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The Genesis of the Kōgei (Craft) Genre and the Avant-Garde: Surrounding the Creation of the Tokyo Municipal Museum of Art
KITAZAWA Noriaki Translated by Chelsea Foxwell
Introduction
The Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku) website lists the
following academic departments under its Faculty of Fine Arts: Painting is first, followed
Sculpture and Craft, and succeeded by Design, Architecture, Intermedia Art, and
Aesthetics and Art History(Gakubu Kenkyūka 2015). This order is hardly arbitrary. We
might say that the genres are ranked in the order of Japanese society’s general perception
of their relative worth.
Painting’s position at the top of the hierarchy stems from the apprehension of the
fine arts (bijutsu 美術) concept as centering around the visual or plastic arts. This is
because, in the typical understanding, painting easily surpasses sculpture and craft in its
degree of visuality or opticality. Sculpture precedes craft because the latter carries the
prerequisite of functionality. Craft belongs to the fine arts inasmuch as it anticipates
appreciation of its visual qualities, but it also contains other attributes that are distinct
from aesthetic appreciation.
Now it must be emphasized that this ranking is a function of the modern
formulation of the fine arts, and even today there are various forms of moving image that
now surpass painting in their degree of visuality. Further, today there are also many types
of contemporary art that directly intervene in social realities in various ways beyond the
original realm of bijutsu based on aesthetic appreciation. In this sense, the ranking on the
website of the Tokyo University of the Arts reflects a value system that is already a thing
of the past.
What was the formation process of this hierarchy which persists so tenaciously to
the present day? If we chart this process through a number of specific cases, we can see
that first, the term bijutsu was created as a translation of Western terms, and then a
number of institutions were gradually constructed around that term. Originally, one
would not have assumed that the things we call kōgei (roughly translatable as craft工芸)
would have been incorporated so fully and exclusively into the domain of bijutsu, but
kōgei somehow became included in the realm of bijutsu as the result of several factors,
most notably (1) the cultural memes (bunka idenshi文化遺伝子; literally, the cultural
genes that allow ideas and practices to be transmitted between people) of making things,
and of the creation of form, in Japanese society (Dawkins 2006, 189-200); (2) the
emergence of an avant-garde in the Taishō era; and (3) the development of strains of
thought which emphasized life (sei or seimei).
With the following thoughts in mind, I would like to develop an investigation of
the genesis of the kōgei genre—its history and structure.
I. Bijutsu and its Institutions: With a Focus on the Relationship Between
Bijutsu and Kōgei
I-i A re-civilizing project patterned on the modern West
The Japanese word bijutsu corresponds to the English terms visual arts or plastic arts and
refers to the techniques (jutsu) of producing things of aesthetic value (bi). It also refers to
the institutions and social schema that stipulate or maintain the criteria of aesthetic
excellence. Since neither the word nor concept of bijutsu existed in Japan in the Edo
period and earlier, we do not encounter the familiar array of institutions surrounding
bijutsu in that period, either. The word bijutsu and its attendant institutions emerged at
the beginning of the Meiji period, when people initiated a re-civilizing project based on
the modern West. Specifically, bijutsu was created as a translation of words such as
Kunst and art when Japan began planning its submissions to the 1873 International
Exhibition in Vienna (Weltausstellung 1873 Wien). Relatedly, this period saw the
national project of establishing the institutions and facilities such as the temporary Art
Gallery (Bijutsukan) in Japan’s new Domestic Industrial Exhibitions (内国勧業博覧会),
or the Technical Fine Arts School (工部美術学校).1 That said, the concept of bijutsu at
the Vienna exhibition still included music and literature and was in that sense used to
mean “art” in the broader sense of the term. At the same time, through the construction of
a physical and conceptual infrastructure for art in these years, the term bijutsu began to
approach its present, more focused meaning (Kitazawa 2013, 13 – 14).
Cultural nationalism was the most prominent force in the construction of this
system of bijutsu, or fine arts, and its integration into Japanese society. Here, however,
the word nationalism requires further comment. To the extent that this system developed
around bijutsu, a term imported from the West, it also played a Westernizing role, and
launched an offensive on existing cultural forms, which, in contrast to Japan’s political or
economic sectors, tended to be deeply conservative. In this sense, the cultural nationalism
of bijutsu played an important role as a camouflaged form of Westernization.2
It was in the 1880s and early 1890s that the art institutions ushered in by cultural
nationalism bore some degree of fruit. In 1889, the same year that the Meiji constitutional
system was established, the government founded the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, which
adopted the approach of cultural nationalism. This year also saw the formation of the
Meiji Art Society (明治美術会), a group of yōga (“Western-style painting”) artists, and
art journalism advanced with the establishment of the journal Kokka (国華 Flowers of the
Nation).
It was also in the same year that the Fine Arts section of the Domestic Industrial
Exhibition, which was the premiere stage for artists at the time, developed the genre
formulations that have persisted up to the present day. Up until that point, sculpture had
headed the list of genres in accordance with political interests that emphasized the
creation of national monuments. At the Third Domestic Industrial Exhibition, however,
painting was listed first, followed by sculpture and craft (kōgei) (Kitazawa 2013, 38-41).
This new hierarchy was based on exposition classifications in France, which were
founded on a modernist purism. Painting, which at the time represented the visual arts in
their purest form, was given the role of representing all the other arts (Kitazawa 2013, 41-
42).
I-ii Kōgei and bijutsu
The same logic appears to have motivated the last-place status accorded to kōgei,
or craft. The modern Japanese word kōgei differs from the ancient Chinese term denoting
expert workmanship. Instead, it has been used to denote a genre of hybrid objects that
combined aesthetic value and usefulness, in other words, “arts and crafts.”3 On account of
this hybridity, kōgei was ranked lower than painting and sculpture, which aimed for
aesthetic value alone. In short, to combine aesthetic and functional qualities was to exist
as both fine art and as industry. Kōgei was positioned at the border between bijutsu, the
creation of form that aimed for aesthetic value, and kōgyō (工業 industry), the creation of
form for functional purposes. This was manifest to an extreme degree at the Third
Domestic Industrial Exhibition, where kōgei was termed bijutsu-kōgyō, or “Art applied to
industry,” “art industry,” etc. (Kitazawa 2005, 223). This mode of existence did not sit
well with modernism’s aspirations toward purity. For that reason, the kōgei genre was
eliminated from the Ministry of Education Exhibition (文展) when it was founded in
1907.4
Calligraphy (書 sho) and architecture also combine aesthetics and practicality.
Like craft, architecture is profoundly related to industry. Calligraphy, by contrast, is a
traditional East Asian art form, while architecture is a form of kōgaku (工学 engineering).
Because of this, those genres ended up being treated separately. In contrast, kōgei
resembles painting and sculpture in that it uses handcraft to produce forms with aesthetic
value; at the same time, it resembles industry (kōgyō) in the aspect of creating functional
objects. In this way, it contains conspicuous aspects of both bijutsu and kōgyō. It is also
probably important to note that kōgei began to be associated with the fine arts through
European connoisseurs whose tastes tended toward Japonaiserie and had a strong interest
in craft objects.
From the above we can see that kōgei was allocated to the border zone of the fine
arts because of its affinities with industry (kōgyō). In fact, however, industry also played
a significant role in the genesis of the fine arts (bijutsu) as a genre. As I mentioned
earlier, the notion of bijutsu originally included literature, music, and other pursuits, but it
gradually came to center on the visual or plastic arts. That process of increased focus on
the visual was prompted in large part by the Industrial Revolution. As society’s values
began to be directed toward the industrial production of things, the production of a work
of art in the form of a thing, in this case painting and sculpture, came to represent the
notion of bijutsu or the fine arts as a whole.
In spite of having emerged in close relation to industrial production, bijutsu also
stood in opposition to industry, emphasizing aesthetic appeal and the hand crafted in
contrast to modern industry’s emphasis on mechanized production in factories. Because
of the similarities and differences between the two, their relationship resembled that of a
parent and child who had had a falling-out. This form of fundamental conflict between
bijutsu and modern industry is likely what marginalized the status of kōgei.
I-iii The art museum as the keystone of the system
In this way, the notion of bijutsu became cemented within society through the
establishment of several types of institutions that were founded beginning around 1889,
when the new constitutional system was taking hold. Yet the centerpieces of the effort to
establish bijutsu, namely, the creation of an official art exhibition and the construction of
an art museum for contemporary works, remained as projects to be tackled in the future.
A national salon or official exhibition did not appear until the establishment of the the
Ministry of Education Exhibition in 1907, while a museum for contemporary art was first
created only with the opening of the Tokyo Municipal Museum (東京府美術館) in 1926.
The national salon played a key role in helping bijutsu to take root as a subsystem
of society. In addition to deepening the public’s awareness of exhibition as a social
system, the Bunten produced many results in Japanese society, including the creation of a
modern audience, the modernization of the art market, and the enlivening of the field of
art journalism.
The national art exhibition was also deeply related to the challenges surrounding
the construction of an art museum. The Bunten was furnished with a system for the
purchase of art works, but the nation lacked a museum in which to house them. Further,
Japan at that time lacked a permanent facility that was suitable for a national salon. The
founding of the Bunten only heightened the demand for such a facility. In other words,
the absence of a museum to display and store contemporary art hovered the background
of the Bunten’s creation. Yet this non-existent museum was itself supposed to be the
keystone of the system of the fine arts, and without it, the arch --the system of bijutsu--
would never be completed. The movement to construct an art museum, which had been
inspired by the creation of the Bunten, gradually converged in the construction of the
Tokyo Municipal Museum of Art (Pak 2012, 104 – 124).
Despite its name, the Tokyo Municipal Museum of Art was less a museum than a
hall available for rental, and from the moment of its founding criticism was directed
toward the use of the term bijutsukan (美術館museum of art). Yet it was highly
significant that the municipal government had decided to append the name bijutsu-kan to
Japan’s first permanent facility for the art of the present day.5 The newly built museum’s
permanent facilities for the display of present-day art complemented the existing
permanent exhibition space for art historical collections at the Imperial Museum (帝室博
物館), which had its origins in the Ministry of Education Museum (文部省博物館) that
had been founded in 1872. With this addition and that of the Ōkura Shūkokan (大倉集古
館 founded in 1917), the system of bijutsu took its shape.
The Tokyo Municipal Museum of Art should have been the keystone that
established bijutsu in its present-day sense as a modern social system. Yet at the same
time as the work to insert this keystone had begun, a challenge to the system of bijutsu
had already begun to churn at the outer periphery of what we can think of as the series of
concentric circles that surrounded the arch. This was the emergence of the avant-garde.
II. The Tokyo Municipal Museum and the Rise and Fall of the Avant-Garde
II-i Simultaneous avant-garde movements and the construction of the art museum
Curiously, the process of building the Tokyo Municipal Museum of Art almost exactly
paralleled the rise and fall of the avant-garde. Just when it seemed that the system of
bijutsu had been firmly established with the realization of the art world’s long-cherished
dream of a museum for present-day art, the avant-garde reared its head under the banner
of anti-bijutsu.
The origins of the two were simultaneous. One year after the establishment of the
Futurist Art Association (未来派美術協会) in 1920, the much-desired art museum
headed on its winding road toward completion after receiving a large donation of funds
from the businessman Satō Keitarō (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, ed. 233-239).
The Futurist Art Association was founded by the artist Fumon Gyō after he failed to have his work accepted to the Second Section Exhibition (二科展), at the time a bastion of artistic modernism. In 1922, Fumon established an exhibition called the Sanka (the
Third Section) Independent. It has been suggested that this “Third Section” was meant to indicate that the exhibition was even newer than the modernist Second Section and thereby contained elements of an oppositional or peripheral mentality vis-a-vis modernism, which was understood as already formed.6 Further, the Second Section Exhibition had grown out of the Second Section Society, a group of oil painters exploring new trends. These painters wanted the oil painting section of the Bunten to split into two groups, a conservative First Section and a progressive Second Section. When this plan was withdrawn, the Second Section was disenfranchised [and separated from the Bunten] (Ishii 1933, 5-16). In this sense, Third Section stood for a group that was on the outer margin of the official exhibitions, which were located at the center of bijutsu.
II-ii The escalation of the avant-garde: the secession from bijutsu
In this way, [the art world] developed in concentric circles around the institution
of the public exhibition, but in 1923, just prior to the Great Kantō Earthquake, there
emerged a radical avant-garde group that surpassed all of it. This was MAVO.7
In this group, which was formed by Murayama Tomoyoshi shortly after his return
from study in Europe, the notion of the avant-garde took on a meaning that transcended
the notion of the front lines or vanguard of bijutsu. That is, it broke through the limits of
bijutsu, which had referred to the visual or plastic arts, and the avant-garde even
exceeded the limits of art (geijutsu), with its goal of aeshetic appreciation. The front
“line” on which the avant-garde was situated was in fact not so much a line as it was
a border zone, a place where art and non-art clashed and challenged each other, at times
intermingling. And because of that, the avant-garde was forced to inhabit an ambivalent
state that belonged to the categories of both art and non-art. Murayama’s MAVO group
epitomized this trend.
In May of 1925, a month after the ceremony to lay the cornerstone of the
Municipal Museum of Art, an event called the Third Section of the Theater (劇場の三
科) took place at the Tsukiji Little Theater [in Tokyo]. Performances filled with violence
and commotion unfolded in quick succession. One year prior, a group of avant-garde
members banded together to form a lively group called the Third Section Plastic Art
Association (三科造形美術協会). In this way, concentric circles ranged in order of
degree of their peripheral status with respect to the official exhibitions formed and
became estranged from the concept of bijutsu. This estrangement, in turn, expressed itself
as a pragmatic critique of the central zone of bijutsu. The Tokyo Municipal Museum of
Art came into being just as the presence of a disaffected avant-garde became more
palpable.
II-iii The death of the avant-garde and the inauguration of the art museum
The activities of the avant-garde peaked around 1923, the year of the Great Kantō
Earthquake, and these years were succeeded by a period of decline. Just before the Third
Section of the Theater, the Third Section Plastic Art Association held its first exhibition
in the Matsuya department store in Ginza. In September of the same year, it held its
second exhibition at the Tokyo Self-Governing Association Meeting Hall (東京市自治会
館), but the group disbanded as a result of an internal dispute that broke out during the
exhibition. Subsequently, although a group called the Unified Third Section (単位三科)
was formed, it never mustered the energy of the earlier groups.
A number of avant-gardists with socialist leanings formed a group called
Zōkei(造形) which sought to return favor to the traditional artistic mediums of painting
and sculpture and, seeking to build stronger ties to the people as a proletariat, made a
pronounced veer toward realism. This trend, which might almost be called a recanting of
earlier commitments, was not unique to the group Zōkei but became prominent among
avant-gardists in general (Kitazawa 1980 169 – 171). The avant-garde movement
that had been developing at the front lines of art shifted to become the political avant-
garde.
Zōkei held its first group exhibition in March of 1926, just as the Tokyo
Municipal Museum of Art was having its dedication ceremony. The museum, whose
plans were launched at the same time as the Futurist Art Association, progressed steadily
toward completion throughout the period when avant-garde activities were intensifying,
and the museum was completed just as the movements were approaching their demise.
This development might at first appear as the act of reconstructing bijutsu after it had
been destroyed, but that was not the case. This is because the avant-garde movements
paralleled the construction process of the Tokyo Municipal Museum and had been
intensifying the entire time.
III The Cultural Memes of Zōkei: Craft and the Avant-Garde
III-i The avant-garde within the nation of “craft” (kōgei)
In this way, in modern Japan, the system of bijutsu reached one form of
completion just as the avant-garde art and cultural movements broke out. This timing,
which might be described as jumping the gun, is characteristic of the avant-garde
movements in Japan. In other words, it was not a movement attacking bijutsu as the
status quo which had already been completed as a system; rather, the new movement
sought to intervene in order to contain or impede the establishment of that system. In that
sense, it can be posited that the construction of the Tokyo Municipal Museum of Art was
a major impetus that actually triggered the avant-garde movements and increased their
intensity.
Why was it necessary to impede or contain the establishment of the system of
bijutsu? It is here that Japan’s cultural memes related to the production of form or the
production of things in general (zōkei) are involved.
In the history of the production of form (the history of zōkei) up until the Edo
period, extremely few objects were made for purely aesthetic appreciation. Most were in
some way connected to use in daily life. For example, we might consider the case of a
large ceramic platter with a picture on it. Although its connection to functionality may in
some cases be merely formal or superficial, the fact that the object takes the form of a
functional vessel in the first place can also be seen as an expression of an irresistible need
to acknowledge functionality. If we could sum up the history of Japanese zōkei in a
phrase, we might say that this history developed in a way that privileged craft. In The
Characteristics of Japanese Art (日本美術の特質,1943), Yashiro Yukio called Japan
“the nation of craft” (工芸国) in response to a similar understanding of the supremacy of
craft within the history of Japanese zōkei (Yashiro 1965, 184).
In the same book, Yashiro cites the term Ramenlosigkeit, which was used by
Tsuzumi Tsuneyoshi in his book Research on the styles of Japanese art (日本芸術様式
の研究,1929) (Yashiro 1965, 450). This word refers to the heart of the craft-like spirit of
Japanese creativity, which has no barrier between art and life. Tsuzumi calls this a
boundary-less quality, a transcendent mode of being (Tsuzumi 1936, 73).
In fact, however, Tsuzumi’s book was the Japanese translation of a book called
Die Kunst Japans and published by Insel-Verlag in Leipzig in the year 1929 (Tsudzumi
1929) This publication year is coupled with the year that the book was issued in Europe
and necessarily sparks our curiosity. Constructivism and the Bauhaus had passed their
great peaks, and attendant with the rise of fascism, Futurism (Futurismo) and Aeropittura
were being promoted. In other words, this book was published during a tumultuous
period for the avant-garde, amidst alternating surges of fascism and nationalism (or
racism). This was surely no coincidence. Research on the styles of Japanese art embodies
the fusion of cultural naturalism and avant-garde approaches to the creation of form.
III-ii The proximity of kōgei and the avant-garde
The border-crossing or transregional nature of Tsuzumi Tsuneyoshi’s portrayal of
the distinctiveness of Japan’s visual arts was also characteristic of the avant-garde. And
like kōgei, this was because the avant-garde, too, came into being from a position that
was peripheral to bijutsu and by gaining elicit entrance into the world outside bijutsu. The
similarities between kōgei and the avant-garde did not end here. They can also be seen in
the specifics of the border-crossing nature of each. Kōgei and the avant-garde each
occupied a place at the border zone between art and industry.
As I mentioned earlier, the front lines occupied by the avant-garde were a border
zone where art and non-art (bijutsu and non-bijutsu) were entangled. Non-art is the
complementary set yielded when everthing in the whole world related to “bijutsu” is
subtracted. Theoretically speaking, the forefront of bijutsu necessarily abuts non-bijutsu
on all sides. But when we recall that the modern period centers around industry as its
main form of production, then it becomes apparent that the particularity of bijutsu as a
form of the plastic arts lies in the fact that non-bijutsu was essentially defined as industry
(kōgyō). Similarly, the two came to coexist as two genres separated along the lines of
functionality and aesthetics. Given this, the liminal territory occupied by the avant-garde
is also a contentious border zone where art (bijutsu) and industry clash with each other. In
other words, the avant-garde ties together the two distinct realms of bijutsu and kōgyō, as
is exemplified in the extreme by Futurism and Constructivism. The representative
qualities of the Taishō avant-garde are also of a piece with them.
Seen in this light, craft and the avant-garde, while they might seem different from
the outside, are actually united by deep similarities. Each occupies a border zone between
art and industry, and each contains some of the features of both art and industry. And
these are also the reasons why each was treated as an outsider by the core of bijutsu. The
aggressive avant-garde was seen as a threatening, antagonistic presence, while mild-
mannered craft was the object of distain.
III-iii The tumultuous movement of cultural memes
Seen from this perspective, it becomes clear that the simultaneity of the avant-
garde movements and the mature period of the system of bijutsu is no mere coincidence.
This system of bijutsu centered on notions of purity and autonomy to separate the realm
of aesthetic appreciation that sustained the work of art from practical functionality related
to daily living. The fact that the avant-garde movements asserted themselves at the very
moment of the system of bijutsu’s full integration into Japanese society may in fact
indicate the triggering presence of cultural memes already found within Japanese society.
It may be, then, that the avant-garde is a variant of kōgei, which is based on Japanese
cultural memes. By assuming this kind of perspective, it finally becomes possible to
accurately position the avant-garde within the history of making things in Japanese
society, or the production of forms (zōkei).
One example of the mutual similarity between the avant-garde and cultural
memes that are already predisposed toward “craft” can be seen in the line of argument
taken up by the MAVO artist Murayama Tomoyoshi, in his discussion of industrialism
(産業主義) in Studies in Constructivism (Kōsei-ha kenkyū published February 1926).
Writing about Russian art immediately after the revolution, Muramaya noted the rise of
“industrialism” and wrote as follows:
Industrialism
declared full-on war against pure art.
Sounding the death knell for artistic individualism, it hailed collectivism.
It said that art (geijutsu) without some form of actual function or effect was not art at all.
And constructivism was born out of this industrialism (Murayama 1926, 40).
With the idea of Constructivism in his head, Murayama began using the word sangyō
shugi (industrialism; literally, the -ism of making or manufacturing). It becomes clear
from Murayama’s reference to “actual functionality” (実際的効用) that this notion was
consonant with that of kōgei. Even the move from “individualism” to “collectivism” can
be found in the notion of “folkish handicrafts” (民衆的工芸) –the ideas around so-called
Mingei-- that Yanagai Muneyoshi heralded around the same time as Murayama’s book
was published. Yanagi repudiated art that relied on individual expression and upheld the
creation of form by collective means (Kikuchi 2004).
But it is also necessary to note the gap between industrialism and existing notions
of kōgei at the time. Yanagi’s view of craft in Mingei tended toward nostalgic ideas based
on the idealization of the peoples’ handmade products prior to the Edo period. There
were also some decisive differences between the arts and crafts (kōgei), which relied on
existing artistic genres, and the avant-garde, which envisioned itself as breaking free from
bijutsu.
III-iv Zōkei = the creation of form: craft (kōgei) after the avant-garde
Three months after the publication of Kōsei-ha kenkyū (Studies in
Constructivism), the Tokyo Municipal Museum of Art opened with an inaugural
exhibition entitled A Fine Arts Exhibition Dedicated in Praise of Shōtoku Taishi (聖徳太
子奉賛美術展覧会). This exhibition, which became the initial event at the Tokyo
Municipal Museum of Art, was noteworthy due to the presence of a craft (kōgei) section
in addition to sections for painting and sculpture. Murayama Tomoyoshi wrote a review
of this craft section. Maintaining that the exhibition should have a “practical arts” (実用
芸術) section, he asserted that the crafts (kōgei) exhibited as works of art in the craft
section were but one portion of the practical arts (Murayama 1926, 49). As examples of
the practical arts, Murayama listed toilets, barbershop chairs, celuloid dolls, signboards or
towers for advertising, dog collars, and other things that generally had little relation to the
category of kōgei. It was a strategy to deliberately confuse craft products with industrial
ones, and to confuse “arts and crafts” with craft; here we can witness his will to blur or
eliminate the boundary between art and non-art.
To be sure, the concept of the avant-garde originated in the twentieth-century
West, and in order to understand the motives behind the emergence and development of
the avant-garde in Japanese society, it is also necessary to consider the operation of
existing cultural memes that may have been triggered by the transplant of the avant-garde
concept from the West.8 That is why I mentioned earlier that the avant-garde is a variant
of kōgei, which is based on Japanese cultural memes.
At that time, the avant-garde in Japan frequently employed the word zōkei, which
means the creation of form or plasticity, as in the title of the group The Third Section
Association for the Plastic Arts (三科造形美術協会). This is a key concept in
Murayama’s above-cited critique. Murayama thought about the fine arts (bijutsu) as one
portion of the broader semantic terrain of zōkei, the creation of form. The avant-garde
objets which had no practical function, and even painting and sculpture, were all
contained within the broader concept of zōkei. In other words, any act of making, of
creating forms, could be included in this category. Consequently, the term was capable of
subsuming the opposed genres of industrial production and fine arts within itself. This
fortold the unification of all forms of making under the heading of zōkei.
Murayama’s view of kōgei may seem forced, a mere avant-gardism which sought
to emphasize affinities with industrial production. Here, however, it is necessary to
remember that in the early Meiji period, the word kōgei did in fact have the meaning of
an “industry.” (Kitazawa 2005, 230). The word kōgyō, used in Japan since the early
modern period, had such strong associations with manual labor or handicraft that in order
to get it to signify “industry” in the post-industrial revolution sense, it was seen as
necessary to create a new and dissimilar word. In the early twentieth century, when
Murayama was born and raised, kōgei had already acquired today’s meaning, yet at the
same time it retained the nuance of industry much more strongly than it does today.
IV The Genesis of the Kōgei Genre: The Border Zone of Bijutsu
IV-i The establishment of a craft section in the official exhibitions
The very nature of the kōgei genre as seen above might be described as
chimerical, and from the perspective of someone seeking to maintain the system of
bijutsu, we can see how dubious it must have appeared. For that reason, neither the the
Ministry of Education Exhibition nor the Imperial Fine Art Academy Exhibition (帝国美
術院展覧会) created a craft section. This meant that, although the third Domestic
Industrial Exhibition of 1890 and the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, founded in 1889, each
established craft departments, the Bunten, which was supposed to be an important
monument to the systematization of the fine arts, nonetheless placed craft outside the
system of bijutsu. The official exhibitions were events that were supposed to swiftly and
effectively raise society’s awareness of the fine arts, so this kind of omission necessarily
dealt a significant blow to crafts. The crafts, which could be said to be a kind of womb
for the fine arts in Japan, were instead discarded like a placenta after the birth of “fine
arts” in Japan. One might also say that the Bunten suppressed craft’s inherent position of
supremacy within Japanese culture or possibly even planned a kind of genetic
modification to the cultural genes (the memes) of craft in Japan. In other words, the
Bunten effected a sort of cultural eugenics based on an imported Western standard.
Shortly after the first Bunten, craft artists petitioned the officials for the addition
of a craft section, but it would be two decades before those efforts bore fruit. A year after
a craft section was included in the inaugural exhibition dedicated to Shōtoku Taishi at the
Tokyo Municipal Museum of Art in 1926, the Eighth Teiten, which opened at the same
location, included a craft section for the first time. When it is described in the above
manner, it might appear that the Teiten followed the example of the Shōtoku Taishi
exhibition. In fact, however, it was the reverse. The establishment of a craft section for
the Teiten had already been decided at the end of 1923 at the Imperial Fine Art Academy
General Meeting.9 The nature of the debate about craft that may have occurred in the
preparation phase of the Shōtoku Taishi exhibition is unclear today, but considering that
Masaaki Naohiko, the director-general of the Imperial Fine Arts Academy, was also at
the center of the Shōtoku Taishi exhibition planing efforts,10 it is impossible to think that
he would have been unaware of the developments being planned for the Teiten.
IV-ii A bridge from life to art
The foregoing account might suffice as far as the causal relationship is concerned,
but historical investigation must not content itself with establishing causal relations; it
must also attend to the relative positions of the event and its surrounding circumstances
and conditions. In other words, the historian must also consider the field that is brought
into being by certain circumstances. What, then, is the broader historical field in which a
craft section was created at the Shōtoku Taishi exhibition and the Teiten?
From the late Meiji through Taishō periods, the arts and the field of thought
(shisō) in general exhibit a profound concern with the relationship to life (sei; seikatsu) .11
A similar trend can also be found in the field of fine art, and it went on to elicit interest in
the formal qualities of implements of daily life. The mingei movement, which
emphasized the nature of craft objects that were intimately related to the people’s daily
life, is a perfect example of that trend. The concerns of the times can also be seen the
handicrafts (ie applique, embroidery) of Fujii Tatsukichi, a member of the Fusain
Society (Fusain-kai), which was dedicated to the expression of one’s inner life.12 These
trends merged directly into Murayama Tomoyoshi’s “practical arts” (jitsuyō geijutsu),
which sought to eliminate all distinctions between the industrial product and kōgei.
Murayama emphasized that life within modern industrialized society should be shaped by
industry as such.
The craft sections at the Shōtoku Taishi exhibition and the Teiten were
established within the above-described intellectual context. But there was no way that the
powers vested in maintaining the fine arts (bijutsu) as a system would have consented to
admit the full range of acts of making–zōkei, in the language of the times—into their
ambit. Still more, it was impossible to ask the system of bijutsu to accept the avant-garde,
with its oppositional mentality toward bijutsu. This was because the value of bijutsu in
societal terms was based on its status as an elite portion of all acts of making. That said,
the notion of understanding art as an expression of one’s inner life, was, coupled with the
advent of Expressionism, an unignorable trend within the art world and one that was in
the process of taking many forms.13 This put bijutsu in the position of needing to
continually redraw its own borders.
IV-iii The Border Zone of Bijutsu: The Break Between Kōgei and the Avant-Garde
As I have already pointed out, the concept of zōkei on which the avant-garde
relies is supposed to encompass all acts of making (or the production of form) , but if we
limit ourselves for a moment to the portion of made things which are at the margin of
bijutsu and thereby help to define bijutsu’s borders, we can notice some genres –namely,
craft (kōgei)-- which are attracted to bijutsu by a sort of centripetal force, and others –
namely, the avant-garde- which distanced themselves from bijutsu as if by centrifugal
force. The narrow belt between these two constituted bijutsu’s border zone in the Taishō
era. To restate, if we return to the metaphor of the concentric circles around the Bunten,
the avant-garde would be located in the outermost position, about to dissolve into zōkei,
the general category for all made things. Toward the middle of the concentric circles, at
the border of bijutsu’s circle of influence, we would find kōgei. Reinterpreted in a more
dynamic fashion, this means that while the outer ring, the avant-garde, exerted a
centrifugal force through its denial of bijutsu, while the inner ring, kōgei, drew
comparataively closer to bijutsu.
In this way, the political consciousness behind the system of the fine arts –which
might also be a subconscious political consciousness-- took advantage of the opportunity
inherent in the dynamic that had been created by the Bunten system, using it to shift the
boundaries of bijutsu so that, by including kōgei within the inner ring, the domain where
art abutted “life” would be included within its own sphere of influence. This occurred
with the founding of the Crafts section at the eighth Teiten in 1927. Until that point, the
fine arts as a system had been allocating kōgei to the border zone on the outskirts of
bijutsu. Now, however, it moved to incorporate kōgei within itself, making a bridge to
“life” while strategically separating itself from the avant-garde.
In sum, if we understand the avant-garde as a mutant form of the cultural genes or
memes of zōkei that had been cultivated within Japanese society, we could also rephrase
the foregoing situation in the following manner. The process from the avant-garde’s
initial rebellions to its eventual death is synonymous with the process of kōgei’s
incorporation into the realm of bijutsu. This death, in turn, was a form of apoptosis which
enabled bijutsu to be incorporated into [Japan’s] existing cultural framework.
Conclusion: The Art Museum (Bijutsukan) and the Transformation of Bijutsu
Having been inaugurated with the Exhibition in Praise of Shōtoku Taishi, the
Tokyo Municipal Museum of Art followed the general framework that had been set up
through that exhibition. Painting and sculpture were placed in the center, while craft was
located in the border zone. At the same time, however, the record of exhibitions held at
the Municipal Museum included calligraphy, bonsai, children’s drawings, posters,
photography, and so forth, and in this way it departed greatly from the framework of the
the Shōtoku Taishi exhibition. By taking in so many forms of zōkei, the museum might
have seemed to be confounding its own status as a keystone of the system of the fine arts.
Yet it could be said that the museum just barely managed to preserve the integrity of the
fine arts system. It expelled the avant-garde, which was filled with destructive, malicious
intent toward bijutsu, and it positioned “pure” industrial manufactures as crude outliers.
In 1943, when Tokyo was reincorporated as a metropolis, the museum was
renamed the Tokyo Metrpolitan Museum of Art (東京都美術館), and even after Japan’s
defeat in the war, the museum’s basic stance and profile remained unchanged for quite
some time. In 1949, the Yomiuri newspaper company founded the Nihon Independent
Exhibition (日本アンデパンダン展; retitled 読売アンデパンダン展 after 1957), and
when the avant-garde reared its head around 1960 with an attack on bijutsu, the museum
repelled it through the creation of a document entitled “An Outline of Standards and
Criteria for the Display of Works in the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art” (東京都美
術館陳列作品企画基準要網) (Segi 1996, 279). And in 1970, when Nakahara Yūsuke,
acting as the sole organizer of the 10th Tokyo Biennale (日本国際美術展) attempted to
include the avant-garde in the museum under the concept heading “Between Man and
Matter” (人間と物質の間), [the museum], cleaving to its existing stance, attempted to
sabotage his efforts through the enactment of various new regulations.14 In these ways,
bijutsu impeded the limitless expansion of zōkei, and this, the nation’s first museum
dedicated to the arts of the present day, used the mechanisms of expulsion and
assimilation to direct peripheral power unrelentingly toward its center.
In the 1980s, however, the situation changed drastically. The prewar and postwar
avant-gardes had become historical and were incorporated into the Tokyo Metropolitan
Museum of Art in the form of special exhibitions. First, a retrospective of the Taishō
avant-garde was mounted (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, ed. 1988). Then, the
museum, with its same bygone “standards and criteria” (規範基準) still on the books
from the old days, offered the works of the 1960s avant-garde to public view (Tokyo
Metropolitan Art Museum, ed. 1983). The exhibition about the 1920s even exhibited
actual industrial manufactures.
Yet this does not mean that the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art experienced a
postwar conversion. In these years, the avant-garde had already come to assume a place
within the center of bijutsu, since it was now impossible to treat the arts of the present
day under the museum’s original rubric of painting and sculture at the center and crafts at
the periphery. Further, the contemporary world was beginning to change from an
industrial society to an information society. In other words, the entire enterprise of
producing physical objects (zōkei) - whether as industry or fine arts- was beginning to
move rapidly away from the core of society as a whole.
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1Kitazawa Noriaki, “ ‘Bijutsu’ gainen no keisei to riarizumu no ten’i” (The Formation of the “Bijutsu” Concept and the Changing Status of Realism) in Kitazawa 2005, 291 -311; Satō 1999. 2 Kitazawa Noriaki, “ ‘Nihonga’ gainen no keisei ni kansuru shiron” (A Hypothesis Concerning the Formation of the Nihonga Concept) in Kitazawa 2005, 152 – 156.
3 The first definition under the entry for kōgei (craft) states: “A form of art based on manual labor” (kōsaku jō no gigei); the second definition reads: “the production of items of daily use such as woven or dyed textiles, lacquerware, ceramics, etc., which harmonize the qualities of ‘function’ and ‘decoration.” (Grand Dictionary of Japanese 2001, 255)
4 Article 2 of “Bijutsu tenrankai kitei” (Regulations for art exhibitions) (1907) declares: “Submissions must fall under [one of] the following three categories: nihonga, yōga, sculpture.” (Nittenshi Hensan Iinkai, ed. 1980, 545).
5 Article one of the “Tokyo-fu bijutsukan shiyō kitei” (Guidelines for the use of the Tokyo Municipal Museum of Art)(1926) stipulates the reasons for use, beginning, “1) The display of creations related to the fine arts” (bijutsu ni kan suru sōsaku no tankan). (Nittenshi Hensan Iinkai, ed., 1982, 659).6 Honma Masayoshi, “Mirai-ha Bijutsu Kyōkai oboegaki,” in Honma 1988, 94 – 95.7 In English, please see Weisenfeld 2002.8Kitazawa Noriaki, “Suichoku na hashi: Bijutsushi kenkyū no aporia to shite no (Avuangyarudo)” (A Vertical Bridge: The Avant-Garde as Aporia in Art History Studies) in Kitazawa 2003, 245 – 283.9 “Teiten Nenpyō 2” (Teiten Timeline 2) in Nittenshi Hensan Iinkai ed. 1982, 665.10 Saitō Yasuyoshi, “Tokyo-fu Bijutsukan no jidai,” in Tokyo-fu Bijutsukan no jidai, 1926-1970, 2005, 10. 11 Suzuki Sadami, “Taishō seimei shugi to wa nani ka” (What is Taishō Vitalism?) in Suzuki ed. 1995, 2-15.12 Catalog of the first Fusain-kai Exhibition, in Tokyo Bunkazai Kenkyūjo ed. 2002, 200. 13 Kitazawa 1993, 45-78; Kitazawa Noriaki, “ ‘Hyōgen’ no kaiga,” in Zen’ei to modan, vol. 17 of Tsuji Nobuo, Takeo Izumi, Yuji Yamashita, and Kiyonobu Itakura eds 2014, 181 – 182. 14 Nakahara Yūsuke, “Keika hōkoku: Jyakkan no oboegaki,” in Nakahara/Nakahara Yūsuke Bijutsu Hihyō Senshū Henshū Iinkai 2011, 16 – 21.