Sogetsu Art Center

The Sōgetsu Art Center (SAC) was founded in 1958 and directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara, who was then known as an avant-garde film director. He received permission to use the auditorium/lecture hall in the newly constructed Sōgetsu Hall (headquarters of the Sōgetsu School of ikebana) in Tokyo's Akasaka district.

Sōfū Teshigahara was extremely supportive of the SAC and its activities from the beginning. He invited Georges Mathieu and Sam Francis to create mural paintings for the auditorium of Sōgetsu Hall.[9][10] The history of this artistic commission was emblematic of the SAC's international ambitions and outlook: following the success of 1956's Sekai konnichi no bijutsu ("Art of Today's World ") exhibition held at Takashimaya Department Store and curated by critics Shin'ichi Segi and Michel Tapié, which set in motion what is known as the Anforumeru senpū ("Informel whirlwind'), Michel Tapié and Georges Mathieu came to Japan, at the invitation of Jirō Yoshihara and Sōfū Teshigahara.[9]

The SAC space hosted a wide variety of activities: musical performances, film screenings, journal publishing, educational space (study groups, workshops). The space was also made available to many artists, both local and international. For a modestly scaled institution, it instigated important changes in the local art scene by connecting Japanese artists and artists from abroad.[9] Although, as outlined below, the SAC hosted diverse activities, its most consistent engagement over the course of its history tended to be with experimental music and film. Throughout its active years, SAC also enjoyed longstanding collaborations with many prominent graphic designers, including Kōhei Sugiura, Makoto Wada, Tadanori Yokoo, Akio Kanda, Ikkō Tanaka and Kiyoshi Awazu, who designed posters and promotional materials for the center's activities.[11]

In the early years, programs were divided into three categories: the first two were focused on music: the Sōgetsu Contemporary Series (avant-garde classical music) and the Sōgetsu Music Inn (jazz); and the third, the Sōgetsu Cinemathèque primarily screened films. The program of the Sōgetsu Contemporary Series, for the first few years, was conducted by members of the Sakkyokuka Shūdan (Composer's Group), including composer Tōru Takemitsu and Toshirō Mayuzumi. The SAC's film activities can be traced back to 1957, when Hiroshi Teshigahara and fellow director Susumu Hani founded the Cinema 57 group, which screened independent films.[12] Sōgetsu Cinemathèque was launched in 1961 and was the SAC's longest running series. It showcased both new and experimental films as well as revisiting key films from history, such as silent films.[13]

From around 1961-1965, the SAC greatly expanded its programming beyond the three earlier series and welcomed various different creators. Notably, the center sponsored performances by prominent artists and musicians from outside Japan, including John Cage, David Tudor, Robert Rauschenberg, and Nam June Paik, as well as solo performances from Japanese artists and composers such as Yoko Ono, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and Tōru Takemitsu. These performances, all by creators with some connection to Fluxus, introduced these new ideas to a Japanese audience. Because of the international notoriety of Fluxus, these performances continue to be some of the best-known events that occurred at the SAC. Group Ongaku, a young Japanese ensemble that composed and played musique concrète, also performed at the SAC several times around this period, and via the SAC was able to connect with Ichiyanagi and establish contact with the international Fluxus network (see more on Group Ongaku below).[14]

The SAC also expanded its film programming during this time. For example, the center hosted screenings of a new animation group known as Animeshon Sannin no Kai ("Association of Three Animators"), as well as three Animation Festivals which invited other animators inside and outside Japan to submit works for screening.[15]

The SAC also experimented with hosting a variety of dance and theatrical performances. Major performances by international visitors included the Off-Broadway play The Coach with the Six Insides by Jean Erdman,[16] and the first showcase in Japan by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.[17] There were noteworthy performances by Japanese creators as well, including dance recitals by Akiko Motofuji, Butoh works by Tatsumi Hijikata, works by Jūrō Kara’s Jōkyō Gekijō (Situation Theatre), plays by Tetsuji Takechi, and plays by Shūji Terayama.[18][19] Members of the Hanayagi school of nihon buyō (traditional Japanese dance), including Suzushi Hanayagi, also performed at the SAC.

There was some effort made by the SAC to start its own experimental theatre series, but the Sōgetsu Experimental Theatre only hosted one performance, by Group NLT (today Gekidan NLT), in 1964.[16]

After 1965, the SAC programming shifted to mostly focus on film, with less activity in the performing arts, although there were still some notable performances of works by Shūji Terayama and others. The SAC launched several new film festivals, including the Sekai Zen’ei Eiga-sai ("World Avant-garde Film Festival"), the Underground Film Festival, the Sōgetsu Experimental Film Festival, and the Film Art Festival. Although these new film festivals underscored the SAC's support for avant-garde artists, the 1969 Film Art Festival was forced to shut down when several violent factions of the underground film scene occupied the auditorium and called for the festival's destruction. Although some of the SAC affiliates were able to de-escalate the mob, whose actual goals were unclear, the festival nevertheless closed.[20]

In the last few years of the SAC, most events were screenings part of the Sōgetsu Cinemathèque.[21] In April 1971 the center closed, ending a significant period in avant-garde art in Tokyo.[5]

The multimedia stage experiments at the SAC arguably helped give birth to so-called intermedia art in the late 1960s.[4][25] Intermedia experiments of the late 1960s pushed beyond collaborations across artistic genres - they used multiple genres (and often integrated new technologies) to create projects that interrogated broad shifts occurring in Japanese environment, culture, and institutions.[26] Several key early experiments in intermedia actually took place at the SAC - for example, the performance tied to the exhibition From Space to Environment in 1966 involved an intermedia apparatus built from sound and light systems.[27]

The SAC is often regarded as the birthplace of the happening in Japan. At Yoko Ono's recital in 1962, she debuted several pieces which were some of the first and most noteworthy artistic happenings in Japan. In each work, she instructed a group of performers, primarily artists affiliated with the SAC, to fulfill various actions.[28] In The Pulse, the group performed mundane acts such as eating fruit and breaking objects.[29][30] The recital concluded with a piece in which every performer stood on stage, and stared at a person in the audience until they established eye contact. Once they established eye contact, they selected a different person in the audience. If the performers grew tired, they could sit down or even lie down on stage. The event ended once there was no one left in the audience.[28] An unidentified reviewer of Ono's performance defined the happening as "not an art that has already been completed, but an art form that enables the audience to receive something by witnessing the unfolding of nonsense acts, experiencing the process together with the performers."[29]

However, artists such as Genpei Akasegawa have noted that even before Yoko Ono's recital, for several years the activities of the Neo-Dada Organizers had already resonated with the "happening." He recalled: "I obviously had the same awareness, even as part of Neo-Dada, you could say it was the instinct of the times, we just wanted to create actions. For me, it was about ceremonial events. We didn't have the word for 'happening' yet, so we were calling it something like a ceremony [gishiki]."[31] As much as the SAC introduced new concepts to the Japanese avant-garde, the center was equally a meeting point for like-minded ideas that had been developing both in Japan and elsewhere.

John Cage and David Tudor were invited to Japan and stayed for six weeks at the end of 1962.[29] Toshiro Mayuzumi, Toshi Ichiyanagi and Yoko Ono, who had collaborated with John Cage while living in New York, were instrumental in bringing Cage to Japan.[22] On his 1962 visit, Cage performed Theater piece and also premiered 0'00, dedicated to Toshi Ichiyanagi and Yoko Ono, at the SAC. In the former piece, he cooked, read a book, and moved around onstage as he would do in his everyday life, but with the sound of his actions amplified and delivered to the audience through a number of speakers. In 0'00, Cage amplified the subtle noise of writing out a score while smoking from time to time. After forty minutes of this action, he descended into the auditorium to receive a kiss from Yoko Ono (who was married to Ichiyanagi at the time), which indicated the end of the performance. These performances brought about what is now remembered as "John Cage shock" among contemporary musicians in Japan.[9][32]

However, by understanding the meeting of the "happening" and Japanese avant-garde practices of "ceremony" at the SAC, this idea of "John Cage shock" can be debated: the degree of direct influence of the Cage's performances is debatable, especially when similar experimentation had already been happening in Japan.[5] These nuances are notably expressed by Yasunao Tone, who put forward the fact that these performances did not constitute a shock but were accepted rather easily.[33] The music critic Hewell Tircuit wrote an article for The Japan Times highlighting the fact that several Japanese artists were already experimenting with processes similar to those that Cage had exhibited.[34] This is the case of Group Ongaku, of which Yasunao Tone was a member, who played a concert at the SAC in 1961. The group used a variety of "instruments" including everyday objects (vacuum cleaner, dishes, washboard...), in a methodology of improvisation described as automatism. They gave their concert in front of a full house (with a capacity of 400 people) and their performance was covered by the major newspapers Mainichi and Asahi Shimbun.[33]

In November 1964, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Steve Paxton, Deborah Hay and Robert Rauschenberg were also able to visit Japan thanks to the Sōgetsu Art Center, as part of a world tour of the Merce Cunningham Dance Compagny, which ended in Tokyo.[9] Robert Rauschenberg participated in a US-Japan dance exchange workshop, arranged by Kuniharu Akiyama, that took place at the SAC on November 20, 1964. American participants were Robert Rauschenberg, Steve Paxton, Deborah Hay and Barbara Lloyd, while Japanese participants included dancers and performers such as Tatsumi Hijikata, Takehisa Kosugi and Mariko Sanjo.[9]

On November 28, 1964, Robert Rauschenberg participated in the event "Twenty Questions to Bob Rauschenberg". The event was originally planned by the art critic Yoshiaki Tōno as a discussion between Rauschenberg and members of the Tokyo art community, including himself, Nobuaki Kojima and Ushio Shinohara. However, instead of answering the questions of his Japanese interviewers, however, Rauschenberg spent the lecture time silently creating a Combine, entitled Gold Standard. He, with Alex Hay as his main assistant and help from Deborah Hay and Steve Paxton, painted and placed objects (barrier from a construction site, image of a clock, Coca-Cola bottles, tie painted gold, a worn-out pair of black leather shoes...) on a gold Japanese folding screen (byōbu), offered by Sōfū Teshigahara. The performance lasted more than four hours until the piece was finished, and most of the audience - including John Cage and Merce Cunningham - had already left, which was the trigger for the departure of Steve Paxton, Barbara Lloyd, Deborah Hay and Robert Rauschenberg from the company.[5][35]

This performance is considered as a legendary incident in the history of postwar Japanese art, an exemplary case of cross-cultural interaction.[9] When Yoshiaki Tōno invited Nobuaki Kojima and Ushio Shinohara to come to the stage to ask their questions to Robert Rauschenberg, the two artists brought onto stage their own works - Shinohara's Marcel Duchamp Thinking (Shiko suru Maruseru Dyushan, 1963) and Coca-Cola Plan (1964), Kojiya's Figure (1964) holding a placard that said "Question." Ushio Shinohara read out his questions, in both Japanese and English, to which Robert Rauschenberg did not respond. The Japanese artist, frustrated, placed the sheet of paper containing the question under the Rauschenberg's foot, which finally paid attention to the question and then pasted the sheet onto the panel of the gold screen. This tense interaction between Rauschenberg and Shinohara, in addition to the presence on stage of works explicitly evoking the works of the star artist, recently awarded at the 1964 Venice Biennale (Coca-Cola Plan) and broadly in the United States (Figure), is indicative of the imbalance of cultural and financial power between American and Japanese artists at the time.[35][9][5]