A Community That Penetrates the Darkness

Art critic Yoshida Yoshie’s essay “A Community that Penetrates the Darkness” was first published in the November 1972 issue of the premiere art magazine Bijutsu techo. This same issue included a special feature entitled “To the commune: Spiritual, Lifestyle,” and apart from Yoshida’s essay, it carried a piece by Suenaga Tamio, who had participated in a variety of avant-garde art collectives in the 1960s, and pages presenting artworks by foreign and domestic artists under the title “Plan for a World Uprising.” As we can see from this special feature, various kinds of activist communes were attempted in 1970s Japan, and the realization of communalism transcending the individual was explored through a variety of experimental methods.
Yoshida’s essay is an analysis of the commune opened on Mt. Suwa in Nagano Prefecture by artist Matsuzawa Yutaka, describing how a throng of artists and art critics gathered there to pursue intimate exchange with nature and the outside world via the body. Here, a facet of the piece that can be connected to the current interest in ecology emerges.
Research on Matsuzawa—an artist representative of postwar Japanese conceptualism—has developed rapidly in recent years. We can cite art historian Reiko Tomii’s English language study Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan (2016, MIT Press) as one such example. In this book, Tomii analyzes Matuzawa‘s practice in detail as a key case study. That this same book received such high acclaim even in the US attests to the rising interest in Matsuzawa within the Anglophone sphere.
A portion of the collection left behind by Yoshida, who developed a critical practice spanning a wide range of not only arts but also dance and other subcultures, has been donated to the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) in the United States, and is currently archived as the Yoshie Yoshida Papers.

Title

A Community That Penetrates the Darkness

Author

Yoshida Yoshie

First published

1972

Translation

Reiko Tomii

Editing

Naoki Matsuyama

Design

Ian Lynam

Theme

Critics

First Posted Online

2023-03-20

Last modified

2023-03-30

© 2022 Yoshida Kakuya + Bunka-cho Art Platform Japan

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Citation

Footnote/endnote: Yoshida Yoshie, "A Community That Penetrates the Darkness," trans. Reiko Tomii, Bunka-cho Art Platform Japan, posted March 20, 2023, artplatform.go.jp/readings/R202228.

Bibliography: Yoshida Yoshie. "A Community That Penetrates the Darkness." Translated by Reiko Tomii. Bunka-cho Art Platform Japan. Posted March 20, 2023. artplatform.go.jp/readings/R202228.

Original Japanese Edition

Yoshida Yoshie, “Matsuzawa Yutaka: Yami wo tōtetsu suru kyōdōtai” in Bijutsu techo no. 360 (November 1972): 5–11.

ヨシダ・ヨシエ「松沢宥・闇を透徹する共同体」『美術手帖』360号（1972年11月）、5–11頁。

National Diet Library(NDL)

https://id.ndl.go.jp/bib/353998

ISBN