In her introduction to this very interesting collection of essays, Fran Lloyd emphasizes that the portrayal of sex and consumerism in Japanese art has formed an important part of the country's complex experience of modernization and commodification.
Further, as Timon Screech demonstrates in his stimulating opening contribution, both elements were a definite part of Japan's urban culture well before the impact of Westernization. This past, he argues, serves as a template for the way in which sex and consumerism are portrayed in Japanese art today. Sexual consumerism was, and is, used by the ruling powers as a means of both controlling potential political unrest and furthering economic prosperity.
Author of one of the finest studies of the earlier uses of sexual consumerism in Japan ("Sex and the Floating World" [1999]), Screech demonstrates, with many examples, that "commerce and sex formed part of the discourse of the shogunal regime. The authorities had built it into their polity and they had, therefore, likewise built it into their systems of control."
Nicholas Bornoff, whose famous book "Pink Samurai" (1999) explored sexuality in Japanese society, continues the argument into our own times, citing the economic and cultural factors that have affected sites of sex and consumerism within Japan. At the same time, he makes the important point that although this densely populated country with its adherence to rigid gender roles does indeed have a long tradition of using sex as a safety valve, this is counterbalanced by the popular use of sex as a form of disobedience, dissent and transgression.
This use rejects modernization and often returns to premodern indigenous traditions. Among Bornoff's many examples are butoh, the art of the '60s and films such as Nagisa Oshima's "In the Realm of the Senses."
These days, he finds that the return is often into a preadult state, citing the infantilization of popular art. This includes a physical rendering of something that Sigmund Freud would have called polymorphous perversity -- the iconization of the school girl, the enthronement of sexual kitsch, the capitalization of the cute.
This double strand -- sexual imagery used both against and by the Japanese public -- is brought into distinct focus by Stephen Barber in his paper on performance art and digital cultures. Author of seminal works on Western counterculture artists (including a 1993 book on anarchist poet Antonin Artaud and a soon-to-be-published title on playwright and novelist Jean Genet), Barber explores the "incorporating elements of opposition and negation, and the exploration of an imagery of the human body through a kind of intensive cross-media furor . . ."
Aspects of this central assumption are taken up in the other essays in the book. Curator Yuko Hasegawa comments on the culture of the cute: "There is a strong connection between the infantilization of postwar culture in Japan and the establishment of a system of patriarchal control as a result of the loss of confidence following the country's defeat in World War II."
Art critic Midori Matsui writes persuasively on antimodernity in art, using the work of "underground" artists as well as that of the popular painter Tadanori Yoko. Artist Yoshiko Shimada examines pop culture and the way in which Japanese imagery is exported into the rest of Asia, carrying with it, however innocently, its hegemonic associations -- hedonism as discipline.
The impetus for this thoughtful and valuable book was a touring exhibition of the work of the artists discussed here by Lloyd. Japan's contemporary art scene is so diverse that the problem of choice is always paramount. These artists are typical in that they carry and illustrate the burden of the major theme of this book -- the double nature of erotic imagery in Japan, and its ability to both reconcile and outrage.
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