Radicals and Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts: The Avant-garde Rejection of Modernism (review)

Thomas Havens needs no introduction to this readership. A historian of modern Japan with an influential array of monographs to his name, ranging from Meiji-period philosophy to the home front during World War II, he has also been a pioneer in the scholarly treatment of Japanese art of the postwar period. His Artist and Patron in Postwar Japan: Dance, Music, Theater, and the Visual Arts, 1955–1980 (Princeton University Press, 1982) is an analysis, unprecedented in any language, of the public role of the arts as viewed through the lenses of audience and patronage. In Radicals and Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts: The Avant-garde Rejection of Modernism, Havens returns to familiar ground, the years between 1945 and 1970, but confines his attention to what he calls the nonverbal arts—painting, sculpture, music, and dance—and to one small, elusive segment of practice in these domains: the avant-garde. Radicals and Realists is the first attempt to survey this tricky terrain since Alexandra Munroe's seminal 1994 project Japanese Art after 1945: Scream against the Sky, an exhibition accompanied by a pair of catalogues (one in Japanese and the other in English). But while the scope of Japanese Art after 1945, enormous in its own right, is largely limited to the visual arts, that of Radicals and Realists, with its inclusion of music and dance, is mind-boggling. Squeezed into a mere 296 pages (which include notes, bibliography, and index), the book is at once both narrow in focus (on the avant-garde) and expansive in breadth (reaching across the arts). The overall effect is of a breathless skimming of surfaces rather than of a deliberate plumbing of depths.

Like Japanese Art after 1945 and most other Western-language publications on postwar Japanese art, including the catalogues Reconstructions: Avant-garde Art in Japan 1945–1965 (1985), Japon des Avant-gardes (1986), and Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art (published just after Havens's book in 2007), Radicals and Realists privileges the avant-garde wing of the artistic field.¹ Following an introductory section that touches on the arts during the Allied Occupation, the book is divided into two parts, the first devoted to "the vast palette of experiments" in the 1950s and the second to "the search for alternative modernities" in the 1960s (pp. 7, 133). In the four chapters comprising part 1, the reader meets charismatic figures such as Takiguchi Shūzō, Okamoto Tarō, Yoshihara Jirō, Kikuhata Mokuma, and the Teshigawaras, father and son (Sōfu and Hiroshi), who serve as fulcrums in Havens's discussion of "innovative" sites of artistic activity that faced "the special challenge of overcoming institutionalized arts culture" (p. 49). We are shown how in each of their worlds—Takiguchi's Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop), Okamoto's Gendai Geijutsu no Kai (Contemporary Arts Society), Yoshihara's Gutai group, Kikuhata's Kyūshūha, and the Teshigawaras' Sōgetsu Kaikan (Sōgetsu Art Center)—artists variously confronted "the attractions and disappointments of high modernism" (p. 52). Havens's narrative highlights two critical trends that he associates with the avant-garde. One, the "cross-pollination among genres," is exemplified by the Jikken Kōbō but is also evident in the activities of the Gendai Geijutsu no Kai and Sōgetsu Kaikan, all based in Tokyo. The other is the interest in "new relations between art and daily life" seen in groups such as Gutai and Kyūshūha that were active outside the capital (pp. 52, 86). The section on the 1960s continues these threads but in the context of the rise of "anti-art," defined as "a multifront assault on formalism" by "antimodernists" and their "nonformalist embrace of the everyday" (p. 8). In a series of six chapters, Havens endeavors to demonstrate how the "artistic vanguard" of the 1960s shifted "radical artistic discourse … to a post-Western phase...