CrissCross: A Glimpse of the Graphic Designer's Cross-disciplinary Collaborations in 1960s Tokyo

By Shirley Surya

A glimpse of the graphic designer’s cross– disciplinary collaborations in 1960s Tokyo.

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R C 1 Michael Bierut, “Warning: May Contain Non–Design Content,” http://observatory. designobserver.com/ entry.html?entry=4137.

2 Through the exhibition “Metabolism, The City of the Future: Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present– Day Japan” http:// moriartmuseum.cocolognifty.com/blog/2011/07/ metabolism-in-a.html

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on a desire for renewal that is in response to, but also one that exceeds, a particular context — however incomplete or transient.

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As a constant mediator of text, images, and symbols representing all types of messaging, institutions, and ideologies on multiple formats and medium, graphic design is, as what Michael Bierut once wrote, “almost always about something else. Corporate Law. Professional football. Art. Politics. Robert Wilson.”1 His statement was part of a call for the graphic designer to be excited about that “something else” other than graphic design, beyond the designer’s given associations or token knowledge of the client and related subject matter. This article is a way of asking what is at stake in the “excitement” that Bierut called for, by considering 1960s Tokyo graphic designer Awazu Kiyoshi as one of the few and far examples of a graphic designer who was conceptually and visually engaged with other disciplines such as art, film and architecture — going beyond the utilitarian structure of work, and into a joint production of meaning.

The subject of choice began with a discovery of Awazu’s involvement in an influential architectural movement called Metabolism.2 Present realities of knowledge gaps between disciplines and designers’

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reluctance to collaborate due to hubris or counter–productivity raised questions about a visual communicator’s capacity to take part in a project of envisioning the organicist development of a city.

However, relatively recent publications and exhibitions have revealed Awazu’s other roles apart from the obvious scope of designing the collective’s publication. Through his thinking and practice, networks, as well as the social context, Awazu created a collective creative output which historians considered as radical not only in terms of its content but also the cross– disciplinary practice it resulted from.

Framed by the availability of literature of a rather under– researched topic, this article hopes to reveal patterns in the motivation, mechanism and effects of such a mode of work — what led to it, how was it done, and what came out of it. It is neither a comprehensive review of all graphic designers’ collaboration with architects and artists of the time, nor is it about advocating a particular practice. But rather, through Awazu’s work, it raises the possibility of extracting a model from the potentials and limits of working across disciplines based

“INTERMEDIALITY” AND THE CARTOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION Beginning with the Bauhaus– inspired Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop), consisting of members involved with everything from sculpture to lighting design in the 1950s, followed by the 1960 World Design Congress (WoDeCo) led by architect Tange Kenzo and graphic designer Kamekura Yusaku from which the Metabolism group3 was launched, to the formation of the Environment Society4 and its cross–disciplinary events in 1966,

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to the theatrical laboratory set up by graphic designer Yokoo Tadanori and playwright Terayama Shuji at the Sogetsu Art Center, and culminating with Expo ‘70 in Osaka – this period of cultural development in Tokyo could not deny how central “cross– disciplinarity” was to the debates across artistic genres in the 1960s.

While respecting the individuality and diversity of cultural production, each genre has to be seen in dynamic collaboration with another due to the concepts that bind various practices searching for a totality in response to the overwhelming agenda of socio–cultural renewal and urban reconstruction.5

While Japan’s return to world affairs since the nation regained self– rule through the Japan–United States Mutual Security Treat of 1952 (also known as Anpo) had brought about a creative vigour in devising new cultural modes, it was the dramatic urban growth and changing media landscape that contributed most to the concepts that fueled cross– disciplinary collaborations.6 Concepts of “graphism” or “graphication”, which traversed a wide range of fields and offered a connection between painting, print, photography, graphic design, architecture, and music, were incubated amid the transforming urban environment and its envisioned plans.7 Construction of the web–like metropolitan highway network in preparation for

A. Members of Metabolism.

Reproduced from Project Japan: Metabolism Talks..., P. 182–183.

Courtesy OMA/AMO.

3 The Metabolism group consisted of critic Kawazoe Noboru, architects Isozaki Arata, Maki Fumihiko, Otaka Masato, Kurokawa Kisho, Kikutake Kiyonori, industrial designer Ekuan Kenji, and Awazu Kiyoshi.

4 The Environment Society consisted of participants spanning the field of art, music, industrial design, graphic design, and architecture, including Awazu Kiyoshi,.

5 Thomas Havens, “Introduction – Postwar Vectors in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts,” in Radicals and Realists in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts (University of Hawaii Press, 2006).

6 Miryam Sas, “Intermedia, 1955–1970,” in Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant–Garde, ed. Doryun Chong (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012).

7 Michio Hayashi, “Tracing the Graphic in Postwar Japanese Art,” in Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant– Garde, ed. Doryun Chong (New York: The Musem of Modern Art, 2012).

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B. Tange Kenzo presents A Plan for Tokyo 1960 in a special New Year’s Day broadcast on NHK. Reproduced from Project Japan: Metabolism Talks..., P. 442–443.

Courtesy OMA/AMO.

8 Rem Koolhaas and Hans–Ulrich Obrist, Project Japan: Metabolism Talks...

(Taschen, 2012)., 267.

9 Midori Yoshimoto, “From Space to Environment: The Origins of Kankyo and the Emergence of Intermedia Art in Japan,” Art Journal 67, no. 3 (2008)., 26.

10 Sas, “Intermedia, 1955–1970.”,139.

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the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and problems of land shortage due to population boom had led to a “cartographic imagination” being played out in the works of graphic designers, architects or musicians.

A new generation of architects and planners, such as Tange’s architecture and urban design lab (Tange Lab), whose members made up part of the Metabolism group, projected a range of schemes of Tokyo Bay as a form of artificial ground upon which to build floating and semi–floating mega structures, highways, piers for housing, governmental buildings, offices and industry. Publications of their proposals in architecture magazines and a televised broadcasting of Tange’s A Plan for Tokyo 1960 sparked people’s imagination from intractable geographical limitation to one of a new zone for free growth.8 The city became the agent of graphic explorations in the form of the Metabolists’ drawings that articulated the connectivity of urban space and the replication of its parts, and it also triggered collectives like the Environment Society to respond to issues of “infrastructure, environment and apparatus”. Such an influence was clearly expressed in the Environment Society’s group statement:

“We are conscious of the concept ENVIRONMENT, which has become adapted and used in the new field of urban design and recent art; ENVIRONMENTAL DESIGN, which considers the city as a subject called ENVIRONMENT where everything is organically and dynamically related rather than as an entity composed of fixed parts such as architecture, space, function, and form.”9 The notion of the “environment” as a dynamic and all–encompassing term also superseded the original concept of kankyo — the indefinable area that exists among different media — that formed the basis of the collective’s formation. The English word “environment”, instead of the Japanese equivalent kankyo (considered a precursor to the later popularised term “intermedia”) was chosen to name the group for its emphasis on the occurring dynamic, as opposed to a fixed, relationship between humans and their surroundings. This distinction was reflected in their main “intermedia” exhibition “From Space to Environment” (1966) — a key example of how the group took the multiple interpretations of kankyo into producing exhibitions and events informed by the diversity of participants’ backgrounds and disparate sources. It was a showcase of works by 38 participants spanning the field of art, music, industrial design, graphic design, and architecture that focused not so much on the individuality of the artist or work, but how a work engaged the wider environment, other disciplines, the surrounding, the viewer’s experience, as well as how it related with the uses of urban space, and transforming media and technological systems.10 A SEARCH FOR “TOTAL” RELEVANCE The intermedia protagonists predicated the cross–pollination of ideas and means that reconceived relationships among art, technology and the environment as a concept

C. Expose ‘68: Tell Me Something, I’ll Find It Now (1968) poster by Awazu.

Courtesy Awazu Design Room.

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11 Ibid., 139 12 Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant–Garde, ed.

Doryun Chong (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012)., 33; Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant–Garde., 112–113 13 “Graphism in the Wilderness: Kiyoshi Awazu,” 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

that was socially relevant to the changing socio–political environment and the city’s dynamic interconnectivity that “demanded nothing less than a reinvention of art”. However, the desire for social relevance was also more than just “reflecting the feeling of being in the contemporary age”.11 Critics such as Okamoto Taro and Hanada Kiyoteru published extensively in the 1950s, advocating the avant–garde as “socially engaging and technologically mediated”, which developed into ideological stances on art’s connection to politics and society, and how artists and their works can have a truly participatory relationship with reality.12 For Awazu, this desire to engage the realities of socio– political barriers led him into painting, sculpture, photography, film, theatre, performance, music, literature and architecture.

Removing the boundaries among forms of expression was hinged on Awazu’s resolve to “remove class, category, disparity, and the upward and downward that have appeared in art”.13

http://www.kanazawa21. jp/data_list.php?g=80& sn%5B%5D=day_from& st%5B%5D=4&sc%5B %5D= 2007,99,99,99,99 &sn%5B %5D=day_to &st%5B %5D=5&sc %5B%5D=2007.

14 Maria Lind, “Sliding Collaboration,” in Zak Kyes Working With... ed.

Zak Kyes and Barbara Steiner (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012).

While this could sound highly rhetorical, such a cultural endeavor was an impetus for him and many graphic designers to be involved in cross–disciplinary events, such as Tadanori’s role in setting up theatrical laboratories, and his collaboration with architect Isozaki Arata and Awazu to organise “Expose ‘68: Tell Me Something, I’ll Find It Now” at the Sogetsu Art Centre. This was a five–day symposium on contemporary art that was an important fulcrum for “intermedia”, featuring performances and cross–disciplinary works as part of their fascination with indigenous culture.

Graphic designers were taking on a new agency in cultural and knowledge production and a type of social practice based on collaboration. This was precisely because any form of social practice cannot thrive through a singular discipline. In Maria Lind’s article about creative collaborations, she noted that the works of cross– disciplinary collectives such as the Russian Constructivists and the Bauhaus hinged on a “prevalent desire to create gesamkunstwerk (total work of art)”, and that the collaborative turn is related to how “joint efforts should result in something palpable, something created by as many people as possible”, in which the totality expressed in creative expression trumps personal authorship.14 It was such a vision that led Shinkenchiku editor Kawazoe Noboru to scout for young talents from the fields of architecture, graphic and industrial design to join the World Design Congress organising committee that made up the Metabolism group in 1959.

For graphic designers, the awakening to a collective social– responsibility was often attributed to the International Olympic Committee’s election of Tokyo as the site of the 1964 Olympics, which led to the eagerness from 1959 to “discover what graphic design could do for the Olympics”.15

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15 Jilly Traganou, “Design and National Identity in the Olympic Games of Tokyo 1964, Beijing 2008 and Athens 2004,”(2008), http://hdl.handle. net/10086/16335., 4.

16 Email Interview with Ota Kayoko, 4 June 2013.

17 Traganou, “Design and National Identity in the Olympic Games of Tokyo 1964, Beijing 2008 and Athens 2004.”, 10.

18 Koolhaas and Obrist, Project Japan: Metabolism Talks..., 13.

19 Ibid., 89.

D. Give Our Sea Back (1955) poster designed by Awazu.

It won the grand prize at the JAAC Exhibition that year.

Courtesy Awazu Design Room.

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In their discussions, such as one entitled “Designers’ Public Awareness” organised by Kamekura (as well as less formal ones initiated

by Tanaka Ikko, Sugiura Kohei, and Awazu), issues of how to conceive communication and information design in public space so that foreign visitors could comprehend while still expressing nationalism and internationalism were major concerns. The discussions grew from the utilitarian or symbolic value of the graphic design for the Olympics into developing events and exhibitions borne out of a desire for social engagement as part of having a shared sense of responsibility in enhancing “social communication and aesthetic literacy”.16 According to Jilly Traganou, who researched on the role of graphic design at the Tokyo Olympics, there was a broader dislike of the term “commercial design”, in favour of “visual design” or “visual communications” after the Olympics, as seen in the shift from commercial works to public service or welfare projects in the 1961 JAAC (Japan Advertising Artists Club) exhibition. The trajectory of designers had thus raised crucial questions about the ideological role of design, and designers, as well as the limitations of formalist interpretations of design.17 CURIOSITY AND STAKE IN CONTENT PRODUCTION When the unfamiliar could often be discomfiting, a common social cause or desire for change as a direct response to the ongoing socio– political–cultural context is possibly the biggest driver for various disciplines to collaborate, as in the case of 1960s Tokyo. They began as multi–fold conversations that turned into friendships marked by a difference that engendered interest and curiosity, and eventually, a theoretical and practical commitment to see collaboration as a productive means of distributing the specifics of content to regenerate a practice, whether through acts of writing or self–organisation.

The relationship between those involved in the 1960 WoDeCo and Metabolism movement, for example, started with a casual and inviting, yet deliberate, context orchestrated by architect Tange. Since the late 1950s, Tange frequently brought together architects, artists, designers and intellectuals such as graphic designer Kamekura, artist– critic Okamoto and architects of the Tange Lab to his home for discussions as part of the WoDeCo preparatory committee. The product of such encounters was perhaps best described by Rem Koolhaas as a “a milieu, a mixing chamber” where “talents are discovered, nourished, (re)programmed, embedded, and married in an almost domestic intimacy”.18 The continued conversations were known to have developed deep and stimulating insights based on tremendously close friendships and profound mutual understanding.19 While Tange played a catalytic role to the collaboration, Kawazoe had the foresight to bring together designers with interests and curiosity on the wider creative practice and society, like Awazu. According to editor of Project Japan, Ota Kayoko, Awazu was invited, among many emerging graphic design talents of the late 1950s, not only for his

E. Spreads from Metabolism 1960: The Proposals for New Urbanism. Reproduced from Project Japan: Metabolism Talks..., P. 207–221.

Courtesy OMA/AMO.

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accomplished career as a graphic designer but also his intellectual capacity.20 He was described as “eloquent and sociable” and expressed thoughts that were “original and capturing the zeitgeist”, which constantly inspired those around him. Known as “a singular genius with a ceaseless interest in the world around him”, Awazu once wrote of his deep interest in metabolism, architecture and cities, and in observing the contemporary world from a biological point of view despite not being an architect or city planner.21 His understanding, and articulation, of the Metabolism project as “an attempt to analogically

build up the city and architecture as living entities that possess biological functions” was not only evident in the design of the logo and book Metabolism 1960: The Proposals for New Urbanism, but also his planned contribution to the second edition of the book Metabolism 1965: Metamorphosis, which was to be a section on “mental landscape”, “fetal movement”, and “morph” under the topic of “Habitation Style”.22 Awazu’s logo for Metabolism 1960: The Proposals for New Urbanism was an adaptation of the tomoe — a Japanese abstract shape of a swirl that resembles the magatama (curved comma–

20 Email Interview with Ota Kayoko.. Awazu won the Grand Prize at the 1955 JAAC Exhibition for his poster Give Our Sea Back which launched his entry into the field of design. He later won the Grand Prix at the World Film Poster Competition in France (1958) for his Pop–influenced designs and set up Awazu Design Institute in 1959.

21 “Graphism in the Wilderness: Kiyoshi Awazu.”

22 ———, Project Japan: Metabolism Talks..., 331.

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23 Ibid., 400.

24 Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant–Garde., 117.

25 Yoshimoto, “From Space to Environment: The Origins of Kankyo and the Emergence of Intermedia Art in Japan.”, 38–39.

26 Ibid., 38–39.

G. Der Gott Der Hunde (1969) poster by Awazu.

Courtesy Awazu Design Room.

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F. Film Quarterly (1968) cover

by Awazu.

Courtesy Awaztu Design Room.

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shaped beads that appeared in prehistoric Japan) — into an organic cell. This expressed the dynamism and self–replicative nature of the Metabolists’ proposals, which were based on society’s construction according to the vital biological process of continuous build–up and destruction of living tissue. The logo also subtly characterised the team’s proposals with cultural identity by making use of a common design element that had origins in Japan’s Jomon era. It was a strategic choice as part of the need to reassert a renewed sense of national identity at an international platform like WoDeCo in which the book was first sold. The basic square format of the book also framed the seemingly chaotic and free–flowing renderings and images of architecture and the city, while the chapter dividers were illustrated with various rendition of singular to multiple magatama, extending the use of the logo with its continuous presence and associated ideas throughout the book. Awazu’s book design provided a bold, yet natural, and almost primitive, counterpoint to the highly futuristic and technologically mediated architectural and urban design proposals.

Apart from architecture, Awazu was also known for his aesthetic and semantic contribution to other areas, in particular film. He made several experimental films, was a founder of Film Quarterly with poet dramatist Terayama and also sat on the board of Film Art Inc. (1968) with architect Kurokawa Kisho and Teshigahara Hiroshi. As a theorist and writer, he helped develop content related to other fields, and this in turn informed the intellectual development of his own discipline.23 As chair of the editorial board of new graphic design magazines in the 1960s such as Dezain Hihyo (1966) and contributor to numerous other graphic design magazines, Awazu raised highly relevant concepts and issues, which became the means of creating a context that had a symbiotic relationship with his work,

and at the same time, helping renew the discipline.

With the introduction of Japan’s first electronic copy machine in 1962 and the translation of Walter Benjamin’s article “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1965), Awazu wrote about the non– distinction between the original and its copy. He described the 1960s as “the age of reproducibility”, or “graphism” (a term he coined and which proved influential in fields beyond graphic design), perceived as the “permeation of everyday life by automatically self–reproducing visual messages driven by modern reproduction technology”.24 This idea was expressed in Awazu’s work as well as fellow graphic designer Yokoo Tadanori, which were characterised by a visual cacophony of mass–media images that used the techniques of superimposition, collage and montage to form visual composites.

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I. Cover of Bijetsu Techo 275 (1966) — a special issue on the exhibition “From Space To Environment” featuring its logo designed

by Fukuda Shigeo.

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After the 15th JAAC exhibition in 1965, whose success was viewed as how Japanese design “had come to an impasse because of the overvaluing of skills in design”, Awazu, who probably shared the same view, wrote in Design magazine how “postwar design” was about to end, and called for “truly liberated creative activities”

H. Performance of Ichiyanagi’s Environment Music (1966).

and the “critical spirit” among the pioneers of a new era.25 Whether or not such a view was influenced by his existing participation as part of the Metabolism group, or if it had a direct influence on other graphic designers, this statement represented the profession’s desire for redirection, as exemplified in the setting up of the Environment Society by four graphic designers — Katsui Mitsuo, Fukuda Shigeo, Nagai Kazumasa and Awazu.

Having organised an exhibition called “Persona: Exhibition of Graphic Design in Tokyo 1965” as part of the urge to revitalise creativity in design and “renovate their artistic directions” following the success of getting design’s public recognition in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, they sought to organise another exhibition by consulting art critic Takiguchi Shuzo, who had advised on the establishment of Jikken Kobo. They took on Takiguchi’s suggestion of an exhibition that was not just focused on design but interdisciplinary collaborations with those from other fields and they were introduced to art critics, architects, composers, photographers and visual artists.26 It resulted in the beginning of the Environment Society and their exhibition “From Space to Environment” — a two–part exhibition and event that had considerable repercussions in

architecture, design, visual art and music, as seen in Expo ‘70.27 Graphic designers Awazu and Fukuda also participated beyond the design of the Society’s logo — appropriately of a man in vortex caught up in a whirlwind of ideas — and organisation of the show by performing Ichiyanagi Toshi’s Environment Music, along with artists Yoshiaki Tono and Ay–O, by having to incline their bodies on a chair as slowly as possible to an unbearable position, until each performer deviated from it.28 Though small in numbers compared to the visual artists, graphic designers like Awazu played a central role — theoretically and practically — in knowledge production through the planning of exhibitions, symposiums and performances which mobilised multi–polar responses from a network of actors to produce a multifaceted approach to the complex reality that altered the context(s) in which they operated.

DIFFERENCE REGENERATES The difference that divergence could accomplish seemed to be the intended origin and result of the projects mentioned thus far.

Yet in exploring, or to some degree, embracing the “difference” in cross–disciplinary practice, there is no delusion of the real gaps between disciplines in terms of goals,

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27 Ibid., 25–27. “From Space to Environment” consisted of the participation of 38 multidisciplinary art individuals, a dozen of whom served as the executive committee responsible for the group’s representation.

Non–architect members of the Environment Society included 17 visual artists, mostly sculptors, 10 graphic and industrial designers, 4 photographers, 2 composers and 2 critics — many of whom were acquainted through attending interdisciplinary art programs at the Sogetsu Art Center in Aoyama Tokyo.

28 Ibid., 35–36.

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29 “Kiyoshu Awazu About Works,” http://www. kiyoshiawazu.com/en/ works.html.

30 Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant–Garde., 104–110.

31 Ibid., 97.

32 Metabolism, the City of the Future: Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present– Day Japan, (Tokyo: Mori Art Museum, 2011)., 292–296.

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J. 4th International Biennial Exhibition of Prints in Tokyo (1964) poster by Awazu.

Courtesy Awazu Design Room.

K. Izumo Shrine Steel Gate (1963) by Awazu.

Courtesy Awazu Design Room

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audience, production process and histories upon which the criteria of evaluating the success of a work is built. It is in fact these differences that have led to the rather mixed views about the 1960s “intermedia” movement that culminated with Expo ‘70. Yet, what were the frictions between art, graphic design, film and architecture, and how could their intersections lead to any new potentials of regenerating the practice on the level of the individual and the collective, in ways that would otherwise not have been possible?

As part of Metabolism, Awazu acknowledged the different approach he had toward architecture and the city compared to the rest of the architect– members, which led him to further explore the “more indigenous and ethnic rather than metabolistic”.29 Perhaps influenced by the Jomon renaissance initiated by Okamoto in the early 1950s, in which the barbaric stylistic dynamism of “primitive” Japanese earthenware and Okinawan culture was desired over the well–balanced, orderly aesthetics of Modernism, Awazu’s works in the 1960s, like those of Yokoo, were characterised by a critical stance toward modernist and functionalist ideology. Although originally inspired by American and European modernist graphic design, Awazu’s later frequent use of indigenous cultural (or un–cultural) motifs, vulgar images, and quivering parallel lines suggestive of seismic movements attest to his altered position, as expressed in what he wrote about the designer’s mission: “to foreground the folklore, reawaken the past, summon back the outdated” and to “see modern technology from afar, with the perspective of a distant grandmother”.30 Yet, the unfettered movement of the graphic in the Metabolist drawings, which Awazu had to frame in the book Metabolism 1960, was predicated on the pursuit of functionality, as he needed to create the most rational

balance among industry, capital, informational technology and human life.31 As seen from his design of the book, Awazu resolved the difference between the pragmatic and aberrant function of graphic design by providing a middle way of abstractly and poetically framing the rational nature of the Metabolists’ architectural imaginings.

Despite the differences, Metabolism’s influence remained inevitable on Awazu’s work on the level of the graphic, as well as the built environment — in film and in architecture. Soon after Awazu took part in the WoDeCo and Metabolism discussions, he started producing a series of drawings entitled “Metabolism” in which he applied the microscopic worlds of biology on the graphic format, as opposed to the urban scale. He then reproduced, copied, repeated and amplified the approach first expressed in these drawings, producing designs that were published in architectural magazines and posters. He even used them for designing the sculpted lines expressing the flow of life forms on the iron gate of the Administrative Building of Izumo Shrine designed

by Kikutake Kiyonori.32 Having been exposed to issues of site, urbanism, and biological mechanism, Awazu also started employing imageries related to geographical and topographical maps, causal statistics, houses, microscopic worlds and azimuthal charts, alongside those of physiognomy, anatomy, and the human body, on the covers of architectural magazine

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and books.33 Following Metabolism 1960, Awazu’s architectural representations, with their highly abstract, organic and unruly patterns as well as use of imageries unrelated to the usual geometric and spatial elements, culminated with the poster The Works of Kisho Kurokawa. Designed for Expo ‘70, Awazu was given the full artistic license to represent Kurokawa’s architectural experiments based on the concept of metamorphosis in the form of the capsules and space frame. Its bold use of collage, silkscreen techniques, and psychedelic colours in Pop aesthetic were considered “a merger of theory and graphic audacity”. To some architects today, Awazu’s representations of architecture exemplify the regenerative effect graphic designers’ “strangeness of view” could have on the all–too– serious architectural culture in the form of a visual “post–disciplinary deconstruction”, presenting the discipline through a more lively medium for use, appropriation and reinvention.34 Being part of the Metabolism group also led Awazu to design environments for film and the built world — of which some were commissioned by the Metabolist architects. Though Awazu’s interest in film could be considered separate from his engagement

with architecture, his “preoccupation with the design aspects of time” and drive to seek “the unexpectedness of space” in his art direction of movies and set design showed the influence of architecture in his manipulation of form, time and space. One example was Awazu’s work for Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide (1968) that led to him being awarded Best Art Direction at Japan’s Academy Award. Built with a low budget, Awazu’s bold, geometrical and highly–stylised mise–en–scene started with the idea of covering the basic set of a Japanese–styled house with enlarged images of a cursive set of written symbols taken from joruri texts and reading books, while some walls had chaotic splashes of paint. The simple and abstract set design enabled the film to bring the condensed passions of the protagonists to the surface by providing an atmosphere of the burden of tradition and duty, alongside the chaos and death resulting from the tragic path a married man and his courtesan had taken.35 As for Awazu’s built projects, apart from the Izumi Shrine gates, he designed the wall relief at the Tsuyama Bunka Center (1965) by Kawashima Kohi and a steel pipe relief wall display entitled Cross–section of the Information Energy Process for the lobby of the

L. The Works of Kisho Kurokawa (1970) poster

by Awazu.

Courtesy Awazu Design Room.

M. Scenes from Double Suicide (Shinjû Ten no Amijima), 1969.

N. Double Suicide (Shinjû Ten no Amijima) (1969) poster by Awazu.

Courtesy Awazu Design Room.

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33 Oyobe Katsuhito, “Awazu Kiyoshi’s Involvement in the Metabolist Movement,” in Metabolism, the City of the Future: Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present– Day Japan (Tokyo: Mori Art Museum)., 172–174.

34 Ibid.

35 Kimata Kimihiko, “Double Suicide (Shinjû Ten no Amijima),” http://www.japansociety. org/resources/content/ 3/0/1/4/documents/ Shinju%20ten%20no% 20amijima%20Kimata. pdf. and Katsuhito, “Awazu Kiyoshi’s Involvement in the Metabolist Movement.”, 292–296.

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Osaka Prefectural Sports Center (1967) by Maki Fumihiko.36 Aware of his inexperience in building, Awazu familiarised himself with, and was inspired by, the actual site, materiality, and production process.

As an amateur, these completed projects demonstrated his firm grasp of the physical, material and visual totality as expressed in his statement about the term “environment” — not as an isolated subject but a “situation where a piece of sculpture that looks independent at a glance actually exists with its platform, the floor, the ground, the heat of the earth, the ceiling and the sky.”

It was a totality that seemed to have resulted from the nightly theorisations with the Metabolists on the “tripartite relationship of man, nature and society”, in which the mutual accommodation of various disciplines would result in a classification of industrial design as “man–nature”, communication design as “man–society” and environmental design as “nature–society”.37

36 Katsuhito, “Awazu Kiyoshi’s Involvement in the Metabolist Movement.”, 292–296.

37 Ibid., 292–6.

38 Sas, “Intermedia, 1955–1970.”, 139–140.

39 Yoshimoto, “From Space to Environment: The Origins of Kankyo and the Emergence of Intermedia Art in Japan.”, 33.

40 Ibid., 28.

41 Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant–Garde., 44.

42 ———, “From Space to Environment: The Origins of Kankyo and the Emergence of Intermedia Art in Japan.”, 44.

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The Metabolists’ attempt to consider how each design discipline relates to the other and greater whole of “man, nature and society” — theoretically and practically in their projects — crystallised the kind of potential that cross–disciplinary collaboration, albeit with the right “ingredients”, could offer on the level of the collective. There was an acknowledgment of inherent distinctions between the disciplines such that each still retained its own agency, at the same time contributing to the functioning of the whole.

Similarly, the intermedia movement, based on a multivalent concept of sogo geijutsu was not just about the organic synthesis of distinct art forms, but also their dialectical relations. In this way, art forms retain their distinctiveness, coexisting in tense dialectical relationship with one another, and their complex links between popular or mass media culture, as well as high or avant–garde art were acknowledged. Thus the term “totality” (zentaisei) as used by the intermedia artists, connoted not a grandiose, organically unified whole, but rather a chaotic multiplicity beyond these experiential limits of human perception.38 The exhibition “From Space to Environment”, though proved to be an influential case of a remarkable artistic confluence, presented “varied interpretations of, and approaches to the term kankyo (“environment”), far from asserting a unified perspective”.39 Different participants exhibited works that transcended their own discipline to various degrees. Awazu installed a stainless water basin that reflected viewers and surrounding sculptures, with its reflections interplayed with blurred Chinese characters randomly laid out in the bottom of the basin.

Tadanori created poster panels that slid freely on a railing set on the wall, and this was criticised by a critic for “not moving beyond the conventional poster format, and the mould of a designer”.40

Nevertheless, “From Space to Environment” had considerable repercussions in architecture, design, visual art, and music in Japan, especially for the overlap of participants between the exhibition and Expo ‘70. Even Kamekura, who chose not to participate, appreciated the festival–like and entertaining aspect of the exhibition, and expressed how “it would be perfect for the Expo ‘70” if it was realised on a larger scale. Kamekura and the main players of the Environment Society became heavily involved in designing multimedia pavilions at Expo ‘70.41 As the curator Nakai Yasuyuki recently suggested, the concept of kankyo as an interactive site advocated by the Environment Society was realised in its ideal form by Experiments in Arts and Technology (E.A.T.) at the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ‘70. In anticipation of Expo ‘70, contemporary art, technology, design and architecture were known to undertake unprecedented collaborations, “where more avant–garde art, music, painting, sculpture, and dance was on display than at any other point in Japan’s history, before or since”, involving the works of Ichiyanagi Toshi, Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, Yokoo Tadanori, and Anti–Art proponents who were considered the “artistic apex of the postwar period”.42 There were however protests against what was perceived as the corporate co–optation of avant– garde arts as these creative outputs were bolstered by corporate sponsorships and national promotions.43 Expo ‘70 was seen to embody both the “grand hopes” and “unfulfilled dreams” of intermedia, signalling the end of art having “sold its soul for nationalistic and commercial purposes”. Such varied assessment of its success reflects the earlier point about the distinct goals of disciplines — the expected aberrance of Art versus the pragmatism of Design. While corporate sponsorships have enabled designers and architects to test–build their paper–architecture

for the built environment, the purist–artist desires to develop a socially relevant project untainted by big money and power. For its scale, complexity, and multiplicity, Expo ‘70 requires an assessment from the broadest perspective of a heterogenous collaboration between art, graphic design, industrial design, architecture, infrastructure, urban planning, media and technology. It should be viewed as a test and demonstration of theory — on how architecture and the city could be built for mobility and proliferation as Metabolism had envisioned, or for the totality of man–nature–society in an information age.

From the perspective of Tange and his team, the goal of Expo ‘70 was to produce an experimental city that could function as a model core of a future city. According to Asada Takashi, its success was built on how the site at Osaka’s Senri Hills endured double the expected number of visitors of six million in six months, and its influence on future environmental development of “system engineering mobilised by architectural construction”.44

The Grand Roof which Tange likened to a “cloud”, and Okamoto’s sculpture Tower of the Sun that pierced through it, were conceived as an environmental art installation but also designed as an urban infrastructure in which the tower was fitted with elevators taking visitor to the roof of “capsules” constructed in space frame technology to model the horizontal proliferation of cities or space above the Festival Plaza. Expo ‘70 was also a success as an intermedia event for the technologically– mediated, heterogenous and multi–sensory physical experiences that resulted from the conversations and exhibitions of artists, graphic designers and architects involved in the movement. It demonstrated the distinct contributions of various disciplines but also how their differences collapsed to provide a “total” environment.

Tange and team had firmly intended Expo ‘70 to be an “experimental model of an urban infrastructure for information society” as well as an “exposition for personal experience and audience participation” in which the personal,

O. At Expo ‘70, visitors saw the interactive “cosmo capsules” by Awazu and the Metabolists, Wall of Capsules. Reproduced from Project Japan: Metabolism Talks..., P. 518.

Courtesy OMA/AMO. O

43 Sas, “Intermedia, 1955–1970.”, 141.

44 Metabolism, the City of the Future: Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present– Day Japan.

45 Koolhaas and Obrist, Project Japan: Metabolism Talks..., 387 & 518.

46 Kikuchi Makoto, “Expo ‘70: Urban Infrastructure in Information Society,” in Metabolism, the City of the Future: Dreams and Visions of Reconstruction in Postwar and Present– Day Japan (Tokyo: Mori Art Museum, 2011).

human experiences would remain with visitors as “recurring images long after they have visited”. The residential capsules about future living by Kurokawa, Awazu’s parade of interactive “cosmo capsules”, and the Metabolists, Wall of Capsules — a rare collaborative work by the Metabolists to capture the realism of architectural multiplication and transformation — were all examples of providing image–able spatial experiences.45 The “cybernetic environment”, as described by Isozaki, of the Festival Plaza — a single space with mechanisms that use water, movement, sound and light as elements controlled by artificial intelligence, also demonstrated how Expo ‘70 was a culmination of the cross–disciplinary efforts of the intermedia collective, as these ideas of architecture as media were first proposed by exhibition participants of “From Space to Environment” in the form of a report entitled “Report on Research and Investigation into General Performance Mechanisms that Use Water, Sound, Light, etc., in Exterior Spaces, Centering on the Festival Plaza of the Japan Exposition”.46

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47 Havens, “Introduction – Postwar Vectors in the Japanese Nonverbal Arts.”

48 Koolhaas and Obrist, Project Japan: Metabolism Talks..., 331 and Yoshimoto, “From Space to Environment: The Origins of Kankyo and the Emergence of Intermedia Art in Japan.”, 26.

What had resulted from Metabolism and Environment Society’s project demonstrated how cross–disciplinary collaboration was far from a bland mix, but marked by a negotiation of heterogeneous content that could produce something new, as opposed to mere multiplications, through the regeneration of each discipline.

The value of Expo ‘70 was therefore beyond its complicity with commerce, but the combinatorial creativity that it had produced, as an indirect result of the “mixing chamber” in Tange’s home ten years before.

AN INCOMPLETE DREAM TO DREAM Increasing bureaucratisation and the collapse of protest movements against the Vietnam War, Anpo, and university–governance policies following the years of Expo ‘70 led to the decline of artistic experimentations of Japan’s post–occupation era. The end of intermedia collaborations could not therefore be attributed to the perceived failures of Expo ‘70, nor could it represent the failures of cross–disciplinary collaborations, although it did reveal its limitations and challenges.47 But having considered what drove it, what was being done, what resulted from it and what were its limitations, could it still prod the rethinking of process and the expansion of design

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methods based on a curiosity for difference to produce new conditions of thought and practice beyond already–found successes, even if the energy it produces is eventually spent and absorbed into the generic? The Metabolists knew that their achievements would not be of “architectural or professional success” but those which “have an intangible strength” in the form of “ideas that manipulate space”; while the Environment Society acknowledged that building on the ideas of kankyo is unstable and multivalent, yet they saw the project as worthy for being “all– encompassing enough to trigger visionary experiments — even if it lasted only for a short time.”48 The call is not about taking on multiple hats, but developing a specific collaborative approach that could reframe the circumstances surrounding one’s own, and others’, disciplinary practice. It is about the possibility of exercising the agency of facilitating encounters with the “strangeness of views” offered by other disciplines, such that a graphic designer, for example, could see how the making of books, the design of visual identities, and other forms of communication could creep into, and through, the domains of art, film, architecture, technology or urban space, as a response to a set of urgent and complex issues of the times.

Timeline of Awazu Kiyoshi’s collaborations in the context of Tokyo (1951–1971) 1951

Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop) is established

1952

Japan–United States Mutual Security Treaty (Anpo) Japan regains self–rule

1955

Awazu wins Grand Prize at JAAC Exhibition for Give Our Sea Back poster

1958

Colour–broadcasting television station opens in Japan Awazu wins the Grand Prix at World Film Poster Competition (France)

1959

The Intenational Olympic Committee elects Tokyo as the 1964 Olympic Games site Sogetsu Art Center designed by Tange Kenzo opens Awazu sets up Awazu Design Institute Kawazoe Noboru scouted for young talents to form the Metabolism group Roundtable discussion “Designers’ Public Awareness” is organised

1960

Metabolism 1960: The Proposals for New Urbanism published at World Design Congress (WoDeCo) NHK broadcast of Tange Kenzo’s A Plan For Tokyo

1962

Japan’s first electronic copy machine is introduced Tokyo’s population exceeds ten million Parts of Tokyo metropolitan highway system opens

1963

Awazu designs Izumo Shrine iron gate

1964

Tokyo Olympics

1965

First Japanese translation of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Awazu, Fukuda Shigeo, Katayama Toshihiro, Tanaka Ikko, and Tadanori Yokoo organises “Persona: Exhibition of Graphic Design in Tokyo 1965” Osaka is selected to host the 1970 World Exposition (Expo ‘70)

1966

Environment Society organises “From Space to Environment” exhibition Dezain Hihyo magazine begins publication headed

by Awazu

1967

First Japanese translation of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media Terayama Shuji, Tadanori Yokoo, and others establish Tenjo Sajiki theatret laboratory

1968

“Expose ‘68: Tell Me Something, I’ll Find It Now” is organised Awazu wins Best Art Direction for Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide (1968) at Japan’s Academy Award Film Art Inc. is established by Awazu, Kurokawa Kisho and Teshigahara Hiroshi

1970

Expo ‘70 runs for 6 months at Osaka’s Senri Hills Awazu designs The Work of Kurokawa and contributes to Metabolists, Wall of Capsules

1971

Sogetsu Art Center closes

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