Day 2: September 13, 2014, Saturday
New Scholarship Panel 1: Students
Discussant-at-Large: Alexandra Munroe
Moderated by Yasufumi Nakamori
Ruins of Flesh and Stone: A Foundational Discourse of Japanese Pornography in Postwar Media
Elizabeth Noelle Tinsley
This paper
will address pornography in Japan, a genre that is underexamined by scholars,
and trace a genealogy for it. It will focus on graphic art from the publication
Kitan kurabu (Bizarre stories club), a postwar progenitor of pornography that awaits
a critical study in its socio-historical context. The drawings, prints, and
paintings I examine show sexualized female bodies depicted as victims of
wartime atrocities and are framed by enthusiasts as an expression of sexual
liberation and the new representations of sex that emerged after the war.
However, this visual culture presents Buddhist and Christian motifs in subculture,
and represents a new stage of the ero-guro
(erotic grotesque) aesthetic. It is a rich resource for studies of the
construction of sexuality, as well as for comprehending the trajectories taken
by Christian and Buddhist artistic motifs in Japan.
Roofs and Grids in Postwar Japan: Tange Kenzō, Shirai Seiichi, and MuranoTōgo
Maki Iisaka
One of the
core issues confronting architects in Japan since the emergence of modernism
has been the role and meaning of Japanese tradition and its representations. In
the mid-1950s, the terms of the debate were highly influenced by a series of
articles in the journal Shinkenchiku,
which introduced and vigorously promoted the idea of the Jomon-Yayoi dichotomy
as the foundation of Japanese culture. Based on the premise that this mode of
thought was a distraction which deflected attention away from what the
architecture of the period actually reveals on the levels of material, effect,
and representation, I propose an alternative reading that unravels the mechanism
of transformation from the earlier mimetic transmission of tradition to
practices less hampered by formal exigencies. This will be achieved through an
analysis of the compositional and conceptual dialectic between the notions of
grid and roof in buildings from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s.
Around Kankyō: The Exhibition Installation of From Space to Environment
Yasutaka Tsuji
This paper investigates the 1966 exhibition From Space to Environment, held at Matsuya Department Store in Tokyo, involving the architects Isozaki Arata and Hara Hiroshi. This exhibition was instrumental in introducing the terms Intermedia and Environment Art (Kankyō geijutsu) to Japan. In studying these two aspects of postwar Japanese art, the past studies rightly observed the importance of the 1950s collective Jikken Kōbō/Experimental Workshop and the Expo ’70, in relation to such Western art movements as Fluxus or E.A.T. However, they have tended to focus on the binaries of “art and technology,” “Expo and anti-Expo,” and “nation-state and environment”—which in fact constitute discursive constuctions at the time. In contrast, this paper will focus on primary sources that illuminate the formation of Environment Society and the installation design to understand the models offered by architecture in the development of postwar art history.
Mura-e: Sanrizuka and a Shift in Documentaries of Protest
This paper investigates the 1966 exhibition From Space to Environment, held at Matsuya Department Store in Tokyo, involving the architects Isozaki Arata and Hara Hiroshi. This exhibition was instrumental in introducing the terms Intermedia and Environment Art (Kankyō geijutsu) to Japan. In studying these two aspects of postwar Japanese art, the past studies rightly observed the importance of the 1950s collective Jikken Kōbō/Experimental Workshop and the Expo ’70, in relation to such Western art movements as Fluxus or E.A.T. However, they have tended to focus on the binaries of “art and technology,” “Expo and anti-Expo,” and “nation-state and environment”—which in fact constitute discursive constuctions at the time. In contrast, this paper will focus on primary sources that illuminate the formation of Environment Society and the installation design to understand the models offered by architecture in the development of postwar art history.
Mura-e: Sanrizuka and a Shift in Documentaries of Protest
Nina Horisaki-Christens
In spite of rich histories of rural protest in Japan, the culture of protest was reframed by the strategies of the 1960s “season of politics” as a predominantly urban phenomenon in the context of the decade’s rapid urbanization. Against this backdrop, 1970s images of the Japanese countryside are often described as reactionary or politically disengaged. However, the case of Sanrizuka presents a rare exception that opens up the possibility of understanding the village as a site of political struggle. I will examine photographer Kitai Kazuo’s Sanrizuka 1969–1971 series through the lens of his engagement with figures like Ogawa Shinsuke and Nakahira Takuma, as well as within the context of the discussions of photographic subjectivity and the landscape discourse (fukei-ron) in the late 1960s. In doing so, I will propose reading Sanrizuka as a catalyst for return to the village as a site of resistance.
In spite of rich histories of rural protest in Japan, the culture of protest was reframed by the strategies of the 1960s “season of politics” as a predominantly urban phenomenon in the context of the decade’s rapid urbanization. Against this backdrop, 1970s images of the Japanese countryside are often described as reactionary or politically disengaged. However, the case of Sanrizuka presents a rare exception that opens up the possibility of understanding the village as a site of political struggle. I will examine photographer Kitai Kazuo’s Sanrizuka 1969–1971 series through the lens of his engagement with figures like Ogawa Shinsuke and Nakahira Takuma, as well as within the context of the discussions of photographic subjectivity and the landscape discourse (fukei-ron) in the late 1960s. In doing so, I will propose reading Sanrizuka as a catalyst for return to the village as a site of resistance.
Bodies In-Between Spaces in dumb type’s Intermedia Performance OR
Joo Yun Lee
This paper will introduce dumb type, a Japanese intermedia performance collective (1984–) that defines itself as “political theatre” and deals with the problems inherent in Japanese society heavily conditioned by information technology and global capitalism. Particularly, this research will discuss the group’s investigation of the border between life and death or the in-betweenness of being in its intermedia performance OR, which addressed the issue of the diminished humanity in a society overloaded with information. In this context, the discussion will focus on the human/machine interface in OR, a body of work as a social space comprised of multiple layers of elements such as image, sound, lighting and bodies. Furthermore, the audio-visual interfaces as unique “thresholds of self and world” in OR will be discussed as cultural interfaces that reveal the specific social and cultural contexts of the media environment that engendered them.
This paper will introduce dumb type, a Japanese intermedia performance collective (1984–) that defines itself as “political theatre” and deals with the problems inherent in Japanese society heavily conditioned by information technology and global capitalism. Particularly, this research will discuss the group’s investigation of the border between life and death or the in-betweenness of being in its intermedia performance OR, which addressed the issue of the diminished humanity in a society overloaded with information. In this context, the discussion will focus on the human/machine interface in OR, a body of work as a social space comprised of multiple layers of elements such as image, sound, lighting and bodies. Furthermore, the audio-visual interfaces as unique “thresholds of self and world” in OR will be discussed as cultural interfaces that reveal the specific social and cultural contexts of the media environment that engendered them.
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