Description:

Phyllis Lyons Lecture in Japanese Studies

Disjunct Collectivities
A Talk by Miryam Sas 

How can we understand photographers’ disjunctive roles both within and beside the emergent political and aesthetic collectives of the late 1960s-1970s? Does gender even matter in the trouble that photographers provoked in the collective practices of their time?  This presentation takes as a starting point the work of Sasaki Michiko (1934-  ), gripping her camera on the barricades of Nihon University, and of Nishimura Tomiko (1948-  ), formulating an oblique and alternative photographic view of landscape alongside fūkeiron (landscape theory). Hardly known in their era of active production, both of these photographers have undergone significant positive revaluation in current gallery and publication practice. What do we see now that couldn’t possibly be seen then, and how does the new perspective on their work deepen our understanding of collectivity and its blind spots and impasses? How do the failures of collectivity emerge as an alternative perspective on Japanese feminist artistic praxis when we take into consideration the individual and oblique explorations of these two photographers during and after the era of protest?  Furthermore, can something unexpected open in the gap between the “document” of then and the mediated realities and virtual publics of today? 

Miryam Sas is Professor of Comparative Literature and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley.