Sogetsu Art Center

Establishment The Sōgetsu Art Center (SAC) was founded in 1958 and directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara, who was then known as an avant-garde film director. He received permission to use the auditorium/lecture hall in the newly constructed Sōgetsu Hall (headquarters of the Sōgetsu School of ikebana) in Tokyo's Akasaka district. Sōfū Teshigahara was extremely supportive of the SAC and its activities from the beginning. He invited Georges Mathieu and Sam Francis to create mural paintings for the auditorium of Sōgetsu Hall. The history of this artistic commission was emblematic of the SAC's international ambitions and outlook: following the success of 1956's Sekai konnichi no bijutsu ("Art of Today's World ") exhibition held at Takashimaya Department Store and curated by critics Shin'ichi Segi and Michel Tapié, which set in motion what is known as the Anforumeru senpū ("Informel whirlwind'), Michel Tapié and Georges Mathieu came to Japan, at the invitation of Jirō Yoshihara and Sōfū Teshigahara. Programming The SAC space hosted a wide variety of activities: musical performances, film screenings, journal publishing, and educational space (study groups, workshops). The space was also made available to many artists, both local and international. For a modestly scaled institution, it instigated important changes in the local art scene by connecting Japanese artists and artists from abroad. 1958–1961 In the early years, programs were divided into three categories: the first two were focused on music: the Sōgetsu Contemporary Series (avant-garde classical music) and the Sōgetsu Music Inn (jazz); and the third, the Sōgetsu Cinemathèque, primarily screened films. The program of the Sōgetsu Contemporary Series, for the first few years, was conducted by members of the Sakkyokuka Shūdan (Composer's Group), including composer Tōru Takemitsu and Toshirō Mayuzumi. The SAC's film activities can be traced back to 1957, when Hiroshi Teshigahara and fellow director Susumu Hani founded the Cinema 57 group, which screened independent films. Sōgetsu Cinemathèque was launched in 1961 and was the SAC's longest-running series. It showcased both new and experimental films as well as revisiting key films from history, such as silent films. 1961–1965 From around 1961–1965, the SAC greatly expanded its programming beyond the three earlier series and welcomed various creators. Notably, the center sponsored performances by prominent artists and musicians from outside Japan, including John Cage, David Tudor, Robert Rauschenberg, and Nam June Paik, as well as solo performances from Japanese artists and composers such as Yoko Ono, Toshi Ichiyanagi, and Tōru Takemitsu. These performances, all by creators with some connection to Fluxus, introduced these new ideas to a Japanese audience. Because of the international notoriety of Fluxus, these performances continue to be some of the best-known events that occurred at the SAC. Group Ongaku, a young Japanese ensemble that composed and played musique concrète, also performed at the SAC several times around this period, and via the SAC was able to connect with Ichiyanagi and establish contact with the international Fluxus network (see more on Group Ongaku below). The SAC also expanded its film programming during this time. For example, the center hosted screenings of a new animation group known as Animeshon Sannin no Kai ("Association of Three Animators"), as well as three Animation Festivals which invited other animators inside and outside Japan to submit works for screening. The SAC also experimented with hosting a variety of dance and theatrical performances. Major performances by international visitors included the Off-Broadway play The Coach with the Six Insides by Jean Erdman, and the first showcase in Japan by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. There were noteworthy performances by Japanese creators as well, including dance recitals by Akiko Motofuji, Butoh works by Tatsumi Hijikata, works by Jūrō Kara’s Jōkyō Gekijō (Situation Theatre), plays by Tetsuji Takechi, and plays by Shūji Terayama. Members of the Hanayagi school of nihon buyō (traditional Japanese dance), including Suzushi Hanayagi, also performed at the SAC. There was some effort made by the SAC to start its own experimental theatre series, but the Sōgetsu Experimental Theatre only hosted one performance, by Group NLT (today Gekidan NLT), in 1964. In the last few years of the SAC, most events were screenings part of the Sōgetsu Cinemathèque. In April 1971, the center closed, ending a significant period in avant-garde art in Tokyo. == Philosophy ==

Although he was the director of SAC, Hiroshi Teshigahara advocated a collaborative and horizontal approach: "I had always been involved with activities that mixed up and brought together various art forms. So the art center was something that really concretized what I had been thinking about for a while. One thing that I insisted on was that it wasn't going to be a place where I would call on artists and ask them to do things. I really wanted people to come here on their own, and find it to be a place where they could be spontaneous and experiment. The artists themselves are the real producers... I think it was probably the first time that any organization was able to sustain and continue this sort of thing." Like the Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition (1949-1964), the goal (self-described) was to offer artists a "safe haven from the storm of capitalism that controlled the art market." This impulse is visible even in the earlier programs of the SAC – despite being demarcated into jazz, experimental music, and film, it was often the case that films would accompany the jazz performances, or that composers would contribute scores to the films. In this way, the SAC is often considered to be a place where the boundaries between genres dissolved through collaboration. Influence on intermedia art The multimedia stage experiments at the SAC arguably helped give birth to so-called intermedia art in the late 1960s. Intermedia experiments of the late 1960s pushed beyond collaborations across artistic genres - they used multiple genres (and often integrated new technologies) to create projects that interrogated broad shifts occurring in Japanese environment, culture, and institutions. Several key early experiments in intermedia actually took place at the SAC - for example, the performance tied to the exhibition From Space to Environment in 1966 involved an intermedia apparatus built from sound and light systems. ==Notable events==

"Works of Yoko Ono" (1962) The SAC is often regarded as the birthplace of the happening in Japan. At Yoko Ono's recital in 1962, she debuted several pieces, which were some of the first and most noteworthy artistic happenings in Japan. In each work, she instructed a group of performers, primarily artists affiliated with the SAC, to fulfill various actions. In The Pulse, the group performed mundane acts such as eating fruit and breaking objects. The recital concluded with a piece in which every performer stood on stage, and stared at a person in the audience until they established eye contact. Once they established eye contact, they selected a different person in the audience. If the performers grew tired, they could sit down or even lie down on stage. The event ended once there was no one left in the audience. As much as the SAC introduced new concepts to the Japanese avant-garde, the center was equally a meeting point for like-minded ideas that had been developing both in Japan and elsewhere. "Performance by John Cage and David Tudor," "John Cage and David Tudor Event" (1962) John Cage and David Tudor were invited to Japan and stayed for six weeks at the end of 1962. Although Toshiro Mayuzumi, Toshi Ichiyanagi and Yoko Ono, who had collaborated with John Cage while living in New York were instrumental, it was Hiroshi Teshigahara who was responsible for bringing Cage to Japan. On his 1962 visit, Cage performed Theater piece and also premiered ''0'00, dedicated to Toshi Ichiyanagi and Yoko Ono, at the SAC. In the former piece, he cooked, read a book, and moved around onstage as he would do in his everyday life, but with the sound of his actions amplified and delivered to the audience through a number of speakers. In 0'00'', Cage amplified the subtle noise of writing out a score while smoking from time to time. After forty minutes of this action, he descended into the auditorium to receive a kiss from Yoko Ono (who was married to Ichiyanagi at the time), which indicated the end of the performance. These performances brought about what is now remembered as "John Cage shock" among contemporary musicians in Japan. However, by understanding the meeting of the "happening" and Japanese avant-garde practices of "ceremony" at the SAC, this idea of "John Cage shock" can be debated: the degree of direct influence of Cage's performances is debatable, especially when similar experimentation had already been happening in Japan. The music critic Hewell Tircuit wrote an article for The Japan Times highlighting the fact that several Japanese artists were already experimenting with processes similar to those that Cage had exhibited. This is the case of Group Ongaku, of which Yasunao Tone was a member, who played a concert at the SAC in 1961. The group used a variety of "instruments" including everyday objects (vacuum cleaner, dishes, washboard...), in a methodology of improvisation described as automatism. They gave their concert in front of a full house (with a capacity of 400 people) and their performance was covered by the major newspapers Mainichi and Asahi Shimbun. This performance is considered a legendary incident in the history of postwar Japanese art, an exemplary case of cross-cultural interaction. When Yoshiaki Tōno invited Nobuaki Kojima and Ushio Shinohara to come to the stage to ask their questions to Robert Rauschenberg, the two artists brought onto stage their own works - Shinohara's Marcel Duchamp Thinking (Shiko suru Maruseru Dyushan, 1963) and Coca-Cola Plan (1964), Kojiya's Figure (1964) holding a placard that said "Question." Ushio Shinohara read out his questions, in both Japanese and English, to which Robert Rauschenberg did not respond. The Japanese artist, frustrated, placed the sheet of paper containing the question under Rauschenberg's foot, which finally paid attention to the question, and then pasted the sheet onto the panel of the gold screen. This tense interaction between Rauschenberg and Shinohara, in addition to the presence on stage of works explicitly evoking the works of the star artist, recently awarded at the 1964 Venice Biennale (Coca-Cola Plan) and broadly in the United States (Figure), is indicative of the imbalance of cultural and financial power between American and Japanese artists at the time. ==Chronology of selected events==

• August 30, 1958: First screening of Cinema 58, a continuation of Hiroshi Teshigahara and Susumu Hani’s screening group Cinema 57. The inaugural screening is a selection of films by Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel. • October 15, 1958: Kōbō Abe produces Sōgetsu-Kyōyō Club (Sōgetsu Culture Club), which focuses on meeting to discuss cinema and art in general. It proves to be a fertile ground for the birth of Fluxus. The club meets eight times, until July 1959. • March 20, 1960: The SAC begins publishing SAC, renamed SAC Journal from No.14. The journal will stop being published in 1964. • July 21, 1961: Inauguration of the film screening program Sōgetsu Cinemathèque. • September 15, 1961: Group Ongaku (Shukō Mizuno, Yasunao Tone, Takehisa Kosugi, Mieko Shiomi and others) presented their first and last concert, Concert of Improvisational Music and Acoustic Objects (Sokkyō ongaku to onkyō obuje no konsato). • November 30, 1961: Toshi Ichiyanagi returned to Tokyo from New York, and performed as part of the Sōgetsu Contemporary Series. • February 23, 1962: Piano recital by composer Yūji Takahashi. • February 20–26, 1963: The exhibition "Bauhaus 1919-1933" opens at SAC and is accompanied by related lectures and performances. • February 8, 1964: Hiroshi Teshigahara screens his film Suna no Onna (Woman in the Dunes), which would go on to win the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. • July 28, 1964: Evening performance by Suzushi Hanayagi. • September 21–26, 1964: Inauguration of the Sōgetsu Animation Festival, held annually from 1964 to 1966, following the screenings organized at the center in the early 1960s by the Association of Three Animators (Hiroshi Manabe, Ryōkei Yanagihara, and Yōji Kuri). Osamu Tezuka presented Memory (めもりい) and mermaid (人魚) and Tadanori Yokoo presented Kiss kiss kiss. • November 10–11, November 24–25, 1964: Merce Cunningham Dance Company performs at Sankei Hall in Tokyo. A modern dance workshop is offered at SAC on November 20. • March 1967: The SAC launches the Underground Film Festival. The festival travels to Osaka, Kyoto, and Nagoya. • April 18–20, 1967: The SAC hosts the play The Hunchback of Aomori, a debut performance by the avant-garde theater group Tenjō Sajiki. • August 1967: A symposium is organized on freedom of expression, in relation of Unfreedom of Expression, an exhibition organized at the Marumatsu Gallery, Tokyo, to support Genpei Akasegawa with his infamous 1,000 Yen Note Trial. • October 18–30, 1968: Film Art Festival Tokyo 68 includes a variety of underground and experimental films. The festival tours and screens in several locations around Japan. • October 16, 1969: A "fake revolt" carried out by members of Suginami Film Club, Newsreel, as well as filmmaker Kenji Kanesaka, drives the cancellation of the 1969 Film Art Festival. ==Key sources==

• 編集芦屋市立美術博物館, 千葉市美術館 『草月とその時代 1945–1970』草月とその時代展実行委員会, 1998. • 草月アートセンターの記録刊行委員会『輝け60年代: 草月アートセンターの全記錄』「草月アートセンターの記錄」刊行委員会, フィルムアート社, 2002. • 文化の仕掛人 -『現代文化の磁場と透視図』 - 秋山邦晴 他 著, 1985 ==Further reading==