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After the “Descent to the Everyday” 53
In the second phase, the “descent to the everyday” began within
the site of exhibition from around 1958, as Anti-Art artists and individual
members of collectives—most notoriously, Kyushu-ha, Neo Dada (renamed
from “Neo Dada Organizers”), Group Ongaku (Music), Hi Red Center, and
Jikan-ha (Time School)—incorporated junk and everyday objects into their
works, partly inspired by the fervor of Art Informel. 21
The third phase was the “descent to everyday life.” On the one
hand, some objects incorporated into works had a tendency themselves to
move about inside the exhibition site and depart from it, as with the famed
examples of Takamatsu Jiro’s string and Nakanishi Natsuyuki’s clothespins
(both HRC members), shown at the “Yomiuri Independent” in 1963. 22 On
the other hand, artists themselves were deWnitely an agency of the descent,
taking their actions to the streets, often in order to promote their exhibitions.
An unexpected precedent was found in Nika: in 1948, when the reorganized
Nika began a tradition of scandalous publicity stunts, sending a
truckload of costumed members and semi-nude models to the Ginza district
in Tokyo on the eve of their exhibition opening, with some luridness even
displayed as a calculated accident. The costume parade to Ginza was subsequently
banned, 23 but Nika’s “Opening-Eve Festival” preceded Kyushu-ha’s
street exhibition in 1957, Neo Dada Organizers’ street demonstrations in
1960, and Zero Dimension’s crawling and other rituals since 1963, which in
turn preceded HRC’s extraexhibition performance works. The Anpo ’60
struggle was an undeniable inXuence in their move out of the exhibition
hall: an urgent desire for “direct action” (chokusetsu kodo) lingered, after the
protest movement waned. It should be noted that parallel phenomena of
“descent to everyday life” also took place in other cultural Welds during this
decade. Most signiWcantly, troupes of underground theater (Angura engeki)
such as Kara Juro’s Red Tent and Theater Center 68/70’s Black Tent were
launched in 1967 and 1970, respectively; the playwright Terayama Shuji,
who initiated the move out of traditional theater places, exploited the idea
of “street theater” with his Tenjo Sajiki group in 1970. 24
In a sense, the departure from the exhibition was another face of
the dematerialization of art. As practitioners moved from the combat zone of
Anti-Art to the no-man’s-land of Non-Art, object-based works were quickly
replaced by works based on installation, conceptualism, and performance,
the last of which was varyingly called “action” (akushon or koi), “Happening”
(hapuningu), “event” (ivento), and “ritual” (gishiki) in Japan. The “descent
to everyday life,” epitomized by HRC’s Cleaning Event, meant in real life the
inWltration of the public sphere, often performed by collectives with an interventional
intent. Accordingly, the nature of collectivism changed. Although
the exhibition remained a key concern, vanguard collectives to a greater