Japan’s big cities, too, were in full upheaval at the decade’s end. In 1968 and 1969, students barricaded the lecture halls at the elite Tokyo University, and at Tama Art University, the students locked themselves in their classrooms and studios and demanded mass leadership resignations. Some young artists found their places in the daily demonstrations and the anti-war and anti-nuclear movements. For others, the best way forward was to get out.
“Radicalism in the Wilderness,” a precise and sturdy exhibition on view at Japan Society, looks deeply into three bold positions rooted far from the lights of late 1960s Tokyo, and explores how putting one’s distance from the capital and its art institutions could be its own productive ferment. Artist Yutaka Matsuzawa, in the forests of Nagano Prefecture, aimed to create a conceptual art that broke from rationalist thought. The collective GUN, formed in Niigata Prefecture, then an agrarian region, produced breathtaking environmental projects, as well as artsy political action and small works sent through the postal service. And the Play, an Osaka group, took its happenings out of the city and into the mountains and rivers of Kansai, where they sought a new kind of collective art-making.
“Radicalism in the Wilderness” has been curated by Reiko Tomii, an independent art historian who also published an award-winning book of the same title in 2017. She has organized the exhibition into three condensed presentations, each standing on its own, but together mapping a vanguard defined by its distance from Tokyo. And a few projects by Western artists working in similar conceptual or land-oriented strains provides the ballast for Tomii’s principal argument: that the full global story of art in the 1960s features both active collaborations and accidental resonances between the East and the West, and between the big city and the countryside.
Of this show’s three figures, Yutaka Matsuzawa (1922—2006) had the most direct links to the structures of the art world, both in Tokyo and in the West. In the 1950s, he came to the United States on a Fulbright fellowship, made abstractions by pouring corrosive chemicals onto iron sheets, and grew fixated on a WOR radio show on paranormal activity. Back in Japan, he made collages and drawings that, so he said, captured clairvoyant visions beyond the realm of the senses. Then, on June 1, 1964, he experienced some kind of otherworldly instruction to “vanish matter” — and in his village Shimo Suwa, he started to create an art out of language alone.
Matsuzawa wrote recondite texts on extrasensory perception, arguing for an art “seen” wholly with the mind's eye, and laid them out in Buddhist-inspired gridsthat he printed on posters and sent through the mail. (Tomii has translated the texts here.) He began proposing “empty” exhibitions, in one case taking out an ad in an art magazine and instructing readers to send imaginary artworks into the wilderness telepathically. A poster here, titled “Ju (Blessings): Talisman of Vanishing” (1966), sets forth his vision of progress as total nothingness: “Governments will vanish. Sex will vanish. Factories will vanish. Production will vanish. Capital will vanish ...”
To some back in Tokyo, it sounded like a cult. Yet Matsuzawa was inventing a Japanese conceptualism with Buddhist characteristics, and when he later found Western counterparts to his own immaterial practice, he happily joined in. At Matsuzawa’s invitation, American artists working with nonvisual, instruction-based techniques, like Lawrence Weiner and Robert Barry, contributed to a 1970 show in Kyoto he called “Nirvana.” Eventually even the British-Italian art duo Gilbert and George came to hang out in Shimo Suwa; Matsuzawa filmed them clambering up to his treehouse studio, looking rather out of place in their tweed suits against the Japanese foliage.
The young artists of the collective GUN (or Group Ultra Niigata), led by Tadashi Maeyama and Michio Horikawa, worked even farther from the metropolis than Matsuzawa, in a city on the far side of Honshu’s central mountain range. In 1970, after some unsuccessful efforts to win attention in Tokyo, they decided to work with the landscape before them — which has the heaviest snowfall in the country — by staging the first of their “Events to Change the Image of Snow.” Filling up pesticide sprayers with red, blue and yellow pigments, the members of GUN blasted snow-covered expanses with spectacular colored clouds and tramlines, transforming the fields of this “provincial” region into thrilling, joyous abstractions. GUN would eventually grow more explicitly political, creating postal art and photo collages that questioned Japan’s self-defense force and imperial family.
Compared to Matsuzawa and GUN, the collective known as the Play (founded in 1967 and still active) will be the best known to Western viewers of this exhibition; they appeared in the 2017 Venice Biennale among a constellation of international collectives devoted to humor, improvisation and volunteer participation. While students in Tokyo protested their nation’s alliance with Washington, the Play took a lighter view of Japanese-American connections in their early “Voyage: Happening in an Egg” (1968) — an absurd but earnest effort to release a giant fiberglass egg on the waves of the Pacific Ocean and to steer it to the American west coast. The artists enlisted the aid of oceanographers and local fishermen, but the egg went missing before long.
The adventure was meant to be a free activity outside of contemporary political and social boundaries, which the Play would double down on in “Current of Contemporary Art,” a summer escapade first undertaken in 1969, for which the artists built an arrow-shaped raft and rowed nonchalantly across the Kansai region. In 1972, they built a floating house of Styrofoam and plywood, where they lived together for a week as they drifted downriver from Kyoto to Osaka. For “Thunder,” an annual project, the group invited participants to build a wooden pyramid and wait for lightning to strike. Year after year, the lightning rarely came — but unlike with Walter De Maria’s nearly contemporaneous “Lightning Field,” the real point of “Thunder” was the collective work and collective waiting.
Up on a mountain, deep in the snow, out in the forest: for Tomii, it was distance from Tokyo and other cultural capitals that permitted the radical innovation of these artists and collectives. Were they really so isolated, and what about today? Even in the 1960s, these radical artists were documenting their performances with photographs and 16-millimeter films, and publishing their actions in magazines and through the mail. Today, when even the most remote regions get high-speed internet and free same-day delivery, we probably have even less reason to hold onto the old distinction between the capital and the sticks.
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Event Information:
“Radicalism in the Wilderness: Japanese Artists in the Global 1960s” runs through June 9 at Japan Society, 333 E. 47th St., Manhattan; 212-715-1258, japansociety.org.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.