The 1980s is known in Japan as the “economic bubble” due to skyrocketing land prices, profligate consumerism, and the rise of Tokyo as a center of global finance and technology. The art world underwent rapid expansion too, and one noteworthy development was a series of art works focused on live fire. High energy consumption in Japan during this period contributed substantially to the Great Acceleration, the global ramp up of human activities producing Anthropocenic conditions, and in hindsight, artists’ pyrophilia seems symptomatic of this burning Zeitgeist. Fire catalyzed material behaviors that were unthinkable without flame; when wood, plastic, and gunpowder were deployed as fuel, they energized allusive new materialities of thought.
Burning practices by four artists in the transnational context of contemporary Japanese art in the 1980s are investigated here. British sculptor David Nash attracted considerable notice in Japan by treating fallen tree wood in “stove sculptures” and other formats that posited burning as recycling in a wholistic ecosystem. While based in Japan from 1986 to 1995, Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang began exploding gunpowder in projects seen as reverberating with the “big bang” origins of the earth and communicating with extra terrestrials. Japanese artists were also big burners. Long absorbed with the sculptural lessons of the vaporization of human bodies by volcanic effluents at Pompeii, sculptor Toya Shigeo chainsawed timbers, braised them with blow-torches, and coated them with ash to produce fossil-like forms premonitory of apocalypse. Tonoshiki Tadashi, who lost his father in the Hiroshima atomic explosion in 1945 and his mother to radiation sickness later, collected massive amounts of plastic trash that washed onto Japanese shores and burned it in sand pits, causing it to fuse into plastiglomerate sculptures that resonate with personal experience of the scorched wasteland.
Like the ventriloquist who creates the illusion that his or her voice emerges from the mouth of a puppet, artists contrive the impression that their thoughts are generated by their materials. But material affordances shape expression too. Pyromancy is a form of divination using fire to decode signs in materials and natural phenomena. Similarly these artists animated their materials -- fallen tree wood, gunpowder, milled lumber, plastic -- by igniting them, whether to spark a sense of spirit or incinerate life. Either way, thought processes were catalyzed in flamboyant matter that were otherwise inconceivable.The polysemy of fire for these artists was nearly open-ended, encompassing sex, passion, life, death, transcendence, war, transmutation, etc. How odd it now seems that global warming rarely if ever appeared in this list, even while artists’ fires, whether large or small, unfailingly contributed some amount of greenhouse gasses that cumulatively threaten life on the planet. Nevertheless, perhaps the most consequential thinking that materials such as wood, gunpowder, and plastic engendered when they smoldered or burst into flame was semi-conscious fear of the weakening of environmental equilibrium caused by massive levels of energy consumption in the economic bubble.
Keywords: Eco-Criticism; Fire; Japan; materiality; 1980s; Pyromancy
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Bert Winther-Tamaki is Professor at the University of California, Irvine. His research focuses on contemporary Japanese art emphasizing materiality, transnationality, and eco-criticism. Monographs include: TSUCHI: Earthy Materials in Contemporary Japanese Art (2022) and Maximum Embodiment: Yōga, the ‘Western Painting’ of Japan (2012). Winther-Tamaki is guest-curator of Return to Earth: Art and Ecology in Japan, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2023).
www.humanities.uci.edu/arthistory/faculty/bwinther.htm
A little noticed streak of burning fires as artistic practice may be identified as a striking feature of the Tokyo art world during the 1980s, a time of Japanese affluence known as the “economic bubble.” Artistic blazes catalyzed material behaviors unthinkable without flame. Awareness of global warming lay in the future, but artists’ fires, whether large or small, unfailingly produced some amount of greenhouse gasses. Nevertheless, perhaps the most consequential thinking that materials such as wood, gunpowder, and plastic engendered when incinerated was semi-conscious fear of environmental damage caused by massive levels of energy consumption in the economic bubble.