Although postwar Japanese avant-garde art is considered to have ended in the year 1970, Julian Ross contends that projection installations in the 1970s took on many of its characteristics, namely, an engagement with the concepts of “environment,” “intermedia,” and “display.” These critical concepts were not merely debated in Tokyo, but were also reflected in artists’ practices in Kyoto and Osaka. Ross discusses case studies, including film installations presented in the exhibition Equivalent Cinema (Kyoto, 1972) and other intermedia pieces that involved projection, kinetic art, synthesis art, video, film, sound, etc., in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Projection Installations in Japan, 1960s–1970s, Part I

Projection Installations in Japan, 1960s–1970s, Part II

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One of these activities was the Happening for Sightseeing Bus Trip in Tokyo, presented in this feature. Ay-O organized the piece in Tokyo on December 18, 1966, with the help of Shimizu Kusuo, the founder and director of Minami Gallery. Assistance was also provided by the artists Yamaguchi Katsuhiro and Akiyama Kuniharu, who had visited New York and were interested in both Fluxus and Happenings. The performers included artist Mieko Shiomi, another participant in New York Fluxus; Tone Yasunao, a former member of Group Ongaku and future member of Fluxus in New York; and the art critic Tono Yoshiaki, who often promoted the emerging art of performance. Because the term “Happening” was more popular than “Event” in Japan, it was used in the title of the tour.

Around noon on that cold day, more than sixty participants boarded two rented buses near the Tokyo Station. In the manner of a commercial sightseeing tour, the buses made various stops across the city. At these stops, the performers realized more than fifteen works billed as Events and several others that were referred to as Happenings. While most of the pieces were by Fluxus artists, Ay-O included some by Happenings artists, including Allan Kaprow and Al Hansen, and also an Event by Yamaguchi. A review in Bijutsu Techo magazine (February 1967) explained that Happenings are “environmental play” and that staging them in the proper setting can be rather difficult, but concluded that the “participants seem to have enjoyed this prepared chance.”

Earlier on November 14, another Happening was held at the Sogetsu Art Center in conjunction with the exhibition Kukan kara kankyo e (From Space to Environment), where many of the same artists participated to promote the concept and practice of Fluxus in Japan. The Happening was recorded on film and in photographs taken by some of the participants. post presents the film and selected photographs by Nishiyama Teruo, who took part in the tour.

Details of the tour are provided in the photograph captions and are placed in the sequence in which they appear in the film.

Fluxus Bus

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Since its beginnings in the early 1960s, Fluxus has attracted artists from a wide range of cultural backgrounds to its open-ended philosophy and practice. It presents a remarkable model of an early transnational artistic movement that drew simultaneously from currents in the United States, Europe, and Japan.¹ It is especially remarkable that Fluxus included so many Japanese artists, including Akiyama Kuniharu, Ay-O, Ichiyanagi Toshi, Kosugi Takehisa, Kubota Shigeko, Yoko Ono, Saito Takako, Shiomi Mieko, and Tone Yasunao. By means of frequent travel and regular correspondence, these artists linked vanguard communities in Tokyo and New York, infusing Fluxus concepts and events with the latest artistic developments from Japan. Most of the literature on Fluxus focuses on the movement’s American and European adherents, barely acknowledging the contributions of Japanese artists.² By shedding light onto the catalytic role Japanese artists played in this trans-Pacific artistic exchange, this article aims to expand knowledge not only of Fluxus, but also of the history of the international avant-garde.

Building the Tokyo–New York Nexus

Yoko Ono and composer Ichiyanagi Toshi, married partners from 1956 to 1962, were key figures early on in the forging of ties between artists in New York and Tokyo. In 1958, Ichiyanagi, who had studied at the Juilliard School, attended John Cage’s electronic music composition class at the New School of Social Research, where he befriended future Happenings and Fluxus artists, such as Allan Kaprow, Dick Higgins, and George Brecht. Together with composer La Monte Young, Ono co-organized experimental music, dance, poetry, and art events in her loft on Chambers Street in 1960. These performances inspired the Lithuanian-born artist George Maciunas to stage a similar series of events the following year at his AG Gallery. His intention was to raise money for his prospective publication Fluxus, which was to feature works by experimental artists and composers worldwide. Ichiyanagi and Ono returned to Japan in 1961 and 1962, respectively, and encouraged friends and associates in Tokyo to send music scores, tapes, and texts to Maciunas before Fluxus was officially inaugurated as an artistic movement.³ Prompted by the influx of material, Maciunas planned a special Japanese issue of Fluxus that was to have had contributions by various Japanese artists and writers, including the critic Tono Yoshiaki. He also planned a concert series devoted to works by Japanese composers, such as members of Group Ongaku (Group Music). Neither plan was realized (Fig. 1).⁴

Among the Japanese avant-garde collectives that emerged in the early 1960s, Group Ongaku was the first to make contact with Fluxus. Founded by Kosugi Takehisa and Shiomi Chieko (later known as Shiomi Mieko),⁵ musicology students at Tokyo National University of Music and Arts, and by Tone Yasunao, who had studied French literature, Group Ongaku used everyday objects—a vacuum cleaner, dishes, an oil can—to create musical improvisations. Although the group had not been exposed to Cage’s music, its members’ knowledge of musique concrète and early twentieth-century avant-garde music led them to explore the concept of objet sonore (sound object, or sound as object).⁶ Ichiyanagi attended Group Ongaku’s concert at the Sogetsu Art Center in September 1961 and was astonished to discover a Japanese band that was engaged in something very similar to what he and his peers were experimenting with in New York. That something would soon be called Fluxus.⁷

Later that year, Ichiyanagi invited Group Ongaku to perform the Japanese premiere of his IBM—Happening and Musique Concrète, also at the Sogetsu Art Center (Fig. 2). As in his earlier work IBM for Merce Cunningham and Music for Electric Metronome (1960), which was later released as a Fluxus edition, Ichiyanagi used a randomly selected set of IBM computer punch cards as scores, and the performers were allowed to interpret them as they wished (Fig. 3).⁸ Instead of playing instruments, Group Ongaku performed a wide range of familiar, unrelated actions from daily life: Shiomi blew soap bubbles; Tone broke a ceramic bowl.⁹ Their attempt to bring life into art/music matched the direction Maciunas was envisioning for Fluxus, and he would soon become an eager collector of music tapes and scores by Group Ongaku members and their friends.¹⁰

In May 1962, Ono held her own concert at the Sogetsu Art Center (Fig. 4). She enlisted more than thirty avant-garde luminaries to perform her complex pieces, including composers Yuasa Joji and Akiyama Kuniharu, formerly with Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop); members of Group Ongaku; the dancer Hijikata Tatsumi; and Akasegawa Genpei, a future member of art collective Hi Red Center. In The Pulse, performers made sounds of their own choosing each time they solved a mathematical problem.¹¹ Throughout the long evening of unconventional musical events, Ono challenged the traditional one-way relationship between performer and audience. An unidentified reviewer commented: “It is 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.”¹²

Later that year, Ono participated in John Cage’s concert at the Sogetsu Art Center. The two events—first Ono’s, then Cage’s—incited a Happening craze in Japan. The media described Ono as one of the initiators of Happenings in New York, thus popularizing the term “Happening.” “Event,” the synonymous term used by Fluxus, would be adopted by the artists’ collective Hi Red Center but didn’t catch on as widely with the public.¹³ By the summer of 1964, when she returned to New York, Ono had written a number of conceptual/performative instructions and published them in an anthology entitled Grapefruit (Fig. 5). She had become a renowned figure in Tokyo’s avant-garde circle, having staged a series of exhibitions at Naiqua Gallery, concerts in Kyoto and Tokyo, and having participated in seminal works by her artist friends, including Hi Red Center’s Shelter Plan, held at the Imperial Hotel Tokyo in January 1964 (Fig. 6) and reenacted as Hotel Event by New York Fluxus members in 1965.¹⁴

The Korean-born composer Nam June Paik was another important catalyst in linking Tokyo and New York. A graduate of the University of Tokyo, Paik visited the Japanese capital in 1963 on a trip from Germany, where he had made his name by destroying musical instruments in the inaugural Fluxus concerts. During his brief stay, Paik met Tone, Kosugi, and Shiomi of the by then defunct Group Ongaku and asked them to perform in the May 1964 staging of his Events at the Sogetsu Art Center (Fig. 7). He found Shiomi’s Endless Box wonderfully witty and, knowing that would fit Fluxus perfectly, encouraged Shiomi to send it to Maciunas (Fig. 8). A visualization of a musical diminuendo, Endless Box consisted of thirty-four handmade paper boxes that could be nested one inside another.¹⁵ Maciunas so much liked the first set he received that he asked for twenty more, and Shiomi used the money he paid for them to travel to New York.¹⁶ Sent by post, Shiomi’s Endless Box and several event scores that she included in the package were offered for sale at the Flux Shop six months before the artist herself arrived in New York in July 1964 (Fig. 9).¹⁷

Shiomi’s friend, the sculptor Kubota Shigeko, learned of Fluxus through Ono, Ichiyanagi, and Paik around 1964 and began corresponding with Maciunas. Disappointed by critics’ indifference to the ambitious exhibition of her environmental sculpture 1st.LOVE, 2nd.LOVE… at the Naiqua Gallery (Fig. 10), Kubota decided to accept an invitation from Maciunas to move to New York.¹⁸ (Fig. 11) In her letter to him, written on a scroll, Kubota expressed her determination: “I’d like to touch, to see and feel something by touching a group of Fluxus and living myself in New York [sic].” Much later, she explained that one of the major factors behind her move was that “Japan [was] so conservative,” made up of “all male artists and male-oriented society.”¹⁹ On July 4, 1964, soon after Japan began issuing tourist visas to facilitate international travel, Kubota and Shiomi took the same flight to New York and received a warm welcome from the Fluxus community. Within a year, they each presented their own Fluxus events and created Flux objects. While Shiomi stayed for only one year, Kubota decided to remain permanently.²⁰

Japanese Contributions to Fluxus

Maciunas’s enthusiasm and admiration for Japanese culture and art were as significant as the change in Japanese foreign policy in strengthening the nascent connection between Japanese and American artists. Not only did Maciunas possess Japanese swords and other artifacts and furnish his apartment with tatami mats, but he led an ascetic lifestyle that gave Japanese artists such as Yoshi Wada the impression that he was a “practitioner of Zen.”²¹ Maciunas even dreamed of building an artist’s commune in Japan where residents would grow their own food and spend their time “Fluxing around, publishing all kinds of things, swindling idiots and robbing the fat capitalists.”²² A committed anti-capitalist and utopian, Maciunas felt a strong connection to the Japanese—and particularly to their group ethics, which were so far removed from Western individualism.²³

Japanese women artists became a hidden force behind the production of Flux objects. Along with Saito Takako, who had joined the group in early 1964, Shiomi and Kubota took part in the Fluxus dinner commune. For several weeks, they shared the duties of shopping for groceries, cooking, and, after dinner, producing Flux objects. Most of the responsibility for the meals fell upon women, and the effort did not last long.²⁴ While Shiomi and Kubota soon found part-time jobs, Saito continued to produce Flux objects until 1967, when she relocated to Europe. Among those works were several versions of Flux Chess, including Sound Chess, Weight Chess, and Nut and Bolt Chess, which she made at the suggestion of Maciunas, a chess aficionado (Fig. 12). Unlike traditional chess sets, Saito’s engaged the five senses. She did not claim authorship but produced the works under the name of the collective.²⁵ Although Fluxus advocated the production of multiples as a way of challenging the traditional sense of authorship, it never sought to undermine the intrinsic value of esthetic quality, which Saito’s crafting skills raised to a high level in Flux objects.

Another Japanese artist, known by the pseudonym Ay-O, had moved to New York from Tokyo in 1958 and joined Fluxus earlier than Shiomi and Kubota did. Although he had hoped to have his first solo show at Maciunas’s AG Gallery, the gallery went bankrupt in 1961, and Maciunas fled to Europe. During Maciunas’s absence, which lasted nearly two years, Ay-O developed friendships with future Fluxus and Happening artists such as Allan Kaprow and Dick Higgins, among many others, helping them with their works and participating in their performances.²⁶ After Maciunas returned to New York, Ay-O helped him build the Flux Shop and Hall on Canal Street, where he lived in a loft just a few doors down. The Flux objects offered for sale at the opening of Fluxus Shop in 1964 included Ay-O’s Finger Box, an edition of cardboard cubes that fit in the palm of the hand and were covered with the artist’s logo, which was designed by Maciunas. The wooden version in the MoMA collection was produced for inclusion in the Fluxkit (Fig. 13). Each box had a hole at the top large enough for a finger to fit through. Inside were objects—or bits of objects—hidden from view, to be examined exclusively by touch. The boxes in the first edition, which comprised about eight hundred, contained only a rubber sponge. The content and quantity were chosen partly to advertise Ay-O’s sponge-filled environment Orange Box, which was installed at the Smolin Gallery. Priced at one dollar and ninety-eight cents, the boxes sold quickly to collectors around the world through the Flux mail order system Maciunas had launched.²⁷ A later, attaché-case version of Finger Box offered a wider range of tactile sensations. It contained a variety of materials: a small brush, sawdust, Vaseline, and even nothing—a void—to surprise the person interacting with the box. Ay-O’s Finger Box became one of the most popular Fluxus products to explore the previously neglected sensory dimension of touch in artistic experience. The work’s playfulness also corresponded to the Fluxus philosophy of making art accessible to all.

Another Japanese member of Fluxus was the composer and music critic Akiyama Kuniharu, a former member of Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop) who had considerable knowledge of Japanese and Western avant-garde art and music. It was he who was responsible for introducing the music of John Cage to Japanese audiences. Akiyama had corresponded with Maciunas from Japan after Ichiyanagi had provided an introduction. He traveled to New York in late 1963, and soon after his arrival, Maciunas showed him how to limit his food budget to five dollars a week, down from the eight dollars per day that he had been spending.²⁸ Just as Akiyama was getting ready to leave for Europe around April 1964, Maciunas asked him to conduct the first Flux concert at Carnegie Recital Hall (Fig. 15). Having had no prior conducting experience, Akiyama initially declined, but he gradually gave in to Maciunas’s repeated pleas and stayed in New York for an extra two months.

On June 28, 1964, Akiyama appeared on stage at Carnegie Recital Hall dressed in a tailcoat. He conducted about a dozen of pieces, beginning with The Star-Spangled Banner arranged by La Monte Young.²⁹ Other pieces included George Brecht’s Solo for Violin, in which all members of the Fluxus Symphony Orchestra polished their instruments when Akiyama gave the signal by polishing his baton; and Kosugi Takehisa’s Organic Music, which called for performers to produce sounds by breathing in and out through paper tubes.³⁰ Bravely and playfully, and to the audience’s delight, Akiyama even introduced the “Japanese samurai style” of conducting by imitating a sword-fighting movement while leading Dick Higgins’s Constellation II. In preparation for the concert, Akiyama attended the series of Flux Fests held at the Flux Hall and in streets of SoHo on weekend evenings from April to June 1964. Moved by fresh encounters he experienced with Fluxus members in New York, Akiyama became a strong proponent of the group after he returned to Tokyo.³¹ When Shiomi felt unsure about traveling to New York, Akiyama encouraged her by writing that Fluxus artists loved her work and that she would be welcomed there.

Tokyo Fluxus

While there was no organized effort to establish a Tokyo branch of Fluxus, a series of Fluxus-related events was held in the Japanese capital after Shiomi’s return in 1965.³² Akiyama and Ichiyanagi co-organized Flux Week, which was comprised of a series of events and an exhibition of publications and objects at Gallery Crystal, in September 1965 (Fig. 16). One evening was dedicated to Shiomi’s performance pieces, including Water Music and A Piece for Two Performers. On other evenings, Akiyama, Ichiyanagi, Tone, and composer Takemitsu Toru performed Fluxus works for a small audience (Fig. 17).³³

The activities that might be said to encompass “Tokyo Fluxus” culminated with Ay-O’s return to Japan at the end of 1966, after eight years’ absence. A Happening titled Kukan kara kankyo e (From Space to Environment) was presented at the Sogetsu Art Center in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title at the Matsuya Department Store Gallery. A collaborative effort by thirty-eight multidisciplinary artists and critics, the exhibition and performances embodied the new concept of “environment” as a site/catalyst for a “dynamic relationship between humans and their surroundings (Figs. 18a and 18b).”³⁴ For Ichiyanagi’s Environmental Music performance, graphic designers Awazu Kiyoshi and Fukuda Shigeo, Ay-O, and the art critic Tono Yoshiaki sat in a row of chairs on stage and followed the instruction “incline your body on a chair as slowly as possible to an unbearable position” (Fig. 19). Tono interpreted the command by crawling under his chair and lifting it above his head. In his Rainbow Event, Ay-O carried out a series of everyday actions such as brushing his teeth and shaving, to each of which he assigned one of the seven colors of the rainbow, while Shiomi and Akiyama performed simple physical exercises. Shiomi presented Compound View I with Ay-O, Akiyama, and artist Yamaguchi Katsuhiro (Fig. 20).³⁵ Comprised of three acts, a series of nonsensical actions unfolded around a water tank placed on a table. Performers took the temperature of the water, sat down, stood up, and wrote a word on a cigarette, which they smoked it until it turned to ashes. Although these performances were dubbed “Happenings” by the press, they were closer to Fluxus Events in their brevity and content, which encouraged the audience to rethink aspects of their daily lives and environments.

The penultimate piece of the evening was Akiyama’s Water Ring Event No. 1, whose score card was recently rediscovered in the Silverman Fluxus Collection at The Museum of Modern Art (Fig. 21). The Japanese text, mimeographed by Akiyama, provides the following instructions:

Warm an object and hide it in another’s hand. Continue this action of exchange while doing the following:

(1) Pronounce the name of the object in your co-performer’s hand in every possible way as a means of confirmation.

(2) Each performer should perform as instructed on the back of the card.

(3) Finally, continue the performance using the objects.³⁶

While there are a few photographs documenting this Event, the somewhat cryptic descriptions make it difficult to reconstruct the performance. The last work in the program, Takemitsu’s Event for Seven Hills, was dedicated to Ay-O, whose signature motif was the seven colors of the rainbow. On stage, seven performers were stationed at ladders representing seven hills and repeated disparate actions, such as typing “WORD” on a typewriter and performing magic tricks.³⁷ It is notable that three former members of Jikken Kobo—Takemitsu, Yamaguchi, and Akiyama—created Fluxus-inspired pieces and presented them on this special occasion, which marked the emergence of intermedia art in Japan.³⁸ This convergence of Fluxus and intermedia art is not surprising, considering the fact that in the mid-1950s Jikken Kobo pioneered cross-genre collaborations that Fluxus would identify as “intermedia” almost a decade later.³⁹

In December 1966, Ay-O, with the help of Minami Gallery, organized the Happening for Sightseeing Bus Trip, a piece in which participants rode in a rented bus and performed Fluxus Events at various stops throughout Tokyo (Fig. 22).⁴⁰ The performers overlapped with those who took part in From Space to Environment, including Shiomi and Akiyama. Together they realized approximately fifteen Events and several Happenings at locations such as the Sengakuji temple and the Meiji shrine. After that, Tokyo Fluxus activities tapered off, but the Fluxus philosophy of turning the viewer into a participant continued to inform the work of many artists. In fact, many artists who had participated in From Space to Environment played an important role in shaping the 1970 Osaka World Exposition as a site for promoting interaction among visitors and the environment.⁴¹

After 1970, the collective activities of Fluxus waned, but Japanese artists remained actively engaged with the movement. Kubota and Paik, who married in 1965, were close friends with Maciunas and lived in the co-op building that he organized in New York’s SoHo. Ay-O lived in the same building and was a regular participant in most of the late Fluxus Events. In 1972, after corresponding with Maciunas for a decade, Tone moved to New York and joined Fluxus.⁴² Back in Japan, Shiomi completed nine mail art Events, part of the Spatial Poem series that she originated in New York in 1965 (Fig. 23). For each Event, she mailed instructions to people worldwide, asking them to interpret her instructions and then send her a written report. Through correspondence, she collaborated with Maciunas in designing the objects based on those reports.

After Maciunas’s death in 1978, there was a lull in Fluxus activities, but since the 1990s there has been a resurgence of interest and energy in the movement. Many international Fluxus exhibitions have been providing opportunities for artists’ reunions. Stimulated by these events, Shiomi has reinterpreted Fluxus through multimedia works such as the intermedia event Fluxus Media Opera (1994), which she executed with the help of young musicians and artists.⁴³ As artists who were directly involved in New York Fluxus, both Ay-O and Shiomi played a central role in the dissemination of Fluxus in Japan, often by presenting Fluxus Events during their exhibitions or concerts (Fig. 23). Now they are passing the Fluxus spirit on to younger generations.

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