Asia-Pacific. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2013. xxi, 417 pp., [16] pp. of plates. (Illus.) US$25.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-4980-8.
Postwar Japanese art has recently attracted much attention amongst academics and curators in North America and Japan. An anthology of critical essays, manifestos and other writings in this field was published by the Museum of Modern Art in 2012, while prominent artists’ groups like the Gutai Art Association (1954–72) and Mono-ha (active in the late 1960s and the early 1970s) had retrospectives at major American museums and galleries, accompanied by scholarly monographs. William A. Marotti’s Money, Trains, and Guillotines is a long-awaited book that deals with artist Akasegawa Genpei and the group Hi-Red Center in the social and political context of 1960s Japan, providing for the first time to an English-language audience access to one of the most important figures in postwar Japanese art.
Marotti’s book is divided into three parts. Part 1 discusses the historical background of the “Model 1,000 Yen Note Trial.” In 1965, Akasegawa was prosecuted for the crime of “currency imitation” after making partial prints of the 1,000-yen banknote as an art project. Marotti argues that the freedom of speech, guaranteed by the postwar Constitution, is limited under the idea of public welfare, arguing how paternalistic state authority, enshrined under the Meiji Constitution of 1889, is retained in the revised postwar Constitution. The author also makes a careful reading of “Spy Rules” (later renamed “The Ambiguous Ocean”), a short story that Akasegawa likely wrote during the preparation of his banknote prints. Marotti argues that the story reflects Akasegawa’s views on contemporary politics, especially the demonstrations against Anpo (the Security Treaty with the US), and the hopes he held for a revolutionary transformation of everyday life and society, as articulated in his subsequent artworks.
The subject of part 2 is the Yomiuri Indépendant, the yearly non-jury, non-prize exhibition sponsored by the newspaper company Yomiuri Shimbun between 1949 and 1963. Marotti shows how the company’s sponsorship and support of a range of exhibitions including the Yomiuri Indépendant led to erase memories of its wartime propaganda activities and postwar labour conflicts and replace them with positive images of high culture and a democratized system of participation and viewing. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the annual exhibition became a major venue for young avant-garde artists, engendering playful competition in a variety of media, including objets, installation and performance. The author discusses how, through their diverse artworks, these young artists focused on the everyday world and developed critical philosophies of political action through art.
“How do you restart political activism in a time of apparent uneventfulness?” (204). Starting with this question, part 3 discusses how young artists reorganized their artistic practices during the temporary abeyance of mass activism in the early 1960s. The author first details a 1962 event in Tokyo in which young artists, two of whom would later form Hi-Red Center with Akasegawa, resorted to “direct action” with their performances on Tokyo’s trains after a friend, Imaizumi Yoshihiko, failed in realizing his plan for erecting a giant guillotine in the Imperial Plaza. “Theses on ‘Capitalist Realism,’” an article written by Akasegawa after his first police interrogations, is analyzed to show how the artist articulated a critique of the pseudo-reality of money, identifying it as “an agent of hidden forms of domination” (206) supported by state authority. The author also studies another essay by Akasegawa, “The Intent of the Act Based on the Intent of the Act—Before Passing through the Courtroom,” reading it as a response to his indictment, to discuss how it critically anticipates the trial’s reduction of his work to either conventional art or crime, affirming the potential of a radical artistic practice to generate moments that allow “glimpses of emancipatory possibilities in everyday life” (206).
Within Japanese scholarship, the art activism of Akasegawa and his colleagues has been largely discussed in relationship to the anti-art movement. Money, Trains, and Guillotines, the product of many years of painstaking research, successfully locates Akasegawa’s practices in a broader historical (not only art-historical), political, and social context by explicating his art in relation to key historical moments such as the making of the new Constitution (especially in relation to the emperor), the formation of the Yomiuri Shimbun, the transformation of mass protests and demonstrations. The author’s use of Jacques Rancière’s term “police,” the distribution of the perceptible, functions effectively in the discussion of the political dimensions of Akasegawa’s art, making an important contribution to the theorization of the 1960s art in Japan and elsewhere.
This book’s other major contribution is Marotti’s detailed analyses of the enigmatic essays and stories Akasegawa wrote in his early period. These writings contrast sharply with the straightforward prose of his later writings, known for their light and witty style. The author read these writings as direct responses to specific events in the artist’s career: “Spy Rules” (June 1963) to his printing of the banknotes in January 1963 and its use as an invitation to his one-man exhibition in February; “Theses on ‘Capitalist Realism’” (February 1964) to the police interrogation and the newspaper article in January; and “The Intent of the Act Based on the Intent of the Act” (January 1966) to his indictment in November 1965. Some might question how far one can appraise Akasegawa’s texts, given their ambiguous and allegorical quality, as effective responses to contemporary urgencies. But Marotti’s subtle readings of these texts, underappreciated in Japanese scholarship, make a strong case for their importance within art history. Money, Trains, and Guillotines not only fills in a major gap within English-language understanding of postwar Japanese art. Once translated into Japanese—which it should be, promptly—it should sharpen the discourse within Akasegawa’s home country.
Kenji Kajiya
Kyoto City University of Arts, Kyoto, Japan