September 15, 2011

"Although I am out of space here, and so I have no more room to do more than mention great books of Japanese history like Andrew Gordon’s edited volume Postwar Japan as History or Victor Koschmann’s Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan, nor to give proper homage to great mentors from my past whose work will always be remembered, like Barbara Johnson’s The Critical Differenceor Edwin McClellan’s beautiful translation of Yoshikawa Eiji’s memoir Fragments of a Past.

"Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan deals a lot with the dynamics of visibility and invisibility, the idealization of darkness (the 'underground' arts) and the many ways artists tried to reach a deeper 'sight' or insight. Everyone’s favorite chapter in my book is chapter 3, 'Blindness and the Visuality of Desire,' which unpacks the philosophical ramifications of an early 1970s play in which audience members lit matches to illuminate the parts of the performance they most wanted to see, and made visible their own faces and desire in the process.

"When I was researching this book, I kept coming back to the work of the independent scholar/art historian Reiko Tomii, co-organizer of the online Japanese contemporary art history forum PonJaGenKon. Viewing the work of the period not through the lens of glorifying a single artist but as a complex network of collaborations in context, Tomii provides an exemplary model of a way to see the arts of this period.

"Japanese artists in the 1960s and 1970s were already debating lots of criticism from Europe, from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness to Benjamin’s 'Critique of Violence.' Although I had already read lots of Benjamin because of his key place in critical theory in the humanities, reading him through the eyes of Japanese artists theorizing their work in the 1960s-70s gave me a whole new way to understand both Benjamain and the Japanese experimental arts."

"If there is a person who traced the history of theater in Japan by himself being present at an overwhelming number of the key performances, it is Senda. With his books in Japanese, such as Theatrical Renaissance: The Story of Contemporary Theater [Gekiteki runessansu: gendai engeki wa kataru] and many others since, Senda gives access to his immediate impressions of the shows, first published in the Asahi Newspaper as reviews. With J. Thomas Rimer’s translation, these journalistic accounts are now available to the Anglophone world."

"Though it was first published over twenty years ago, David Goodman, a participant himself in the angura  (underground) theater movements of the 1960s, wrote this book that remains one of the most useful introductions in English to the theater of this period of upheaval and transformation, with translations of key plays. As a supplement, he also curated the exhibition Angura: Posters of the Japanese Avant-Garde, which remains in the form of a gorgeous catalogue of the graphic arts related to the theater of the time, an excellent survey full of clear and concise introductions.

"Hijikata Tatsumi, one of the co-founders of the butô movement in avant-garde dance, did not only dance and choreograph: he also wrote, and language is a key part of all early butô dance. The chapter on Hijikata links this book to my earlier book on Japanese surrealist poetry, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism, showing how experimental arts in the 1920s-1930s that took place in language move in the 1960s to experiments with the body.

"At last, a work that focuses on the places of art making, the institutions that supported  experimental arts production: the Sôgetsu Art Center was one of the key spaces for music, film, animation, dance, and intermedia experiments from late 1950s until the early 1970s in Tokyo. This book brings together photos, reviews, essays, personal histories, and chronologies from a central space of avant-garde collaborative work.

“This box contains republications of some the most provocative and interesting works of Japanese photography from the late 1960s to early 1970s. Though it costs $2000 or more to buy, Berkeley’s  Art/Classics library has it for you to peruse freely along with their excellent collection of Japanese photo books of the period.