MAVO
Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931
By GENNIFER WEISENFELD
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 379 pages, $55

reviewed by Claire Cuccio

Rocks shattering the glass roof of a Ueno Park exhibition hall; a man masquerading as a pregnant prostitute; wire, burlap, and ladies' shoes in collage. Although the Japanese detective-novel genre has attracted increasing interest in recent English scholarship, this list does not catalogue clues to a crime found in a detective novel. Instead, it represents some of the acts and objects investigated in Gennifer Weisenfeld's Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, a comprehensive study of Mavo, the iconoclastic 1920s Japanese art group, and the first work by an art historian included in the University of California's interesting series of publications, Twentieth Century Japan: The Emergence of a World Power. While analyzing Mavo in all of its artistic permutations, Weisenfeld's complex work complements the other books in this series by documenting Mavo's engagement in the social, economic, and political circumstances of the time.

Mavo's use of conventional items like wire and burlap in unconventional artistic production manifested the group's ambivalence toward Japan's modern society. Not long after artists of the Meiji period (1868-1912) established standards for a discrete category of "art" in order to participate in, and ultimately compete against, Western culture, Mavo's revisionist agenda emerged to deconstructphysically as well as theoreticallythe new standards and to push for a reintegration of art into everyday life. While the group maintained a fluid membership of approximately a dozen young male artist-activists, Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901-77), the putative leader, promoted what Weisenfeld terms "conscious constructivism." This self-invented amalgam of anarchism, Marxism, futurism, expressionism, dadaism, and constructivism helped define Mavo's purpose of reinstating individualism into what was seen as a dehumanizing modernity. Mavo's motives and methods were not dissimilar to other concurrent avant-garde movements around the world. By choosing to use the preexisting language of modernism and the avant-garde in writing about Mavo, Weisenfeld locates Mavo's contributions within the realm of international art and substantiates Japanese participation in the worldwide avant-garde movement. Weisenfeld's approach will likely help bridge the remaining gap between Asian and Western art history and encourage greater comparative assessment.

The role of individualism in modern Japan has inspired copious literary scholarship on the place of writers and intellectuals. Weisenfeld broadens this discourse by introducing artists into the discussion. Ideologically, she paints a portrait of the "Mavoists" as modern artists in the dual guise of dissidents and bohemians. We see Mavoists performing their roles as artiststheir counterculture hairstyles and attire, intimacies from their lives, their studios, homes and exhibition venues, and other spaces they occupied. Weisenfeld also shows us the Mavoists as artists in practice: struggling for financial backing, organizing exhibitions, and wrangling with censorship. Their artistic goal of reinstating individualism evolved into demanding that Mavoists be anarchists and take artistic actions resisting the state. Given Japan's subsequent colonial expansion, one wonders whether the group's collective artistic acts were too few or too iconoclastic to affect subsequent events.

One of the book's most engaging discussions traces Mavo's artistic reaction to the 1923 Kanto earthquake. At the same time that their activities displayed imagination rising out of the disaster, they provided additional perspectives on a cataclysmic event that changed the course of Tokyo's history. Taking advantage of the destruction to promote its own vision of a modern landscape, Mavo embarked on architectural projects, including people-friendly signboards and facades, and organized traveling exhibitions, displayed in interactive spaces such as cafés and restaurants. Redevelopment after the earthquake spurred consumerism; Weisenfeld documents Mavo's participation in the new commodified culture fusing art with industry that dictated living a bunka seikatsu, or a cultured life. Burgeoning consumerism in turn bolstered the print culture. Forecasting the innovative graphic design and vibrancy of Japanese publishing, Weisenfeld reveals much about the inner workings of Japanese publishing in her section on Mavo's launch, in July 1924, of its own magazine and the graphic designs, illustrations, and advertisements Mavo created for other publications.

The book's final chapter, on Mavo's participation in theater, provides a fascinating glimpse of the stage in 1920s Japan. Weisenfeld demonstrates that by diversifying to theater, Mavo could further subvert artistic representation and transgress the conventional boundary between high art and daily life. Mavo's performances tended toward the erotic, signifying a "return" to the body itself and the autonomy of the individual. It is not surprising then that Mavo's productions were at the vanguard of Japanese experimental theater and thus that Weisenfeld compares them to contemporary German and Russian theater. Though Weisenfeld notes stylistic differences between Mavo and traditional No and Kabuki performances, a more extensive discussion of the subject might well identify influences of these precursors or trace Mavo's conscious efforts to break from tradition.

Like the Kanto earthquake, World War II offered Mavo another leveled landscape to consciously (re)construct. But Weisenfeld's interesting account in the epilogue shows that the postwar blight was sufficient to extinguish Mavo's spirit of constructivism, leaving to critics, curators, and historians the task of reviving the avant-garde. The last event in the book marking Mavo's legacy documents the 1970 World's Fair, held in Osaka at a time when Japan was flexing its economic muscle. The fair organizers exhibited avant-garde art with their display of Japanese national culture and, according to Weisenfeld, mainstreamed the avant-garde. This integration of avant-garde art was likely motivated by the general awareness that art can be used as a device to influence global relations and that economic might alone is insufficient to curry favor among individuals and institutions worldwide. Indeed, the inclusion of avant-garde art in an international exposition reads as an ironic coda to Mavo's aim to reintegrate art with life, even as it defies Mavo's radicalism.

The visual range, content, and format of Weisenfeld's book warrant special attention. Weisenfeld notes that some of the images possess a "dark or murky" quality, but her animated vocabulary and textured prose inject a quality of clarity and movement that enables readers to "view" the images many degrees closer to what Mavo must have originally intended. The compromised quality of some of the images, moreover, reminds viewers of the difficulty in accessing and understanding such artifacts and the challenges that current scholars like Weisenfeld face because these types of reproductions are often the only form available. Finally, if you enjoy a book that feels good in your hands and the design of which heightens both your reading and viewing experience, Mavo, an Ahmanson Murphy fine arts imprint, is an exceptional volume. When a book combines outstanding scholarship and writing in the form of a pleasing aesthetic design, it is a tribute to author, designers, editors, publishers, and the others behind the book. Most of all, it pays homage to Mavo's own contributions and the impact of modern Japanese art overall.