Drifting Objects of Dreams: Shuzo Takiguchi at Setagaya Art Museum
Norio Ito
Shuzo Takiguchi, Tick-tack my heart-the Watch?, 1962. Paper, decalcomania, 11.4 x 9.6 in. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Toyama
Shuzo Takiguchi, who was born in 1903 and died in 1979 at the age of seventy-five, was a poet and art critic as well as a visual artist. During this multifaceted career Takiguchi, closely attuned as he was to the latest trends in avant-garde art overseas, left an indelible stamp on the development of modern art in postwar Japan.
His best-known achievement is his pioneering role in introducing surrealism to a Japanese audience at the end of the 1920s; in 1930, he published a translation of Andre Breton’s Surr�alisme et Peinture. From then on, as a close associate of the surrealists, Takiguchi produced a steady stream of art criticism and translation. After the war he became a prolific writer of art reviews in newspapers and magazines. As such, he got to know many young artists through events like the Yomiuri Independent–an exhibition sponsored by one of Japan’s newspapers that accepted works without reviewing them first–and he associated with the members of Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop), an all-round group of artists working in many different genres. He also devoted himself to discovering fresh talent. For example, he was given complete charge of selecting artists to show works at the newly opened Takemiya Gallery in Kanda, and between 1951 and 1957 he organized a total of 208 shows.
The exhibition at Setagaya Art Museum features a total of some 700 items. These include artistic works, photographs, books, and such that all came into Takiguchi’s hands through the artists he associated with. There are also a vast number of works by Takiguchi, made using such experimental techniques as d�calcomanie. Vested with dreams of freedom, these objects celebrate belief in the omnipotence of dreams. They capture the very moment of creation when a new entity comes into being.
Over 130 artists are represented at the exhibition, all leaders of the day not just in the arts but in many other fields of creative endeavor: film, poetry, photography, music, architecture, dance, flower arrangement, calligraphy, design. All were artists who molded the cultural scene of the 1950s and 1960s, and the pieces on display were products of the most fertile period in the postwar efflorescence of the Japanese avant-garde.
After visiting Europe in 1959, Takiguchi ceased contributing to periodicals, for he was finding it increasingly difficult to write commentary in a journalistic style. Instead, he tried to come to grips with the age in which he lived by becoming an artist himself. He started doing automatic unconscious drawings, and began producing d�calcomanies. Despite his successive transformations from poet to art critic, and from art critic to visual artist, Takiguchi remained a surrealist to the end of his days. Perhaps he sensed that in the near future there would come a day when art itself would become well-nigh impossible.
