Contemporary Art is a Brain Child of the West
I’m pretty sure a lot of Japanese art world types are drooling right now with jealousy over the renewed attention that the Mono-ha movement is getting in America. And people who were involved with the movement long ago will probably say the following: “It’s me who built this.” Factually, that may be true. But can you really say to me that this scene, where we help artists just enough to keep them alive and where unpaid expenses are a fact of life, helped these artists to grow? Quite the contrary, isn’t it more likely that we closed off their potential and led them to doubt and lose hope in their artistry?
In the Spring of 2012, Japanese American Mika Yoshitake curated a retrospective called “Requiem for the Sun: The art of Monoha” at LA’s Blum and Poe Gallery and the show has been the subject of much praise and admiration from the American audience. Surely there is no one in Japan who will cry foul at the fact that this is the first time Mono-ha has been accepted by global art community. This is because for Japanese, being praised in the west is the true sign of success. But the reason that the curation of this show was so successful was that it broke up the original context of the works and reassembled it in a western contemporary art format. Without this reediting and reassembling, there’s no chance it would have been understood. The show explained the historical background of that point and time in western art history, the particularities of Japanese identity, the effects of the war being felt at the time – it explained anything and everything to do with the topic and only then was the concept of Mono-ha born in real time and people could understand that the philosophy was something unique and unseen in western art. It was this last line of reasoning which led to the relative praise that followed.
Why is it that the Japanese contemporary art world is incapable of sharing this structural understanding? My own view after 30 years of observation is that the scene here is a nexus for people who want to lead an easy life without the need for self-study and that for most people, their goal is to get a professorship at a university. The act of producing their own work and putting it up for objective evaluation requires them to go through the troublesome process of explaining and translating. They’d rather skip this process and instead spend their time having a laugh with students in a bar somewhere. They have never asked themselves to what degree we can overcome the contextual divisions between nations. The sad truth that no Japanese wants to accept is that if they continue to draw boundaries and confine themselves in one place, they will forever be lions at home and mice abroad.
What are otaku?
So contemporary art world of Japan: let’s try something a little old school and examine the root definition of the term otaku. It began with subcultural theorist Akio Nakamori, who identified a cluster of people in University Science Fiction Clubs addressing each other mockingly as “otaku” which is a highly formal, and subsequently high class, way of saying “you”. In the pre-dawn of the anime boom, fans began gathering in droves to attend the premieres of theatrical film re-edits of shows like Space Battleship Yamato and Gundam. The people working in the animation industry had suddenly reached stardom. One particularly symbolic moment occurred when director Yoshiyuki Tomino appeared in front of the Shinjuku Alta to promote the theatrical version of Gundam and proclaimed the dawn of the “age of anime.” From there, Animeito began producing goods to sell to the budding market and several specialty magazines went into publishing. At the same time, however, society began to take note and the fact that a group of people with already low communication skills was now entering into fantasy worlds led to a prejudice against them as a lower form of life. Then came the double punch of the Tsutomu Miyazaki murders and the Aum Cult, both of which were tied to anime and manga, and soon otaku had become objects of outright disdain.
But otaku did not stop there. They began to take advantage of the very framework that despised them, using the underground as their cover and fusing themselves with the subcultures of their time to build their own universe in the real world: idols, pro wrestling, cars, cosplay. Before long, subuculture and otaku culture were completely inseparable. Innately creative, otaku plunged forward in radical directions making their own games, anime, dojinshi, and other contents. The market soon followed and with the advent of the internet and the break of the TV show “Densha Otoko,” otaku moved above ground. Today, nearly every area of mainstream Japanese culture is composed of otaku elements and these elements have become representative of the Japanese character. On the other hand, having now become overly diffused, much of otaku culture has become displaced from its core concerns and the context of what defines the culture is becoming increasingly difficult to express. It is this gap that the Japanese bureaucrats have exploited to their own benefit with the campaign Cool Japan and their involvement has warped otaku culture into a truly grotesque shape.
