(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)

Abstract

From 1969-1974, the Japanese “nonsense” art collective Production Gas utilized public buildings and urban planning to perform their large-scale, guerilla installation-style “happenings” – a distinct style of Japanese postwar performance art – in the city of Nagoya, Japan. Venues included novel constructs of early 1970s urban life, such as remodeled movie theatres, public parks, underground shopping centers, pedestrian paradises, and more. As Production Gas member Hioki Takashi states, happenings were always concerned with being “happened upon” by “an unsuspecting public.” Therefore, the traditional space of the art institution was avoided in Japan’s happening performance culture and new architectures in the city for negotiated instead. Production Gas was unique via their infiltrating contemporary modes of leisure and their associated spaces through media happenings: they produced and sold both a completely blank weekly magazine and an LP legitimately through Nagoya’s bookstore and record store chain locations. Due to the ephemeral, Anti-Art nature of happenings, little physical evidence remains today. However, new online, open-access database projects such as the Oral Art History Archive and the Japan Art Sound Archive are leading the effort in mining for collective memory and memorabilia Nagoya citizens who experienced these happenings share and are disseminating them through new digital formats. This paper analyzes various installations performed by the group with a focus on their use of contemporary city constructs and modes of urban leisure in 1970s’ Nagoya’s rapidly advancing citysphere. This study also includes an analysis on both the re-enactment of the group’s work in museums and galleries decades after their initial activities as well as the role of infiltrating modern constructs in Japan’s happening culture.