"Revolt of the Flesh: Ankoku Butoh and Obsess ional Art." Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994. 189-201.

Alexander Munroe's article highlights the postwar Japanese cultural and artistic obsession with the dark side of man such as death, deformity, and despair. The focus is on anti-government, anti-society, anti-Western civilization counterculture, which tends towards expression of natural desires suppressed by the strict and controlling society. A few artists are discussed for their use images of phallic objects, violence, and grotesque scenes. A neurotic mind set of repetition, irrationality, and self-negativity was shown to be used to heal pain through its release as Japanese Obsessional Art. The other concept introduced is Butoh dance, a unique postwar development in which movements express pain and the unconscious primal, natural darkness of man. The body is shown as metaphor of the sad and "decaying human condition."

Munroe's is a good representation of how Japanese history and the war fed into art. The author uses a good mix of background information, ideas of individual artists, and visual and literal examples of work such as the weasel, which shows the helplessness felt after the war. This psychological review of art history is interesting, for it links Butoh and Obsessional art to kabuki and the Edo period's tendencies to focus on horror, showing a progression, an evolution of movement from the floating world of excess to a new disgust with material society. The article explained in depth the meaning of both Butoh and Obsessional art, both of which use the body to depict the human crisis. The author shows how the artists are viewed and how they view themselves. He takes a positive stance, not a critical one, and cites many reliable sources in both Japanese and English, lending to his credibility. The author does not engage in depth with any one aspect, but appears to agree with and support the two movements in a journalistic and very believable overall summary of the two movements and Japanese postwar art.

-Jacqui Phillips