Postwar Japanese Avant-garde: Beauty in the Grotesque Open Access
Kim, Ji Eun (2013)
Published
Abstract
Contrary to the optimism and sense of liberation that marked the
immediate postwar years, Japan
rebuilt itself in the image of its nationalist past in the decades
following World War II. The
dissonance between the government's conservative policies and the
ideals of the new democratic
Constitution became a major cause of the chaos and eruptions of
violence in the 1960s.
Moreover, this discourse that took place between conflicting
political and social ideologies
inspired the abject aesthetics of Japanese postwar avant-garde art.
The avant-garde movement
struggled to answer many of the questions ailing the populace,
which ranged from the superiority
of the collective over the individual, the male over the female,
and the West over the East. This
paper will focus specifically on the female intermedia artists and
male butoh artists, who
represent two different art forms of postwar avant-garde, and
observe the ways these artists
concurred and diverged in the approaches to these questions.
Ultimately, they both refused to
reinforce prevailing power dynamics in the fabrics of human
society, thereby reinforcing
equality. Behind the grotesque, dark and seemingly absurd
aesthetics of postwar avant-garde,
the art form arguably encapsulates the same sense of optimism and
hope for true democracy that
marked the very beginnings of the postwar era.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Intermedia 5
Chapter 2: Butoh 20
Chapter 3: Analysis 40
Conclusion 49
Notes 50
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