| Abstrakt: |
This is a study of On Kawara's figurative paintings and drawings produced in Japan in the 1950s, with particular emphasis on the Bathroom series. During this period, Kawara espoused the vocabulary of social realism which prevailed throughout the Japanese postwar art scene, yet his radical experiments in painting technique and production procedure were clearly differentiated from conventional social realists' inclinations toward the didactic function of figurative painting. A close examination of the conflict between the subject of brutality and the formal strategy of indifference reveals that the disrupted representation of Kawara's Bathroom series registers the effect of "psychic numbing." Significantly, the rupture between the superficial order and the underlying turmoil which marks Kawara's works emerged at a time of sociopolitical upheaval surrounding the outbreak of the Korean War, a period which signified the excruciating repetition of a traumatic history. I maintain that the bathroom symbolizes the "uncanny home," the haunted ground of the ontological security of Japanese nationals after defeat. In Kawara's works, the formal structure and production procedure actually generated, rather than merely represented, the psychophysical terror of the uncanny home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
