Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

After the “Descent to the Everyday” 61
post-HRC performance unit was Kato Yoshihiro, who joined the group
around 1963. He moved to Tokyo in late 1963 and started an electric store,
the income from which Wnanced the group’s subsequent activities in Tokyo
and other cities.
Zero Dimension’s body of work is diverse, numbering over three
hundred performances (Kato’s estimate) 47 with some thirty participants or so
for each. (The number was a factor in creating a presence in Zero Dimension’s
collectivism.) Mainly “naked demonstrations,” its projects ranged from
simple acts (e.g., crawling on the streets) that sometimes deployed large or
small props to carefully planned stage productions, all imbued with a sense
of absurdity and silliness. In addition to the urban streets of Tokyo, it also
used various outdoor spaces, including commuter trains, graveyards, and barricaded
university campuses; the indoor spaces they performed in were often
vaudeville and underground theaters and clubs. Its frequent nudity and
occasional pornographic male-female acts, together with Kato’s provocative
words (“We rape the city” 48 was but one), produced abundant mass-media
publicity, and they were invited to TV programs and starred in a few Wlms
(see Figure I.2 in the Introduction).
Kato’s description of Buck-Naked and Masked Parade in Tokyo on
December 9, 1967, gives a sense of what to expect: “On the streets of Shinjuku
bustling with a Saturday-night crowd, totally naked men made a procession,
raising their right arms, trailing the long pipes of the gasmasks they
wore, and deliberately taking one slow step at a time on the freezing concrete
of shopping streets, as though no man had ever walked on it.” 49 In
1965–68, the group’s activities intersected with the burgeoning underground
culture in Tokyo, whereas in 1969–71, it drew inspiration and energy from
radical politics that transformed Japan’s urban streets into battleWelds, as the
nation geared up to the Anpo ’70 struggle. Like many ritualists, Zero Dimension
joined the cultural left’s opposition to Expo ’70, another international
showcasing of afXuent Japan. 50 While working with radical student groups
nationwide, it formed Joint-Struggle Group for the Destruction of Expo (Banpaku
Hakai Kyoto-ha) with Kokuin and others. However, the joint group
collapsed after Kato and a few central members were arrested by security
police in 1969, and after 1971 Zero Dimension practically stopped its activity.
Bikyoto and the Institutional Critique
Among activist collectives organized by artists and art students in the midst
of the nationwide campus conXict in the late 1960s, Bikyoto outlived its
political life and went on to contribute its own modernity critique in the
form of “institutional critique.”
Bikyoto (Bijutsuka Kyoto Kaigi, or Artists Joint-Struggle Council)