MFA Fine Arts presents a talk by art historian and curator Reiko Tomii, titled "From Body in Action to Information in Time: Performance Art and Its 'Second Life' in 1960s Japan."

From Tomii: "In the history of performance art, 1960s Japan occupies a pioneering place with its early experiments and innovations in body-based and time-based practices. The study of performance art has customarily focused on the bodily agency of a performance artist. However, in reality, the object of study is what I call the 'second life' of a performance work, usually documentary photographs, which are but only a part of the information generated by the work. In this lecture, in order to re-examine the history of Japanese performance art, I propose to introduce an agency centering not so much on body as on information, thereby expressly foregrounding the second-life aspect of performance art. This allows us to see a major shift that took place as the expanded 1960s unfolded from Gutai to Anti-Art (Han-geijutsu) to Non-Art (Hi-geijutsu). In the beginning, Japanese artists tended to leave the information operation to others, typically photographers, but increasingly they took control of it and elevated the second life to the status of work (sakuhin) as such. This observation also illuminates a fundamental difference in performative practices in 1960s Japan from Euro-American counterparts."

Reiko Tomii is an independent art historian and curator who investigates post-1945 Japanese art in world art history. Her early works include her contribution to "Global Conceptualism" (Queens Museum of Art, 1999) and "Century City" (Tate Modern, 2001). She is co-director of PoNJA-GenKon, a listserv group of specialists interested in contemporary Japanese art. Her recent publication Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (MIT Press, 2016) received the 2017 Robert Motherwell Book Award, and was turned into an exhibition "Radicalism in the Wilderness: Japanese Artists in the Global 1960s" at Japan Society in New York (March – June 2019).

Talk

Reiko Tomii

Room 101C