The Emergence of the Contemporary: Japanese Postwar Art in Twenty-First-Century Brazil

Abstract

34 Portfolio Curated by Pedro Erber The Emergence of the Contemporary: Japanese Postwar Art in Twenty-­ First-­ Century Brazil On July 14, 2016, The Emergence of the Contemporary: Avant-­Garde Art in Japan,1950–­1970 opened at Rio de Janeiro’s Paço Imperial. The exhibition was on view until August 28, thus coinciding with Rio’s 2016 Olympic Games. I curated the show with the collaboration of Suzuki Katsuo and the support of the Japan Foundation. We presented a panorama of avant-­ garde art in Japan between 1950 and 1970, focusing on artists whose practice and theoretical reflections marked the transition from painting toward three-­dimensional objects, performance, and conceptual art. We brought together some of the most representative works of the period as well as documentary photographs, films, and other historical items. The exhibition thus contextualized the trajectory of the avant-­garde in its dialogue with events that shaped the history of the postwar era, such as the movements against the renewal of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan (ANPO) in 1960 and 1970, the Expo ’70 in Osaka, and, in particular, the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. It was the first major exhibition of Japanese avant-­garde art ever to take place in Brazil. This Portfolio feature presents an annotated record of The Emergence of the Contemporary. It combines an account of the exhibition’s framework and content with reflections on the goals, implications, and challenges of showing postwar Japanese art in twenty-­ first-­ century Brazil and a discussion of the tactics we developed for approaching this task. I chart the curatorial strategies we devised to bring the radical creativity of Japan ’s postwar avant-­ garde into dialogue with the past and present of Brazilian art and with the contemporary social and political moment. In Figure 1. A Emergência do Contemporâneo: Vanguarda no Japão, 1950–­ 1970. Exhibition invitation model in Portuguese. 36 Portfolio addition, I discuss the theoretical underpinnings of our attempt to unsettle conventional views about Japanese art, the origins and the stakes of contemporary art, and the transnational panorama of contemporary cultural practices.1 In the decades following the Second World War, Japan was the stage for some of the most radically innovative avant-­ garde movements of the twentieth century. Visual artists, critics, and writers engaged in a common effort to reinvent the place of art in a society rebuilding itself after the devastation of war and years of cultural censorship under the fascist regime of the Japanese empire. In 1963, Miyakawa Atsushi, one of the most acute theoreticians of postwar art in Japan, observed that the reach and nature of the transformations taking place in artistic expression were such that the modern paradigm had become obsolete, and in its place emerged a new paradigm, which he termed, in almost premonitory fashion, “contemporary art” (gendai bijutsu) (Miyakawa 1980, 16). Miyakawa’s observation not only referred to Japanese art, which was not an isolated phenomenon, but also reflected a general effort to think contemporaneity as the sharing of a common historical time across national , linguistic, and cultural borders. The goal of attaining contemporaneity (dōjidaisei) with the international art world was regarded as a crucial task among artists and critics in postwar Japan (see Tomii 2016, 11–­44). Implicitly subscribing to an understanding of historical time as a kind of universal progressive development, from which Japan had been supposedly cut off during the fascist era, they regarded catching up with Western modernity and bringing Japanese art “up to date” as the first, inevitable step toward the possibility of authentic artistic expression. To catch up with Euro-­American modernity and attain “international contemporaneity” or “world relevance” (sekai-­sei) was not only a matter of reinventing the role of art within Japan’s postwar society but of reinventing the role of Japan within the postwar international order (see Winther-­ Tamaki 2001, 15–­ 16). It is therefore no wonder that, perhaps more than anywhere else, the emergence of contemporary art as a discursive category in postwar Japan went hand in hand with a pressing sense of—­ and preoccupation with—­ contemporaneity. Yet the contemporaneity of Japanese postwar art, which we sought to...