On May 25, 2021, the 254th Japanese Expert Invitation Seminar was held as a webinar. In the presence of about 40 people, Hyeyeon Park, lecturer in Western Painting, Seoul National University, gave a presentation on the theme of ‘From Production to Practice: Institutional Critical Art of the 1970s Artistic Revolution Committee’. The contents of the presentation are as follows.
The presenter paid attention to the activities of the Artistic Revolution Committee, which was formed in 1970 as a group for artistic expression, as a predecessor to the Artistic Revolution Committee, which was led by Tama Art University students in July 1969. Existing research tends to approach the theory mainly about the point that the American Civil War Committee tried a different exhibition method and criticized the fundamental institutional nature of art. In particular, the video works published between 1971 and 1975 by artists belonging to the Artistic Revolution Committee were evaluated as a transitional stage before 1977 when they returned to painting, and thus were not actively studied. In the presentation, we decided to break away from this point of view and focus on the video work in the mid-1970s of the U.S. Military Combat Committee, which has not received much attention so far, and try to position the act of making art as a “practice” as part of social labor participation. It aimed to reveal that the medium of video played a key role in laying the theoretical and practical foundation for the works of artists who wanted to be art that lives and breathes in the concrete time and space of everyday life.
An attempt to criticize “art as an institution” in the context of a declining student movement led by Kosai Hori, Naoyoshi Hikosaka, and Nobuo Yamanaka. it was They were able to break free from the dualism of materialism and immaterialism by emphasizing production as a practice, as opposed to the Japanese conceptualist, which pursued non-materialistic conceptual art, and monoha, which pursued materialistic art by emphasizing “non-production” of not making. In particular, they viewed the practice and activity itself as the core, emphasizing the process of group production, and disseminated their work and opinions to society through publications such as 『Recorder』 and 『Art History Review』.
Then, the presenter introduced how the artists of the American Confederation and Conflict Committee used film and video to break down the boundaries between art and life, institutional space and everyday space, and specifically place their work in the space and time of Japan in the 1970s. Nobuo Yamanaka showed the use of film in art as opposed to film as a film through the work
, while Naoyoshi Hikosaka made images through . The task was to incorporate it into the everyday world. In , Kosai Hori formed a cycle in which text is replaced with sound and image, and sound and image are replaced with text again, showing the error of communication due to the video medium. Through the analysis of these works, the medium of video came to a dead end, such as the distrust, lack of communication, and severance that prevailed in society after the student movement in the works of artists belonging to the American Public Fighting Committee, and thoroughly denies the fundamental institutional nature of art. Meanwhile, it played a key role in putting production back into practice and deeply rooted in life.
After the presentation, a question-and-answer session followed. The question is: What are the characteristics of the U.S. Combat Committee that distinguishes it from the contemporary avant-garde? Why did their work return to painting after 1977? Did the activities of the American Civil Conflict Committee have meaning as not only an art movement but also a political movement? Haven't their works been interpreted in connection with mental ideas such as zen? How much empathy has it elicited from the public and the art world? In the midst of widespread skepticism about social change, including the student movement, since 1972, what was the reason that they were able to keep up with their activities? After a question-and-answer session, the seminar ended.
