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Article Excerpt
In November of 1966, thirty-eight multidisciplinary artists in Tokyo gathered under the group name of Environment Society (Enbairamento no Kai) to hold From Space to Environment (Kukan kara kankyo e), a two-part exhibition and event program that would have considerable repercussions in the areas of architecture, design, visual art, and music in Japan. While From Space to Environment is commonly mentioned as a benchmark in the history of post-1945 Japanese art, its actual contents and impact have rarely been examined. Because of the overlap of participants between this exhibition and the 1970 Japan World Exposition in Osaka (hereafter Expo '70), From Space to Environment has often been reduced to the mere starting point of a linear development toward the technological spectacles which dominated Expo '70. In fact, the notion of kankyo (environment) put forth by the Environment Society was later conflated with technology and konkyo geijutsu (environment art) and took on curiously technological connotations in Japan. In the process, intermedia art became synonymous with technological art, adding to the existing confusion of terms. Through the close examination of From Space to Environment in its contents and origins, this essay illuminates the emergence of intermedia art in Japan while sorting out the confusion that has obscured its reception.
Furthermore, this case study will demonstrate that the Japanese art world had already become an integral part of the international world of art by the late 1960s. When the contemporary art critic Haryu Ichiro coined the phrase "international contemporaneity" (kokusai - teki dojisei) in the 1960s, it soon gained popularity among Japanese arts professionals, denoting the confluence of the global and local artistic tendencies rather than the one-way influence of Western modernism on non-Western art. (1) Recent scholarship in post- 1945 Japanese art reveals numerous stylistic parallels between Japanese and Euro-American art movements in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but their dynamics cannot be reduced to simplistic, causal relationships. (2) Joining such ongoing efforts in revising contemporary art history in a more global manner, this essay demonstrates the multiplicity of contemporary art practice through a case study of a remarkable artistic confluence as seen in From Space to Environment.
In fact, From Space to Environment occurred the same year that Experiments in Art and Technology presented a series of innovative dance, music, and theater performances entitled 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City. (3) While the 9 Evenings were only performances, the main component of From Space to Environment was the exhibition. From Space to Environment preceded by two years the groundbreaking intermedia art exhibitions Cybernetic Serendipity at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and Some More Beginnings organized at the Brooklyn Museum in New York by Experiments in Art and Technology (4) Distinct from the highly technological contents of these counterparts in the West, From Space to Environment was conceived and realized as a cross-genre collaboration within various disciplines of arts and did not readily incorporate then-cutting-edge technologies such as robotics. Yet the artists were well aware of the conceptual implications of cybernetics and placed its system thinking within the larger framework of environment partly through the communication theory of Marshall McLuhan, whose writings had just been introduced to Japan. (5) By-comparing and contrasting the exhibition with its concurrent art movements in the West, this essay will place the Japanese intermedia art on the international map.
What Is Kankyo?
First, it is necessary to examine the notion of environment/kankyo proposed by the Environment Society. From Space to Environment was held at the Matsuya Department Store Gallery in the Ginza business district of Tokyo for six days from November 11, 1966, while the event portion took place at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo on the evening of November 14. In its manifestolike collective statement printed in the exhibition flyer, the group advocated the English term environment (pronounced enbairamento), as well as its Japanese translation kankyo, as a socially relevant concept connecting separate genres in the arts, namely, visual art, music, design, and architecture. (6) Distinct from its common, vernacular ecological usage today, I argue that environment or kankyo functioned as a precursor to the later popularized term intermedia, which originally referred to the indefinable area that exists among different media. (7)
The exhibition title From Space to Environment (Kukan kara kankyo e) reflected shared awareness of the internationally popularized term environment in art and urban design among the participants. The third paragraph of the group statement reads:
We are conscious of the concept environment, which has become adapted and used in the new field of urban design and recent art; environmental design, which considers the city as a subject called environment where everything is organically and dynamically related rather than as an entity composed of fixed parts such as architecture, space, function, and form. The environmental nature of large sculptures by Nevelson and large paintings by Pollock, which physically and corporeally surround the viewer. Or environment as a site for Happenings, which seek unknowable results by collapsing human actions against objects or chance. When translated into Japanese, it becomes kankyo, shii, shui, or igyo, but kankyo tends to refer to a fixed relationship as opposed to environment, which the Oxford dictionary defines as "the action of surrounding or the situation in which one is surrounded," and which refers to an actually occurring dynamic relationship between a human and his or her surroundings. When we use the term kankyo, please keep in mind that we are using it with such a nuance. (8)
By using the English word environment in capital letters throughout a paragraph which was otherwise completely in Japanese, Environment Society emphasized the fact that the term was a foreign import and differentiated it from its Japanese counterpart, kankyo, by highlighting the nuance of a dynamic relationship between a human and his or her surroundings in the former, in contrast to the relative fixity of the latter. Nevertheless, the use of the Japanese kankyo for the exhibition title and the English environment as the group name suggests that for the most part it used these terms interchangeably. (9) More significant than the difference between kankyo and environment was the contrast between kukan and kankyo. The earlier section of the same statement proclaims that an environment allowed a more dynamic and even chaotic relationship between the viewer and the art, while a space (kukan) presented a fixed yet harmonious relationship. (10) As a counterpoint to space, environment/kankyo here suggested the inseparable relationship to one's surroundings and represented physical circumstances in which humans actively engaged with the external world. In its essence, then, environment/kankyo as presented in the exhibition was decidedly interactive and the viewer was an active participant in it.
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Environment Society consisted of thirty-eight multidisciplinary art individuals, a dozen of whom served as the executive committee responsible for the group's representation--among them the visual artist Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, the architect Isozaki Arata, the designers Awazu Kiyoshi and Izumi Shin'ya, and the art critics Takiguchi Shuzo, Tono Yoshiaki, and Nakahara Yusuke--who met regularly at the Sogetsu Art Center. (11) The involvement of two art critics, Takiguchi and Tono, in particular, can be identified through wordings in the previously quoted section of the group statement; these are further developed in individual statements included in the special supplementary issue of the art magazine Bijutsu Techo (hereafter BT) published simultaneously with the exhibition, which functioned as the catalogue or concept book for the exhibition. (12) This concept was eloquently visualized by the logo, created by the graphic designer Fukuda Shigeo, of a man in a vortex, which was featured on the cover of the special BT issue.
The Key Concepts and Components of the Exhibition
As proclaimed in the group statement, one of the main goals of the exhibition was to promote a dynamic relationship between the viewer and the art. The most direct way of realizing this was to incorporate kinetic or interactive elements in the works. In the corner of the main gallery space, for example, visitors could easily locate mobile spiral sculptures by the industrial designer Tomura Hiroshi hanging from the ceiling. Made of thin plastic, the mobiles were rotated by the slight air flow in the space. To the left of the Tomura work were the designer Ito Takamichi's twin cylinders made of striped rings, which made noise when...
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