Hillel Schwartz: The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles, 2nd ed. (1996/2013)

The Culture of the Copy is an unprecedented attempt to make sense of the Western fascination with replicas, duplicates, and twins. In a work that is breathtaking in its synthetic and critical achievements, Hillel Schwartz charts the repercussions of our entanglement with copies of all kinds, whose presence alternately sustains and overwhelms us. Through intriguing, and at times humorous, historical analysis and case studies in contemporary culture, Schwartz investigates a stunning array of simulacra—counterfeits, decoys, mannequins, and portraits; ditto marks, genetic cloning, war games, and camouflage; instant replays, digital imaging, parrots, and photocopies; wax museums, apes, and art forgeries, not to mention the very notion of the Real McCoy. Working through a range of theories on biological, mechanical, and electronic repro­duction, Schwartz questions the modern esteem for authenticity and uniqueness. The Culture of the Copy shows how the ethical dilemmas central to so many fields of endeavor have become inseparable from our pursuit of copies—of the natural world, of our own creations, indeed of our very selves.

This updated edition takes notice of recent shifts in thought with regard to such issues as biological cloning, conjoined twins, copyright, digital reproduction, and multiple personality disorder. At once abbreviated and refined, it will be of interest to anyone concerned with proglems of authenticity, identity, and originality.

First published in 1996
Publisher Zone Books, New York, 2013
ISBN 1935408453, 9781935408451
480 pages

Review (Terence Hawkes, London Review of Books, 1997)
Review (Francis Kane, The New York Times, 1997)
Review (Todd Gitlin, Los Angeles Times, 1997)

Publisher
Google books

Download (removed on 2014-3-20 upon request of the publisher)

Kyōjirō Hagiwara: Death Sentence (1925) [Japanese]

The poetry anthology Shikei senkoku “is one of Mavo’s best-known projects and the group’s only collaborative book design. Mavo executed the entire layout of Hagiwara’s anthology, deciding everything down to the pitch of the text. It is one of the finest examples of a successful integration of text, design, typography, and illustration.

At the time, Shikei senkoku was considered extremely experimental graphically. As Takahashi Shūichirō has noted, it was designed to fit Hagiwara’s persona as a kuroki hannin (black criminal, that is, an anarchist). Without the artistic constraints placed on many commercial publications, Mavo artists were free to produce a strong visual response to the tumultuous poems. Okada did most of the illustrations for the volume, as well as designing the cover. It consists of two bold black lattices on both the left and right borders, a yellow band at the top with the author’s name, a thicker red band with the book title below this, a bluish circle in the center, and a black-and-white grid pattern at the bottom with boxes filled in to create an abstract pattern. The tide consists of irregularly rendered, blocky characters, playfully tilted against one another, creating a horizontal rhythm across the top of the book.

Several of the illustrations inside Shikei senkoku are photographic reproductions of Mavo work already published in the group’s magazine. The rest are abstract linocuts. Line, dot, and arrow border patterns dynamically frame the texts, which are interspersed with full-page illustrations, some featuring bold, black-and-white abstract patterns.

In one example, illustrations by Okada Tatsuo and Yabashi Kimimaro face each other (pp 34-35). Okada’s untitled print, on the right-hand page, is largely rectilinear, with a few crisscrossing diagonals. The Still Life Yawns, Yabashi’s work on the left-hand page, consists of a black rectangular form with white areas cut away inside, producing free-form shapes. In another of Okada’s many untitled designs in Shikei senkoku, an anthropomorphic head springs into the composition from the left, its segmented neck pierced by a long protruding cone; black-and-white abstract shapes and line patterns animate the background (p 155). The typography used for the poems is also experimental, often incorporating symbols and shapes to substitute for characters and letters (pp 130-131).” (from Gennifer Weisenfeld, Mavo, 2002, pp 197-200)

With illustrations by Mavo (Tatsuo Okada, Kimimaro Yabashi, Tomoyoshi Murayama, Masamu Yanase, Hisao Maki, Shuzo Oura, Seiho Sawa, Tatsuo Toda, Michinao Takamizawa)
Publisher Chōryūsha, Tokyo, 1925
161+6 pages
via Waseda University Library, (2)

Commentary (John Solt, 1999)
MAVO at Monoskop wiki

PDF, JPGs (First edition, PDF 46 MB)
PDF, JPGs (Second edition, PDF 48 MB)
HTML (added on 2014-10-8)

Gennifer Weisenfeld: Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905-1931 (2002)

“The radical Japanese art group Mavo roared into new arenas and new art forms during the 1920s, with work ranging from performance art to painting, book illustration, and architectural projects. Hurling rocks through glass roofs and displaying their rejected works, Mavo artists held peripatetic protest exhibitions against the Japanese art establishment. Ultimately, Mavo’s work became a major influence in Japanese commercial art and had a pronounced and lasting impact on Japanese visual and political culture. This abundantly illustrated volume, the first book-length study in English on Mavo, provides a critical evaluation of this often outrageous and iconoclastic movement, tracing Mavo’s relationship to broader developments in modernism worldwide.

Gennifer Weisenfeld provides a fascinating look into Japanese popular culture by showing how Mavo artists sought to transform Japanese art in response to the rise of industrialism. They deliberately created images that conveyed the feelings of crisis, peril, and uncertainty that were beginning to characterize daily life. Their art often alluded to mechanical environments through the use of abstracted imagery such as interconnected tubular forms and shapes reminiscent of riveted steel-plate girders. Looking in depth at the art itself, the flamboyant personalities of the artists, and the cultural and political history of Japan in this interwar period, Weisenfeld traces the strategies used by these artists as they sought to reintegrate art into daily experience.

Weisenfeld thoroughly documents the links between Mavo artists and a wide range of other artistic and political movements with which they associated themselves, such as futurism, dada, expressionism, socialism, and communism. Capturing the restlessness and iconoclastic fervor of Mavo, Weisenfeld is the first to fully locate this modern Japanese artistic community within the broader historical and intellectual framework of international art of the early twentieth century.”

Publisher University of California Press, 2002
ISBN 0520223381, 9780520223387
368 pages

Reviews: Patricia Failing (caa.reviews), Alexandra Munroe (J Japanese Studies), J. Keith Vincent (J Asian Studies).

Publisher

PDF (95 MB, no OCR, updated on 2017-7-17)
multiple formats (Internet Archive, added on 2017-7-17)

See also Weisenfeld’s essay Mavo’s Conscious Constructivism: Art, Individualism, and Daily Life in Interwar Japan (1996, 10 pp) and
Hagiwara Kyōjirō’s Death Sentence (1925).