Political aesthetics: activism,everyday life,and art’s object in 1960s’ Japan

Abstract

Around 1960, revolutionary forms of activism and critique emerged to challenge administrative forms of politics and daily life. In Japan, despite massive strikes and widespread protest, the ruling party used a Diet majority and riot police to renew the USA–Japan Security Treaty. After this display of force, this party’s new administration sought a new legitimacy, and a means to assuage and co‐opt the defeated opposition, through promoting a depoliticized everyday world of high growth and consumption, and a dehistoricized national image in preparation for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Among those activists who emerged to contest this new cultural politics, a diverse group of young artists worked to repoliticize daily life through an interventionist art practice. Their practices arose out of a particular local, playful art practice, whose focus on the material debris and spaces of the economic expansion led to an engagement with the transformations of daily life. Focusing on the art practices connected with the yearly exhibition, the Yomiuri Indépendant, I examine the advent of a critical art examining the everyday world of Japan in the late 1950s and early 1960s, reflecting on its complex relation with an internationalized art world and domestic art scene, mass culture, and domestic protest movements. Examining the history of this art illuminates the state’s investments in a normative cultural order, and a particular configuration of the politics of culture in the early 1960s.     

Grease and Sweat: Race and Smell in Eighteenth-Century English Culture

From 1690 to 1800 texts printed in England linked racial difference and foul odour through understandings of occupation, food, cosmetics and sweat. Even by the end of the eighteenth-century racial odour was represented as a labile, culturally and environmentally determined characteristic. This article traces how the social ‘use’ of olfactory stereotypes, particularly their links with cosmetics, food, and odorous spaces, determined the mobilization of explanations for and attitudes to racial scent. It argues that ideas of race should not be considered monolithic or described in terms of narratives that posit a divide between the body/culture, but that racial stereotypes should be understood as collections of traits, of which smell was one, with distinctive histories.     

BOOK REVIEWS

ESSAYS IN TEACHING. Edited by Harold Taylor. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1950. 239 pp.
Two Essays On A Prize-Winning Book EDUCATION AND MORALS. By John L. Chills. New York: Appleton-Century - Crofts, 1950. 293 pp. $2.75.
PHILOSOPHICAL NARCISSISM
PATTERNS OF EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY: A DEMOCRATIC INTERPRETATION. By Theodore Brameld. Y onkers-on-Hudson, New York: World Book Company, 1950. 824 pp.     

Application of a semi-quantitative estimation of nitrogen and other elements in organic microanalysis

Several methods of decomposition of original sample for the detection of nitrogen and other elements are reviewed briefly. Emphasis is placed on a procedure in which aliquot portions of the stock fusion solution are used and the amount of constituent elements present is approximated. An accuracy of within 5 per cent (absolute) can be obtained within half an hour for nitrogen, halides, sulfur, and phosphorus. The method is useful as a screening test, and allows the selection of the correct amount of sample for a quantitative organic microanalysis.