From Design to Environment: "Art and Technology" in Two1966 Exhibitions at the Matsuya Department Store

Abstract

In November 1966, when visitors standing on the busy thoroughfare of Ginza stepped into Matsuya Department Store, few of them probably remembered that the store had been commandeered by the Occupation Forces and served as the Tokyo Main PX (Post Exchange) for military and occupation personnel from 1946 to 1952. Those who ascended to Matsuya’s eighth floor encountered two exhibitions side by side when they got off the escalator. One exhibition, to the left, Good Design, continued one of the store’s signature cultural programs that dated back to the establishment of the “Good Design Corner” in 1955 (fig. 18.1). A place to showcase design objects that could be used in everyday home life, the corner featured a Good Design exhibition, organized almost annually, to promote and make accessible the idea of modern design. That year, the exhibition included such functional objects as plastic-made lighting devices and table calendars. The other exhibition, to the right, From Space to Environment (Kūkan kara kankyō e), was an art exhibition that promoted a different kind of modernity: the marriage of art and technology (fig. 18.2).1 Subtitled An Exhibition Synthesizing Painting + Sculpture + Photography + Design + Architecture + Music, the exhibit decisively advocated “intermedia,” gesturing toward the productive collaboration among practitioners of various disciplines,2 and is considered a landmark in defining the course of 1960s art in Japan. Indeed, once inside, the visitors saw twoand three-dimensional objects that transcended the standard definitions of “painting” and “sculpture”—some hanging from the ceiling, some emitting light, and some others otherwise challenging the visitors’ conventional idea of art. An ambitious goal of the organizers was to have the visitors experience an aggregate formation defined as an “environment” that encompassed the interior and exterior of buildings as well as the viewers. Situated innocuously side by side, Good Design and From Space to Environment were different from each other—more so than they might first appear to the unsuspecting From Design to Environment: “Art and Technology” in Two1966 Exhibitions at the Matsuya Department Store Tsuji Yasutaka