In Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), T. J. Clark imagines the bewilderment of a future archaeologist trying to reconstruct the history of modern art from four fragments: Adolph Menzel’s Moltke’s Binoculars (1871); John Heartfield’s A New Man, Master of a New World (1934); Pablo Picasso’s Italian Woman (1919); and Kasimir Malevich’s Complex Presentiment (Half-Figure in Yellow Shirt) (1928–32). This game sets up Clark’s analysis of “modernism’s changes of face: its inward-turning and outward-reaching; its purism and opportunism; its centripetal and centrifugal force” (Clark 407).

One way to position the accomplishments of Gennifer Weisenfeld’s Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931 is to imagine Clark’s archaeologist confronted with another fragment: Mavo artist Okada Tatsuo’s Gate and Moving Ticket-Selling Machine (1925). This addition undercuts the Eurocentric, painting-oriented premise of Clark’s exercise. But Weisenfeld has done something even more substantial with her groundbreaking study: she demonstrates that Mavo artists engaged the changing faces of modernism as a canny Futurist/Constructivist avant-garde, confronting the politics of the body with an intensity that seems unprecedented in the West.

Gate and Moving Ticket-Selling Machine was a tall, mobile, box-shaped collage that could be tipped on its side or stationed upright. In photographs it looks something like an early Rauschenberg combine decorated with Futurist-style calligraphy written in Japanese. When visitors approached the machine, the artist, hidden inside, would suddenly thrust out his black-colored hand, offering a ticket. The ticket was for an art exhibition housed nearby that featured quasiarchitectural installations, paintings, and mixed-media constructions by Mavo artists and other rebels who set themselves up as outsiders by resisting Japan’s visual-art establishment.

Mavo was an amorphous group of renegade writers and visual artists founded in Tokyo in 1923. The central player was Murayama Tomoyoshi (1901–77), whose biography reveals one improbability after another. Murayama grew up a devoted Christian and was tutored by the iconoclastic Christian philosopher Uchimura Kanzo. He was accepted as a philosophy student at Tokyo Imperial University but decided to study philosophy and Christianity in Germany. Arriving in Berlin in early 1922, he found himself disqualified as a student because he did not read Latin. So he looked up an old friend, an expatriate Japanese poet, who introduced him to Herwarth Walden and the Galerie Der Sturm. Although Murayama had little formal training, he was invited to contribute a painting to “The Great Futurist Exhibition” at the Neumann Gallery in Berlin in 1922. Also that year, he participated in the raucous Congress of International Artists in Dusseldorf. He met Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who gave him a copy of his manifesto on tactilism, which Murayama translated and distributed in Japan in 1923. He saw productions of Expressionist plays, watched Mary Wigman dance, and was deeply impressed by the interpretive dances of Niddy Impekoven. George Grosz and Max Reinhardt inspired him to become a socialist. After eleven months Murayama returned to Japan, began exhibiting the mixed-media paintings he carried back from Germany, and made himself a celebrity.

Mavo became Murayama’s primary rhetorical venue. The group’s major target was the codification of an autonomous “pure art” based on the Western modernism that was well-established in Mejii culture. Inspired in varying degrees by Dada, Constructivism, Futurism, anarchism, and Marxism, the Mavo group adopted Murayama’s theory of “conscious constructivism” as a means of reintegrating art into the praxis of everyday life. The most straightforward realization of this ambition was Mavo activity in the aftermath of the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923. Mavo artists participated in the reconstruction of Tokyo with several architectural projects related to the assemblage aesthetic Murayama identified with Constructivism.

Weisenfeld’s study demonstrates that “conscious constructivism” was more than an aesthetic posture; it was a carefully negotiated program for reinventing the Japanese art world through social and creative liberation of individual subjectivity. For Murayama, this program was a perfect synthesis of Dada destruction and Constructivist affirmation—”Constructivism as an ethical response to Dada. Constructivism as the most direct slap in the face. Constructivism as dada” (Weisenfeld 159). It was Constructivism pitched to the middle class, a form of cultural anarchism advertised on the model of Marinetti’s campaign for Futurism.

Weisenfeld notes that the bond between artists and the culture industry has been strong in Japan since the seventeenth century, and that in the 1920s artists became media celebrities, playing into a middle-class desire for entertainment. Through their publications, poster designs, and theatrical and architectural projects, Mavo exploited mass-marketing systems in order to mock and pervert them. Here the author invokes Andreas Huyssen, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas to back up Mavo’s view of mass culture as an autonomous realm generated neither by the state nor any individual entity, and hence a locus for subversion.

Mavo artists also used their bodies as surfaces, almost like billboards. Russian Futurists hit the streets with painted faces and colorful clothing, but the Mavoists were even more resourceful. Mavo bodies came to signify a radical, fashionable modernity that simultaneously supported and subverted national aspirations for cultural advancement.

Weisenfield considers Mavo “a Japanese manifestation of a worldwide avant-garde” (2) and thus raises the issue of ranking the group’s accomplishments vis-à-vis their European counterparts. In this text, Mavo’s radicalism assumes its own distinctive profile when one recalls photographs of Europe’s most influential early twentieth-century avant-gardists—Marinetti, Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, John Heartfield, André Breton, for example—who are pictured consistently in bourgeois uniform, with collars tightly buttoned under their neckties. They stand upright, arms close to their bodies, staring at the camera. Compare these images to a 1925 photograph of Murayama wearing the Mavo haircut, a longer version of the bob favored by U.S. flappers. He is clad in a long, feminine tunic, slit to crotch level. Barefoot and bare-armed, he bends his right arm and left leg into opposing “S” curves. Another photo shows Murayama wearing a similar tunic and high-heeled women’s shoes. In a series of pictures from 1923–24 he dances nude in his studio, surrounded by his abstract paintings. (This series is related to another biographical twist: Murayama became one of the founders of Japanese modern dance.) Other Mavo artists performed acrobatic choreography clad only in briefs; they also danced nude. Okada Tatsuo is shown in a newspaper photo constructing his Gate and Moving Ticket-Selling Machine wearing just a loincloth and Mavo bob. He told the press that he would be inside the machine, naked.

Mavo manifestos and critical essays are punctuated with language about vomit, feces, masturbation, and carnal desire. Weisenfeld convincingly situates the group’s preoccupation with androgyny and abjection in the context of Mejii-period attempts to legislate “normal” and “abnormal” bodies in conformity with Western psychological criteria—part of a government campaign to transform Japan into a modern nation. Mavo’s subversive effect was realized in part because the artists’ flamboyant surfaces were seen as fashionable signs of the creativity and individuality that was also thought necessary for Japan’s cultural advancement.

Mavo is a revelation, not only to scholars of European modernism but also to many Japanese art historians. To reclaim the avant-garde group’s history, Weisenfeld had to work back though essentialist art histories and sanitized biographies. Murayama abandoned Mavo individualism after 1925 to spearhead the proletarian arts and theater movement in Japan. He was imprisoned for his associations with the communist party in the 1930s and renounced Marxism. In the wartime culture of the 1940s, Mavo’s values were understood as criminally seditious and anti-Japanese. Japanese art historians who began to reconstruct the history of the Japanese prewar avant-garde in the late 1950s, in Weisenfeld’s view, were largely conservative intellectuals who created an “establishment history” that dominated official postwar public memory. These historians brought to the foreground the accomplishments of Japanese postwar abstractionists as part of their campaign to reposition Japan as an internationally recognized and superior culture. Mavo was inscribed in this discourse as a formalist predecessor of postwar abstract painting. More recent historians have imagined a fraternity between 1920s avant-gardists and postwar political activists, accomplished through a transhistorical Japanese “spirit of opposition.” Boldly confronting the task of extracting Mavo from the palace of Japanese essential culture, Weisenfeld has restored a whole new range of native players to the twentieth-century avant-garde.