The Virtual Time Garden

in "Art & Text 40, Australia,1991

Transit Zone -- Modern Japanese Art

 

 

Does "Art" really exist in Japan?

      For the Japanese, Australia is still the country of kangaroos and koalas. And, I suppose, New Zealand would be the country of sheep. Lately, more and more young people from Japan visit these two countries, but it is only because they consider them the most appropriately trendy destinations for their heneymoons. In Japan there have been several exhibitions about the contemporary cultures of these two countries, but I believe only a handful of people have acturally gone to see them. This is probably due to the fact that most of us in the "hi-tech", "samurai" country of Japan consider art is meant to be brought in only from Europe and North America.

 

      We have always thought that culture is supposed to come from the West. The "Far-East" is nothing more than the term we use to position ourselves within this framework. So far we have tended to position our culture from an external point of view. In the beginning, the "external viewpoint" was that of China or India, during the modern era it was transferred to Europe and North America, and in recent times it is probably the viewpoint of the "satellite". To regard Japan as a nation of "samurai" who commit "harakiri" is merely an illusion much like the European "orientalism" outlined by Edward Said. However, strangely enough, this illusion has become fundamental to the underlying self-consciousness of the Japanese today. Many of us agree that we are indeed samurai, i.e. businessmen who operate actively on a global scale. The effect of such an inverse orientalism can be seen in various areas in Japan.

 

      By the way, my task here is to report on the circumstances of modern art in Japan. But in fact the main question is whether "art" even exists in Japan in the first place. It is true that historically we have our own culture -- consisting of tales and poetry, painting, sculpture and performing arts such as noh or kabuki. However, they originate in a conceptual tradition that has continued for thousands of years completely separate from the concept of "art" formed in Europe from the end of the 18th century. Since Japan re-opened its doors to the West approximately 120 years ago, we have imported Western art an literature and have made efforts to assimilate them. This happened to correspond to the period when so-called "japonisme" caused a stir in Europe, and only then did "art" as a concept of valuer begin to exist in Japan. This is also the manifestation of a kind of inverse orientalism. We have imported the latest and most "superior" works of art from the West, with the aim of reaching the Western standard and then exceeding it. But this process has taken place on two different levels. For example, in the field of painting, it has manifested itself in a division into Yo-ga( Western-style painting) and Nihon-ga( Japanes-style painting). In short, the impact caused by the arrival of Western painting resulted in the birth of two separate genres: Nihon-ga, which attempted to introduce the Western influence into our own tradition; and Yo-ga, which tried to cultivate the imported Western material and style, even its very spirit, within our culture. Yo-ga was our "external self", and Nihon-ga the "internal self". And Japan today exists in the gap between these two different "selves". This division exists in various different artistic and cultural genres. As a result, two traditions have developed independently in the fields of painting, sculpture, literature, music, theatre, and scholarship in general. Nihon-ga, as a local Japanese genre, is scarcely known overseas. However we may say that within Japan it has found a consistent and extremely widespread market. The Yo-ga genre tried to assimilate itself into the tradition of European painting, but in reality it was ostracised as a mere local expression. Apart from a few painters such as Leonard Foujita, the reputation of Yo-ga painters has never come near that of the respectable Nihon-ga painters.

 

      In simple terms, Yo-ga painters are those who believed in the universality and internationally acceptable nature of Western art. They felt more affinity with Renoir or van Gogh than with Hokusai or Utamaro. They made a conscious effort to position their work in the direction of Western innovators such as Picasso and Matisse. The same applies to the current Japanese artists. They are the descendants of Yo-ga painters, who are still actively and successfully working all over the world. Yet paradoxically, in order to be accepted overseas, they have had no choice but to foreground the regional characteristics of Japanese art, which they believed they had abandoned as they left their homeland. Whatever they go, they encounter questions such as: "What are the Japanese characteristics within your work?". The originality of Japanese painters only exists in the exoticism imputed by European orientalism. In this way, "art" in Japan is placed in an extremely unstable position between Western and Japanese concepts of orientalism. In short, within the cultural domain "art" is not explicable solely in Japanese terms. Hence, I do not need to mention the fact that its universality and internationally recognisable nature are merely a mirage, and that the real "art" is a local phenomenon unique in the modernday West. At the same time, the very effort to reject European orientalism plays a crucial role in both aspects of Japanese orientalism. The history of Japanese art has to take these circumstances into consideration.

 

 

Gutai and Beyond

      What first comes to mind when thinking about modern art in Japan is a group of artists who called themselves Gutai. They were active from the 1950s to the 1970s in Osaka. Members of the group, most of whom were not formally trained in the field of art, gathered around the central figure of Jiro Yoshihara, an avant-garde painter from the prewar period onwards. Following their master's command to do only those things that had never been done before, they put various anti-art ideas into practice. Kazuo Shiraga's foot painting, on which he drew rough vigorous lines with his foot; Shozo Shimamoto's cannon paintings or works where the canvas was slashed with a knife; and Sadamasa Motonaga's installations of water and light are some examples of the creations of this group. They are all original works which, in effect, heavily influenced the later Fluxus or Neo-Dada movements.

 

      The Gutai movement was first "discovered" by the French critic of Art Informel, Michel Tapies. Until this "discovery", the movement had not been accepted by anyone in the field of art in Japan, and the group's creations were only good for causing a stir in the human interest columns of the newspapers as a manifestation of the strange behaviour of youth. Tapies understood Gutai in relation to Art Informel or Abstract Expressionism, and claimed its originality within the history of art. In this way, Gutai was "discovered as art" by a French critic.

 

     However, in actual fact Gutai had hardly any relation to Abstract Expressionism or to Art Informel. What the artists had leant from European avan-garde movements was nothing more than the spirit of "taking a leap in the effort to break into a new dimension far above the norm". Their paintings, drawn by foot or, even more nonsensical or exaggerated, created through the explosion of paint from a cannon, had no relation whatsoever to the history of "art" -- such as Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, whose particular technique was founded in the tradition stemming from the discovery of automatism in Surrealism. The Gutai creations are completely outside the categories of "art" or the "fine arts"; they are "overly exaggerated" works which, taken as a whole, are totally idiosyncratic and lacking in quality. It was this aspect of Gutai that actually amazed Tapies, and not its historically coincidental correspondence to Art Informel or Abstract Expressionism.

 

     The fact that it had to be "discoverd" by Europe is not in any way degrading to the Gutai group. It merely indicates the apathy of Japanese critics and journalists( although, since the Yo-ga era, it has become a Japanese cultural tradition to consider such overseas recognition as a prerequisite for discovery in any case). Moreover, we may say that through such idiosyncratic moments in the history of our art, Japanese art has been able to obtain a certain international value. In other words, the fact that this art has come to have international value is not because it encouraged individuality, or regional or traditional differences, which would amount to origiality within the fixed system of art (if this were so, it would only make it become the object of mere exoticism or orientalism), but because it succeeded in creating a kind of gap outside the art system, which created the opportunity for Japanese art to have its own critical function for the first time. We may say that Gutai was the first modern art in Japan to clearly demonstrate such a possibility.

 

     Thereafter, "art" in Japan saw movements such as Neo-Dada or Mono-ha, and later the postmodernism of the 1980s. In the interim, many changes had taken place in Japan. One that is especially pertinent here was the almost miraculous growth of the economy and the rapid progress in media technology. The planet has become increasingly smaller, and the speed of transition to a new form of information society -- comparable to the "simulation society" once outlined by Jean Baudrillard -- is occuring faster and faster. Japanese art has undergone considerable change amidst this rapid disappearance of space, time, and distance.

 

 

The Information Society and Its Virus

      It is commonly thought that Japan is the most Westernised country in Asia, which I believe is true. However, from a Westerner's point of view, there are many strange traditions and customs still remaining in Japan; while from a Japanese point of view, we believe ourselves to be more than sufficiently Westernised. In the case of Japan, being "Westernised" in actual fact means "Americanised", at least in the postwar era. Therefore, when Japanese people go on a trip to Europe it is not rare for them to feel that many European cities are "lagging behind" the times and less Westernised. The psychological trauma of having been "raped" by Western culture and having been made to internalise its external value system, has in effect turned the whole of Japan into an ultra-modern country. Now it has become a unique hyperreal country.

 

     The same theory applies to the field of "art". The latest wave of art from Europe or North America is instantaneously imported into Japan and consumed by the young artists. In some cases, the rate at which these new movements penetrate into Japan can occur faster than in Paris or New York. However, at this point we must pause and think for a moment about the fact that such a transmission of art lacks any firm foundation. The information spreads everywhere -- even to art schools in any country town -- while in the big cities exhibitions of works following the new "-ism" are held one after another. That only aomounts to art simulation and not "art". Of course, it may well be the case that art can now only be a simulation anywhere in the world, and I believe "real" art has never at all existed in Japan. It may be true to say that the information era is corrupting the West's concept of the subject (in other words, that of the middle-aged white male), but the inner core of us Japanese has always been corrupted from the very beginning. This is an advantage for Japanese artists in the field of simulation. They are endeavouring to work in the space between their subjectivity and a world that has turned itself into an information network.

 

     Artists such as Dumb Type, Complesso Plastico, Tatsuo Miyajima, Kohdai Nakahara and Yasumasa Morimura, who exhibited their works in the exhibition "Zones of Love", have all been searching for this kind of aesthetics of simulationism. Of course, there are several different attitudes to be found within their approach, but I will not inquire into them here.

 

     On second thoughts, if I may bring up one importand possibility, I would like to focus on the shift away from the trend of "self-editing" in art, functioning as media toward a "deconstruction", examples of which are seen in the creations by Dumb Type and the artists Mihoko Kosugi+ Yasuhiko Ando. This is because as long as simulationism disguises the mirror or monitor of society and its essence, it cannot ultimately help but be overpowered by simulation which has itself already become the reality. For example, society and its essence stand no chance against the genre of computer games or television commercials. Art not only has as its design the network formed by the different philosophies, senses and information, but it also has to function like a virus in order to clearly show the limitations of this network. Like a retrovirus that contains reverse-image enzymes enabling it to reprogram genes, or like the computer virus that makes visible the invisible network, art has to be able to secretly reprogram history and culture on a genetic level by penetrating into the nucleus or into the social system.

 

     The question as to what kind of influence Japan could bring about in the history and traditions of "art" or the "fine arts" has first to be overturned from its root. It may be true to say that Japan has already become a virus in the field of world economy, but we must now begin creating the cultural virus. Unlike the economic virus, the creation of the cultural virus will direct us toward liberation, because it indicates the creation of a new media-type art that will gradually enable us to become an authoritative world figure on the cultural level. It will increasingly be more important for us to abandon the conventional understanding of "art", and to venture into a whole new dimension. Now, we are about to welcome an age of "art" extending its influence to an "editorial engineering" of the cosmologic information network.

 

translated by Kaoru Sato