"Japanese Art 1950-2010" at the National Museum of Art, Osaka is a historical show by virtue of the span of time it covers.
Drawn from the museum's collection, however, it is also historically disengaged, largely not placing works within the narrative contexts of art history and casually overlooking whole areas distinctive to contemporary Japanese art.
For example, the conceptual and occasionally anarchic Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai (Concrete Art Association), which held court with the public from the late 1950s to the early '70s, gets a section given to its achievements, but Mono-ha (School of Things) — the avant-garde in the late '60s and early '70s — goes without mention, even though members Koji Enokura and Jiro Takamatsu have works featured in the section vaguely titled "Trends of the 1970s." Rather than an assemblage of events that provide a plot or broader interpretative network, artworks are displayed as indexical markers of their kind: This was made at this time, and this at another.
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