Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 2018. xi, 326 pp. (B&W photos, coloured photos, illustrations.) US$49.95, cloth. ISBN 978-1-5017-1504-4.
The British Marxist cultural theorist Raymond Williams once famously said: “To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing.” Justin Jesty’s ambitious cultural history addresses this challenge via a study of the social forms of radical art and education in Japan from 1945 to 1960. The activism of cultural producers in Japan during this postwar period of flux and uncertainty is often taken to be of less significance than the more spectacular gestures of protest art conclusively canonized in the art scene of the 1960s. Jesty sees the confused hybridity of the preceding years as key to a new understanding. At that time, artists pursued new methods in collaboration; their work was less singular, provisional, more akin to activism; and it was intimately bound up with forms of political organization, including the Japanese Communist Party, workers’ unions, and civic discussion circles. Potentially, at least, it was better attuned to the mass public than later avant garde artists who rejected everyday life and mainstream society. Informed by Williams’ generative view of culture and politics, the book combines meticulous documentary with a cultural studies sensibility for theory and social dynamics, particularly the organizational forms of collectives and their societally embedded practices.
Jesty’s thesis dovetails with influential scholarship in art theory, notably by Grant Kester and Shannon Jackson, which stresses the form, organization, and process of genuinely politically engaged work: that is, artistic practice that has taken its time to insinuate itself into everyday life and mass culture. This stands in contrast to the more habitual emphasis in the current critical humanities, highlighting rupture or antagonism as the artist’s sacred vocation. At the same time, such art theory debates rarely consider East Asian examples. Echoing Kester and Jackson, Jesty understands the art work as a process, relational and discursive in form: a “social sculpture” built out of a tissue of repetitive and insistent practices that might otherwise be overlooked as the banal backdrop to a genius-inspired moment or finished object. He focuses on and tracks activities like hand-printing flyers, passing out leaflets, attending study meetings, joining political rallies, or just persuading ordinary people in the street to take a look.
The argument is perhaps most convincingly illustrated with the opening discussion of the famous Atomic Bomb Panels by the husband-and=wife team of Maruki Iri and Toshi. Jesty underlines how this work was so much more than a series of (now famous) paintings. It was, first of all, a documentary work, researched under appalling conditions in situ and created when any kind of representation of what happened in Hiroshima was prohibited. Sustained by a network of activists, it toured the country with word of mouth and amateur promotion, supplemented by performances and public discussion, eventually reaching the eyes of more than half a million people. The work of art—the objects that now stand canonized in a museum—was in fact made in large part by the practices by which it was produced, exhibited, discussed, and disseminated.
The rest of the book puts forward a wide range of examples to evidence this central point. It is structured around three main cases, grouping artists by their connection to a movement. The first focuses on the documentary work of reportage artists, who went to work in coal mines, joined protest movements against American occupation, or publicized the plight of nuclear test victims. These, for example, included the well-known surrealist artists of this era, Yamashita Kikuji and Nakamura Hiroshi. Jesty’s emphasis is less on a new reading of their works, more on their political engagements, connections to other figures, and the production of ephemeral work around the famous paintings. It also details how they came to turn away from political activism and collectivism.
The final part similarly traces an arc into the 1960s: the emergence, flourishing, then dissipation of the radical Fukuoka-based collective of Kyushu-ha. Unlike other artists discussed with a more elite, art-school background, Kyushu-ha members were salaried workers from humdrum social milieux who attempted to take an organizational form closer to union activism. They created works out of everyday materials such as asphalt, wood, and rope, that mirrored the rapid urban construction going on around them, while also organizing ephemeral events and happenings. Jesty owes much to the Fukuoka-based curator Kuroda Raiji, who has pioneered the re-assessment of such overlooked movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Kuroda narrates Kyushu-ha as a glorious failure in light of the assertive political modernism of the 1960s, but one whose activist collectivism can be viewed positively alongside other contemporaneous movements across East Asia.
Sandwiched a little awkwardly between these substantial contributions to Japanese art history, Jesty develops a third case, on the alternative educational practices of the Sōbi movement. This account offers a further illustration of the distinctive every-day or anarchist-style forms of civil society in Japan, which have been studied by other historians who emphasize overlooked non-state forms as a constant feature of an otherwise top-down, centrally organized society.
Jesty’s wide curiosity, and his unwillingness to drop any small detail from the picture, leave the conclusions to this long and uneven book open-ended. The closing summary suggestively comments on the current hopelessness of critique in capitalism that has so preoccupied contemporary critical theory; in response, he includes epigrams and postscripts from iconic journalist-activist Rebecca Solnit. The parallel with the present may appear underdeveloped without looking up Jesty’s extensive engagement and output on recent socially engaged art in Japan for more substantiation. Yet this is a book with an important message. Art historians and art theorists perhaps too quickly accept the declaration, by artists and curators, that great art by definition destabilizes politics and society. Jesty instead offers compelling material to support an alternative sociological view, suggesting that social and political change in fact destabilizes what art is and can be, and that greatness may lie in the ordinary and the everyday practices of “making politics artful.”
Adrian Favell
University of Leeds, Leeds