was one of the most important postwar Japanese artists. Takamatsu used photography, sculpture, painting, drawing, and performance to fundamentally investigate the philosophical and material conditions of art. Takamatsu's practice was dedicated to the critique of cognition and perception, through the rendering and variation of morphological devices, such as shadow, tautology, appropriation, perceptual and perspective distortion and representation. Takamatsu's conceptual work can be understood through his notions of the Zero Dimension, which renders an object or form to observe its fundamental geometrical components. Takamatsu isolated these smallest constituent elements, asserting that these elements produce reality, or existence. For Takamatsu the elementary particle represents “the ultimate of division” and also “emptiness itself,” like the a line within a painting—there appears to be nothing more beyond the line itself. Yet, Takamatsu's end goal was not to just prove the presence or object-ness of these elements, but rather to use them as a way to challenge and prove the limits of human perception, leading to his fixation on “absence” or the things that are unobservable.Hosaka, Kenjiro. Takamatsu Jiro : mysteries (Tokyo: The National Museum of Modern Art, 2014), 12.
The impact of Takamatsu's practice also has to be considered in terms of his contributions to the avant garde art scenes through his individual practice and work with collectives, as well as the legibility of his work in the discourse of conceptual art and thus the broader international art world.
Biography
Early life and education Takamatsu was born in Tokyo in 1936. From 1954 to 1958 he attended Tokyo University of the Arts, where he majored in oil painting and was a classmate of his future Hi-Red Center member Natsuyuki Nakanishi. As part of his coursework, Takamatsu studied the beginnings of pictorial modernities spanning Sesshū Tōyō to Paul Cézanne (as noted in his writings). Duncan Wooldridge has argued that Takamtsu's interest in both modern Western and Japanese art histories allows us to understand his work as a crucial meeting point between culturally coded conventions,Wooldridge, Duncan. "Jiro Takamatsu: The Temperature of Sculpture." Art Monthly 409 (2017): 24-24. as well as his later success as a Japanese artist at the forefront of the movement towards international contemporaneity.
Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition (1958-1963) After graduation, Takamatsu began showing paintings at the raucous and unjuried Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition. Sponsored by the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper between 1949 and 1963 and held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, this annual exhibition was modeled after the French Salon des Artistes Indépendants. Takamatsu formed his network of anti-establishment artists at the Yomiuri Indépendant, which became a site of exploration and experimentation for many avant-garde-minded younger artists, especially from 1958 onward.
From 1958 to 1961, Takamatsu submitted works to the painting section, but he re-conceived his practice as sculptural from 1961 to 1963. Takamatsu has attributed this shift to "sculptural" to the Point series of works he submitted in 1961, which consisted of masses of wire in varying states of being pulled from two dimensions to three dimensions. This evolved into the series String: Black, which Takamatsu showed at the 14th Yomiuri Indépendant in 1962, and which marked the beginning of a long series of artworks making use of string as an eminently portable medium which could be used to infiltrate and cordon off artistic space even beyond and outside the art gallery itself. One of these works was interactive, allowing viewers to don gloves and unravel a ball of black string along sheets of cloth.
Art critic Tōno Yoshiaki characterized artists participating in Yomiuri Indépendant as developing Anti-Art practices, departing from the conventional notion of art. Takamatsu and his peers became increasingly interested in moving beyond figural representation and into the mediation of performance and environments, causing the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum to institute rules banning obtrusive materials and installation arrangements for the 14th edition. Some artists continued their subversive strategy, leading to the suspension of the exhibition in January 1964. Thus, artists like Takamatsu relocated their practice from the exhibition space into the urban environments of Tokyo. This transition is best exemplified by Takamatsu's submissions to the final edition of the Yomiuri Indépendant in 1963, On the Anti-Existence of the Curtain (Kāten ni kansuru hanjitsuzaisei ni tsuite) and Cord (Himo), a single piece of black string against a white cloth background and a 1000 meter long string extending out of the museum space to the Ueno Station respectively.Yoshida, Kenichi. Avant-Garde Art and Non-Dominant Thought in Postwar Japan: Image, Matter, Separation. Routledge, 2020.Marotti, William, Money, Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).Yoshimoto, Midori. Into performance: Japanese women artists in New York. Rutgers University Press, 2005.
Yamanote Line Incident (1962) On October 18, 1962, Takamatsu along with future Hi-Red Center collaborator Natsuyuki Nakanishi and others, carried out an artistic happening they titled the "Yamanote Line Incident" (山手線事件, Yamanote-sen jiken), in which they boarded a Yamanote loop line train heading counter-clockwise on its route, disrupting the normalcy of passenger's commutes with a series of bizarre performative actions. Takamatsu served as the main photographer documenting the event.
On the Fluxus-produced map of Hi-Red Center's activities, compiled and edited with the help of Shigeko Kubota, the Yamanote Line Incident is listed as number three. This is despite the fact that the Yamanote Line Incident is now considered to belong more properly to the pre-history of Hi-Red Center. The work is printed as such:
“18 Oct. Event on Yamate loop line street car. A continuous black string with various everyday objects attached to it at intervals was laid out on street from moving street car along its circular route. Compact objects were hung from hand straps inside street car and observed by performers at close range with battery lights. Faces of performers were painted white. Performers read newspapers with holes burned in them.”
The event was featured in the magazine Keishō, then under the editorship of Yoshihiko Imaizumi.Chong, Doryun, Mitsuda Yuri, and Reiko Tomii. “Trauma and Deliverance: Portraits of Avant-Garde Artists in Japan, 1955-1970.” Essay. In Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde, 158–77. New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art, 2012. Pg. 169 According to Akasegawa, Nakanishi and Takamatsu used the Yamanote Line as a site for their event in order to "destroy the hierarchical status of art by bringing it into the ‘space of daily activities.’”Munroe, Alexandra. “Morphology of Revenge: The Yomiuri Indépendant Artists and Social Protest Tendencies in the 1960s.” Essay. In Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, edited by Alexandra Munroe, 149–63. New York, NY: H.N. Abrams, 1994. Pg. 159
Hi-Red Center (1963-1964)
In 1963, Takamatsu co-founded the art collective Hi-Red Center along with Natsuyuki Nakanishi and Genpei Akasegawa. This brief-lived but influential group executed a variety of performance art events that sought to eliminate the boundaries between daily life and art. The group's name was formed from the first kanji characters of the three artists' surnames: "high" (the "Taka" in Takamatsu), "red" (the "Aka" in Akasegawa), and "center" (the "Naka" in Nakanishi). The foundation for Hi-Red Center might be located in the roundtable discussion, sponsored by the art magazine Keishō in November 1962, on the relationship between art and political action (as reflected the recent Yamanote Line Incident happening) titled Signs of Discourse on Direct Action, in which all three members had participated.Jaimey Hamilton Faris; Rooms in Alibi: How Akasegawa Genpei Framed Capitalist Reality. ARTMargins 2015; 4 (3): 40–64, 46. All three artists had begun as painters but had turned to methods of “direct action” through Hi-Red Center, a term taken from prewar socialist agitators. With “direct action,” the artists meant to raise to consciousness the absurdities and contradictions of Japanese society. This interest in Art as direct action has been contextualised as rooted in the atmosphere following massive Anpo protests against the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty in 1960.
Although the group's inaugural exhibition, Fifth Mixer Plan (Dai goji mikisā keikaku, May 1963), featured artworks the three artists had created independently, such as Takamatsu's busy entanglements of strings, Akasegawa's objects wrapped in printed 1000-yen notes, and Nakanishi's Konpakuto obuje ("Compact Objets"), egg-shaped translucent resign sculptures that embalmed everyday items, the emphasis on collaborative "direct action" came to the fore in the group's later activities, which featured a variety of "events," "plans," and "happenings." For example in Dropping Event (October 10, 1964), the group heaved various objects from the roof of Ikenobo Kaikan hall.Alexandra Munroe, Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (New York, NY: H.N. Abrams, 1994), 178. After dropping the objects they collected and packed them all into a suitcase, placing it in a public locker and sending the key to the locker to someone chosen at random from a phone book. For Shelter Plan (1964), they booked a room at the Imperial Hotel and invited guests to have themselves custom-fitted for a personal nuclear fallout shelter. Participants included Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik, and were photographed from six sides to create a quasi-medical document ostensibly meant for the outfitting of personal fallout shelters. The group carried out its final happening, The Movement for the Promotion for a Clean and Organized Metropolitan Area (abbreviated as Cleaning Event) on October 16, 1964. The artists and their assistants dressed in goggles and lab coats, roped off small areas of public sidewalk and meticulously cleaned them to mock the efforts to beautify the streets ahead of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.Alexandra Munroe, Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (New York, NY: H.N. Abrams, 1994), 179.
The events and happenings were subjected to documentation by both collaborators and strangers; Takamatsu in particular hoped that outsider [gaibusha] who had no knowledge of their existence or intention would document these events, in order to confirm the multiplicity (fukusūsei) or externalization (kyakutaika) of their works. Although Hi-Red Center succeeded in attracting media attention and has come to be considered highly influential on later Japanese artists, its activities were short-lived; the group would dissolve only a year and a half after its inception, with Akasegawa recounting cryptically that “after Cleaning Event there was simply nothing left to do.”
Return to painting In 1964, Takamatsu began his signature Shadows (影, kage) series of paintings (which he continued until the end of his life). With Shadows, Takamatsu launched a critical inquiry into the nature of painting by realistically painting images of people's shadows cast on white walls, uneven surfaces, or wooden planks to create a trompe l’oeil effect. This series of works recalls Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" as well as Pliny the Elder's account of the origins of painting, in which the daughter of the famed Greek potter Dibutades creates the first painting by tracing the silhouette of her lover.
Institutional recognition When Takamatsu was around 30 years old (1966), he received a number of prizes including the Shell Art Award and the Nagaoka Museum of Contemporary Art Award. He was also awarded the Grand International Prize at the Tokyo Print Biennial (1972).