Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

After the “Descent to the Everyday” 51
showcased in such international events as the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 and
Expo ’70 in Osaka, both Wrsts for Asia. Geopolitically, the decade was shaped
by Anpo, the Japanese abbreviation for the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. That
is to say, Japan’s sixties began with the Anpo ’60 struggle and concluded
with the Anpo ’70 struggle. Signed in 1951, Anpo turned the island nation
into a key front base for America’s Asian operations by allowing the stationing
of U.S. troops. Slated for renewal in 1960, the treaty incited Werce and
massive popular protests, which failed to stop its renewal but managed to
topple the cabinet. From the mid-1960s onward, the strong anti–Vietnam
War movement merged with the student revolts nationwide, in expression
of the moral crisis of postwar Japanese society. Toward 1970, these movements
in turn merged with a larger movement of the New Left against Anpo’s
decennial renewal. Haunted by the nightmare of 1960 and determined to
quash any obstacle, the state used its iron Wst to suppress opposition. 15 In retrospect,
Anpo brought about the momentous political, social, and cultural
movement that aligned leftist rhetoric with avant-garde strategies, making
the 1960s as a whole a deWning time of postwar Japan.
In art, the decade was marked by two movements: the junk-art
tendency of Anti-Art arose around 1960, in part fueled by the fervor of the
Anpo ’60 struggle; and the tides of Non-Art arose around 1970 and continued
into the next decade. They prompted a major paradigm shift, completely
transforming the face of Japanese art as well as the nature of the avant-garde.
This shift paralleled, or in some cases preceded, what is called the “dematerialization”
of art—a move away from the self-contained object—that was
widely observed globally during the same decade. Well before postmodern
discourse was introduced, in the local context of Japan, the shift was initially
recognized and theorized in 1963 as one from the modern (kindai) to the
contemporary (gendai) by the art critic Miyakawa Atsushi. He discerned a
symptom of the “collapse of the modern” in the gestural abstraction of Art
Informel (the rubric encompassing both Gutai and American abstract expressionism)
in the late 1950s, which he called “an adventure that staked an
authenticity of expression . . . on the act of expression.” 16 His observation
was prescient in a broader context of culture: toward the end of the 1960s,
the discourse of the modernity critique emerged simultaneously with the
upsurge of radical politics of the New Left. 17
In the evolutionary narrative of art, Art Informel was followed by
Anti-Art, which dominated the vanguard scenes into the early 1960s after
its emergence in and around the annual “Yomiuri Independent Exhibition,”
further propelling the collapse of the modern paradigm. “Descent to the
everyday” (nihijo-sei eno kako) was Miyakawa’s “stylistic” thesis, with which
he evocatively described the subversion of the conventional notion of art