Struggles between curators and artists: the case of the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts in Japan in the early 1980s

Abstract

This paper, which takes the form of a case study, focuses on the conflictual relations between two particular agents, the curator and the local artist, which became prevalent in public art museums in Japan from the 1970s. These two agents had affinities to different sets of culture, and their conflict was intensified over the use of regional museums. I discuss the most controversial example of such conflicts, which took place at the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts, and I show the complexity of these agents, their struggles and their outcomes. For this purpose of the analysis, I combine Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory and the conceptual framework of transculturation. Field theory explains the mechanisms of ongoing struggles between the agents associated with different cultures over the boundaries of the field. The perspective of transculturation is useful as way of expanding Bourdieu’s theory and as a means of understanding the complexity and fluidity of the field structure. Originally developed in relation to postcolonial studies, the concept of transculturation highlights both the hybridity of modern Japanese culture and the interactions between different cultures in the artistic field. The case of Tochigi shows that regional art museums in Japan have been developing not as ‘frontiers’ or ‘fortress’ of the curator but as ‘contact zones’ – i.e. the sites where the curator and the local artist interact.