Since February 19th, 1996
in "Art Asia-Pacific vol3 no.1 1996
The post-colonial body in
contemporary Japanese art
It has been some time since the body attracted wide attention in contemporary art.
The human body has, of course, always been an important theme in the history of art. However, for a long time following the advent of the modernism it was forgotten,and it was not only the body that was forgotten. In the era when the notion of 'creating an illusion of the existence of objects' was denied altogether and painting was compelled to be autonomous, representation was loathed.Instead, pure form and pure vision were pursued.
During this period, the body became superfluous and outsider in art. Of course, one should not take the term 'body' as a fixed concept.In European dualism the body was always material, an object in opposition to the mind or consciousness. It was Other, a part of nature which should be controlled by reason.
However, in different culture such as those of China or Japan, this was not always the case. Take, for example, the soft curves of the Buddha's body revealed through the patterns and folds of his robe; the puppet-like portrait clad in geometric costumes; the figures of woman represented only by simple lines in . In these examples, the body is immersed in culture and is in harmony with (the format).
In fact, the body as such does not exist in these cultural tradition. The body is not an object, it is inseparable from the mind and culture, and as a distinct concept the body has never existed.
In bodily performance, therefore, also plays an important part. is the subtle harmony created between the mind and the body, a system of movement which has been elaborated on over the long period of time.
It is a kind of software for the body which coordinates the modality of the body and fine-tunes the relationship between the world and the mind.
Zeami, who perfected Japanese theater in the fifteenth century, says in his essay on theater, , that the actor must faithfully follow this principle and never let his own fancy lead him. Zeami terms the beauty which is created by the body of an actor, (flower). The flower is only found in the movements which are faithful to and are the outside the actor's individual control. An exception, however, are the unexpected actions and movements which come unconsciously from an old actor who has accomplished kata. Zeami considers the beauty of the movements as the supreme flower.
The beauty of the body, then, is not the physical body nor is it found in physical expression of the individuality of an actor. Rather it is the opposite - only when an actor completely abandons his control over his own body and bends it to the does his body become free. An accomplished old actor reaches the stage where the body is completely merged with the movements and it is impossible to separate the two.
In traditional Japanese theaters such as or these techniques of the body were established over hundreds of years. The body here is not 'nature'. In fact, nature does not exist apart from culture and no culture exists apart from nature; it is not that the mind controls the body, nor that the body tries to free itself from the mind, rather that the body itself becomes an impersonal medium. One may say that the body is not something that exists but something that generates.
Eisenstein once pointed out that in kabuki theater different elements such as the actor's movements, and the music and stage sets, each create a subtle ensemble, while remaining extraneous to one another. This, he said, is in contrast to western theater, opera or ballet in which one element is dominant and the others are subordinate to that element. This notion of kabuki became a catalyst for the birth of Eisenstein's montage theory. The body is very much a montage. The organic unity of the body is only an illusion: various forces from within and without interact with one another, exchanging information of different wave-lengths and combinations.
What determines the combination of forces is not nature but culture, traditions and history. The culture of has created a distinctly conscious tradition in this plasticity of the body.
For example, there is no such things as 'the way one walks naturally'. The question is whether or not we are conscious of this fact. During the modernization process, Japan's kata culture was completely shattered. With the importation of modern western theater the Japanese people considered their traditional theater feudalistic and scorned it. In the visual art too, with the introduction of naturalism, representation of reality was valued and realistic nude painting became mainstream. The body was thus transformed as an outside object, as nature.
Modernization has also changed the Japanese body. If I may put it this way, 'media = body space' has changed its nature. A westernized lifestyle has brought about changes in the Japanese way of life, from diet and clothing to modes of dwelling - it has even altered our muscle and body structure itself.
Modernization has oppressed the body both culturally and technologically. Modern concepts consider the body as a slave of the mind, thus relegating it as a subject of discipline. From time to time the body rebelled against the mind, only to be conquered by reason. The mind colonized the body, as it were.
Technological development also accelerated the abandonment of the body. In a society of advanced transport and communication, the body has basically become redundant; in a society in pursuit of efficiency and speed only intelligence is considered important.
The world-wide 'reinstatement of the body' movement began as a large-scale rebellion against this abandonment of the body. The movement was related to the anti-colonial struggle which began after the Second World War and peaked in the 1960's. It was also a protest against the modern paradigms of nature, culture, mind and the body. One may even go further to say that it was a protest against the modern West itself.
The reinstatement of the body does not suggest the reinstatement of something lost.No such things as the wild body marred by civilization or the natural body ever existed. Many of the trends in art - some overemphasizing the genitals and others insisting on the uniqueness of the body - were nothing but backward-looking reaction. Of course, this is not to say that all those anti-modern, anti-technology movements were futile. Many of the difficulties faced by post-colonialism or post-modernism at least raised some issues.
For example, the Butoh school led by Tatsumi Hijikata is representative of the reinstatement of the body movement in Japan. Butoh is a style of dance devised by Hijikata, who came from Japan's northern farming region, and is based on his own native memory of the body. It was a regionalist attempt to reinstate the pre-modernist body.
At the same time, by searching for the ancient or emotional depth - the subconsciousness of the body - it went beyond a simple 'return to tradition' movement and joined the European avant-garde movement, receiving high acclaim outside Japan (although some of its popularity was based on its exoticism and Orientalism).
Butoh attempted to liberate the body from the various everyday forces which control it and to get down to the level of the 'anti-body', a medium which links the consciousness with the outside world. For Hijikata, this 'anti-body' was the Asiatic body which, in turn, was the original Japanese body -- the true body that had been concealed by modernization. In other words, Butoh was an anti-colonial struggle against the colonization of the body.
For the younger generation, however, the equation is not always appropriate. The 'original experience' which supports such an equation is lacking in the people who were born after the Second World War. For the generation which grew up with an Americanized lifestyle and urban environment, the Asiatic body is not part of their own roots but an artificial concept to be learned.
The paradox which confronted the Butoh groups which succeeded Hijikata was the fact that the localized body, namely the Asiatic body, was in fact not part of their experience but a cyborg, a body which they had to construct anew,. In the age of post-colonialism this is a common problem within localist, and regionalist, identity politics.
This aspect of the reinstating of the body, therefore, faced a serious problem of self-contradiction after its peak in the 1960s. The Asiatic body and the local, individualized body existed only as dichotomic oppositions to the modern west or 'the body = the colony' concept, and their only value was that of antithesis. They were concepts without substance.
To begin with, the concept of Asia itself originated as a phantasm of the European; it was an effect, a result of a perspective perversion. It is fundamentally impossible for the body to revert to a kind of original body. Likewise, it is also impossible to simply return to the traditional culture. We need to begin by reconstructing the body, an entity in which various forces interact and which links our individual self and the world. This is not an easy task. With society becoming more consumer and information oriented, globalized and post-modernized, the body is also transforming itself. As our senses are extended through various media, our perception of the world is becoming increasingly diverse and complicated. In such an environment, no self-evident concept of the body remains.
Since the 1980s artists have begun raising new question about the body in modern Japanese art.
One can think of many examples: works by Yasumasa Morimura, who attempts to merge his own body into the histoy of art or pop culture; multi-media performances by Dumb Type, whose main theme is the body fragmented within technological space; or installations by Tatsuo Miyajima, who tries to draw the complexity and confusion of the senses into the cosmic time.
I would now like to introduce an artist and a group whose works are less known.
Shozo Shimamoto is a leading figure of the Gutai group. In the 1950s Shimamoto created paintings by making holes in the canvas (before Fontana did it) and created extraordinary 'action paintings' by firing paint from cannon onto the wall.
After the Gutai group dissolved 1970s, Shimamoto became preoccupied with forming an international network of artists mostly through mail-art. Then, from the second half of the 1980s, he ventured into a series of original performances with the body as the central theme.
It all began with Milanese artist Cavellini's visit to Japan in 1986. This network artist, known for his eccentric conduct, was at the time developing a performance in which he wrote his autobiography in a variety of media. Shimamoto planned a public performance for Cavellini in which Shimamoto had his head shaved at Shitennoji, a large Buddhist temple in Osaka, and Cavellini wrote his biographical text on Shimamoto's shaven head.
As a continuation of this public performance, he then sent out pictures of the back of his shaven head via the mail-art network, with a message, 'Please use it in whatever way you like'. In preparation for his performance for the 'Japon des Avantgardes' exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, he sent out copies of the picture all over the world, and hundred of his 'works' were mailed back to him. Concurrently, Shimamoto performed in different countries, getting the back of his head 'used'. A variety of uses were devised: his head was painted, slides were projected on to it, and it was used dance performance. This attempt 'to make a free use of the back of Shozo Shimamoto's head' attracted wide attention. In Finland, for example, a collection of photographs of the back of his head was published. This series was an attempt to liberate part of body literally from its own properties and let it slip into the network.
His next work was a series of performances entitled 'Time Rack'. The series began with a project: he had a medium-sized building painted by a number of young artists before destroying the building, creating an instant ruin. For the next project in this series, he tied several people onto crosses while burying others below the crosses with only their head above ground.
The significance of this series lay not in the destruction of the building nor in the crucifying of people, but in presenting the building or the body in these states: the ruin of the building became an exhibition in itself, and the artists who were crucified or buried became a performance.
In the latter, the body was 'fixed' out of the control of the individual to whom it belong -- an attempt at reorganizing the body.
Meanwhile, younger generations are literally burying the body in computer networks, focusing their attention on how the body as a medium will transform itself.
The theme of the series 'Interface/Eros' by Mihoko Kosugi and Yasuhiko Ando is that of the body which has been extended into a computer network (or it may be that the body itself is a gigantic computer network).
In their 1991 work , they arranged a number of monitors, connected to one another with pipes, around an empty operating table; a presentation of body as it transformed into a computer network. The monitors screened a throbbing heart, eyeballs, organs and electrocardiogram.
In their following work , 1992, Kosugi and Ando created a forest of gigantic black boxes connected to one another via pipes. In this forest they arranged screens onto which rows of the letters ATGC, the four bases of DNA, were continuously projected. The visitors could walk amongst the rays form the projectors and the rays were interrupted by the bodies crossing them. The rows slightly changed their shapes, indicating that the mechanized giant body was interacting with other units or intruders.
Their next project , 1993, was an installation in which the viewer could receive a variety of information as images or sound from the body, which was buried under ground, by inserting a plug into any of the numerous jacks in a tower. The installation was suggestive of various erotic interactions within the body and was integrated with the media network.
Since the 1980s Kosugi and Ando have been making conceptual and interactive installations using mirrors and labyrinthine forms. Now, in the 1990s, they are trying to relate the intimate and erotic interactions inside the body to the computer and media networks. Their works are outstanding attempts at making precise measurements of the phase of the body in its current historical context.
At any rate, as Foucault once pointed out, the question of the body is nothing more than the question of configuration of invisible power. The work of these artists are attempts to disentangle various problems in the post-cold war world by thinking about the body.
The body, therefore, is not a metaphor but a theme directly related to the problems of globalization and post-colonialism of the present world.
Translated by Chiaki Ajioka.
Hisashi Muroi is a critic and Associated Professor in the Department of Art and Technology, Yokohama National University, Japan. He has written several books including "Information and life: Brain, mind and computer", 1993, and "On Informatic Universe", 1991.