Art and Street Politics in the Global 1960s: Yoshio Nakajima and the Global Avant-Garde

Anarchic street performances in late-1950s Japan; inauguration of the first Happenings in Antwerp and charging of the "magic circle" in Amsterdam; Bauhaus Situationiste and anti-national art exchanges, networks and communes. As "Happener" and "Art Missionary," Yoshio Nakajima’s storied career traverses an astounding range of locations, scenes, movements, media, and performance modes in the global 1960s and 1970s in ways that challenge our notions of the possibilities of art.

Nakajima repeatedly plays a role in jump-starting spaces of possibility, from Tokyo to Ubbeboda, from Spui Square and the Dutch Provos to Antwerp and Sweden. Despite this, Nakajima’s work has paradoxically been largely excluded from accounts where it might have justifiably featured. The present volume represents an international collaboration of researchers working to remedy this oversight. Nakajima’s work demands a reconceptualization of narratives of this art and politics and their specific interrelation to consider his exemplary nonconformity―and its exemplary exclusion.

This history demonstrates the inadequacy of notions of specificity that would oppose an authentic local or national frame to an inauthentic transnational one. Conversely, Nakajima manifests a key dimension of the 1960s as a global event in the interrelation between eventfulness itself and the redrawing of categories of practice and understanding.