State v. (Anti-)Art: Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident by Akasegawa Genpei and Company Reiko Tomii All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. —Marcel Duchamp, 1957 A Preliminary Overview Open to the public? asks the present volume. This question, which distinctly engages modern society, is one that confounds art. It can be argued that art is open to the public in many post-1945 societies. In Japan, for example, a staggering number of people saw such world treasures as Venus de Milo, the riches of King Tutankhamen, and Mona Lisa. (These works attracted, respectively, audiences of 831,198, 1,297,718, and 1,505,239 in 1964, 1965, and 1974.)1 This phenomenon, however, coexists with a multiplicity of contem- porary practices and productions of art, including those of the avant-garde positions 10:1 © 2002 by Duke University Press positions 10:1 Spring 2002 142 that are more often than not antagonistic to mainstream taste. Although vanguard artists may aspire to communicate with a large audience, with their exhibition, in theory, open to the public, in reality their art caters to a small circle of people in the hundreds, or even tens, who are receptive to such new art. Generally speaking the “public-openness” of art concerns, in part, the issue of reception and relates, in part, to that of art institutions. What is offered to the public, at which venue, by whom, under what circumstances, resulting in what reception—all are subjects worthy of investigation if one is to understand the mechanism and politics of the exhibition system. At the same time the issue of public-openness also foregrounds the contradictory anddividednatureoftheavant-garde.Whileformalistfactions(forexample, abstractionism) embrace the sanctum of high art, antiformalist factions (such as Neo-Dada and Anti-Art) seek to transgress the boundary between art and life. Still, not unlike the former, the latter tend, despite their merge-art-and- life rhetoric, to operate on the modernist principle of “autonomy,” which is by definition elitist. Thus an inquiry into the public-openness of vanguard art, more than that of masterpiece art, inevitably leads to the fundamental, though contentious question, What is art? Vanguard artists are not entirely indifferent to addressing the public. Okamoto Tar¯o (1911–1996), for one, was an influential artist-theorist whose advocacy of avant-garde philosophy gained a popular audience from the 1950s onward. Still, artists of radical persuasion seldom volunteer to explain themselves and their art to society at large. In this respect, Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident [Mokei sen-en satsu jiken] was a rare occasion of just such open self-explanation. The infamous Incident began quietly in 1963, unbeknownst to the public, when one-sided, monochrome replicas of the 1,000-yen note were fabri- cated for Akasegawa Genpei (b. 1937), a core member of Tokyo’s avant- garde (fig. 1). But there was no incident until a year later when the Tokyo Metropolitan Police launched a criminal investigation of the artist and the printers as coconspirators, decidedly thrusting Akasegawa’s work into pub- lic consciousness. Subsequently the Tokyo Metropolitan Prosecutors Office indicted them for currency fraud and successfully tried the case in the court Tomii State v. (Anti-)Art 143 Figure 1 Akasegawa Genpei, Model 1,000-Yen Note (1963), as cut to size and inserted in Keish¯o, no. 8. The string visible above Akasegawa’s money is Takamatsu Jir¯o’s work. Collection of the artist; photo courtesy of Nagoya City Art Museum of law. In 1970 the supreme court upheld Akasegawa’s guilty verdict, thus activating his suspended three-month sentence of hard labor. As the events unfolded in the public press, the artist and his peers made imaginative efforts to cope with the situation. Akasegawa invented the theory of model (mokei); his supporters formed the 1,000-Yen-Note Incident Discussion Group (Sen- en-satsu Jiken Kondankai);2 and what was once an artist’s experimental idea evolved into a collective project titled Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident.3 positions 10:1 Spring 2002 144 Figure 2 Cover of Keish¯o, no. 8, designed by Akasegawa Genpei. The small square opening shows Akasegawa’s Model 1,000-Yen Note. Collection of the artist; photo cour- tesy of Nagoya City Art Museum It may not be an exaggeration to say that Incident left an indelible mark in the annals of postwar art,4 largely due to the so-called Exhibition Event at the CourtroomthatmaterializedattheTokyoDistrictCourtonthefirstdayofthe trial in August 1966. Akasegawa himself later published a witty account of the guerrilla maneuver during the motion to request defense evidence.5 The thirty-five minutes taken to review the gamut of art evidence transformed the courtroom into an impromptu exhibition hall and the proceedings into a happening, with unheard-of participation by the gallery audience. The exhibit(ion) was documented by a court photographer in lieu of the hard Tomii State v. (Anti-)Art 145 evidence, that is, the “works of art,” that the court found itself unable to properly care for in its custody. Copies made from the color photographs pasted in the official court document have since entered the canon of postwar art,6 within which the performative aspect of Incident has been singled out.7 The courtroom exhibition, however, is but a part of the trial, which in turn is a part of Incident. Furthermore, “action” alone does not characterize the entire undertaking or its public-openness. In fact, at each stage, from the moment the alleged crime was committed to the investigation to the trial to the posttrial phase, Incident offers possibilities of more cerebral readings that will enable further investigation of, among other issues, the place of art in society. Above all, the very act of forging money is provocative, warranting manifold art-historical and theoretical inquiries, which include but are not limited to Marxist and conceptualist analyses.8 Moreover, given the legal nature of Incident, whereby language, exacting yet elusive, is sometimes the sole weapon available against the system, the whole affair can be read as a work, as a part of the creative act as defined by Marcel Duchamp (1887– 1968), one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. (Hence, in accordance with the convention of art history, the incident’s title is italicized in this essay to expressly denote its status as a work of art.) In this sense Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident is not an isolated object made by a solitary creator. Akasegawa’s money was at the core of Incident, in what Duchamp called the “raw state”;9 the body of this work consists of the first set of readings—interpretations and decipherings—produced at the time by Akasegawa and other parties immediately involved (such as the police, the judicial system, and the witnesses) and not involved (fellow artists and critics, the general press, the interested public, etc.).10 While Akasegawa is its primary author, without whom the work would not have existed, the others played crucial roles, if only inadvertently, collaborating with him in its making. The discursive space that Incident engendered is abundantly rich and profoundly insightful: its sheer size is overwhelming, with literally tens of thousands of words uttered and written within and outside the courtroom. Aside from the voluminous court transcript, the records in public—available as published materials—may be roughly grouped as follows: official legal documents, printed primarily in art magazines;11 news reports in the general positions 10:1 Spring 2002 146 Figure 3 Dust jacket of Akasegawa’s An Objet-Carrying Proletarian (1970), designed by the author himself and showing two objet-based works wrapped in Model 1,000-Yen Notes (1963), which were seized and tagged by law enforcement authorities as evidence. Photo courtesy of Nagoya City Art Museum and art presses; commentaries by Akasegawa and others; a 1970 anthology of Akasegawa’s writings, An Objet-Carrying Proletarian (fig. 3);12 and the discussion group’s publications. What follows is a set of readings of these public records. Not only do they help us reconstruct the narrative of Incident and recapture the circumstances surrounding it, some of which have been obscured over time; they also provide insights into the essence of Akasegawa’s mechanically reproduced moneyaswellasIncidentasawhole.Theissuestouchedonwithsuchurgency three decades ago—the concept of Art (geijutsu), the paradigm of the modern (kindai), and the institutions of the state—still engage us today. This study will guide readers through five “readings” of Incident and conclude with an examination of its place and that of the avant-garde in the public sphere. Tomii State v. (Anti-)Art 147 Reading 1 Genesis of Model: Money Mechanically Reproduced A member of Neo-Dada and Hi Red Center,13 Akasegawa belongs to the generation of Anti-Art (Han-geijutsu) that emerged from the late 1950s to the early 1960s. In retrospect, the label of Anti-Art, which originated in an art critic’s offhand remark that instantly entered the art lexicon,14 aptly points to what was fundamentally at issue: Art, with a capital A. That is to say, the goal of Anti-Art was to question and dismantle Art (geijutsu) as a cultural and metaphysical construct of modern times.15 Onestrategyforachievingthiswasto“descendtothemundane.”16 Stylisti- cally the favorite tool of Anti-Art practitioners was the objet, or a readymade, everyday object that could be employed individually or in combination, with or without alteration (Marcel Duchamp is credited with inventing this mode of making art).