-imagined, seemingly without bounds, actively resisting signification – interact with and pose questions about place, time, and politics? Looking back some fifty years, what are the most enabling discourses of the body to account for the role of performance in the fast-changing times of the 1960s?² The performances of Zero Jigen (Zero Dimension) are particularly well suited to informing a consideration of these questions. Founded between 1960 and 1963 by KatŌ Yoshihiro and Iwata Shin’ichi in Nagoya, Zero Jigen’s ritual performances (called gishiki) included absurd and uncanny processions, naked acts of sensual arousal, and scandalous confrontations with the public. Zero Jigen performances caused consternation and revelled in conflict with state authorities and institutions, defiling urban spaces and outraging social decorum.

Some of the reasons why Zero Jigen is so instructive lie in the repetitious nature of the group’s performances, its longevity (the group’s activities span pretty much the whole decade), its visibility, and the ways that it thought about ritual as a mechanism for transforming social reality.

Yet other reasons arise in relation to the formation of han geijutsu, the ‘anti-art’ projects dating from the early 1960s that rejected the formal aesthetic qualities of visual arts and quickly moved into an array of performative works, many of them taking place outdoors and questioning daily life. The term han geijutsu was coined by the critic TŌno Yoshiaki to describe a trend of purging the optimistic progressivism and aestheticism of the art of the 1950s in the contemporary practices of the 1960s (Yoshimoto, 2005: 23). It was originally applied to the work of the artist KudŌ Tetsumi, who exhibited at the Twelfth Yomiuri Independent Exhibition (Yomiuri Indépendant, or Anpan) in Tokyo in 1960. Groups making anti-art performances from the early to mid-1960s include Kyūshū-ha, Neo Dada, Group Ongaku, High Red Centre, and Zero Jigen. Han geijutsu performances tried to negotiate an implicit boundary separating art and life and breach it with bodily acts – a point especially relevant to Zero Jigen, as will be seen. Aiming to function at the level of transforming consciousness rather than ideology, han geijutsu rejected all forms of authority, including the modern gallery system. In an implied encounter with the viewer, many han geijutsu works stressed participation in a wider discourse of art that connected objects to a sensory experience; art running into the streets, interrupting daily life, and provoking performative responses were all features of this work.

Although not formally aligned with han geijutsu artists, Zero Jigen’s work shows many of the characteristics of anti-art. The performers thumbed their noses at institutional settings for art from the very beginning. For example, in Netai Gishiki (Sleeping Body Ritual), staged in 1963 at the open selection Yomiuri Independent exhibition, group members lay in a sectioned area of futon mattresses staring at erotic shunga prints pasted on the ceiling of the gallery. Shunga, woodblock prints dating from the Edo period (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), often show explicit depictions of sex acts and exaggerated images of sex organs in states of arousal. In Sleeping Body Ritual, the artists seem to idly stare at these explicit images that in their day were mass-produced popular forms of erotic entertainment.³ Like many Zero Jigen works, Sleeping Body Ritual brings into play a performative dialectic: it shows Zero Jigen performing the act of viewing popular artworks taken from a widely known historical genre. It is a double performance, making the point that seeing and experiencing art is also an embodied process of making art. No new visual art is made; rather, the composition of objects and bodies and the context of an engagement are shown. At the same time, what is and what is not art are dramatically questioned in the work; the place of the art gallery, the casual anti-art attitude, and the fact that there is no separation between art, parody, body, and the everyday all contribute to the effect and meaning of the work. In Zero Jigen’s manifest inaction, a sense of looking back is also suggested in that the shunga prints are ultimately more interesting and vibrant than the group’s indolently passive gaze. We can read this as an example of how artist and viewer, materials and forms, and acts of seeing and performance are interwoven. We cannot make judgements about the nature of art in this case, as the apparent hierarchy of art that typically involves the viewer in a subordinate position is transformed. In many ways, Sleeping Body Ritual set the tone for Zero Jigen’s future oeuvre, events that were more like happenings and mysterious celebrations, events that blocked pathways, played games, and confused art and daily life.

Sleeping Body Ritual also points to a popularist dimension of Zero Jigen that was encouraged by KatŌ, who desired to play to a gallery of sensationalist onlookers rather than intellectuals and other artists. In this sense, the passive consumption of shunga mirrors Zero Jigen’s popularisation of their own nude and sexually explicit ritual performances in the 1960s lowbrow media, such as in Friday magazine and on late-night television. While the critical appreciation of Zero Jigen’s work is analysed by scholars in ways that explore transgression, the wider public sometimes saw their work as a form of titillating humour and erotic absurdist play, a point that, according to KatŌ, was met with approval by the group’s membership (KatŌ, 2007).

In his comprehensive study Ningen no Ana- kizumu (Anarchy of the Body), Kuroda Raijee calls for an urgent re-evaluation of Japan’s anti-art performance culture. ‘While the methodology and aesthetics of the creators differed greatly’, he writes, ‘it can be stated that there were practically speaking no anti-art performances that did not include the concept of anarchy’ (Kuroda, 2010: 527). Kuroda discusses anarchy as a form of collective corporeal disorder, and his work documents Dada-like and visceral insurgent practices positing the body directly and unmediated as a site of psychophysical confrontation. Anarchy of the body ‘vivified corners of urban spaces, and having abandoned the extant leftist ideologies and organisations [artists] formed their own groups [to] carry out “direct actions”’ (Kuroda, 2010: 523). In fact, the very idea of direct action (chokusetsu kōdō) that Kuroda refers to is a defining characteristic of the era, steeped as it was in mass protest and political disorder. This factor broaches questions about the unique political and even dramaturgical features of han geijutsu performance in relation to wider transformations then taking place in society. As Kuroda writes, han geijutsu was an avantgarde movement ‘targeted towards “society” going beyond the realm of “art”’ (Kuroda, 2010: 524). In other words, there is an attempt to reorder the perceptible experience of reality in its reawakening of the sensory experience of the body and positing of this in a dialectical encounter.

As already noted, the 1960s was an era of remarkable economic development and social and technological transformation. Han geijutsu performances often parodied the material and organisational aspects of this post-war growth. The movement can be seen as a source of playful and theatricalised criticism that, nonetheless, raised serious points about how power in the mainstream society functioned as an invented and apparently unchangeable reality. Key to this criticism was its intention to interrupt the everyday flows of the city and create disturbances that ultimately questioned the conventional and expected uses of its public spaces. Han geijutsu also blurred the understanding of public and private space by showing naked bodies and questioning and showing the means and procedures of making and displaying art in sharp relief. It demystified art and created new anti-aesthetic and performative forms of expression. In short, the uncanny objects and almost everyday things that were sources of inspiration for han geijutsu are important for its unique capacity to broach critical perspectives on the constructed nature of reality.

Zero Jigen – walks, masks, and ritual encounters

[Zero Jigen] performance ... began with simple actions intended to stand out in the street, and they gradually established their unique style by refining the earlier chaotic elements and integrating various action patterns ... . They initially gave performances during art exhibitions but gradually became independent from exhibitions, presenting their work primarily in street performances in areas such as Ginza, Shinjuku and Shibuya. Venues for their ‘rituals’ included not only downtown streets but the Yamanote line train and Tokyo tram carriages, public baths, river beds, cemeteries, shrines, May Day meeting places, popular theatre, angura theatre and strip clubs, and the performers truly began to take on the air of kawara kojiki – third-rate actors. (Kuroda, in Hirata, 2006: n.p.)

Many of the titles of Zero Jigen’s performances are appended with the term gishiki, meaning ritual or ceremony; thus the works are called ‘sleeping ritual’, ‘walking ritual’, and so on.⁴ Gishiki are performative in that they suppose that the correct forms will be observed in dress, demeanour, formality, and processional rites. They invite participation, enjoin commitment, and usually want witnesses to see their acts. In the wider social context, many ritual forms are arcane, while others are ‘invented traditions’ designed to give historical legitimacy to socio-political norms in modern life. As ceremonial and ritual practices, gishiki are also ideological and play an important role in establishing and maintaining social practices, while at the same time opening up questions of class and gender politics and theories and practices of nationalism and identity formation. A factor common to all rituals then is that they must be performed and must be seen to be performed, and in that moment of enactment a vested ideological or political position is solemnised and reiterated. This is an important point to consider in relation to the radical subversive awareness about the everyday world that Zero Jigen fostered in its own rituals. It will be argued that Zero Jigen shows an intuitive awareness that is at the same time sociological in its application of the formulaic iterative qualities of ritual to foster oppositional perspectives. From the standpoint of history, if gishiki were upholding sacred institutions of Japan – not only the rituals that create social cohesion but also the institution of the imperial family (significant, given that its historical legitimacy rests on arcane rituals of mythical significance) – Zero Jigen’s adoption of ritual strategies – tactics in the Certeauan sense – takes those enactments and uses them in parodic and deconstructive ways. As Michel de Certeau writes in The Practice of Everyday Life, ‘A tactic insinuates itself into the other’s place, fragmentarily, without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance’ (1984: xix). In similar fashion Zero Jigen’s idea of ritual seems to be seeking a sense of communion and unity and also presenting antiestablishment forms of expression that are designed to crack the smooth veneer of modern capitalism and the city.

Ritual is theorised as a subversive practice in the work of the anthropologist Victor Turner, who explored the phenomenon in the context of his work on tribal ceremony (Turner, 1967). Turner’s insight is that rituals begin with a process of separation from the daily world. This might involve enacting ceremonies or entering states of trace, for example, the important point being that these forms of practice separate us from the everyday. Ritual is therefore a liminal activity that crosses a threshold into another dimension of human experience. It can imagine different expressions of social reality and affords embodied experiences of otherness. For Turner, rituals are alternative playful spaces or scenes where taboos can be expressed, crises enacted, and problems resolved. Such an idea is a therapeutic one, comparable to the ancient idea of theatrical catharsis that likewise features a temporary suspension of classical norms only to conclude with the restoration of a given ‘natural’ order. Turner understands ritual as an almost bacchanalian form of collective social behaviour that temporarily enables a place for generally unacceptable activity, such as when people yell abuse at an umpire at a sports match, get drunk at the New Year, or engage in overly erotic behaviours in nightclubs. The point for Turner, though, is that ritual space, like classical drama, is a temporary suspension of order. Whatever the liminal behaviour, the theory rests on an eventual return to social norms.

But what if the return premised in Turner’s theory is forever pending and undecided? According to the performance theorist and 1960s theatre director Richard Schechner (who draws on Turner’s work in the development of performance studies), ‘rituals arise or are devised around disruptive, turbulent, and ambivalent interactions where faulty communication can lead to violent and even fatal encounters’ (Schechner, 1995: 230). Schechner’s work on ritual practices explores how contemporary sites of rituals such as meetings, protests, performance events, family gatherings, and even parliaments help determine social and cultural practices more widely; he notes that ritual behaviour is ‘over determined, full of redundancy, repetition, and exaggeration’ (Schechner, 1995: 230). For Schechner, rituals are symbolic actions pointing at and standing for real transactions of power. They are no less important or efficacious for their constitutive features of play and ambiguity or indeed their speculative essence. At the same time, the ‘disruptive, turbulent, and ambivalent interactions’ of ritual also point to the kind of anarchy that Kuroda argues is the predominant means of understanding corporeal artistic practices in the 1960s, such as those pioneered by Zero Jigen.

Two kinds of ritual performance by Zero Jigen recur throughout the decade: (1) walks and marches and crawling rituals that often take place outdoors and (2) installation performances of naked and clothed bodies, held sometimes in public spaces, such as public baths, but more often in private venues such as galleries and theatres.

In the walks and marches performers wearing suits or in various states of undress, walk in lines along footpaths and subway plazas with one hand raised. Their serious facial expressions and unexplained hand-in-the-air gestures seem uncanny. They each wear white cotton gloves (like those worn by train drivers and elevator attendants), perhaps suggesting a token of decorum, but the bodies are either naked or dressed in a parody of businessmen’s attire. By contrast, their marches are playful and evoke a memory of ‘snake dances’, the phalanxes of linked bodies jogging along in mass demonstrations, a common occurrence in the 1960s. Here, though, the dancers use an open-body stance and lift their bandy legs in rhythm and sway from side to side like drunken sailors with mad grins. T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Zero Jigen’s Pre-expressive Utopian Body: Ritual Theory and Urban Transformation
• 2. Butoh Cine Dance and the Remediated Sixties
• 3. Singing Yokoo Tadanori: Ichiyanagi Toshi, the City, and the Aesthetics of Listening
• 4. Performing Revolution at Shinjuku Plaza
• 5. The Osaka Exposition: Bodies and the Impossible Utopia
• 6. Memory and City: Port B and the Tokyo Olympics
• Closing: Transforming Everydayness
• Notes
• References
• Index