Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 25

A Restatement: The Art of ‘Ground Zero’ (Part 6)
Yusuke Nakahara and Nuclear Criticism I


Yusuke Nakahara speaking at the symposium The Shape of the Art Museum of the Future (September 2010, Benesse House, Naoshima). Photo Osama Nakamura, courtesy the Setouchi International Art Festival organizing committee.

On April 24 I took part in a dialogue in front of a live audience with Fram Kitagawa in which we discussed the late Yusuke Nakahara.(1)

The last time I met Nakahara was at the symposium, The Shape of the Art Museum of the Future, held as part of the Setouchi International Art Festival 2010, which Kitagawa directed.(2) If my memory serves me correctly, this was the third time the two of us shared a platform. Only once, however, did we speak one-to-one rather than as panelists. It was for a total of around 30 minutes when we shared a taxi from the Port of Takamatsu to the airport on our way back from that event in Naoshima. Upon reaching the airport, because we were catching different flights we simply bowed to each other slightly and went our separate ways. That was the last time I saw Yusuke Nakahara. Just six months later, by March 11, 2011, Nakahara had already departed this life.

In the wake of the disaster of March 11, there are more than a few things I want to ask him. But Nakahara died on March 3, and so he left this world without any knowledge of the massive earthquake or the massive tsunami or the nuclear accident that followed. I recall receiving the actual news of his death on March 12. So in my mind, the death of Yusuke Nakahara, one of the leading figures in post-war art criticism, and the catastrophic impact of March 11 overlap in many respects. However, in one sense it would be totally wrong to dismiss this as a mere coincidence.


Noi Sawaragi + Fram Kitagawa at “The Now, Post 3.11: What might Yusuke Nakahara have talked about,” a talk staged to celebrate the release of the second volume of Nakahara Yusuke bijutsu hihyo senshu (Selected works of art criticism by Yusuke Nakahara), April 2012, Hillside Plaza. © BankART1929, photo Tatsuhiko Nakagawa.

In my dialogue with Kitagawa I dwelled at length on the following single sentence from the end of Nakahara’s very first work of criticism, “Sozo no tame no hihyo” (Criticism for creation, 1955). Often, without the author being aware of it, the first text (book) they send out into the world contains a piece of writing that defines that author’s activities over their entire life, and in Nakahara’s case I think it is probably this sentence:

“In order to examine the contradiction between consciousness and matter and unrelenting development, we need to discover in league with artists a new way of looking at things.” (3)
“Sozo no tame no hihyo” was written while Nakahara was still a student in Hideki Yukawa’s laboratory at Kyoto University. Normally, it would be inconceivable for a discussion of “matter” not to be influenced by theoretical physics. But as hinted at by Nakahara’s original choice of the title for the “Man and Matter” art exhibition, “Between Man and Matter,” here “matter” means more than simply “physical objects.” Rather, the intended meaning is closer to the relativistic/quantum mechanical “place.” This should serve as a clue to understanding the reasons why Nakahara consistently found possibilities not in the mechanical “boxes” of art museums but in quantum mechanical “places,” and why he emphasized “place,” incorporating such things as perception and process, action and environment, more than readymade “artworks” and “exhibits,” employing such terms as “circumstances” and “presence.” At the same time, however, such an approach naturally contains within it the seeds of the destruction of “art.” Which is why it was probably an inevitability of sorts that after “Man and Matter” Nakahara made the most of these ideas and connections not by pursuing a career as a so-called “international curator” (ie, reinforcing existing “art”), but by directing his attention to the broader field of post-artistic cultural theory/civilization theory (despite the restrictions of the time).

Precisely for this reason, upon being informed of Nakahara’s death amidst the maelstrom of that cruel nuclear disaster, I immediately called to mind the fact that he had been a student of theoretical physics in Hideki Yukawa’s laboratory. If Nakahara had lived to witness that large-scale nuclear accident, I have no doubt he would have had some thoughts on the matter.


The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant (Unit 4) after the accident. Photographed March 15, 2011 (from the TEPCO website).

In fact, in his debut essay mentioned above, “Sozo no tame no hihyo,” rather unexpectedly there is a criticism of cybernetics from the very beginning. As the basis for his argument, Nakahara cites Kobo Abe, who, like Nakahara, studied science (at the School of Medicine at Tokyo Imperial University) before entering the world of literature, emphasizing the “cold and fragmentary nature” of matter. As a student of Hideki Yukawa’s at Kyoto University, Nakahara would have mentioned this with the full knowledge of the extent to which the physics of the atom are beyond anything imaginable to humans in terms of power and time. In contraposition to cybernetics, Nakahara offered poetry and the possibilities of art criticism. In a manner of speaking, this is the resistance through “creativity” to automated “machines.”

In reality, there is no better example of a cybernetic product than a nuclear reactor, a device by means of which humans seek to control the extraordinary power of nuclear energy. One could say that designs in which control rods are inserted automatically to prevent nuclear fission in the event of some kind of malfunction in a nuclear reactor and systems such as the emergency core cooling system (ECCS) that circulate steam generated by decay heat and cool the nuclear fuel even if power is temporarily lost are without doubt heirs of cybernetics. However, the very things Nakahara opposed in writing his criticism were these systems (as opposed to the ideology) of cybernetics. That is to say, his switch from theoretical physics to art criticism was not simply the result of his having been given an opportunity by having a piece he submitted published at the time of his debut, but may also have entailed a criticism of automatic control systems that far surpassed the capabilities of humans, as symbolized by a power generation technology that applied nuclear fission, basic research into which was then being conducted in Hideki Yukawa’s laboratory. Of course, Nakahara never lost interest in cybernetics in a broad sense. He continued to take an enduring interest in this field through his interest in such things as the invention of machines and perpetual motion and his peculiar view of nonsense as expressed through tautology. And yet this interest was always dogged by a paradox in that Nakahara was both attracted to and repelled by the subject. In fact, there are already indications of this vacillation in “Sozo no tame no hihyo.” Precisely for this reason, this “ambiguity” also gave Nakahara’s criticism a complex nuance that pushed it beyond plain science and technology criticism.

In this sense, when reading Yusuke Nakahara’s “Sozo no tame no hihyo,” one must not only closely examine the contents, but also consider the historical background to Nakahara’s writing at the time. In March 1954, the year before the essay’s publication, the Daigo Fukuryu Maru was exposed to radioactive fallout from a nuclear test on Bikini Atoll. This led to the rise of a massive anti-nuclear movement in Japan, which in turn was used to the advantage of the pro-nuclear lobby, who began to promote “the peaceful use of atomic energy (Atoms for Peace).” That same year there was another major shift in the field of atomic energy research. In February, the month before the Bikini incident, amidst political maneuvering by a group centered on Yasuhiro Nakasone, Japan’s first ever atomic energy draft budget of 250 million yen was submitted to the Diet, where it promptly passed through the House of Representatives. “The scientists are vacillating,” said Nakasone, “so we’re slapping their cheeks with bundles of money.”

This statement by Nakasone was a denial of everything to do with Japan’s basic research into atomic power. Japanese scientists had built a cyclotron as early as the 1930s (4), and during the war, research into atomic weapons was conducted in secret by the likes of Hantaro Nagaoka and Yoshio Nishina. After the war, the US prohibited all such research, although the theoretical knowledge was passed on to people such as Hideki Yukawa and Shinichiro Tomonaga. Yusuke Nakahara, the scientist-turned-art critic, shared this same pedigree.

Nakasone’s statement was also a clear expression of Japan’s policy of dispensing with its own program of nuclear reactor development and importing nuclear reactors already developed in the UK and US. In fact, the reactors in Unit 1 at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant were built by General Electric. It is not inconceivable that this gave rise to a disparity between the power generation technology used in commercial nuclear reactors and the academic research into theoretical physics being conducted at Japanese universities, as a result of which basic research into such things as the kind of response necessary during an emergency involving a light-water reactor atrophied. In fact, looking back over the almost frightened conduct and untruths that emanated from this country’s foremost “scholars” and “experts” who seemed at a loss for what to do when confronted with the nuclear reactor meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, this should immediately be obvious.

Yusuke Nakahara’s switch to cybernetics criticism and art criticism came against the historical background of this sequence of events concerning the peaceful use of atomic energy. Precisely for this reason, as an art critic myself I feel obliged to consider again what Nakahara, who became an art critic as these events were unfolding, would have thought upon witnessing explosions at a nuclear power plant, a product of the cybernetics whose development had to be abandoned in his own country. (To be continued)

 

 

    1. “The Now, Post 3.11: What might Yusuke Nakahara have talked about,” a dialogue between Noi Sawaragi and Fram Kitagawa staged to celebrate the release of the second volume of

Nakahara Yusuke bijutsu hihyo senshu

    1. (Selected works of art criticism by Yusuke Nakahara) held April 24, 2012, at Hillside Plaza, Tokyo.

  1. Held at Benesse House, Naoshima on September 5, 2010. Panelists: Yusuke Nakahara, Fram Kitagawa, Noi Sawaragi, Katsuhiko Hibino and Akira Tatehata (moderator).
  2. Yusuke Nakahara, “Sozo no tame no hihyo” (Criticism for creation) Nakahara Yusuke bijutsu hihyo senshu, dai-ikkan: Sozo no tame no hihyo – sengo bijutsu hihyo no chihei (Selected works of art criticism by Yusuke Nakahara, Volume 1: Criticism for creation – Perspectives on post-war art criticism), (Tokyo: Gendai Kikakushitsu + BankART 1929, 2011).
  3. It is thought that following Japan’s defeat in the war, the three cyclotrons built in Japan (at the Riken Institute and at the Imperial universities in Osaka and Kyoto) were sent to the bottom of Tokyo Bay, Osaka Bay, and Lake Biwa, respectively, by the US occupation forces. Could it be that they still rest at the bottom of those waters?

Noi Sawaragi: Notes on Art and Current Events 1-6

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