Avant -garde art in postwar Japan: The culture and politics of radical critique, 1951--1970

This dissertation of avant-garde art in postwar Japan is based upon a previous publication by the author titled Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994). Focusing on key art movements and artists' groups which defined postwar discourses on radical critique, this history charts the intellectual, aesthetic, and stylistic developments of avant-garde art in Japan from circa 1951 to 1970, a period defined by the leftist struggle against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, known as Anpo.;Both American and Japanese historians have studied the sociopolitical debates that mark the postwar period. What is less well-known is the history of new artistic forms and practices that emerged from this era of unprecedented upheaval, and how radical artists' strategies underscored and reworked the leftist discourses on democratic revolution, political subjectivity, and cultural anarchism. This study examines the avant-garde within the broader context of postwar Japanese social, political, and cultural history, focusing on its vigorous critique of the ruling ideologies of modernization and its opposition to institutionalized culture and politics.;This dissertation originated as an art historical research topic and certain formalist modes of stylistic analysis and aesthetic interpretation prevail. Among the questions explored here are: How can national characteristics of modern art be defined within a global discourse of modernity and modernism? If originality is the crux of the modernist adventure, how do we interpret this work within the framework of the modernist discourse?;Drawing on extensive primary sources and interviews, this dissertation aims to construct the first history in English of the following art movements: Gutai Art Association, Bokujin-kai and Sodeisha, the Yomiuri Independant's Anti-Art groups, Obsessional Art and Ankoku Butoh dance, VIVO and the Postwar School of Photography, Tokyo Fluxus and Conceptual Art, and the Mono-ha movement. The Introduction describes the Anpo movement, whose periodization defines this study; reviews the Taisho and Showa prehistory of the Japanese avant-garde; explores the discourse on cultural autonomy in modern Japanese intellectual debates; and offers a theoretical framework for defining the terminology of "radical critique." The Conclusion reviews the contradictions inherent in the Japanese avant-garde's embrace of leftist cultural critiques, and identifies problematic issues of historicizing zen'ei (avant-garde) and gendai (contemporary) art.