Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

52 Reiko Tomii
(i.e., painting and sculpture) by Anti-Art: artists brought everyday signs,
images, and objects into the work of art. 18 In other words, through the insertion
of everyday things into the work of art, which constituted a locus of
Art with a capital A—that characteristically modern concept, which boasted
an absolute superiority over Life—Art was taken down from its pedestal and
forced to descend to the humble realm of Life. This degrading move remained
metaphorical, since it occurred within the work of art. However, artists did
not stay with this metaphorical stage but made a “descent to everyday life,”
if you will: some artists actually made everyday life itself the site of their work,
most typically staging performances in the real space of Life. This development
was exempliWed by Cleaning Event in 1964. In this performance, the
members of Hi Red Center—who had made Anti-Art objects and presented
them in the exhibition hall—now literally performed an everyday act of
cleaning the streets, albeit with a twist, preWguring many aspects of post-
HRC collectivism.
In the latter half of the 1960s, practitioners continued to push
forward, cutting a wide swath of experimental terrain into Non-Art of conceptualism
and Mono-ha (literally “Thing School”), 19 wherein the mandate
no longer concerned “making” in the conventional sense but explicitly “not
making.” (To be more precise, Non-Art even rejected Anti-Art’s “rebellion
against making.”) By the mid-1970s, this transition was complete, and the
avant-garde (zen’ei), which had previously operated on the fringes of the art
world, transmuted into what is today understood in Japan as “contemporary
art” (gendai bijutsu), which has since become an institution unto itself.
“Collectivism after Modernism” in Japan
Post-1945 collectivism continued the venerable tradition of modern collectivism,
as a driving force of changes—speciWcally, prompting the fundamental
shift from kindai to gendai. The shift toward gendai can also be understood
in terms of the exhibition. As outlined above, the collectivism of the art
organizations as exhibition societies helped Japanese society acclimate to
the modern exhibition system. In the postwar years, collectivism’s relationship
to the exhibition underwent three phases of transition.
In the Wrst phase, the possibility of the exhibition as a formal and
structured means of presentation was pursued in a few signiWcant manners.
Outstanding in this respect was Gutai, especially in its early period after its
foundation in 1954. In Tokyo, Jikken Kobo (whose ofWcial English name
was Experimental Workshop) from the Wrst half of the 1950s was another
important group; its intermedia experiments in stage design constituted an
early example of collaborative collectivism under the vision of modernist
“total art” and preWgured technology-oriented art in the late 1960s. 20