Relooking at the Japanese Dada-Constructivist Group the Mavoists

Frieze Magazine does not disappoint in this monograph of the Tokyo avant-garde art group known as the "Mavoists." Andrew Maerkle provides a thorough background of the movement, started in 1923, placing it alongside traditions of antagonizing institutions, proletariat theater, and other "artistic models from the west," i.e., Dada, Constructivism and Soviet avant-garde architecture and theater. He also looks at contemporary Japanese art and art discourse (particularly the anti-nuclear movement) in relation to the country's political, economic, and art history. On their magazine, Mavo:

While relatively few of their works survive, Mavo’s intellectual dynamism is still felt in the pages of their journal, published for seven issues from 1924 to 1925, and reissued in 1991 in a facsimile edition (itself now out of print) by Nihon Kindai Bungakukan (the Museum of Modern Japanese Literature). From its distinctive cover lettering in both Japanese and English to its bold compositions of reproductions, prints, type and design elements, the journal bristled with provocative content, arranged upside down, right to left and left to right, inverted or stretching across several pages in irregular columns, so that one almost tumbles through it. Contained within it were translations of poems and texts by Wassily Kandinsky and El Lissitzky, commentaries on local and international art, essays on Soviet Avant-garde architecture, as well as scenarios for Dadaist stage productions and poems filled with nonsense words and absurdist imagery by group members and other writers.

For the cover of the third issue of Mavo, published in September 1924, artist Michinao Takamizawa created Portrait of a Foreigner’s Mistress, a collage incorporating strands of hair and firecracker packets. Within the journal, the group staged a kind of conceptual exhibition, with prints and reproductions individually pasted onto sheets of found newsprint integrated into the binding. A text introducing this section compared the journal itself to the explosives on its cover, and asserted: ‘We are the basic preparation for the eternal revenge of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, and we are pushy but frank destroyers.’ Cited for the potential public danger of the firecrackers, the issue was censored upon its release.

"A few artists, have, in fact, already revisited the work of Mavo," writes Maerkle. On that note:

In 1983, Yoshio Shirakawa organized the exhibition ‘Dada in Japan / The Japanese Avant-Garde 1920–1970: Photo-Documentation’ at Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, attempting to synthesize the pre-war and postwar Avant-gardes through the recurrence of anarchic performance in Japanese art. More recently, Ei Arakawa, who learned of Mavo through Shirakawa’s writing, has incorporated it into performances such as M for Mavoists (and so on…) (2010) and Joy of Life (2012), while Miwa Yanagi staged the three-part Theatre Project: 1924 (2011–13), revisiting key moments in the careers of Murayama and the founders of the Tsukiji Little Theatre.

Shirakawa based his reading of the Japanese Avant-garde on the metaphor of uneri, an image that evokes the ouroboros-like motion of waves swallowing other waves and being swallowed in turn. But perhaps a closer analogy can be found in Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar (1983), who sees in the waves the possibility to ‘overturn time, to perceive the true substance of the world beyond sensory and mental habits’, only to walk away, ‘even more unsure about everything’. What Arakawa identifies – when he has participants in a Japanese art history workshop at Tate Modern mimic poses from Mavo performances, as he did for Joy of Life – and what Yanagi shows through her reconstruction of the Tsukiji Little Theatre’s 1924 production of Reinhard Goering’s Seeschlacht (Sea Battle) – with its frenetic action and modular, shifting stage – are the uncanny parallels that arise from a history in which the international and Japanese contexts, past and present, are themselves caught in an ouroboros-like cycle. We recognize correspondences with our own time, but we don’t quite know where to place them, or where to place ourselves.

We're so grateful to have discovered this! Thanks to (and read more at) Frieze. At top: Masao Kato, The Delightful Castle Gate, Mavo, issue 4, 1 October 1924.