Throw Out the Books, Get Out in the Streets: Subjectivity and Space in Japanese Underground Art of the 1960s

This dissertation examines the relationship between subjectivity and spatialization, or the dynamic process of understanding space in terms of social and psychic relations, as it is articulated in the works of Japanese avant-garde and underground artists of the politically turbulent decade of the 1960s. The premise of this work is that analyses of social spaces and subjectivity are necessary to adequately understand the period's Japanese avant-garde and underground art practices. It takes up this task by scrutinizing, in addition to the actual works, their documentation, and critical and popular receptions, academic and popular print media of the era in order to situate them in their specific cultural context. I examine a broad range of artists to reflect the dense connection between artists of the 1960s who were working with different media. The artists include Fluxus-affiliated art collective Hi Red Center; Yoko Ono, who was an important figure for not only her own groundbreaking work but also her introduction of happenings and events to Japanese audiences; dramatist, essayist, filmmaker, and poet Shuji Terayama; acclaimed experimental filmmaker and a trenchant critic Toshio Matsumoto; and preeminent "Shochiku Nouvelle Vague" director and left-wing polemicist Nagisa Oshima. While the content and medium of their works vary, they all address the complex relation between subjects and the urban environment and offer critical responses to the larger postwar cultural and political climates, which were shaped significantly by Japan's relation to the U.S. The works I consider suggest that this relation also took on cultural, psychic, and sexual dimensions. I conclude that by focusing on the performance of socially inscribed bodies in the urban environment, these artists show, against the myth of Japanese homogeneity, that space and subjectivity are products of social relations, always marked by class, gender, racial and sexual difference.