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Abstract
This article analyses some of the important early work (ca. late 1960s-early 1970s) of the Japanese photographer Nakahira Takuma (1938–2015) in terms of the themes of materiality and cultural alienation, focusing on Nakahira’s links with radical European art and writing of the period. In particular, it explores the relationship with the work of the French writer J.M.G Le Clézio in early writings such as Le Procès-Verbal (1963), L’Extase matérielle (1967) and La Guerre (1970). Le Clézio includes a selection of his own photos as an appendix to La Guerre and the article also embraces an analysis of that imagery and its role in relation to the author’s association with the nouveau roman during this early, experimental phase of his career.
Acknowledgements
I am extremely grateful both to Osiris and to Nakahira Gen in making possible the inclusion of the work of Nakahira Takuma and to Gallimard for that of of J.M.G. Le Clézio.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Munroe in Tiampo and Munroe, Gutai, 143.
2. Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel; and Valerie Minogue, “Realism and the Nouveau Roman,” 77-94.
3. In “A Future for the Novel” (1956) Robbe-Grillet also credits the visual image, in both cinema and photography, with the power to “help free us from our own conventions” and to reveal “the unaccustomed character of the world that surrounds us” — For a New Novel, pp.20-21.
4. See Yasumi, “Introduction: the trajectory of Nakahira Takuma.”
5. Charrier, “Nakahira Takuma’s Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary? (1973) and the quest for ‘true’ photographic realism in post-war Japan.”
6. Nakahira cited in Nakamori, “Experiments with the camera,” 16.
7. Charrier, op. cit., 7.
8. See Mitsuda, “Intersections of art and photography in 1970s Japan,” 33-4.
9. Le Clézio, Le Procès-Verbal, 9.
10. Ibid., 72.
11. Nakahira cited in Charrier, op. cit., 5-6.
12. Martin, Le Clézio. Le Procès-Verbal, 3.
13. Ibid., 29.
14. Ibid., 79.
15. Charrier, op. cit., 18.
16. Provoke manifesto, cited in Nakamori, For a New World to Come, 16-8.
17. Nakahira, Circulation, n.p. and 294.
18. Consumer society was a major topic of investigation at this time, as in Baudrillard’s Système des objets (1968) and his La Société de la consommation (1970).
19. Ferrat sang of “flowered aluminium suns” and “little sales assistants the colour of orange pschitt” — for full lyrics see: http://www.paroles.cc/chanson,prisunic,20727 (accessed October 13, 2020).
20. Nakahira, “Excerpt from Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary?”.127.
21. Ibid., 128.
22. Robbe-Grillet, cited in Nakahira, Ibid., 128.
23. Nakahira, “Excerpt from Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary?” 128-9.
24. Ibid., 129.
25. Martin, Le Clézio. Le Procès-Verbal, op. cit., 35.
26. Artaud, “To Have Done with the Judgement of God,”571.
27. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 8.
28. Le Clézio, Le Procès-Verbal, 166.
29. Nakahira, “Excerpt from Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary?” op. cit., 130-31.
30. Nakahira, “Excerpt from Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary?” 129.
31. Ibid., 130.
32. See Deleuze and Guattari, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, ch.10 — the chapter in fact opens with the idea of becoming a rat.
33. Le Clézio, Le Procès-Verbal, 121.
34. The death is attributed to “neurasthenia” — the quintessential expression of the stresses of modern life.
35. Franz K. Prichard, “On For a Language to Come, Circulation and Overflow,”86.
36. See Deleuze and Guattari, L’anti-Oedipe, 1972.
37. Nakahira, “Looking at the City, or the Look from the City,” 12-3.
38. Nakahira, “Photography, a Single Day’s Actuality,” 291.
39. Nakahira, “The Exhaustion of Contemporary Art: My participation in the Seventh Paris Biennale,” 295.
40. Mitsuda, “Yūsuke Nakahara,” 98.
41. See Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem (exh. cat.), Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1994, 234-7. I’m grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing to the relevance of Morris’s project.
42. Nakahira in conversation with Daido Moriyama, August 2, 1971, in Daido Moriyama, Farewell Photography, Tokyo: Getsuyosha + Bookshop M, 2019 (1972), n.p.
43. Nakahira, artist’s statement included in location photograph in Circulation, n.p.
44. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Exeter: Rebel Press, 1987 (1967), sections 1 and 2 (n.p.).
45. Nakahira, “Would it be possible to deviate from vision as an institution”, cited in Nakamori, For a New World to Come, 18.
46. Nakahira, “Excerpt from Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary?” 125.
47. Ibid., 126.
48. Nakahira, cited in Yasumi Akihito, “Optical Remnants,”313.
49. Nakahira, “Photography, a Single Day’s Actuality,” op. cit., 292.
50. Nakahira, “Photography, a Single Day’s Actuality,”293.
51. Nakahira, “The Exhaustion of Contemporary Art”, op. cit., 299.
52. Mitsuda, in For a New World to Come, 28. Such works were shown the previous year by Enokura at the 1970 Tokyo Biennale.
53. Enokura Kōji, in Mitsuda, Ibid., 28.
54. Nakahira, “The Exhaustion of Contemporary Art,” op. cit., 295-6.
55. Nakahira cited in Nakamori, For a New World to Come, 21.
56. See Yasumi, “Optical Remnants: Paris 1971, Takuma Nakahira,” 311-12.
57. Nakahira, “The Exhaustion of Contemporary Art,” 301.
58. Le Clézio, L’extase matérielle, 47.
59. Le Clézio, Le Procès-Verbal, 160.
60. Ibid., 160.
61. Martin, op. cit., 62.
62. Le Clézio, Le Procès-Verbal, 60.
63. Nakahira cited in Yasumi, op. cit., 313.
64. Le Clézio, L’extase matérielle, 298.
65. Martin, op. cit., 49.
66. Ibid., 50.
67. Le Clézio, L’extase matérielle, 176.
68. Le Clézio, La Guerre, 20.
69. Ibid., 31.
70. Ibid., 47 and 37.
71. Ibid., 47.
72. Ibid., 48-55.
73. Ibid., 179.
74. Nakahira cited in Prichard, “An Illustrated Dictionary of Urban Overflows”, in Nakahira, Overflow, Tokyo: Case Publishing, 2018, n.p.
75. Nakahira, ibid., n.p.
76. Takuma Nakahira, extract from Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary?, in Doryun Chong et al (eds), From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan 1945-1989. Primary Documents, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2012, p.267; Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin, 1979, p.106.
77. Nakahira, cited in Prichard, “An Illustrated Dictionary of Urban Overflows,” n.p.
78. Nakahira, in From Postwar to Postmodern, 266-67.
79. Ibid., 266.
80. Le Clézio, La Guerre, 190-91.
81. Marx observes in his model of “commodity fetishism” that “the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own” — Marx, Capital, 165.
82. Kōbō, Hako otoko trans. as The Box Man.
83. Sakaki, The Rhetoric of Photography in Modern Japanese Literature, 13.
84. Ibid., 14.
85. Ibid., 60.
86. Abe cited in Sakaki, Ibid., 73.
87. See Takuma, Degree Zero — Yokohama (exh. cat.), Yokohama Museum of Art, 2003 — figs.761-820.
88. Nakamori, in For a New World to Come, 12.
89. Prichard, “An Illustrated Dictionary of Urban Overflows,” n.p.
90. Ibid.
91. Nakahira cited in Prichard, Ibid.
92. Moriyama Daido, “The Decision to Shoot,” 34.
93. Nakahira, “Excerpt from Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary?” 131.
94. Ibid. p.131.
95. Nakahira, “Rebellion against the landscape: fire at the limits of my perpetual gazing …, ” 8-9.
96. See note 28 above.
97. Nakahira, “Looking at the City, or the Look of the City,” 12.
98. Charrier, op. cit., 11 and 20. Again see Nakahira Takuma, Degree Zero — Yokohama.
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Notes on contributors
Neil Matheson
Neil Matheson is Senior Lecturer in Theory and Criticism of Photography at the University of Westminster and has published widely on photography, surrealism and contemporary art. He is editor of The Sources of Surrealism (2006) and joint editor of the collection The Machine and the Ghost (2013). He has written recently on postwar Japanese photography and his most recent book is Surrealism and the Gothic (2018).