Pre-recorded Presentations: December 2-12, 2021 (link to videos)
Live Discussion: December 10th (EST) / December 11th (JST/CET)
Online Live Discussion Event - Register
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/interrogating-ecology-media-and-art-in-1970s-japan-tickets-214434257637
EST - 12/10, 7:00pm–9:00pm
JST - 12/11. 9:00am-11:00am
CET - 12/11, 1:00am-3:00am
Please join us in the Winter Panel event for Interrogating Ecology project, with core group scholars Haeyun Park, Seoul National University; Tomotaro Kaneko, Aichi University of the Arts; Nina Horisaki-Christens, Columbia University; Franz Prichard, Princeton University; Julian Ross, Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS); and contextual scholars Yuriko Furuhata, McGill University; Takeshi Kadobayashi, Kansai University; and Takuya Tsunoda, Columbia University.
The presentations by the panelists will be available online from December 2-12, and a collective panel discussion and Q&A will be held on December 10. Please register at the above link to join the panel discussion event.
Following the first panel event in May this year, this second panel expands the discussion in the Interrogating Ecology research project led by scholar Nina Horisaki-Christens. The year-long project concludes in December with this panel event, accompanying workshop event, online screening program of works by Norio Imai, a video interview publication between Haeyun Park and Norio Imai, as well as new digitizations and preservation projects including works by Fujiko Nakaya, Norio Imai, and Takehisa Kosugi.
Image: Norio Imai, Pieces of Images - 64 Pieces, 1973-2014. Courtesy of Artcourt Gallery. © Norio Imai.
Interrogating Ecology is made possible in part with a grant from the Asian Cultural Council to advance international understanding through cultural exchange in the arts. The Asian Cultural Council advances international dialogue, understanding, and respect through cultural exchange activities that support individual artists, scholars, and arts professionals in Asia and the United States.
Interrogating Ecology: Media and Art in 1970s Japan
In Japan, 1970 marked a shift from rapid economic growth, industrialization, and urbanization to a critical reckoning with the new order created by the information economy, the managed society, and environmental pollution. Instigated by the 1960s discourses of cybernetics and futurology, compounded by the publication of Silent Spring and the litigation of pollution in Minamata Bay, and still further modulated by the burgeoning discourse of the information society (jōhō shakai), systems-thinking had reached an inflection point by the start of Expo '70. This conference posits the concept of "ecology" as a key framework through which to re-examine the role, structure, and aspirations that shaped the 1970s Japanese art and media landscapes.
There was a marked increase, starting in 1970, in the appearance of the term ekorojī in Japanese publications on such diverse topics as arts, architecture, electronics, and economics. However, beyond the proliferation of the term, our consideration of ecology gestures to a more widespread systems-based conceptualization of contemporary society that came into its own with the turn of the decade. Within media discourse, the flurry around Hans Magnus Enzensberger's 1974 appearance in Tokyo signaled the popularity of a perspective that envisioned media as a complex interaction between different modalities, materialities, and institutional structures—namely a media ecological perspective. At the same time, early 1970s articles in Bijutsu techō (Art Notebook) and Shin nihon bungaku (New Japanese Literature) address the "ecology" of art and the relationship of literature to the "information environment." Still, as early as December 1970, science fiction writer and futurologist Komatsu Sakyō posits a turn toward a concern with "environmental balance" in an article entitled "Banpaku kara kōgai e" (From Expo to Pollution). With the spate of anti-pollution bills passed by the Diet that month, the rise of Japan's environmental movement through Jishu Kōza's appearance on the international scene in 1972, and a series of supply chain crises purportedly linked to the oil crisis in 1973, the interrelatedness of environmental, economic, and social concerns became inescapable. Thus, although environmental concerns were an integral element in the rise of this systems-based perspective, during the greater 1970s, the boundaries of ecological thinking did not start nor end only with a concern for man's effect on the natural environment.
In bringing together scholars of art, film, television, media, photography, and literature, this academic conference takes a first step toward analyzing the diversity and limits of ecological thinking in 1970s Japan. A panel of contextual presentations will address Japan's media and material conditions in the late 1960s and early '70s, while a panel of case studies will analyze works of art and expanded media in the greater 1970s. These presentations will be available online from December 2-12, and a collective panel discussion and Q&A on December 10 will directly address the intersections between our respective studies. The conference thus cuts across disciplinary boundaries in pursuit of a more comprehensive account of the cultural landscape of an underexamined decade in Japanese history while providing a critical historical example through which to approach contemporary concerns about how media forms and structures shape environmental crises, participatory politics, and social accessibility anew.
CONTEXTUAL PRESENTATIONS
Plastics on Spaceship Earth: The Ecological Dilemma of Metabolist Architecture
Yuriko Furuhata, McGill University
Architecture and ecology are intimately tied. This talk examines Metabolist architects’ use of petrochemical products, in particular plastics, as their building materials through the lens of the contemporary Marxist discourse on the “metabolic rift.” Focusing on the design and writings of Kurokawa Kishō and his engagement with ecosystem theories, it explores the ecological dilemma of Metabolist capsule architecture made of plastics. In so doing, this talk situates the architectural movement of Metabolism within the larger ecological and political economic context of Japan in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, a period marked by environmental pollutions caused in part by the industrial processing of plastics, which in turn relied on the extraction of fossil fuels and the expansion of the oil economy.
Yuriko Furuhata is Associate Professor and William Dawson Scholar of Cinema and Media History in the Department of East Asian Studies and an associate member of the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Her first book, Cinema of Actuality: Japanese Avant-Garde Filmmaking in the Season of Image Politics (Duke University Press, 2013). Her second book, entitled Climatic Media: Transpacific Experiments in Atmospheric Control (Duke University Press, 2022) explores geopolitical connections across environmental art, weather control, digital computing, and cybernetic architecture in Japan and the United States. She is currently working on two new projects: the first, titled Frozen Archives, explores snow and ice cores as storage media in relation to the legacies of Japanese and American imperialisms; and the second, titled Enchanted Consultation, examines the cultural techniques of divination and prediction in relation to histories of pseudoscience, including astrology, geomancy, and parapsychology.
TV Documentary You are… and the Media Ecology of 1960s Tokyo
Takeshi Kadobayashi, Kansai University
You are… (Anata wa… (Tokyo Broadcasting Station, 1966) is a fascinatingly experimental TV documentary program created by key figures of the independent media scene: Haruhiko Hagimoto and Yoshihiko Muraki directed the show based on a scenario by Shūji Terayama with music provided by Tōru Takemitsu.You are… is composed of 18 interview scenes in which anonymous people on the streets of Tokyo are asked a series of set questions such as, “what do you want the most now?” and, “what is happiness for you?” Most of the interview scenes are composed of single unedited shots, and its style clearly invokes the New Wave European films of the postwar era, especially in their cinema vérite approach.
This talk will examine the style of You are… and situate it in the dynamic media ecology of 1960s Tokyo. I will consider how the show engaged with the new way of life enjoyed by the younger generation, ongoing burning social movements, and the zenith of the underground (angura) cultural scene in which Shūji Terayama and his Tenjō Sajiki theater company took part. This talk will also interpret Hagimoto, Muraki, and Tsutomu Konno’s book You Are Nothing but Now (Omae wa tada no genzai ni suginai) (1969) as a kind of theoretical analysis of TV media. Co-written in the aftermath of the so-called TBS Narita struggle, the book can be understood as a quasi-manifesto, articulating the rifts that motivated the three of them to quit Tokyo Broadcasting Station and found their own TV production company, Terebi Man Union. In doing so, this talk will attempt to illuminate some moments in the changing media ecology of Japan from the 1960s to the 1970s.
Takeshi Kadobayashi is professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies, Faculty of Letters, Kansai University, and received his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, The University of Tokyo. He specializes in media theory, epistemology, and studies of culture and representation. He wrote Watcha doin, Marshall McLuhan?: An Aesthetics of Media (in Japanese; NTT Press, 2009) and has edited numerous books, including Critical Words for Media Studies (in Japanese; co-edited with Nobuhiro Matsuda, Film Art, 2021). Notable among the many articles he has written is the chapter “The Media Theory and Media Strategy of Azuma Hiroki, 1997-2003,” his contribution to the recent volume Media Theory in Japan (Marc Steinberg and Alexander Zahlten, eds. Duke UP, 2017).
Public Relations film in Postwar Japan: Toward a Technical and Environmental Understanding of Cinema
Takuya Tsunoda, Columbia University
In 1953 the National PR Film Festival (Zen Nihon PR eiga konkūru) was inaugurated. This newly established venue, which accepted submissions not from individual productions but rather from sponsoring institutions and corporations, was indicative of the unprecedented popularity of industrial documentaries at the time. The rise of the non-fiction construction spectacle made possible a new type of film: a commercially viable industrial feature aimed at theatrical release. This presentation examines several nexuses of concern about industrial film that were deeply intertwined with ongoing transformations occurring across a broad spectrum of media technologies and across the social and infrastructural developments of postwar Japan. Taking up a few sponsored industrial documentaries from the 1950s and the 1960s, this presentation attempts to foreground the way in which industrial film serves as a point of convergence between increasingly technical conditions of existence in post-occupation Japan and a material, technical, and environmental understanding of cinema. The aim of this study on postwar PR film is to juxtapose the historically specific configuration of cinema (as an aggregate of various clusters of mechanisms and environment-making in transition) with reflexive techniques and templates that enabled viewers to interface with cinema as a technical image medium.
Takuya Tsunoda is Assistant Professor of Japanese film and media in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University. His research centers on the interplay between institutions and media, technologies and sociocultural practices, industrial cinema, and a history and theory of media-centered scientific research in Japan. He is currently working on a study of the history of audiovisual education and its relation to the new cinemas of the 1960s in Japan. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in such publications as Films That Work Harder: The Circulations of Industrial Film and the Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema, among others.
CASE STUDIES
Troubled Waters: Waterfall: Integrated River and Flood in the context of Nakaya Fujiko’s 1970s practice
Nina Horisaki-Christens, Columbia University
A 1981 exhibition at the Miyagi Museum of Art presented an unusual opportunity to understand the breadth of Nakaya Fujiko’s engagement with the concept of ecology through two distinct approaches to the medium of video. Although both centered on images of flowing water, Waterfall: Integrated River functioned as a video sculpture delineating a composition in real space whereas the single-channel video Flood took advantage of the observational and documentary possibilities of the video medium. Sadly little analysis of this work was undertaken at the time, and the show remains unexamined in more recent scholarship. This talk will examine the conceptual precedents for these two works in Nakaya's 1970s practice, placing Nakaya's work within the terrain of her 1970s transnational community, which included such figures as David Tudor, Kosugi Takehisa, Bill Viola, Yamaguchi Katsuhito, and Shigeko Kubota. In doing so, it will highlight some of the historically specific implications of Nakaya’s video treatment of water that have remained unexamined, moving beyond any simple equation of such imagery with a traditional Japanese artistic concern with nature transposed into a video medium. Through a reexamination of Waterfall: Integrated River and Flood, this talk seeks to articulate the ways Nakaya’s work as a video proponent, fog sculptor, and media artist fed into each other, shifting away from her engagement with her father's scientific philosophies and research to instead treat the development of her media practice and its engagement with ecology within its own time.
Nina Horisaki-Christens is currently a Mary Griggs Burke Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Art History and Archaeology and the Institute for Comparative Literature in Society at Columbia University with a dissertation on the 1970s Tokyo-based collective Video Hiroba. Horisaki-Christens was a 2017 Fulbright Graduate Research Fellow, and a visiting scholar at Sophia University's Institute for Comparative Culture from 2017-19. She assisted with the Japan Society's 2019 exhibition "Made in Tokyo: Architecture & Living, 1964/2020," served as Research Assistant for "Gutai: Splendid Playground" at the Guggenheim Museum, was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow in the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program, and worked as Assistant Curator and Interim Programs Manager at Art in General. Additionally, she has contributed texts and translations to publications produced by MoMA, Art Tower Mito, ArtAsiaPacific, the Mori Art Museum, Keio University Art Center, Bunka-cho Art Platform Japan, Smarthistory, Hyperallergic, among others.
Home exhibition as an institutional critique: Ueda Kayoko and Watanabe Erize’s Tautology series
Tomotaro Kaneko, Aichi University of the Arts
After the student movement at the end of the 1960s, the relevance of institutions including the art institution was thrown into question. But how exactly did the institutional-critical practices of young Japanese artists develop under these conditions? This presentation will take Ueda Kayoko and Watanabe (Hori) Erize's 1973 Tautology series as an example. After studying at Tama Art University, which had been temporarily closed due to the student movement, and at Takamatsu Juro's Juku (School), they began working on this series approximately once a month while co-managing a painting school. Three of the eight Tautology exhibitions were held in their home; the exhibition space was a place where Ueda and Watanabe lived together, doubling as a shared studio and classroom for their painting classes. Their works, which made use of the environment of their home, demonstrated a critical perspective toward the institutions that structured their artistic practices and everyday lives. Although a number of artists born in the postwar period used their homes as a site of both work and presentation in the early 1970s, Ueda and Watanabe's example stands out because of how they treated the home, itself, as an institution.
Dr. Tomotaro Kaneko is Associate Professor at Aichi University of the Arts. His field is Aesthetics and aural culture, and he has organized the Japanese Art Sound Archive since 2017. His recent publications include ““Kosai Hori’s performances in the 1970s: Art after the student movement in the late 1960s in Japan” (in Kallista, vol.26, 2019), “Odd epistemology: Mitsunori Kurashige’s seven performances in 1974” (in Kurashige Mitsunori and Amano Junji: Where Minimalism Leads, Exhibition catalogue, Yokosuka Museum of Art, 2020), “Namaroku culture in 1970s Japan: The techniques and joy of sound recording” (in Aesthetics (Japanese Society for Aesthetics), no.23-24, 2021), "The persistence of daily life’s constrains: Tatsuo Kawaguchi, 172800 Seconds" (in Tatsuo Kawaguchi: From 172800 Seconds in 1971 to 345600 Seconds in 2021, Exhibition catalogue, SNOW Contemporary, 2021).
Rerouting Eizō: Imai Norio’s Intermedial Engagement with Moving Image
Haeyun Park, Seoul National University
This paper sheds light on Imai Norio’s works in photography, television, and video in the 1970s, in which the artist sought to redefine the nature of the moving image by moving away from the utopian celebration of technology and the excessive sensory immersion of multi-screen projections at the Osaka Expo ’70. Although he participated in the latter, Imai criticized the “information overload” caused by the inundation of multi-screen projections in the pavilions, which he argued only facilitated one-way communication, turning viewers into passive spectators. To counter the spectacular use of eizō as simulacra, Imai began to critically analyze the circulation of images in mass media and popular culture to reroute them from serving the logic of consumerist culture toward a field of critical reflection for the viewers. Through my analysis of Imai’s works in the 1970s, in which the artist appropriates images from television and fashion magazines and remediates them through polaroid photographs, I will show how these works demonstrate an intermedial engagement with eizō, to slow down the relentless speed in which these images circulated within the structure of capitalist consumption.
Haeyun Park is an art historian and art critic, who currently teaches in the College of Fine Arts at Seoul National University. She received her PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center, CUNY (City University of New York) with a dissertation on the trans-Pacific development of postwar video art in Japan, Korea, and the U.S. Her recent publications include “From ‘Production’ to ‘Practice’: Bikyōtō REVOLUTION Committee’s Moving Image Works in the 1970s” (Korean Journal of Art History and Visual Culture No. 27, 2021), “Water, Stone, Body: The Feedback between Matter, Man, and Moving Image in Park Hyunki’s Work” (Gallery Hyundai, 2021), and “Reality is Like Amateur Baseball: VIC’s Activities from Information to Communication” (Keio University Art Center, 2018), among others. She has also worked in the exhibition departments at MoMA, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and the International Center of Photography.
Anticolonial and Ecological Praxis in the Work of Nakahira Takuma
Franz Prichard, Princeton University
This paper explores the anticolonial and ecological dimensions of Nakahira Takuma’s critical writings and photography in the wake of the macro-political upheavals of the global 1960s. The paper is derived from ongoing research into the ways specific affective and discursive articulations of embodied sensation (visuality, aurality, touch, and taste) informed writers, critics, and artists’ efforts to reforge relational expressions of place at the center of their varied anticolonial and ecological modalities of praxis since the 1970s. Here, I survey Nakahira’s engagements with anticolonial thought as an important but overlooked dimension of the shifting modalities of his photographic praxis. As part of an expanded understanding of ecological relations (beyond dominant human-centric understandings of “environments”), Nakahira’s work offers a generative example of the entanglements of the anticolonial and ecological horizons of critical praxis that emerged in the wake of global upheavals of the 1960s. Moreover, I outline the ways that Nakahira’s work provides crucial perspectives on the workings of settler colonialism and racial capitalism afforded by photographic media. Through this approach, I examine how his work invites us to take seriously the transformative potentials of what Ariella Azoulay has described as the necessity of “unlearning imperialism,” the dominant framework that informs the contemporary conditions of our collective scholarly work of thinking, studying, and teaching with/in the Asian humanities.
Franz Prichard teaches in the Department of East Asian Studies at Princeton University. His work explores the literature, visual media, and critical thought of contemporary Japan. His first book Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan (2019) examines the rapid transformation of the urban and media ecologies of Japanese literary and visual media of the 1960s and 70s.
Air art and Japanese Expanded Cinema
Julian Ross, Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society
After performing his first off-screen projection in 1963, Japanese filmmaker Iimura Takahiko wrote '...in the future we may even see projections onto spherical screens.' (1963, p.10) Not only was his vision realised a few years later in his own performance Floating (1970), but projections onto balloons also became a familiar sight in 1960s Japanese expanded cinema. In the run-up to the Osaka Expo of 1970, industries began to collaborate with artists, architects and technicians to establish new forms of inflatable art in a moment that filmmakers sought other surfaces for their film projection in expanded cinema. Breaking out of the cinema space, projections onto balloons took place in gymnasiums, underground discotheques, fashion shows and public parks. Merging performance, sculpture and cinema, projections onto balloons revealed the porosity between film and other media in their exploration of the interface between air and light.
This presentation will explore how the collision of air art and expanded cinema give an insight into Japan's understanding of intermedia. Through the introduction of works by two Japanese pneumatic artists, Ōnishi Seiji and Isobe Yukihisa, and their collaborations with Japanese and American filmmakers respectively, the presentation will investigate how intermedia was understood in Japan to establish interconnections between media while rendering them immiscible.
Julian Ross is a researcher, curator and writer based in Amsterdam. He is Programmer at International Film Festival Rotterdam and an Assistant Professor at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). He is an editorial board member of Collaborative Cataloging Japan, co-editor of the CCJ book Japanese Expanded Cinema and Intermedia: Critical Texts of the 1960s (Archive Books, 2020) and co-curator of the CCJ exhibition More Than Cinema: Motoharu Jonouchi and Keiichi Tanaami at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn (2020). In 2021, he was guest programmer at Singapore International Film Festival, film curator at Other Futures, and co-curator of the film programme at Tallinn Photomonth Biennale.