Public Lecture: Bodies in Earth: Postwar Japanese Ceramics, Photography, and Installation Art

Bert Winther-Tamaki is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine.

Co-sponsored by the Five College History of Art Faculty Seminar and Smith College East Asian Studies.

Placing the human body in direct physical contact with some mode of earthy matter was a widespread impulse in ceramics, photography, and installation art in postwar Japan. Images and actions that foregrounded the touch of skin and flesh to soil or clay evoked thoughts ranging from death and abjection to pastoral nostalgia and agricultural fertility. A new aesthetics of earth was driven by the historical context of full-throttle economic growth and urbanization that polluted the land with chemical emissions and concealed the soil beneath an expanding shell of asphalt and concrete. This lecture considers critical responses to these conditions by photographers, ceramicists, and avant-garde installation artists working in Japan in the 1950s through 1970s.