Critical design in Japan
Author | : Ory Bartal |
Publisher | : Manchester University Press |
Total Pages | : 392 |
Release | : 2020-04-17 |
ISBN-10 | : 9781526140012 |
ISBN-13 | : 1526140012 |
Rating | : 4/5 (12 Downloads) |
Book excerpt: This book tells the story of critical avant-garde design in Japan, which emerged during the 1960s and continues to inspire designers today. The practice communicates a form of visual and material protest drawing on the ideologies and critical theories of the 1960s and 1970s, notably feminism, body politics, the politics of identity, and ecological, anti-consumerist and anti-institutional critiques, as well as the concept of otherness. It also presents an encounter between two seemingly contradictory concepts: luxury and the avant-garde. The book challenges the definition of design as the production of unnecessary decorative and conceptual objects, and the characterisation of Japanese design in particular as beautiful, sublime or a product of ‘Japanese culture’. In doing so it reveals the ways in which material and visual culture serve to voice protest and formulate a social critique.