The first half of my talk will introduce research results and arguments in my book, The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art, published from The MIT Press in 2010. The main methodological challenge for this study was how to create a new theoretical framework for Rauschenberg—the symbolic figure of American art’s triumph, on whom so much had been already said—beyond the nationbased art history. Unlike previous revisionist studies that have viewed the postwar rise of American art as a consequence of American propaganda during the Cold War era, I wanted to weave a more complex narrative about the phenomenon by presenting four case studies on Rauschenberg’s interaction with the local art communities—namely in Paris, Venice, Stockholm, and Tokyo. With an emphasis on the active agency of these locales, my study sought to illuminate the global rise of American art as a crosscultural and reciprocal process, in which each culture had to negotiate its presence in the international art scene vis-à-vis the most powerful force, American art.
In the second half of my talk, I will discuss my current project, which deals with the development of Pop in Japan. If my study on Rauschenberg attempted to decenter the canon of postwar modernism by situating American art in the context of postwar art as an international event, the next step would be to examine diverse practices of Pop Art that unfolded outside Western mainstream cultures. However, Pop-inspired work by Japanese artists wasn’t really called “Pop,” as the term meant nothing but “American Pop Art” at the time (despite the term’s origin in British Pop). The methodological challenge for this study is then to create a theoretical framework from scratch to map out this phenomenon, and to connect it to the arts of other regions. As a consulting curator for Walker Art Center’s exhibition “International Pop,” which will open in the spring of 2015, I will introduce works by a number of artists including Shinohara Ushio, Yokoo Tadanori, and Tanaami Keiichi, with a particular emphasis on Tanaami, who tried to undo the boundary between art and design with his inter-media practices in artist’s books, collages, and experimental animation films.
Salle de l’Institut d’Histoire moderne et contemporaine (Escalier D, 3e étage, au fond à gauche)
École Normale Supérieure, 45 rue d’Ulm
ARTL@S Postdoctoral Fellow, 2013-2014
École Normale Superiéure
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