Content area
Full text
Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931. By GENNIFER WEISENFELD. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. 379 pp. $55.00 (cloth).
Gennifer Weisenfeld's Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931 provides an informative account of the prewar avant-garde as a movement dedicated to seizing hold of everyday life as a site of struggle, of liberation, and as the source and subject of art.
Weisenfeld focuses on the enigmatically named "Mavo," a group founded in July 1923 to fill the vacuum left by the recently dissolved Futurist Art Association (Mirai-ha Bijutsu Kyokai). Four out of five of Mavo's founding members were involved with the FAA, but the new group was distinguished by its emphasis on the inequities and anxieties of the present over the utopian promise of the future. Their insistence on the integration of art with everyday life meant that Mavo members worked in a wide variety of media, including staged happenings, theater, dance, manga, architecture, and journalism, as well as painting, constructions, and installations. The theoretical underpinning of this diverse body of work was derived from founder Murayama Tomoyoshi's notion of "conscious constructivism" (ishikiteki koseishugi). The conscious constructivist artist, in Weisenfeld's words, "must turn interior, subjective experience outward, using personal vision to critique...