William Marotti – författare

Anarchic street performances in late-1950s Japan; inauguration of the first Happenings in Antwerp and charging of the "magic circle" in Amsterdam; Bauhaus Situationiste and anti-national art exchanges, networks and communes. As "Happener" and "Art Missionary," Yoshio Nakajima’s storied career traverses an astounding range of locations, scenes, movements, media, and performance modes in the global 1960s and 1970s in ways that challenge our notions of the possibilities of art. Nakajima repeatedly plays a role in jump-starting spaces of possibility, from Tokyo to Ubbeboda, from Spui Square and the Dutch Provos to Antwerp and Sweden. Despite this, Nakajima’s work has paradoxically been largely excluded from accounts where it might have justifiably featured. The present volume represents an international collaboration of researchers working to remedy this oversight. Nakajima’s work demands a reconceptualization of narratives of this art and politics and their specific interrelation to consider his exemplary nonconformity—and its exemplary exclusion. This history demonstrates the inadequacy of notions of specificity that would oppose an authentic local or national frame to an inauthentic transnational one. Conversely, Nakajima manifests a key dimension of the 1960s as a global event in the interrelation between eventfulness itself and the redrawing of categories of practice and understanding.

Anarchic street performances in late-1950s Japan; inauguration of the first Happenings in Antwerp and charging of the "magic circle" in Amsterdam; Bauhaus Situationiste and anti-national art exchanges, networks and communes. As "Happener" and "Art Missionary," Yoshio Nakajima’s storied career traverses an astounding range of locations, scenes, movements, media, and performance modes in the global 1960s and 1970s in ways that challenge our notions of the possibilities of art. Nakajima repeatedly plays a role in jump-starting spaces of possibility, from Tokyo to Ubbeboda, from Spui Square and the Dutch Provos to Antwerp and Sweden. Despite this, Nakajima’s work has paradoxically been largely excluded from accounts where it might have justifiably featured. The present volume represents an international collaboration of researchers working to remedy this oversight. Nakajima’s work demands a reconceptualization of narratives of this art and politics and their specific interrelation to consider his exemplary nonconformity—and its exemplary exclusion. This history demonstrates the inadequacy of notions of specificity that would oppose an authentic local or national frame to an inauthentic transnational one. Conversely, Nakajima manifests a key dimension of the 1960s as a global event in the interrelation between eventfulness itself and the redrawing of categories of practice and understanding.

During the 1960s a group of young artists in Japan challenged official forms of politics and daily life through interventionist art practices. William Marotti situates this phenomenon in the historical and political contexts of Japan after the Second World War and the international activism of the 1960s. The Japanese government renewed its Cold War partnership with the United States in 1960, defeating protests against a new security treaty through parliamentary action and the use of riot police. Afterward, the government promoted a depoliticized everyday world of high growth and consumption, creating a sanitized national image to present in the Tokyo Olympics of 1964. Artists were first to challenge this new political mythology. Marotti examines their political art, and the state's aggressive response to it. He reveals the challenge mounted in projects such as Akasegawa Genpei's 1,000-yen prints, a group performance on the busy Yamanote train line, and a plan for a giant guillotine in the Imperial Plaza. Focusing on the annual Yomiuri IndÉpendant exhibition, he demonstrates how artists came together in a playful but powerful critical art, triggering judicial and police response. Money, Trains, and Guillotines expands our understanding of the role of art in the international 1960s, and of the dynamics of art and policing in Japan.