January 3–10, 2002

naked city

Agitate and Cogitate

The momentary return of Japan’s Provoke magazine.

by A.D. Amorosi

Deep thoughts: An image from the first issue of Provoke, released in November 1968.

Japan, 1968. Like the United States, France, Brazil and Germany, the land of the rising sun was facing the turmoil of bloody protest and student uprising that would last for several years, ultimately resulting in a red-hot overflow that reflected itself in the arts. This social change was pictured (from 1968 through the mid-’70s) by Provoke magazine and its valued revolutionary photographers and theorists. Its now-rare volumes were recently exhumed and re-released as The Japanese Box (Steidl/Edition 7L). Edited by Christoph Schifferli and Akihito Yasumi and based on couture designer Karl Lagerfeld’s valuable collection of issues and crucial offshoots, The Japanese Box reinstates what too few know: Japan’s importance within the social history of radical politicized art.

Crisis was near. The skyscraping modernist movement of the 1950s brought housing shortages and monetary problems that, by the mid-’60s, led to Tokyo’s election of a Marxist governor, along with rising self-doubts about artists working within a dehumanized consumerist society and anti-military protests against the U.S. — discontent ruled.

That unrest would be captured — as it had never been before — in Provoke, a journal of hard, grainy photo-reportage, that, like Mishima’s The Temple of The Golden Pavilion and Confessions of a Mask, showed a wounded country.

Usually limited to a 1,000-copy run and printed in fanzine fashion on rough paper with ink-stained images, Provoke was meant, quite literally, to titillate the mind, to create a new immediate photographic dialogue between viewer and artist, removing each from the staid roles of voyeur and exhibitionist.

Photographer/writer Takuma Nakahira and art critic Koji Taki sought almost violently to seek out a new philosophical vision that was at one with the radical edges of pop (think Warhol’s Electric Chair and Car Crash), Fluxus (like Yoko Ono’s slow, mummy-esque peels representing the psychic rape of all women) and physical art (Chris Burden nailing himself to a Volkswagen).

As cruel, realistic manifestoes go, few came as harsh or as raw as the black-and-white images in Provoke’s first three issues or its big-volume offshoots from contributors Nobuyoshi Araki (Sentimental Journey), Daido Moriyama (Bye Bye, Photography Dear) and Takuma Nakahira (For a Language to Come).

Each book seems to find itself deeper in the muck of Japan’s upheaval and its desire to un-make art, or, rather, make "un-art," meant to deglorify technology and rehumanize a proto-futurist Japan by showing its pores and pockmarks. As theorist Arata Isozaki once wrote, the art of Japan in the latter ’60s was meant to "dismantle architecture."

That deglorification is now made glorious in Japanese Box. It’s almost primal, as witnessed in Moriyama’s scratched, over-burned negatives and scuffed photos showing commuters and stoic statesmen whited out beyond recognition. Unlike Moriyama’s blurs and scrapes, Nakahira uses deep, grainy pixels to look into an over-industrialized morass, the mess of modernist rule. Araki is Japan’s Mary Ellen Mark, an artist who fucks with tradition by painting portraits of bare-boned subjects that reveal a loss of all soul and all sanctity.

As for the three issues of Provoke in the set, each volume streams by like a crude flipbook or a DJ on hyper-spin, sampling then mix-mastering the fashionable with the anti-fashionable: field and mine workers with bikini girls; posturing, posing teen models set against the ragged mess of a bombed-out subway train; cool, sunglassed cads and busboys on break. Sex shots look vile and putrid; nudes grainy and disconnected. By the time you reach No. 3 — the red volume — its oxidized silver-black photos seem almost proud of turning pretty faces into bulbous, blurry monstrosities.

Provoke magazine sought to bring the viewer a "world as it is" while forcing each individual to focus on mortality, time and Japan’s place in that world — an art form that provoked as much as it enraged and engaged.

Why a genteel but curious designer such as Karl Lagerfeld chose to collect or distribute Provoke anew is unknown. That he has decided to share these hidden once-forbidden fruits with us in the present is to our benefit.