Obliteration through Obsession
In the wake of World War Two and Japan’s defeat at the hands of the allied forces, Japanese art took a significantly darker turn post-1945. The postwar landscape in the late 1940s and 1950s had an undertone of destruction and desolation as the country worked to rebuild what it lost in the war and recover from the traumatic loss of life that occurred. Starting in 1951 with the signing of Nichi-Bei anzen hosho joyaku (The US-Japan Security Treaty), otherwise know as Anpo, and the subsequent development of the ‘Anpo crisis’, or the conflict of identity for Japanese regarding the complex relationship between Japan and its foreign occupiers, Japan’s artists were swimming in a cauldron of postwar fervor. The crisis was forcibly concluded in 1960, with the resigning of Anpo, dashing any hope by the youth of regaining Japan’s symbolic independence from the West and re-establishing a sense of Japanese identity (this occurred in a different form in 1970 with yet another resigning of Anpo and the American war in Vietnam). The San Francisco Peace Treaty in September of 1951, took effect in April of 1952, and formally ended the American occupation of Japan (Tokyo, pg 29). The 9-year series of political events gave rise to a strong ‘Anpo-spirit’, which was characterized as anti-establishment and anti-authority. This spirit and the youth it enveloped reflected the feelings of frustration and impotence by the generation who grew up with the backdrop of war during their formative years and foreign occupation as they aged into adulthood. The art critic Tono Yoshiaki described the contemporary Japanese artist’s mental state developing as such;
The rubble, the smell of death and the social confusion of the post-war era had constituted their everyday environment. The ruins were their playground and this state of absolute void became necessarily the foundation for their art. (Tono 1986)
These events and sentiments acted as kindling to the growing contemporary Avant Garde and post-Western art movements that were developing in Japan’s cultural centers and that would later move out into the rest of the world and fundamentally change the landscape of Contemporary art. Movements and art groups such as The High Red Center, Tokyo Fluxus, Gutai, The Yomimuri Independent artists, Anti-Art and Non-Art practitioners, and the like composed the postwar Japanese art environment. The growth of these movements was increased as a result of the aggressive and large-scale reconstruction of city centers like Tokyo by the Japanese government and the ‘High Growth Era’ of the Japanese economy (lasting from 1950 until the end of the 1970s). A large number of cultural institutions, museums, and non-juried public art exhibitions were put in place and provided the postwar art community with a ready platform and a willing audience that could support the work.
Three visual artists in particular are indicative of the darker artistic movement in Japanese art and have come to represent the identity of the contemporary art movement known as ‘Obsessionalist Art’. The artists Kusama Yayoi, Miki Tomio, and Kudo Tetsumi were infinitely preoccupied with thoughts of the void and their artistic process and their subject matter reflected their personal obsession with their own neuroses as well as postwar era social issues.
Obsessional artists, despite having roots and ties to the larger Avant-Garde art movement through various artist collaborations and artists’ participation in earlier Yomiuri Andepandan-ten, (Yomiuri Independent artists shows), consider themselves largely ‘Independent of established genres and heirs to the legacy of Dada, Surrealism, and Existential thought in the Japanese Avant Garde…’ (Munroe, pg 189). Rather, their particular aesthetic revolves around an obsession with the effects of the post-atomic age on Japanese society through its focus on post-western and post-modern themes, portrayed through blatant uses of phallic symbols, irrational repetition, violence and self negativity as a way to address social and political issues of the time. Even though the movement and its artists considered themselves largely autonomous to other art movements, it nonetheless had far reaching and apparent effects on not only the art of their contemporaries but the progress of Japanese art and media throughout the postwar era.
The movement constantly walked a balance between sovereignty from other contemporary art ideals and methods and being an entity that strongly influenced, and was influenced by, art contemporary to the movement, as well as art post-1979. For example, Obsessionalist art has direct ties to Ankuko-Butoh, The Dance of Utter Darkness, which ultimately connected it to many artists, writers and intellectuals that partnered with its creator, Hijikata Tetsumi, as well as Butoh dance troupes. Additionally, Kusama Yayoi’s and Kudo Tetsumi’s moves to New York and Paris respectively put them in direct contact and collaboration with many of the world’s foremost artists of the time, some of whom admit to being greatly influenced by the artists. Kusama recalls,
“Those male artists [in New York] were simply imitating my illness… When I went to an opening of [Oldenbeug’s] solo show… his wife led me to his piece ‘Calendar’ and said to the effect, ‘Yayoi, I am so sorry we took your idea.’ I was surprised to see the work almost identical to mine.” (Bomb, 1966, pg 69).
However, the basis of the artistic movement is fundamentally a desire to repulse one’s audience or cause a sense of loss resulting in an audience’s personal desire to disassociate from the work’s ideas. The artists did not consider themselves as fundamentally part of any larger art movement because the core purpose of their work was to remove and obliterate themselves from that which so obsessed them.
The namesake of the movement was coined by Kusama Yayoi who used the term ‘Obsessional art’ as a way to define her work as ‘the unique, visionary expression of personal neurosis’ (Munroe pg 189). The artist Miki Tomio echoes this sentiment, describing his art as being, ‘between a human obsession and inhuman desire.’ (Munroe, pg 189). The question now becomes, why obsession? What is the point of fixating on the dark and disturbing for these artists?
Japanese Obsessionalist artists used their art as a means of escape or disassociation from the horrors of the Japanese wartime landscape and the devastation of the nuclear bomb. The themes of the movement served as a means and an end — obsession as a subject and process — for the artists, as a result of the particular and unique circumstances that Japan faced in the postwar era. The manifestation of these artists’ means of coping was done through fixation and obsession; they survived by concentrating on what they were most afraid of. Obsessionalist artists worked to obliterate their themes through intense and highly focused repetition, both thematically and technically, as a way to remove any sense of importance or significance from them.
This created an interesting dichotomy in the work. Obsessionalist themes were repeated until their power was removed through artistic process, yet the presentation of these themes required audiences to come face-to-face with the dark undercurrent of the postwar era, thus recreating a platform for the very issues the Obsessionalists artists were trying to disassociate from and creating a cycle of creation and evolution in each one of the artists throughout their careers.
Kusama’s dissociative tendencies were largely directed toward societal norms as they related to gender roles and traditional Japanese ideas of one’s place in society, as well as a general disassociation from ideas of reality and physical presence in her work. For Miki, disassociation came in the more Sartren form of assault of/by the physical body and a need to remove himself from postwar social memories of bodily harm, pain and death. He did this through his repetition and eventual personification of the physical form of the ear. Kudo’s work was concerned more with the disassociation from modern ideas of humanism, as well as the fallacies of Japanese imperialism and the old ideas of social place in both Japan and the west, due to their extreme constraints on artistic idealism.
Kusama Yayoi is the only artist of the three discussed who has been diagnosed with an acute obsessive-compulsive and hysterical psychological condition. She attributes this to her artistic manic obsession with themes of repetition, aggregation and accumulation.
One day I was looking at the red flower patterns of the table-cloth on a table, and when I looked up I saw the same pattern covering the ceiling, the windows, and the walls, and finally all of the room, my body, and the universe. I felt as if I had begun to self-obliterate, to revolve in the infinity of the endless time and absoluteness of space, and be reduced to nothingness. (Fortess pg 35)
It was after this experience at the age of ten that Kusama began painting and as a result, Kusama’s art became a representation of her life and the oppressions within it. Having grown up during the rise of military imperialism in Japan and later working on the fringes of the Japanese art world, Kusama’s work was her very personal form of protest against the prewar and wartime environments in which she lived.
Kusama has worked in a variety of mediums but her style stays consistent. Her work, much like her hallucinations, aims to overwhelm life and reality, as the viewer understands it until it ‘self-obliterates.’ Kusama also uses her art as a means to address her interests and, more to the point, her intense fears. Kusama’s style is overwhelmingly characterized by pattern and repetition. She has single-handedly made the form of the polka dot her own and it has become indicative of her work. For the purposes of the essay, I will look at two types of pieces done by Kusama, her infinity nets and her soft sculptures, as a means to explain how they served as a thematic vessel for escape and disassociation. However, it must first be understood why Kusama personally had the urge to disassociate in the postwar era.
As mentioned before, Kusama’s psychological state was a great catalyst for the production of the work and served as a coping mechanism for Kusama as a young girl to deal with and understand an illness that was disturbing and manifested itself outside of the realm of normal human thought. Furthermore, Kusama’s childhood and her relationship with her mother were very violent and carried the tenor of war.
“… she was extremely violent. She hated to see me painting, so she destroyed the canvases I was working one… I made [art] in huge quantity. Even before I started to paint, I was different from other children. My mother beat and kicked me on the derriere everyday, irritated that I was always painting. She forced me to help employees (Kusama’s family owned a successful family business), even when I had to study for my terms exam. I was so exhausted that I felt very insecure at times.” (Turner, pg 65)
This familial experience, coupled with the dark Japanese postwar backdrop, created the foundation for Kusama’s artistic obsessions. This foundation was built upon as Kusama grew up in a pre-feminism Japanese society that restricted opportunities for women, and further more, amplified Kusama’s overwhelming sense of oppression. These two factors in large part informed Kusama’s move to New York in 1958.
Kusama’s most recognizable artistic form is her Infinity Nets series (see Appendix A), which is the cornerstone of her work and her artistic understanding of the world. These Infinity Nets established Kusama as a lead figure in proto-Minimalism and, not surprisingly, ran contrary to many of the Pop Art tendencies of the time in New York.
When I arrived in New York, action painting was the rage: De Kooning, Pollock and others. I wanted to be completely detached from all that and start a new art movement. I painted obsessional, monochromatic paintings from morning till night. They were huge paintings that had no composition…(Turner, pg 5)
The point is not only that Kusama had strong artistic ambitions throughout her career; but that her obsession, in and of itself, dictated the path of her career and the themes she addressed.
The Infinity Nets, for Kusama, are the physical manifestation of her disassociation from reality. Polka dots and extreme patterning represented self-obliteration, and were inspired by her illness and subsequent hallucinations. Kusama understood her Infinity Nets as, “curtains which separated me from people and reality.” (Munroe pg. 195). Self-obliteration through Kusama’s Infinity Nets is at its core a very Zen idea. It makes everything and everyone the same. Kusama’s work, as it spreads out from the canvas, becomes more and more like itself and changes into an infinite plane of dots (or nets). Her nets work to return physical objects and persons to the infinite universe, which ultimately, in Kusama’s mind, is a state of death, infinity and peace.
Kusama’s Infinity Nets took a logical turn later in her work and physically began moving into sculpture form and later installations. Kusama’s soft sculptures are well known in the art world and take two main forms; sculptures that are obliterated with Infinity Nets and sculptures that are obliterated with phallic objects or objects resembling human body parts (see Appendix B). The phallic sculptures in particular are Kusama’s direct comment on patriarchal suppression and female domesticity. Historical photographs of these sculptures frequently have Kusama posing within them, covered in polka dots, ultimately moving the self-obliteration of the Infinity Nets into the realm of objects and ultimately into the realm of human existence.
The phallic soft sculptures are some of Kusama’s best forms of artistic protest and are linked directly to her personal experiences. They have come to symbolize the oppression of women in domesticity and subsequent male womanization (which Kusama experienced growing up with her father who she describes as kind but a womanizer). They also represent Kusama’s sexual fears, which she dealt with all of her life, and her overwhelmedness at the physical manifestation of sexuality in men.
The fears that are the basis for the work are in part what makes the success of the work so genius. Namely, the obliteration of the physical everyday objects by obsessively covering them with phallic objects is extremely absurd to the point of being comedic. While Kusama’s Infinity Nets had airs of Zen Buddhism and represented a desire for peace and oneness, Kusama’s phallic soft sculptures emasculate men by trivializing the physical representation of manhood. By doing this, Kusama was able to cope with and disassociate from patriarchal oppression through trivialization.
There are other works by Kusama that further emphasize the idea of self-obliteration, such as her mirrored installation work (see Appendix C), which is probably her most extreme artistic representation of self-obliteration. Ultimately, Kusama’s obsessions have evolved from a resentment and anger towards Japanese wartime and postwar society, as well as the general oppression of women in the art world during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, to a desire to create beauty and magic. While her tendencies still have an obsessive core, her themes have grown away from the movement’s darker qualities. Perhaps this is a result of the success of the movement and its artistic process and its ability to not only help Kusama create amazing work and grow artistically, but also to help her move away from the general darkness of war and postwar Japan.
Miki Tomio, like Kusama Yayoi, embraced artistic tendencies toward obsessive repetition and the use of disembodied body parts. Also like Kusama, Miki’s obsessive tendencies early on were rooted in the idea of obliterating reality through art. However, while Kusama tended towards phallic forms as well as other body parts like hands, Miki focused entirely on the form of the human ear, which he sometimes displayed in a manner that implied the organ being ripped from the body and still carrying physical ties to a human head (See Appendix D). Miki recalls,
In Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Nausea’, Monsieur Roquentin suddenly vomits against the existence of the roots of a tree. I had a similar experience in a train, when, for no reason, I suddenly felt myself surrounded by hundreds of ears trying to assault me… I can hardly say I chose the ear. More precisely, isn’t it that the ear chose me? (Tono 1968)
Miki’s use of the ear form and his self described obsessive need to repeat it, unlike Kusama, who has described feelings of accomplishment and understanding of her repetitive forms, had a darker and more unfulfilling quality for the artist. Miki did not admit to any symbolic tie between the ear and larger art themes that he dealt with but rather describes his repetition of the ear form as an uncontrollable compulsion that with each attempt was another “turn of unfulfilled consciousness [that] drives a person to self-torturing desperation.” (Miki). Miki’s repetition of the ear was also a study in perpetual failure and inadequacy. Miki never believed that his ear forms were a successful reproduction of what his mind wanted him to create. As a result, Miki used the form of the ear as a way to discuss his preoccupation with death and violence.
Miki’s use of the ear in his career is incredibly interesting and covered a wide berth despite its seemingly limiting usage. He used the ear in two major ways; through the active repetition of the form over a canvas and through larger-than-life scale sculptures. These two methods were able to speak to very different themes and ideas. Miki largely preferred to use things like aluminum and other hard, cold materials to create his ears, rather than soft pliable materials like his other Neo-Dadaist contemporaries. The harshness of the sculptures in combination with the perceived softness of a normal human ear created an object that were almost transcendent and had an incredibly surreal quality.
One of the ways Miki uses the ear form is on canvases that are covered in ears, many of the same size over a grid. While repetition by other Obsessionalist artists was used to obliterate an object or idea, Miki used the technique as a way to personify the ear as a group of people or identities. He created a conundrum for audiences in that the perceived group personification is composed of same-looking identities, rather than a variety of different forms or identities. This usage of the ear, for Miki, was a manifestation of the expectation that the ear (as a free thinking identity) had for him and his work in his mind. Many of the repeated ear series have a daunting look and seem like a kind of tribunal that the audience is undergoing.
The other way that Miki uses the ear is as a larger-than-life sculpture. He created a number of sculptures of ears that were over 12 feet tall; some had wing like skin attachments that made them look like a beast taking flight and others were a more recognizable form of the ear consisting of the outer lobe. Others extended the eardrum portion to cause the ears to resemble a vomiting beast. Unlike many pop-artists of the time that created larger-than-life sculptures as a way to parody mass production and an increasingly consumer based society, Miki could not understand the idea of creating a parody of one’s subject through absurdity. The ear, to him, was too precious and close to his heart. These pieces were a way for Miki to personify the ear as an entity with an identity. Also, like the smaller sculptures and canvas pieces that Miki did of the ear, these larger sculptures were also made largely out of aluminum, making their ‘identities’ seem more foreboding and inhospitable. It should be noted however, that Miki also sometimes worked with materials and designs that made the ear far more welcoming and he was not limited to the darker, more aggressive, forms of the ear.
The question for Miki’s work, as it relates to disassociation is; if Miki’s work imposed a dark identity and personification upon itself, then how could it have any quality of disassociation? When thinking about this question the reasoning is based on understanding what Miki was making negligible through his work, as opposed to what was actively being emphasized and portrayed, the argument being that if you impose an identity or idea on an object then, on some level, you are removing it from another source, in Miki’s case, the source of his anxieties and worry.
The post war era of Japan was incredibly preoccupied with the physical damage of war. This was not only because of the large number of injured soldiers that returned home, but also because of the vast devastation of war on the country. A huge portion of Japan had been destroyed through fire bombings and the physical trauma of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was indelibly etched on the Japanese psyche. These traumatic events had a number of social repercussions that have lasted well into the 21st century. This preoccupation with physical damage can be seen in every facet of Japanese society, art, writing, intellectual thought and the like, from the film Gorjira with the fear of radiation, to the book and later movie, Face of Another, by Kobo Abe which dealt with the physical absence of a man’s face, to social stigmas against radiation victims and their children. It is also interesting to note that the director of Face of Another, Hiroshi Teshigahara, uses Miki’s ears in the background of his film (see Appendix E). Miki was no stranger to this social preoccupation with physical pain and damage and, given his already strong preoccupation with death, was strongly influenced and obsessed with these themes.
Miki’s work was a tool for him to move his fears and obsession with death onto another form, therefore disassociating from it, or perhaps subduing thoughts of it. Unlike Kusama however, Miki’s obsession and its use in his art were not as successful in liberating him from his fear and inner darkness, but rather brought him closer to it. Miki’s life and work were always close to death and his work slowly encouraged a schizophrenic state that put him between a compulsion to repeat a familiar structure and a need to escape the art making process as a whole. Towards the end of Miki’s life he was not creating a great deal of work and he had an acute drug addiction before his early death at age forty.
Miki was an active participant in the Yomiuri Independent Art Exhibitions, along with Kudo Tetsumi and they both had strong ties to earlier Anti-Art and Non-Art Movements. It is not surprising that Obsessional artists had ties to Anti-Art and Non-art movements as the goals of the two movements have similar roots. Anti-Art and Non-art is a broad term used to loosely describe artwork that rejects any prior notion of what art ‘is,’ and typically makes fun of and trivializes former artworks and art movements as a way for the movement and its artists to liberate themselves from old art paradigms and move forward. Obsessional artists took the original idea of Anti-Art and Non-Art and stretched it further to not only liberate themselves from old art paradigms and ideas, but also to liberate themselves (as previously mentioned) from social norms and postwar anxieties.
Kudo’s artistic ties to Anti-Art and Non-art are strong and his early work with artists like Akasegawa Ganpei and groups like Tokyo Fluxus helped give the Obsessional art movement context within the quickly changing Japanese art scene. In accordance with Obsessionalist art tendencies, Kudo’s work was very preoccupied with the human body and the use of phallic imagery. Unlike Miki, which used the ear as a means of personification and Kusama who used phallic imagery to trivialize male social power, Kudo’s use of the human body was far more interested in talking about its physical decay.
The core of Kudo’s work is inherently Japanese, though his themes and work have successfully transcended the scope of only Japanese postwar art culture and history. The inspiration for Kudo’s work was Japan in the wake of Atomic bomb and, like Miki, he used images of the human body as a site of pain and disfigurement. Kudo used the body as a vessel for understanding postwar global progress, specifically as it related to the global arms races and the deterioration of old ideas and ways of operating. Kudo’s sculptures also have a strong organic component to them, which is indicative of Kudo’s aesthetic (See Appendix F).
Kudo once wrote, “For what is now necessary?” (Kudo), and this question is at the center of his work. Kudo’s pieces continually think about what issues and ideas are necessary to discuss through art. In accordance with postwar Japanese thought and Obsessionalist tendencies, Kudo aimed his work towards the relationship between decay of old ways in Japan, as well as globally, and the development of new ideas and technologies. This dichotomy was also taken a step further by Kudo’s later work in Paris, which pitted man, sexuality and spirituality, against the rising technological age through the use of old mechanical structures and modern everyday objects in his sculptures. In this way, Kudo used his work as a way to move forward.
“perhaps it must irradiate the instinct — the cells of the genes and of the brain — by irradiating their bodies with radioactivity, to reform their conservative and egoistical heads.” (Jouffroy)
Considering the sheer magnitude of Kudo’s work, I will confine my discussion to two pieces done by Kudo; Your Portrait series and Philosophy of Impotence. The Your Portrait series preoccupied Kudo’s work throughout the 1960s and 70s. This series made use of the cage (and sometime fish tanks) as a way to fuse together human identity, through the portrayal of human body parts like brains, phallic symbols, heads, hands etc., with everyday mundane objects such as electronic wires, plants, and fish tanks, to create little decaying worlds that erased the line between humanity and that which was perceived to be mundane and unimportant. In this series Kudo was exploring the notion of humans as “formless, transparent organisms” (Walker) as a way to talk about the decay of society from old to new. Alexandra Munroe, a curator in New York, describes the series as;
“Kudo’s Obsessional works reflects his intellectual despair at the ‘the hanamichi of suicide’ offers only the liberation from an existence fated to be consumed by the interconnecting, proliferating, and destructive forces of nature, humanity and electronics.” (Munroe, pg 197)
The human body parts, as well as the other organic matter and electronics in Kudo’s pieces are all in a state of decay, creating a sense of impending oneness in death and decay — a kind of ‘return to the earth’ idea. This is no doubt caused by Kudo’s impression of the atomic bomb and its literal and symbolic effects on Japan. The atomic bomb obliterated all things equally and even fused things and people together, as well as making some everyday objects look almost human and organic, thus creating the idea of, not the blurring the line between man and object, but destroying it completely for Kudo. Through this series, Kudo not only worked to come to terms with this notion, but also developed it into its symbolic meaning of the death of old Japanese social ways. Furthermore, the rotting state of the objects in the sculptures implies just how uncomfortable and disturbing these thoughts are to Kudo. However, unlike Miki and Kusama, whose pieces had a much more dire and foreboding feel to them, Kudo’s work, as a result of its highly organic aesthetic, also implies the potential for growth out of the ashes of death and decay. Kudo’s use of brightly colored objects in the piece gives it an ethereal and transcendent feel and implies a sense of hope and recovery, as well as making the piece a little easier to look at for his audience.
Kudo’s installation piece Philosophy of Impotence, which was created for the 4th Yomiuri Independent exhibition in Tokyo (1962), is indicative of much of Kudo’s work, in that it shows an extreme preoccupation with male sexuality and uses phallic imagery obsessively (see Appendix G). Philosphy of Impotence represents a period of Kudo’s work that is utterly remorseful of the “pathetic despair of human efforts” (Walker). Unlike Kusama’s phallic soft sculptures and installations, Kudo’s sculptures are far more graphic and there is a much stronger sense of revulsion towards the work for his audience. The piece can best be described as a phallic chrysalis. It is composed of phallic and fecal phallic objects with light bulb heads, duct-taped together across the room in which they are exhibited. There are also a series of phallic pillars and at the center of the installation, a large, red phallic object spewing udon noodles in the center. Some curators have read Kudo’s phallic obsession as a desire to be sexually emancipated; however, I feel that the piece speaks more to the core idea of impotence being the complete inability to act or engage. Furthermore, the piece does not have the positive undertones of Kudo’s later work (e.g., the Your portrait series). Rather, Kudo uses this piece to talk about human devolution into a single reproductive organ and emphasizes his point that humans are not so inherently different or special from anything else. This degradation of humanity to only reproduction can be compared to insect life, especially those with short lifespans. What other way could you see an insect whose sole purpose in its short life (24 hours for example) is to reproduce? This idea is further emphasized by the many insect-like structures throughout the piece.
The interesting thing to note about Kudo is that he is not fundamentally upset or repulsed by the deterioration or death of old ways, or even the idea that humans are miniscule and unimportant in the larger scheme of things Rather, he is energized by this idea and it acts as fuel for his work. His work is based on the idea that birth from the ashes of destruction is a good thing and rather than mourning the old ways and old ideas, it is good to move forward and embrace the unknown. Through his work he realized that the failures and pains of Japan’s history gave the youth a chance to grow and become something inherently and excitingly different from their ancestors. Kudo’s relocation to Paris. France could be interpreted an artistic step back, considering that Paris is part of the Western world and in the context of the global art community, represents the old, established way of doing things. However, while in Paris, Kudo worked to break apart western ideas of humanity, thereby moving his message outward from Japan and Japanese discourse to a global stage. For Kudo, the post war era was more that just a Japanese complex, it was a global state of change.
Kudo, Miki and Kusama all represent fundamental shifts in Japanese and modern art in the postwar era. Their work not only broke out of artistic norms, it also was indicative of the mindset and preoccupations of Japanese youth at the time. The themes of these three artists — preoccupation with death, disfigurement, sexuality, war etc. — can be seen in other obsessional artists, writers and dancers as well (Eiko Hosoe, Shomei Tomatsu, Hijikata Tetsumi, Yukio Mishima, Oe Kenzaburo, Kobe Abe, etc.).
The most important thing to note about these artists is that they were fearless. Their willingness to look into the void and come face-to-face with it is, in part, what gave their work power and helped it transcend preconceived notions of art and society. Miki stated in 1975;
“Right now, I do not know where I am. I do not even want to know. I am liberated from that. Right now, I am inside a golden light, and I am a dead thing.” (Miki)
Obsessional artists created their work as a means of disassociation; however, it was a necessary disassociation and it represented society’s need to move on and become better in the postwar era. Their artistic disassociation was their protest against inflexible modern society. These artists took on their obsession with death, sexuality, inferiority and illness as if they were normal extensions of everyday thought. By concentrating on the extremes of human psyche they were able to comment on humanity in a way that different and insightful and as a result was unconfined by social barriers to freethinking. For Obsessional artists the extremes of humanity were not different from everyday thoughts and actions.
When looking at these artists’ work it becomes clear that they used their obsession to disassociate for two main reasons. The first was that they felt they had no choice. These artists were obsessive by nature and disassociated in order to survive their obsession with the themes that so engulfed their work and their minds. However, these artists also disassociated so that they could move themselves and society forward. The need in postwar Japan to move past events and ideas of the past was incredibly strong due to past failures. The Obsessional artists used the large postwar Japanese art platform in a way that no other art movement did and as a result fundamentally changed the art world in the Contemporary Age.
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Appendix D
Appendix E
Appendix F
Appendix G
Works Cited
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Jouffroy, Alain, Kudo, Rini Dippel, and Frank Reynders. Tetsumi Kudo: Pollution, Cultivation, New Ecology, Your Portrait = Vervuiling, Cultivering, Nieuwe Ecologie, Jouw Portret. Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1972. Print.
Kusama, Yayoi, and Alexandra Munroe. “Fortress of Shooting Start.” Grand Street 53 (1995): 32–41. Print.
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Merewether, Charles, Rika Iezumi. Hiro, and Reiko Tomii. “Origin of Anti-Art.” Art, Anti-art, Non-art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan, 1950–1970. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2007. 36–41. Print.
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Munroe, Alexandra. “Obsessional Art.” Japanese Art after 1945: Scream against the Sky. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1994. N. pag. Print.
Saito, Yasuyoshi. “THE COLLECTION.” MoMA.org. MOMA, n.d. Web. 12 Apr. 2013.
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Tono, Yoshiaki. “Miki and Ears.” Minami Gallery (1968): n. pag. Print.
Tono, Yoshiaki. “Neo Dada Et Anti-Art.” Centre Georges Pompidou (1986): n. pag. Print.
Turner, Grady, and Yayoi Kusama. “Yayoi Kusama.” Bomb 66 (1999): 62–69. Print.
“Walker Art Center.” To Premiere the Late Japanese Artist Tetsumi Kudo’s First U.S. Solo Museum Exhibition — Press Releases — Press — . Walker Art, n.d. Web. 18 Apr. 2013.
“Walker Art Center.” Walker Shop. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Apr. 2013.
Karia, Bhupendra, and Yayoi Kusama. Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective. New York: Center for International Contemporary Arts, 1989. Print.
Kudo, Tetsumi, and Yujiro Nakamura. “Strategies of Contemporary Art.” Gendai Shiso 9.12 (1981): 36–58. Print.
