Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

70 Reiko Tomii
crowd, and generated, by extension, publicity. HRC’s cleaning was unquestioned
because the presence created by a group of people normalized their
peculiar activity; one person’s cleaning—with a toothbrush or a handy rag—
would have been more conspicuous. With Group “I,” the collective context of
its works made the issues of individual authorship, originality, and anonymity
all the more explicit and consequential. Hikosaka Naoyoshi of Bikyoto
theorized the meaning of collectivity in relation to Bikyoto Revolution Committee’s
solo exhibition series in 1971:
The museum emerges wherever one conducts an act of art-making. However, it is meaningless
if one artist holds an exhibition outside the museum/gallery. Our starting point is:
several people encounter and discover the museum manifesting itself within the act of
art-making, of which we as individuals have been previously unaware.
Through our activities, we have aimed to concretely possess this “internal museum”
as our commonality. 68
Hikosaka’s words saliently speak for the post-HRC collectivism, through
which these artists endeavored to seek out a new horizon of practices.
Given the volatile social situation in the 1960s, it goes without
saying that the explicit and implicit activism that pervaded Japanese collectivism
cannot be understood without reference to the two anti-Anpo
struggles and the student revolt. Still, the need for artists to band together
in creating their own platform was not new, nor was the artists’ ingenuity
of inventing something new to meet, or preWgure, the changing historical,
social, and cultural context. Even the seemingly apolitical projects of The
Play have a profound implication of things to come. In fact, with The Play,
collaborative and interventional collectivism came a long way from HRC,
anticipating yet another type of collectivism that would emerge in the late
1990s: “grass-roots collectivism.” This concerns the locally based collaborations
between artists and area residents that have generated works of both
artistic and social signiWcance.
For example, the nonproWt collective Command N, led by Nakamura
Masato, produced Akihabara TV (1999, 2000, and 2002) in Tokyo’s
famous electronics district Akihabara: it played dozens of international video
works on television monitors displayed for sale at participating electronics
stores. To execute this simple but clever plan, Command N closely worked
with a local community for a great success. 69 Area rejuvenation was also the
goal of Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennial (2000, 2003, and 2006), which was held
in the mountainous Niigata Prefecture in central Japan. The project was a
collaboration between the area’s local governments and Art Front Gallery
in Tokyo, which has functioned as not so much a commercial gallery as an
alternative gallery since its foundation in 1976. In 2003, among more than
150 practitioners from twenty-three countries, a good number of artists and