Overview

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 Independant 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.

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Reviews

The annual Yomiuri Independant exhibition, the Hi Red Center group, and the 1000 Note Trial are surely among the most significant avant-garde initiatives anywhere in the world in the 1960s. This stunning study assesses the oppositional politics of these and other Japanese avant-garde undertakings by probing deep into the history of that which they opposed: the arrogation of power by the postwar Japanese State over everyday life. In Marotti's hard-hitting theoretical analysis and accessible prose, the seemingly nonsensical antics of avant-gardists become occasions for grasping fundamental truths about the political make-up of postwar Japanese society. --Bert Winther-Tamaki, author of Maximum Embodiment: Yoga, the Western Painting of Japan, 1910-1955

Money, Trains, and Guillotines is the first extended study of art and activism in 1960s Japan, and as such it constitutes a major contribution, not only to the history of Japanese art and politics but also to our knowledge of 1960s activism. --Thomas LaMarre, author of The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation .

Author Information

William Marotti is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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