M22 Jikan-Ha

Manifesto of the Jikan-Ha Group (1962)

The avant-garde art collective Jikan-Ha (School of Time) was formed in the early 1960s and was at the forefront of the development of anti-art in Japan. The four young provocateurs rejected traditional art, and the institutions that perpetuated it, in favour of imaginative experiments. They staged happenings and performances involving mass audience participation, invariably situating their work in the street rather than in the gallery. Sculptures were made of everyday detritus, causing considerable consternation from traditionalists.

In May 1962 the group staged an exhibition at the Satō Gallery in Tokyo, where they handed out their manifesto, ‘Jikan-Ha sengen’, written by the Jikan-Ha member Nakazawa Ushio (1932–2015). Referring to Isaac Newton’s principles of mathematical philosophy, Gottfried Leibniz’s laws of continuity and Leonardo da Vinci’s belief that the eye is the universal judge, the document argues that mathematics, science and art have all failed to determine an eternal or absolute truth. Reality is only a construct – so, Nakazawa posits, the artist must be in a constant state of flux, adapting to the existing surroundings rather than following a rigid ideology.

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This philosophical appeal is not the work of an individual; together with you, the artists will act, respond, and raise doubt.

Declaration: the whole of reality is a construct; all living things are created by a series of changes in geometric, astronomic, and temporal/spatial functions, and within these changing conditions human beings perceive hues, shapes, colours, and aspects. The awareness of time is constructed in the gaps between physical changes or in the material, metabolic structure of life as it is generated and annihilated. In the same way, however, it is delimited by the rhythms of the earth and forced to conform to the framework of temporal pressures shaped by the rhythms of society.

Seeing the perceptual present as the simultaneity of individual people’s activities, we represent and make visible the corresponding changes based on the premise that, in looking at them, we can see the distinct measuring function of each individual. Thus, experience and its evaluation are verified by each individual’s responding to a variety of different processes, and the main factors in regulating this verification are diverse and varied. By locating these occurrences in the work in relation to each individual, we attempt to measure the sufficiency of perception. While negating a fixed, uniform total image – that is, a visual impression of an unchanging reality based in static spatial form – we aim to replace absolute time with particular time and, by bringing an unknown dimension to art, to identify another reality.

The point: a human being lives in a state of change. Before becoming aware of the changes within himself, he is a witness to the changing world. Night leads to day, good weather to bad, summer to winter, life to death, construction to destruction, and it is doubtless that every form of existence develops on the basis of a temporal operation.

When mathematics discovered negative and imaginary numbers along with zero, they expanded the scope of geometry and reason, and the examination of the maximum and minimum properties led in time to Newton’s and Leibniz’s superior means of differentiation. These methods of calculus led to the discovery of techniques with an unprecedented degree of acuity and power, and together with analytical geometry they completely killed the potential for an accumulation of the natural spirit. Astronomy and mechanics explained that the very irregularity of appearances was proof of the complete validity of their laws. Along with the theory of relativity, quantum theory altered the course of this century by negating the absolute concept of time and space that had existed since Newton’s mechanics and by doing away with the existence of ether. Likewise, by exploring the infinitesimal world through particle physics, we discovered the idea of a non-individuated body containing nuclear force that is generated only by the exchange of states. As metabolism itself is the essence of an organism, the metaphysical superiority of life can be completely rejected. If the conditions of our existence are constantly changing, then what remains consistent is the extent to which we are diversely formed. And Leonardo’s view in which the eye is the universal judge of all things became, not long after the Industrial Revolution, entirely classical due to Cézanne’s volumetric way of seeing nature and treating space in two dimensions, a development that led to Cubism and formed the theoretical basis for contemporary painting. By attaching importance to dynamism and functionality, the Constructivists called for works of art to have the expressive features of a high-performance machine, and according to Le Corbusier, for whom the house was a machine for living, Suprematist works could be considered machines to live with. Naum Gabo viewed reality as part of a physical transformation of time and space, and his aspiration not to recognise constant, absolute uniformity provides some insight into the era. Artists’ methods of solving the riddles of nature intellectually altered the analysis of the internal labyrinth.

In this way, mathematics, science, and art have each attempted to establish a means of perceiving and reacting according to a unique method. None of them, however, has attained an eternal or absolute truth.

Today, no one believes that there is any certainty in the reality seen before us or in historical events. We can live only in the present; in other words, our actions are nothing more than a function of the whole that is prescribed in the here and now. But the present constantly rejects us as something that no longer is or has yet to be. This instant of provocation and reaction itself constitutes our entire being, and to perceive time in change is the only way we can perceive our reality and affirm our existence. The continual, ceaseless generating of fragments of phenomena and modern conventions to be perceived in the realm of time will be annihilated. ‘Time creates me, I create time’ (Bonaparte).