, sometimes shortened to Neo-Dada Organizers or simply , was a short-lived but influential Japanese Neo-Dadaist art collective formed by Masunobu Yoshimura in 1960. Composed of a small group of young, up-and-coming artists who met periodically at Yoshimura's "White House" atelier in Shinjuku, the Neo-Dada Organizers engaged in all manner of visual and performance artworks, but specialized in producing disturbing, impulsive spectacles, often involving physical destruction of objects, that the art critic Ichirō Hariu deemed "savagely meaningless," and that inspired another art critic, Yoshiaki Tōno, to coin the term "anti-art" (han-geijutsu). Examples included filling galleries with piles of garbage, smashing furniture to the beat of jazz music, and prancing the streets of Tokyo in various states of dress and undress. Using the human body as their medium of art, their violent performances reflected both their dissatisfaction with the restrictive environment of the Japanese art world at the time, as well as contemporary social developments, most notably the massive 1960 Anpo protests against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty.
The Neo-Dada Organizers held three official exhibitions in 1960, as well as a number of bizarre "actions," "events," and "happenings" in which they sought to mock, deconstruct, and in many cases, physically destroy conventional forms of art. Many of the group's members and participants would go on to become noted artists in their own right, including Genpei Akasegawa, Shūsaku Arakawa, Sayako Kishimoto, Tetsumi Kudō, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, and Ushio Shinohara.
Artistic stance Neo-Dada Organizers was formed at a time when Japan was rapidly modernizing after the destruction of World War II. The group positioned themselves in opposition to all established art forms and institutions, especially the strains of humanism and socialist realism that dominated Japanese art circles in the 1950s, but also the recent tendency toward wholesale importation of foreign art trends, such as abstract art and Art Informel. But beyond opposing the dominant art forms of the time, the Neo-Dada Organizers reacted to the efforts by the Liberal Democratic Party government, led by conservative Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, to revise and extend the United States Japan Security Treaty (known as "Anpo" in Japanese), which led to the massive Anpo protests across the country. Because it locked Japan into a quasi-permanent military alliance with the United States, the treaty led many Japanese to fear that Japan would become a target should a nuclear war break out.
At their first exhibition, held at the Ginza Gallery in Tokyo in April, 1960, the Neo-Dada Organizers released a list of their guiding principles:
These principles signaled the group's devotion to what group member Genpei Akasegawa would later term "creative destruction" whereby the group sought to create a space for new types of art to emerge by systematically seeking out and destroying all existing artistic norms and conventions.
In June 1960, Akasegawa read out the group's "manifesto" (written by group member Ushio Shinohara) to a group of reporters:
This statement conveyed a sense of hopeless desperation that, at a time when attempts to create new forms of art were being suffocated by oppressive ideologies and hide-bound institutions, the only way to save art was to kill it.
Name The term "Neo-Dada" was first used in May 1957 in Robert Rosenblum's "Castelli Group" article for Arts Magazine, and then, more dramatically, in January 1958, in the New York art monthly ARTnews, to describe the style of the most recent collage and assemblage artists - primarily Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. The latter became known in Japan primarily through the art critic Yoshiaki Tōno, who published an article about them in the November 1959 issue of Geijutsu shinchō.
The use of the term "Neo-Dada" did not mean that the group claimed any direct link to the original Japanese Dadaists of the 1920s (such as Tomoyoshi Murayama or the group MAVO). The term "Neo-Dada" in this usage was as much a wink to the New York avant-garde as a reference to historical Dadaism. That said, relations between certain members of the Neo-Dada Organizers and their American counterparts could be tense, as exemplified most notably in a confrontation between Ushio Shinohara and Robert Rauschenberg during the performance Twenty Questions to Bob Rauschenberg, which took place at the Sōgetsu Art Center on November 28, 1964.
By adding the English word "organizers" to their name, the group indicated their interest in appropriating (and possibly mocking) the left-wing jargon of the ongoing Anpo protests. The group's Japanese name, written Neo・dada・oruganaizāzu in katakana script with dots in between the words, would normally translate to "Neo-Dada Organizers" in a standard English translation. However, the group's usage of this name was inconsistent, and increasingly came to be abbreviated simply "Neo-Dada" over time. In the announcement for their first exhibition, the group called the exhibition the "Neo-Dadaism Organizer Exhibition" without an "s" at the end, but "Organizers" with an "s" was used in other contexts.
Art historian Reiko Tomii has argued, in a 2005 "Translator's Note," that the group's name should be spelled "Neo Dada" without a hyphen, despite the fact that the term "Neo-Dada" is almost invariably hyphenated in English. However, hyphens do not ordinarily exist in Japanese script, and group members often employed the Japanese interpunct (a centrally-aligned black dot, the closest Japanese equivalent to a hyphen) between the words "Neo" and "Dada," as attested in their flyers, writings, and artworks. In any case, the term "Neo-Dada Organizers" (with hyphen and in the plural), has become a standard term for the group in English language scholarship, as well as in standard art historical reference works.
Activities The Neo-Dada group members gathered at their leader Masunobu Yoshimura's atelier, called the "White House" (Howaito Hausu), which had been designed by Arata Isozaki and built by Junzō Yoshimura in Shinjuku in 1958. It would serve as their main base of operations until 1962.
At the "White House," they spent day and night discussing, writing leaflets, organizing performances-cum-parties, and working towards the Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition and other group shows. They arranged a rapid-fire series of exhibitions in 1960, at times accompanied by guerrilla actions on the street.
In 1960, the movement against the renewal of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty had spread throughout the country and formed the background to the violent political upheaval of the time. In Tokyo, the Diet was surrounded by the crowd of demonstrators, and in the middle of the ranting and tumult, Shūsaku Arakawa threw a brick at the police: legend has it that, as a result, the demonstration turned into a riot. The Neo-Dada Organizers actively took part in the anti-Treaty protests on the streets of Tokyo, but deliberately sought to conflate political revolution with artistic revolution. For example, they paraded through the streets with leaflets, lightbulbs, or other bizarre paraphernalia attached all over their bodies and replaced shouts of "Anpo hantai" ("down with the Security Treaty") with cries of "Anfo hantai" ("down with Art Informel").
In parallel with these activist activities, the group organized three official exhibitions and individual members of the collective participated in the major events of the early 1960s, especially the Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition cycle (1949-1963) and at the Sogetsu Art Center (1958-1971).
Selected events
First Neo-Dada Exhibition (April 4–9, 1960)
The first "official" Neo-Dada Organizers exhibition was held at the Ginza Gallery in Tokyo. The group displayed found objects and garbage while playing jazz tapes and "sexy whispers." Meanwhile, a half-naked man hacked at the "artworks" with an axe. The sounds of objects being destroyed were recorded, and then played loudly out into the street from the gallery's window. Betsujin Ishibashi also performed his work Fifteen Minutes in a Waseda Street in the Morning, reminiscent of American Neo-Dadaist Robert Rauschenberg’s Automobile Tire Print (1951), in which Ishibashi laid a large sheet of paper in the street and let passing automobiles run it over before retrieving the dirtied paper 15 minutes later.
Anpo Commemoration Event (June 18, 1960)
On June 18, 1960, just three days after student activist Michiko Kanba was killed in a clash with police at the National Diet as part of the ongoing Anpo protests, group members convened at Yoshinobu's "White House" atelier and staged a performance called Anpo Commemoration Event (安保記念エベント) for gathered reporters and television cameras, supposedly to "commemorate" the failure of the protests to stop the passage of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. Several group members group stripped naked and danced wildly. Yoshimura appeared with a massive erect penis and testicles made of cloth, paper, and string tied to his loins, white arrows painted on his chest, and a gaping red wound painted on his stomach that looked as if he had just disembowled himself in a seppuku suicide ritual, and Arakawa appeared in a grotesque, monster-like costume and gulped directly from a bottle of strong shōchū while dancing around and making strange noises. The performance concluded with the group gathering around a large plywood panel and taking turns ritualistically destroying it with acid, fire, and a hatchet. Shortly after this somber event concluded, the Security Treaty was automatically passed in the Upper House of the Japanese Diet, in accordance with Japanese law.
Second Neo-Dada Exhibition (July 1–10, 1960)
The second "official" Neo-Dada Exhibition took place at Yoshimura's atelier in Shinjuku. Group member Tatsumi Yoshino set his aptly-named work Danger alight inside the atelier.
Beach Show (July 20, 1960)
The Beach Show was performed at Zaimokuza Beach in Kamakura. In a performance filmed by television station TBS, male members carried out sadistic acts against women associated with the group, including Sayako Kishimoto. The event was representative of the male oppression reigning in the group, where women - already in the minority - were subjected to physical abuse and their work was not regarded as equal to that of other male members. These behaviors reflected the idea in vogue at the time in certain artistic circles that the subversion of societal norms required, among other things, the liberalization of violence, particularly sexist violence.
Third Neo-Dada Exhibition (September 1–7, 1960)
The third and final "official" Neo-Dada Exhibition was put on at the Hibiya Gallery near Hibiya Park. Ushio Shinohara, sporting his trademark mohawk hairstyle, installed a temporary installation in Hibiya Park and then slashed it to ribbons. Masunobu Yoshimura wrapped his naked body with the group's exhibition flyers and Kinpei Masuzawa covered himself in fragile glass lightbulbs before proceeding to stroll through downtown Tokyo.
Bizarre Assembly (September 30, 1960)
The Bizarre Assembly, an outdoor destructive performance, was held at Yoshimura's "White House" atelier in Shinjuku. Yoshimura, Masuzawa, and Shinohara struck jagged holes into a metal sheet. Shinohara also performed his now-famous “boxing painting,” in which he punched a large piece of paper with boxing gloves that had been dipped in ink.
Dinner Commemorating Our Defeat in the War (August 15, 1962)