Justin Jesty

Selected out of 90 submissions.
Comments from the judging committee: "A virtuosic study of the intersection of art and politics, Justin Jesty’s Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan presents an original and important contribution to the fields of global contemporary art criticism and East Asian studies. But it is also a profound study of the art of one country that reaches outward toward other contexts and disciplines. Skewing the recent fascination with the so-called global conceptualism of the 1960s, Jesty shows how overlooked genres and amateur and collective artistic practices attempted to shape democratic culture from below amidst the radical uncertainty of the immediate postwar period in Japan. This was a transitional moment characterized by intense debate about how to move on from violent trauma and how not to reproduce the mistakes of the past. Jesty pushes back against the fashionable and aestheticized revolutionary demands typical of the neo-avant-garde by underscoring, instead, the problems of “organization, goal-directedness, and incremental change” that formed part of a postwar common sense overlooked by the emphasis, among recent art histories, on the effects of reconstruction and modernization during the following decades.

Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan reconstructs an intriguing corpus of works and phenomena: the woodblocks of artist-miners; the drawings and paintings of reportage artists visiting the sites of U.S. military occupation; the attempt, among a younger generation of artists, to practice forms of collective authorship and circulation of their works; and the mobilization of art in progressive pedagogy projects. In each case, Jesty underscores the imbrication of politics not only in the archive of art but also in the sociopolitical context that gave it meaning. In the author’s own words, Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan presents artists and movements “enacting delineable social change, not just simply marking the need for it.” One could make a similar case for the lucid and rich sociocultural and art historical reconstructions in Jesty’s book. Rather than merely engaging in meta-critical debates about art and politics, Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan reveals the movements and styles of the early postwar period as terrain for rethinking the definition and social function of art beyond modernist autonomy."

https://www.artsofthepresent.org/2019/10/31/winner-of-the-asap-2019-book-prize/

This is the first part of a double special issue of the journal FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism. http://field-journal.com/

These essays developed from papers presented at the UW-JSPS Symposium “Socially Engaged Art in Japan” held at the University of Washington in 2015. The remainder of the papers will be appearing in the Fall 2017 issue.

“Japan’s Social Turn: An Introductory Companion”
Justin JESTY

“Isolation and Neighboring Relation in Osaka's Kamagasaki, the Gaps and What Breaks Through Them. To Express is to Live.”
UEDA Kanayo

“Don’t Follow the Wind: Chim↑Pom and the Creation of a Collective Imaginary”
Miwako TEZUKA

“After the Exhibition Artists and the Disaster: Documentation in Progress”
TAKEHISA Yuu

“Localizing Socially Engaged Art: Some Observations on Collective Operations in Prewar and Postwar Japan”
Reiko TOMII

“Japanese Art Projects in History”
KAJIYA Kenji

“Socially Engaged Art in Japan: Mapping the Pioneers”
Adrian FAVELL

This is my introduction to a double special issue of the journal FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism titled "Japan's Social Turn." http://field-journal.com/

The TOC for the Spring issue is below. Another group of papers will be appearing in the Fall 2017 issue.

“Japan’s Social Turn: An Introductory Companion”
Justin JESTY

“Isolation and Neighboring Relation in Osaka's Kamagasaki, the Gaps and What Breaks Through Them. To Express is to Live.”
UEDA Kanayo

“Don’t Follow the Wind: Chim↑Pom and the Creation of a Collective Imaginary”
Miwako TEZUKA

“After the Exhibition Artists and the Disaster: Documentation in Progress”
TAKEHISA Yuu

“Localizing Socially Engaged Art: Some Observations on Collective Operations in Prewar and Postwar Japan”
Reiko TOMII

“Japanese Art Projects in History”
KAJIYA Kenji

“Socially Engaged Art in Japan: Mapping the Pioneers”
Adrian FAVELL

This paper focuses on a single, mid-sized initiative whose main feature is a contemporary art festival that takes place every autumn in a neighborhood of Yokohama called Koganechō. Koganechō was long a center for illegal and gray-area activity, most (in)famously the sex trade, which by the early 2000s thoroughly dominated it. That changed in 2005 when police shut down the sex shops there, as part of a nationwide trend towards clamping down on sex work in urban entertainment districts (kanrakugai). The Koganechō Bazaar, as the festival is called, was conceived as a way to regenerate public life and change the image of the neighborhood in the aftermath. Although only one project, the Bazaar provides an opportunity to consider questions that perennially surface in comparing new public art and socially engaged art (as common terms in the North American context) with art projects (as the more common term in Japan).

Socially Engaged Art in Japan
A UW-JSPS Joint Symposium
November 12-14, 2015
University of Washington, Seattle

The past two decades have seen a surge in practices that cross the boundaries between art and social activism. Nowhere has the social turn been more deeply felt than in Japan, where the art world has seen a massive shift towards socially engaged art and artists increasingly find a role in rebuilding struggling communities, helping disadvantaged populations, and connecting people with local history and culture. As many have noted, socially engaged art has emerged at a time when social services wither, civic space disappears, and visions of a shared future falter, all trends which register with particular intensity in contemporary Japan. This symposium will explore how to understand the field of socially engaged practice in a global context and how Japan’s experience can inform that understanding.

--  Keynote addresses by Kitagawa Fram and Sharon Daniel
--  Artist talk by Tanaka Koki
--  Confirmed panelists Kawashima Nobuko, Kuresawa Takemi, Yoshimoto Mitsuhiro, Adrian Favell, Kumakura Sumiko, Fukuzumi Ren, Sasha Su-Ling Welland, Ueda Kanayo, Sumitomo Fumihiko, Makiko Hara, Xiaojin Wu, Reiko Tomii, William Marotti, Mori Yoshitaka, Tad Hirsch, Igarashi Taro, Takehisa Yu, Miwako Tezuka, and Marilyn Ivy

All events are free and open to the public. Registration is recommended. For full details please visit the website: https://sites.google.com/a/uw.edu/seajapan/home

This symposium is organized by Justin Jesty.

Generous support has been provided by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Simpson Center for the Humanities, the Japan Faculty in Humanities and Arts, the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership, the UW Japan Program, and the UW Department of Asian Languages and Literature.

Published in the essay collection edited by Toba Koji and Yamamoto Naoki: Tenkeiki no mediolojii: 1950 nendai Nihon no geijutsu to media no saihensei (Mediology of an age of transformation: the reorganization of art and media in 1950s Japan) (Tokyo: Shinwasha, 2019).
http://www.shinwasha.com/141-5.html

Part of a special issue "Developments in Japanese Documentary Film" edited by Marcos Centeno and Michael Raine.

This paper focuses on two discrete bodies of work, Hani Susumu's films of the late 1950s and Tsuchimoto Noriaki's Minamata documentaries of the early 1970s, to trace the emergence of the cinéma vérité mode of participant-observer, small-crew documentary in Japan and to suggest how it shapes the work of later social documentarists. It argues that Hani Susumu's emphasis on duration and receptivity in the practice of filmmaking, along with his pragmatic understanding of the power of the cinematic image, establish a fundamentally different theoretical basis and set of questions for social documentary than the emphasis on mobility and access, and the attendant question of truth that tend to afflict the discourse of cinéma vérité in the U.S. and France. Tsuchimoto Noriaki critically adopts and develops Hani's theoretical and methodological framework in his emphasis on long-running involvement with the subjects of his films and his practical conviction that the image is not single-authored, self-sufficient, or meaningful in and of itself, but emerges from collaboration and must be embedded in a responsive social practice in order to meaningfully reach an audience. Hani and Tsuchimoto both believe that it is possible for filmmakers and the film itself to be fundamentally processual and intersubjective: grounded in actual collaboration, but also underwritten by a belief that intersubjective processes are more basic to human being than "the individual," let alone "the author." This paper explores the implications for representation and ethics of this basic difference in vérité theory and practice in Japan.

Professor Justin Jesty’s Art and Engagement in Early Postwar Japan reframes the history of art and its politics in Japan post-1945. This fascinating cultural history addresses our broad understanding of the immediate postwar era moving toward the Cold War and subsequent consolidations of political and cultural life. At the same time, Jesty delves into an examination of the relationship between art and politics that approaches art as a mode of intervention, but he moves beyond the idea that the artwork or artist unilaterally authors political signi cance to trace how creations and expressive acts may (or may not) actually engage the terms of shared meaning and value.