Lecture about the art of Yoshio Nakajima by Dr William Marotti, author of his monograph
In collaboration with the Department of Asian Studies at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana, we invite you to a lecture by Dr Marotti, Professor of History and Chair of the East Asian Studies MA IDP Programme at UCLA, titled Seized by Art: Grasping Untimely Art and Politics in the 1960s with Yoshio Nakajima. During the lecture, Dr Marotti will examine the pivotal yet overlooked career of Nakajima and consider the relations of art, politics and violence in the 1960s, as well as the very possibilities of art.
Known as “the Japanese artist from Sweden”, Nakajima has played a significant role in major art and political movements from Japan to Europe in the 1960s, yet has been largely overlooked by nation-focused art histories. In a short abstract for the lecture in Ljubljana, Dr Marotti wrote that Nakajima's storied career has traversed an astounding range of locations, scenes, and movements, as well as media and performance modes.
Marotti claims that the paradox of Nakajima's work is that, despite its apparent exemplification of art's potential to move and to transform, it has largely fallen out of accounts in which its impact might have justifiably featured. Nakajima’s street performances predate similar, better-known explorations by avant-gardists in Tokyo and beyond. His free-form chanting and frequent collaborative public performances across Europe played a role in creating spaces of possibility, from Tokyo to Ubbeboda and from Spui Square and the Dutch Provos movement to Antwerp and Sweden.
Nakajima's work, timely in its untimeliness, allowed others to see and experience the world differently, and this is something that has been widely acknowledged. Following its elusive actuality reveals the potential of such art and politics as ever-present possibilities. With the aid of contemporaneous critic Yoshida Yoshie's observations, Marotti will consider the relations of art, politics and violence in the 1960s, as well as the very possibilities of art.
William Marotti is a Professor of History and Chair of the East Asian Studies MA IDP Program at UCLA. He teaches modern Japanese history, emphasising everyday life and cultural-historical issues. Marotti's Money, Trains and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan (Duke University Press, 2013), addresses Japanese politics in the 1960s by focusing on avant-garde artistic production and performance. His current book project, The Art of Revolution: Politics and Aesthetic Dissent in Japan’s 1968', analyses cultural politics and oppositional practices in Japan, paying particular attention to 1968 as a global event.
Find out moore at: history.ucla.edu/marotti