The Unexpected Collectives: Intermedia Art in Postwar Japan

This dissertation is an ethnomusicological and historical exploration of intermedia art as an experimental artistic practice in Japan between 1958 and 1970. My research shows how intermedia art itself was a contested musical, aesthetic, political, technological and economic assemblage that negotiated complex plays of power particular to the social and historical terrain of postwar Japan./nIn the first half of the dissertation I examine relations--both productive and ambivalent--between politics and experimental aesthetics in the collectives at the Sogetsu Art Center, a hub for experimental and avant-garde activities in Tokyo. I then turn to EXPO'70, the world's fair held in Osaka in 1970. Deemed a failure in terms of artistic innovation by many, EXPO'70 has come to be seen as a moment that divided artists working in the realms of experimental and avant-garde practice. I look behind these "failures" to examine the disruptions and disagreements that bring to the surface the limits of collective cohesion. In the last part of the dissertation, I examine forms of intermedia that depart from the dominant intermedia aesthetics that appeared at EXPO'70. Focusing on the acoustics of intermedia, I investigate examples of these "other" forms of intermedia that engage experiences of the liminal in the everyday in contrast to normalized senses of the "depoliticized everyday." I argue that experimental practices in intermedia productively questioned these normalized senses of perception and perceptibility through specific, local, creative responses to a volatile period in postwar Japan. Over the course of the dissertation, I consider the significance of transnational networks for intermedia. As a deeply transnational practice, I argue that intermedia engaged with aesthetic and political negotiations with the "West" and the US (both real and imagined) that by far exceed simple transactions of "borrowing" or "imitation."/nResearch methods for this project combine ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, musical analysis, and archival research conducted in Japan and the United States. Critical theory and analytic methods based in the fields of ethnomusicology, music theory, and music history, as well as art history, new media studies, history, anthropology, and sociology inform this study. Through the notion of the "collective" as a central analytic theme, I engage with a theoretical framework that is open to understanding the coexistence contradictions, ruptures, and the politics of ambivalence within collectives. The critical methodology of this dissertation departs from the existing majority of scholarship on avant-garde and experimental music that has overwhelmingly tended to focus on the framework of the innovations of composers or artists and their works./nMore broadly, by presenting a study of original and innovative experimental music and art practices in Japan in the 1960s, I contest persisting echoes of Euro-American ethnocentrism that assumes the "belated" or "derivative" nature of avant-garde practices outside of Euro-American contexts in scholarship both within and outside of Japan.

Advisor: Wade, Bonnie C.