D O C U M E N T/ I N T R O D U C T I O N

introdUction to
AKAseGAWA GenPei’s
“tHe oBJet After stAlin”

pedro erber

Explosive, sharply witty, often paradoxical, and at times seemingly non-
sensical, the writings of Japanese artist Akasegawa Genpei (1937–2015)
provide a glimpse into a complex realm of postwar artistic practice
through one of its most original and compelling voices. Published in
the wake of Akasegawa’s trial for mechanically reproducing single-
sided, monochrome copies of the 1,000-yen note, “The Objet after
Stalin” bears witness to a unique episode in the history of Japanese
avant-garde art and casts light upon the singular circumstances that
prompted the author to theorize on the meanings of artistic practice, 它是
political potential, and the relationship between art and state power.
Akasegawa’s indictment, 审判, and ultimate condemnation marked a
watershed event in the relationship between art and the state in post-
war Japan. His writings on the 1,000-yen note trial were collected in a
volume suggestively entitled Obuje o motta musansha (An Objet-
Carrying Proletarian). “Sutalin igo no obuje” (The Objet after Stalin),
published here in English in its entirety for the fi rst time, is one of the
texts included in the volume.1 More than just a historical document

Excerpts of “The Objet after Stalin” have been published in William Marotti’s Money,
Trains, and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan (达勒姆, NC: 杜克大学
按, 2013), 303 和 309. A few other texts from the collection Obuje o motta musansha
have also been published in English translation: “The Intent of the Act Based on the
Intent of the Act—Before Passing through the Courtroom,” translated by Marotti,

土井:10.1162/ARTM_a_00125

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from a particular time and place in 20th-century art, Akasegawa’s text
lies at the center of a realm of artistic practice and discourse whose
potential impact on the global panorama of postwar art is just starting
to come to the attention of an English-language readership.

Art And Politics After stAlin

的确, the political trajectory of Japanese postwar art—from the
socially engaged painting of the late 1940s and 1950s, through abstrac-
的, Surrealism, and Dadaism, to the defiant avant-garde practices of
the 1960s—resonates deeply in Akasegawa’s writings. Akasegawa
Genpei (born Akasegawa Katsuhiko) belongs to a generation of artists
who grew up amidst the dire socioeconomic conditions of Japan’s early
postwar period and came of age during the politically turbulent
1950s—a generation for whom art and politics were virtually
inseparable.

From the late 1940s into the 1950s, the recently legalized Japanese

Communist Party (JCP) played a major role in the production and
exhibition of politically engaged art and in Japanese intellectual life
in general.2 Thanks to the JCP’s active involvement in cultural politics,
together with its widespread network of members and sympathizers,
paintings such as the famous Hiroshima Panels (Genbaku no zu) 经过
husband and wife artists Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi, which depicted
the horrors of atomic bombing, were exhibited in the most remote cor-
ners of the country, raising consciousness about pressing political
issues that were systematically suppressed by the mainstream media.
By the mid-1950s, 然而, the JCP’s adherence to the Stalinist doc-
trines of Socialist Realism was dealing a significant blow to the project
of a realist avant-garde. 同时, French Informel painting
was acquiring momentous popularity in Japan. This was due not only
to a generalized desire to catch up with international trends or to the
multiple visits of the French critic Michel Tapié and his group of

appeared in From Postwar to Postmodern, Art in Japan 1945–1989: Primary Documents,
edited by Doryun Chong, Michio Hayashi, Fumihiko Sumitomo, and Kenji Kajiya (新的
约克: MoMA Publications, 2012), 187–190; and “Capitalist Realism” and “Final
Statement” appeared in Concerned Theater Japan 1, 不. 3 (1970): 32–35 and 36–43,
分别.
I discuss this further in my article “Art and/or Revolution: The Matter of Painting in
Postwar Japan,” ARTMargins 2, 不. 1 (二月 2013): 37–57.

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Informel painters to Japan during the 1950s, but also to the support
of leftist art critics such as Hariu Ichiro¯, who opposed the Stalinist
turn of the JCP and felt disillusioned with the project of a realist
avant-garde.

It was during this crucial period of cultural and political transfor-

mation that Akasegawa and his peers presented their first works at
the Japan Independent Exhibition (1947–) and later at the Yomiuri
Independent Exhibition (1949–1963), the annual no-award, no-jury
exhibition that served as the breeding ground for Tokyo’s 1960s avant-
gardes. 从 1960 到 1963, Akasegawa was a member of the avant-
garde collective Neo-Dadaism Organizers (later known as Neo-Dada);
besides Akasegawa, the group comprised core members Shinohara
Ushio, Arakawa Shu¯saku, Yoshimura Masunobu, and Kazakura Sho¯,
and included, 除其他外, the architect Isozaki Arata as a loosely
affiliated participant. 在 1963, Akasegawa joined Nakanishi Natsuyuki
and Takamatsu Jiro¯ to form a new collective called Hi-Red Center,
whose name, despite its suggestive political connotations, was a combi-
nation of the English translations of the first characters of the family
names of its three core members: Taka = “hi(gh)” (高), Aka = “red” (赤),
Naka = “center” (中).

That same year, Akasegawa started his artistic explorations of

paper currency. Before resorting to photomechanical reproduction,
his first experiment with money was the manual copy of a 1,000-yen
note magnified two hundred times, which he exhibited still unfinished
在里面 1963 Yomiuri Independent Exhibition. In a cheeky reference to
the Stalinist doctrine of Socialist Realism, Akasegawa referred to his
meticulous magnified reproduction of the 1,000-yen note as “capitalist
realism”: “Magnifying glass in hand, I performed a precise analysis
of the bill and copied it on a panel at two hundred times its size.
The picture, which I copied while remaining emotionally aloof
from the task, was shit realism—not socialist but capitalist realism.
It was not the design on the flag to be planted at the end of the quest,
but a map of the road we are presently walking.”3 It is unlikely that
Akasegawa was aware of Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke’s usage
of the expression “capitalist realism” around the same time: 尽管
all of these artists emphasized a politically critical edge to the term,

Akasegawa, “Capitalist Realism,” 33.

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Akasegawa Genpei. Greater Japan Zero-

Yen Note, 1967. Courtesy of SCAI THE

BATHHOUSE, 东京.

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Akasegawa Genpei. 模型 1,000-

Yen Note. Courtesy of SCAI THE

BATHHOUSE, 东京.

Akasegawa used it in a somewhat absurdly literal fashion, 其中
“realism” came to signify an exact imitation of the “real thing” in
a way that ridiculed both the romanticism of Stalinist aesthetics
and its capitalist antithesis.

A few months earlier, Akasegawa had participated with Taka-
matsu, Nakanishi, and others in a symposium aimed at discussing
new forms of political action through art. The symposium’s context
was the aftermath of the demoralizing defeat in 1960 of the wide-
spread popular movements against the renewal of the Treaty of Mutual
Cooperation and Security between the United States and Japan (a treaty
known in Japan as anpo joyaku, or ANPO). William Marotti remarks
that Akasegawa himself credited the symposium with raising his con-
sciousness about the nature and potential of their artistic practices.4 It
is thus clear that the politically provocative character of his actions—
including the 1,000-yen note copies—was not unknown to him, 和
was to some extent intended. 尽管如此, it would have been hard for

4 Marotti, 钱, Trains, and Guillotines, 208.

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106

Akasegawa to predict the major consequences of this particular experi-
ment with money copying.

In January 1963, Akasegawa ordered three hundred photome-
chanical copies of the recto of a 1,000-yen note at a local print shop in
东京; he then mailed the copies to friends and acquaintances using
the Japanese Post Office’s cash mailers, along with an invitation to his
solo exhibition at the Shinjuku Daiichi Gallery printed on the flip side.
One year later, Akasegawa received his first visit from a police officer
inquiring about the copies. The one-sided, monochromatic copies of
the 1,000-yen note were not sufficient to prove Akasegawa guilty of
counterfeiting; he was thus indicted under an old, ambiguous law dat-
ing from 1895, which controlled the “imitation of currency and securi-
ties.”5 Accused of “threatening society’s confidence in paper currency,”6
Akasegawa faced public trial eleven times between 1965 和 1967; 他
was finally sentenced to three months of imprisonment with hard
劳动, after the Supreme Court rejected his last appeal in April 1970.
The timing of Akasegawa’s model of the 1,000-yen note contrib-
uted significantly to its wide repercussions. 之间 1961 和 1963,
the 1,000-yen note had been the object of numerous counterfeit
attempts, including a major incident involving high-quality counter-
feits known as Chi-37; the police were unable to solve these problems of
欺诈罪, despite an enormous mobilization of their resources. 同时,
according to Akasegawa’s lawyer, Sugimoto Masazumi, it was while
investigating a lesser incident involving an avant-garde group called the
League of Criminals (Hanzaisha Do¯mei) that the Tokyo Metropolitan
Police first took notice of Akasegawa’s money reproductions. In an epi-
sode reminiscent of Oshima Nagisa’s film Diary of a Shinjuku Thief
(1968), a member of the League of Criminals was caught shoplifting
a copy of The Autobiography of the Marquis de Sade from a Tokyo book-
store. One consequence of the arrest was that the police found a copy
of a banned volume printed by the League of Criminals, 到哪个
Akasegawa had contributed a partial copy of his 1,000-yen note.7

During the trial, Akasegawa’s defense tried to demonstrate that his

reproduction of the 1,000-yen note constituted a form of avant-garde

6
7

Cf. Akasegawa Genpei, “Saishu¯ iken chinjutsu” in Obuje o motta musansha [An Objet-
Carrying Proletarian], 118–144; English translation as “Final Statement.”
Akasegawa, “Final Statement,” 41.
See Marotti, 钱, Trains, and Guillotines, 20–21.

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Model 1,000-Yen Note trial scene, 1966.

Courtesy of SCAI THE BATHHOUSE, 东京.

artistic practice and was therefore not to be deemed a criminal act. 这
entire “who’s who” of postwar Japanese art gathered for the trial, 反式-
forming the courtroom into an improvised exhibition space in which
artists and critics lectured the police and magistrates on a wide range
of practices and theories of avant-garde art. Although legally defeated,
insofar as the defendant was eventually convicted, the strategy seemed
to have succeeded as an artistic event. As art historian Reiko Tomii has
suggested, the “Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident” may even be regarded
as a multilayered collaborative artwork, for “the body of this work con-
sists of the first set of readings—interpretations and decipherings—
produced at the time by Akasegawa and other parties immediately
涉及 (fellow artists and critics, the general press, the interested
民众, ETC。).”8 Ultimately, 然而, Model 1,000-Yen Note belongs to
a long history of artistic experiments with copying money. Marcel
Duchamp—himself one of Akasegawa’s models—had produced “fake”
personal checks since 1919. 在 1962, Andy Warhol exhibited copies
of a one-dollar bill at Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. Throughout the

Reiko Tomii, “State v. (Anti-)Art: Model 1,000-Yen Note Incident by Akasegawa Genpei
and Company,” Positions 10, 不. 1 (春天 2002): 145.

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108

1970s, Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles produced zero-dollar and zero-
cruzeiro bills that would seem to have been inspired by Akasegawa’s
zero-yen note, were it not for the fact that Akasegawa’s experiments
remained mostly unknown outside Japan at least until the late 1980s.
For the displacement of art theory into the courtroom which
Akasegawa’s trial occasioned—and for the ultimate defeat of the logic
of art by that of a vaguely defined public well-being—the fate of Model
1,000-Yen Note can also be compared to that of Richard Serra’s 1981
site-specific sculpture Tilted Arc in downtown Manhattan’s Federal
Plaza. 然而, in Akasegawa’s case, the legal activation of the logic
and theory of art had a very particular implication, given the character
of his artistic practices. Akasegawa was an artist who stressed repeat-
edly the importance of hiding the artistic identity of his own practices,
of maintaining their “anonymity” (mumeisei); explicating that approach
for the court’s benefit amounted to a form of capitulation to the state’s
methods of interpellation. Akasegawa had long described the activities
of the Hi-Red Center throughout Tokyo in the 1960s as attempts to
practice “secret art” (himitsu geijutsu). According to Akasegawa, 它是
important to hide from the public the artistic identity behind the
group’s actions, in order to prevent the public from assuming the pas-
西韦, contemplative attitude of spectators. Unprotected by the frame of
艺术, yet testing the boundaries of established uses and habits, 这
group’s practices were necessarily drawn to the nexus of crime, mad-
内斯, and marginality. As critic Sawaragi Noi wittily remarked, 在下面
those circumstances, rather than “it is art therefore it is not a crime,”
Akasegawa and company could more consistently argue: “it is art, yet it
is not a crime.”9

任何状况之下, this close proximity to, and constant flirting with, 这

realm of crime, this existence at the fringes of law and established
social norms, constituted for Akasegawa an essential aspect of avant-
garde art—indeed, its inherently political facet. Rather than direct
opposition to the established powers, straightforward criticism of
the capitalist status quo, or revolutionary propaganda, Akasegawa
described the politicality of his artistic practices as a way of “tickling”
the establishment.10 Revealing the paradoxical nature of the rules that
govern modern everyday life was one of the key operations through

Sawaragi Noi, Nihon. Gendai. Bijutsu (东京: Shinchosha, 1998), 218.

9
10 Akasegawa Genpei, personal interview, 十一月 10, 2006.

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which his works and writings challenged the established order. 在里面
Surrealist-inspired notion of the artwork as objet, Akasegawa found the
most cogent embodiment of this paradoxical nature of the laws and
logic governing modern capitalist society.

Art As Objet

The French word objet, phonetically transposed from André Breton’s
vocabulary into Japanese as obuje (オブジェ), was frequently used in
postwar Japanese art in reference to object-based artworks. Its earliest
uses date from the late 1930s, when the poet and critic Takiguchi
Shu¯zo¯ is credited with introducing the term in two articles published
在 1938 in the Japanese photography journal Photo Times.11 Transposed
directly from the context of French Surrealism, the word objet was
inserted into the Japanese artistic vocabulary stripped of its ordinary
meaning of “object,”12 both as that which is perceived by a subject and
as a thing we use or encounter in everyday life. The Japanese term
obuje is thus deprived of the ambiguity inherent to its usage in the
French original; it is defined as “a method of contemporary art after
Dadaism and Surrealism,” which consists in the act of “isolating a
ready-made article (kiseihin) or natural thing (shizen-butsu) from its
original function and place, and presenting it as it is as an independent
工作 (sakuhin), thus attributing to it a symbolic, illusionary meaning
different from its everyday meaning.”13 In this way, it can be said that
the transposition of the term objet into Japanese performs an operation
similar to the method of objet art itself, in that it isolates the term from
its everyday usage and gives it the almost magical meaning conferred
on it by Surrealism. In the early 1960s, when avant-garde painters tran-
sitioned into creating three-dimensional, object-based art, the term
objet fit perfectly the need for a conceptual understanding and geneal-
ogy of their new experiments.

In “The Objet after Stalin,” Akasegawa’s appropriation of the con-

Takiguchi Shu¯zo¯, “Shashin to kaiga no ko¯ryu¯” [The Exchange between Photography and
Painting], Foto Taimusu 15.5 (可能 1938), and “Buttai to shashin: Toku-ni sururearisumu
no obuje ni tsuite” [Object and Photography: Particularly Concerning the Surrealist
Objet], Foto Taimusu 15.8 (八月 1938). Cf. Anne Tucker, The History of Japanese
摄影 (新天堂: 耶鲁大学出版社, 2003), 150–51.
In Japanese, many other translations of “object” are available: mono or buttai as a syn-
onym of “thing,” taisho in the sense of the object as “target,” kyakutai as the counterpart
of the subject of action (shutai), and kyakugo as the grammatical object.

13 Daijirin [Japanese dictionary] (东京: Sanseido, 1988).

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ceptual framework of French Surrealism within the context of postwar
cultural politics is announced already in the peculiar combination
of Stalin and the surrealist objet in the essay’s title. Written in 1967,
at a time of rising political tensions, and shortly after Akasegawa’s
first appeal against the guilty verdict was rejected by the High Court,
the text is filled with references to the weapons of street protests,
such as bamboo spears and Ramune soda bottles (used to make
Molotov cocktails). Akasegawa traces a parallel between an artwork
and criminal evidence, between the museum and the courtroom:
like Duchamp’s urinal in the museum, a weapon “put to rest” as evi-
dence in the courtroom is both tamed and liberated from its intended
用法. Following this logic, Akasegawa compared, in his final court
statement, the displacement of his 1,000-yen note into the courtroom
by the prosecutors to the surrealist technique of defamiliarization
(dépaysement): “This trial started because the Metropolitan Police
Board and the Public Prosecutor’s Office, a certain group of men,
attempted to apply one law to one of my actions. The same sort of
method is used in artistic works. It is called the montage or dépayse-
蒙特, 和, although these are now thought to be classic techniques,
they remain most provocative.”14

In Akasegawa’s use of the word objet, it is important to keep in
mind the “crisis of the object,” announced by Breton as early as 1936,
which strongly resonates not only within the Surrealist movement, 但
in a wide range of artistic experiments throughout the 20th century.
According to Breton, the parallel developments of science and art since
the early 19th century had brought about a dissolution of the object,
which science reduced to a material thing and art turned into a mere
support of aesthetic attributes;15 in response, surrealism sought to re-
enchant the world by recuperating the inherent strangeness and absur-
dity of objecthood. After the Second World War, movements as diverse
as Minimalism and Conceptual Art in North America, Brazilian
Neoconcretism, Arte Povera in Italy, and the Japanese collective
Mono-ha shared this preoccupation with the status of the object as a
focus of artistic experimentation and questioning, whether through
reduction and dematerialization of the art object or, on the contrary,
through ever greater emphasis on things and their materiality.

14 Akasegawa, “Final Statement,” 36.
15 André Breton, “La crise de l’objet,” Cahiers d’art 11, nos. 1–2 (1936): 21–26.

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然而, Akasegawa’s understanding of this re-enchanted,
autonomous world of objects is fundamentally different from contem-
porary proposals of an “object-oriented ontology” by thinkers such as
Graham Harman, who stress the agency of material objects indepen-
dent from subjective apprehension. While arguing for a liberation of
the objet from the rule of subjectivity, Akasegawa acknowledges that
this liberating process must take place within “our interior self”
(onore no naibu) 或者, as he puts it even more cogently, inside our “skull”
(zugaikotsu). 所以, the liberated objet cannot exist apart from a
relationship between materiality and consciousness. In brief, artistic
实践 (or at least the kind of practice Akasegawa pursued) liberates
the objet from the rule of subjectivity—that is, from its condition as a
mere object. But this liberation is inexorably an act of consciousness;
it has its point of departure in the mind of the artist. This relationship
comes full circle insofar as the mind itself, as Akasegawa wittily
stresses, is not simply a disembodied entity, but a realm of activity
that exists within our skull.

In pointing out the striking contemporaneity between the
Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and Duchamp’s first ready-mades in
纽约, Akasegawa introduces a reflection on the ephemeral charac-
ter of liberation and the risks of bureaucratization—of both art and rev-
olutionary politics. Stalin figures in the text as an index of this threat
and fate of bureaucratization. For the artistic community in postwar
日本, even more immediately than the bureaucratization of the revolu-
tionary process in general, Stalinism was intrinsically connected with
the bureaucratization and canceling out of political art under the guise
of Socialist Realism. Akasegawa expressed this frustration with the
ineffectiveness of Socialist Realist painting as a mode of political inter-
vention in a later account of Japanese 1960s art in a volume signifi-
cantly entitled Now Action Is All That’s Left! According to Akasegawa,
what young artists in the 1950s most desired was a mode of “immedi-
ate correspondence with society” (shakai to no chokusetsu-na taio¯)
through artistic practice. This desire for immediacy and social rele-
vance, 他认为, “was what first attracted painters to so-called Socialist
Realist painting. 然而, this quickly became a pattern, and this pat-
tern ended up playing the function of a sort of dike conserving the dis-
tance between painting and real society. This is roughly the same as
what happens in politics with the bureaucratization of the revolutionary

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government.”16 It is precisely at this moment that Akasegawa resorts to
the production of objets as an alternative mode of political art, liberated
from the frame of realism, and of representation in general.

In a more immediately political sense, the liberation at stake in
Akasegawa’s understanding of the objet was a liberation from capitalism,
and more precisely, from the system of private property. Aesthetic libera-
tion and political liberation were for him necessarily contemporaneous,
figured through the ready-made and the Bolshevik Revolution respec-
主动地. Even more than to Breton and French Surrealism in general,
Akasegawa’s understanding of the objet is indebted to Takiguchi’s own
spin on the term. 的确, the critic Tatehata Akira sharply pointed out
the “surreptitious encounter” between Akasegawa’s titular “obuje o motta
musansha” (“proletarian who possessed objets” or “objet-carrying proletar-
ian”) and Takiguchi’s formulation “motazaru mono no monotsuki” (“pos-
session of the dispossessed”).17 Throughout the 1960s Takiguchi played
the role of a sort of theoretical guru for the young generation of avant-
garde artists who resorted to the methods of Surrealism and Dada as an
inspiration for their radical practices. Among those artists, Akasegawa
was probably the closest to Takiguchi’s theoretical framework, 特别
in his understanding of the objet. 在某种程度上, for both Akasegawa and
Takiguchi what is at stake in the objet is the paradox of private property,
the impossibility of subjective possession and control over the world of
事物, over matter. As Tatehata puts it, “The objet for Takiguchi is the
paradoxical fetish discovered from the point of view of non-private prop-
厄蒂 (hi-shiyu¯ ), the incomplete, always itinerant, deviating matter. 这
non-private property, this deviation, Akasegawa grasps and explains, 在一个
more strategic manner, as the renunciation of the power to dominate and
控制: the revolt (ho¯ki: 蜂起 ) of matter by means of abandonment (ho¯ki:
放棄).”18 As that which cannot be possessed or entirely controlled, 这
objet can only be the paradoxical possession of the dispossessed or, 在
Akasegawa’s vocabulary, of the proletarian (musansha: “the one without
property”). To “possess” an objet is to renounce possession.

16 Akasegawa Genpei, Ima ya akushon aru nomi! “Yomiuri Andepandan” to iu gensho¯ [现在
Action Is All That’s Left! The “Yomiuri Independent” Phenomenon] (东京: Chikuma
Shobo¯, 1985), 68.

17 Tatehata Akira, To¯i-naki kaito¯: Obuje to cho¯koku [Answers without Questions: Objet and

Sculpture] (东京: Goryu¯ Shoin, 1998), 8.
同上.

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The objet is, 因此, neither a thing in itself, nor that which exists
only in the mind of a subject, but both at the same time. It is simulta-
neously a mode of subjective perception of matter, an attitude toward
事物 (of the renunciation of power), and a condition of matter itself,
namely of revolt against the rule of subjectivity. This double-edged
character of Akasegawa’s understanding of the objet, of his material-
主义, is what makes it fundamentally political. Precisely this logic of lib-
eration through revolt and abandonment constitutes the theoretical
core of “The Objet after Stalin.” Like a bolide, perhaps more than any
other of the essays included in the collection, this textual objet con-
denses Akasegawa’s intervention into its most concise, fiery form.