keiichi 1

鮮やかな思い出の生涯 田名網敬

田名網敬 Lifetime of Vivid Recollections Keiichi Tanaami

年 Lifetime of Vivid Recollections

Keiichi Tanaami

םיריהב תונורכז לש םייח

ימאנט י'צייק

Catalog Designer and Editor: Amit Hagay

Course's mentor: David Moscovitz

Photos by: NANZUKA UNDERGROUND, Keiichi Tanaami

Used fonts: Unbounded, Open Sans, Gloria, Noto Sans JP

This art catalog is a product of a complex material processing course, within visual communication studies, taken during my second year at the Holon Institute of Technology - HIT 2023.

Table of Contents 目次

私の名前は田名網敬 です

MY NAME IS KEIICHI TANAAMI

"A magazine that is packed to the brim with human interests and desires bears a strong resemblance to who I am as a person. My life is not a straight shot, with one central theme running through it like a book. It would be more properly called a magazine editor's life, spent looking about at my surroundings constantly wandering from place to place engaging in a wide variety of work along the way."

CHILDHOOD AND WAR 幼少期と戦争

The year was 1936 the February 26 Incident took place in Japan as German troops entered the Rhineland, sparking the flames of the Second World War, and it was in this year that Keiichi Tanaami was born the eldest son of a textile wholesaler in the Kyōbashi neighborhood of Tokyo.

In 1941, the Pacific War erupted after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, and Tanaami's birthplace was put in peril. The bombing of Tokyo began with a B29 on April 18, 1942, and Tanaami fled from Kyōbashi with his family, relocating to his grandfather's house in the Gonnosuke-zaka neighborhood of the Meguro ward. From the house bomb

shelter, Tanaami witnessed the over one hundred firebombing attacks on Tokyo that continued until the war ended on August 15, 1945. Images seared into the back of his mind at this time would become major motifs in his art: roaring American bombers, Japanese searchlights scanning the skies, firebombs and flares dropped from planes, the city a sea of fire, fleeing masses, and the flashes of the bombs reflecting off of his grandfather's deformed goldfish swimming in its tank. Tanaami's experience of the war, and in particular this fish, are stored in his memory with the mystery of an illusion.

Old magazine scrap which artist collected in late 1960

"It's a grotesque form of beauty. The fish tank that appears there in the bright light of the flares strong as the noonday sun. In the tank, a twisted goldfish, its scales catching the light, shimmering and shining, fluttering and swaying like it swims. I was scared, but I also felt this excitement going through my whole body when I saw that fish tank. To this day I believe that this experience was more intense than all my hallucinations."

MY NAME IS KEIICHI TANAAMI / 私の名前は田名網敬

Three FragmentsPart 3 2016

END OF THE WAR AND KAMISHIBA 終戦と紙芝居

As the war conditions deteriorated, Tanaami and his mother evacuated to Muikamachi, Niigata, where they stayed until the end of the war. When they returned to Meguro, they found the town they knew so well had all but vanished. "There is no doubt that fear and apprehension along with anger and resignation surged through my dreams, in which the enigmatic monster of war chased down my boyhood, spent eating and playing to my heart's content. As I recall, one night during an air raid, I watched a fleeing mob of people from atop a hill. But, I wonder about this. I wonder if it actually happened. Dreams and reality are all jumbled up in my memories, stored in my mind in that ambiguous state." Not long afterwards, at the age of nine, the young Tanaami came across kamishibai, picture-card shows, in the scorched streets of Tokyo.

"Yet, the image I have stored in my memory of kamishibai is that of a thick matière similar to that of classic European paintings by the likes of Emilio Greco or Veláquez, painted in meticulous detail. That distinct matière remains permanently linked in my memory with the haunting sight of the baby girl born from the white snake's egg with the body of a snake and the face and hands of a human. the sprite Bella, flicking her red tongue as she slithers her way down the cliff, each distinctive character from The Golden Bat, an action story that was always set against a backdrop of the setting sun."

Lost and wandering Bridge #15 2011

"Sōji Yamakawa was my starting point and if it weren't for my coming across the kamishibai and the book version of Boy King, I probably wouldn't have entered this world."

CINEMATIC EFFECTS

シネマティック エフェクト

His background of the war and his encounter with kamishibai are both deeply connected to his birth as Tanaami the artist. Another factor that greatly influenced Tanaami was film. In Meguro, where Tanaami grew up, there was a "horribly pathetic movie theater that was basically a shack made out of plywood" called the Meguro Palace where Tanaami spent almost every day watching American B movies.

"Well, when you are watching over 500 movies a year, the line between fiction and reality gets blurred, and you end up in a state of confusion where truth and falsehood are all mixed up, as though you are glimpsing out at reality from a loophole in the dream world. I even seriously considered whether I

could just live in that cozy darkness." What grabbed Tanaami's attention were many of the popular entertainment flicks of the time: monster movies such as Freaks by Tod Browning and Creature from the Black Lagoon by Jack Arnold; films that starred seductive, glamorous actresses such as Jane Russell in The Outlaw, Marilyn Monroe in Niagara, and Jayne Mansfield in The Girl Can't Help It and the list goes on.

Tanaami reminisces about his "madman-like games played behind closed doors" in connection with his passion for movies. Once the young Tanaami caught a black stray dog with a lame leg, smeared white paint over its entire body, then let it loose on a dark field, "It is a black and strong memory for me".

Red Elephant and Green Whale 2014

映写機

In another instance, Tanaami set up a handmade snare and captured a sparrow. He came up with a savage idea using his uncle's film projector.

"I switched off all of the light bulbs, then groped about to take the cover off of the light source. I then took out the sparrow, which I had put into a box ahead of time, and placed it in the space next to the light bulb, and quietly put the cover back on. There was no sign of motion from the sparrow, but perhaps that was because of the pitch darkness.

With my heat pounding in my chest, I switched the film projector on. The stark black silhouette of the sparrow, its black outline trembling, was projected onto the bright white screen. Its tiny tremors continued for some time, until finally, no longer able to endure the heat of the bulb, the sparrow began to flap its wings.

It seemed about to break out into a momentous rampage, its movements crisply mirrored on the white screen. I couldn't move, I was so stunned by that great aggression, and I just sat there staring at the screen. "Tanaami's abnormal obsession with moving things" carried on into the animations and experimental films he would later produce.

THE FAMILY OPPOSTION 家族の反対

Already excelling beyond his age in painting by the time he was a high school student, Tanaami naturally aspired to enroll in an art university. However, he was met with vehement opposition from his mother as well as the rest of his relatives, whose only concept of artists at the time was that they were "dirty, womanizing, drunken derelicts living in poverty".

In the end he was permitted to attend the college of design at Musashino Art University under the condition that a concentration in design would at least lead him to land a real job. His talents became widely known during his college years, and during his second year, in 1958, he won a special selection award at the Japan Advertising Art Exhibition, held by the authoritative design organization, Japan Advertising Artists Club. After winning the award, he started taking on editorial design jobs for magazines despite still being enrolled full time in school. His first job commissioned was for art direction of the new magazine Mademoiselle. "I knew virtually nothing about design. Or what kind of work it entailed. But I had a feeling that if I passed this chance by, it would never come again."

Upon showing his mother the large sum of money he received as compensation for his work, she grew angry, asking him, "What sort of criminal activity have you gotten yourself into?" After graduating, he took a job at the Advertising Branch of Hakuhodo, but quit after just two years due to receiving far too many independent job offers. After meeting his mentor, Kiyoshi Awazu, he delved into his fascination with design. "When I graduated, I was recommended for membership in the Japan Advertising Artists Club, and I tasted an overwhelming euphoria like I had never felt before. Of course after that even more design work came in, and the allure of design, of dodging through various systems and constraints, had me in its grasp and would not let go."

Fishbow 2017

"There was an allure to the air of excitement they exuded and the life they lived, these artists who had adopted antiart, the polar opposite of commercial arts. It occurred to me that this mode of expression that stripped away every sort of institution and constraint, that this too was indispensable to me."

LIFELONG FRIENDS

生涯の友

It was also at this time that Tanaami had the important encounter with fellow artist Ushio Shinohara, who would become his lifelong friend. From the front line, Tanaami observed the Neo Dadaism Organizers' movement, started up in 1960 by artists Ushio Shinohara, Genhei Akasegawa, and Shūsaku Arakawa. "Masanobu Yoshimura had a studio in the Hyakunincho neighborhood of Shinjuku. it was the first private residence designed by Arata Isozaki.

Young artists would gather there nearly every day at around sunset, and would hold parties that raved through the night. They were a feast of sounds that existed in that alternate dimension that really represented the '60s, like a feverish ritual with brains and bodies clashing with great noise." Steadily building his career in commercial arts on the one side, Tanaami was also greatly inspired by the presence of these friends.

Deformed Universe in the Fishbowl 2017

" Piece of art that is a book that does not adhere to exhibition on a gallery wall "

POP ART BOOK ポップアートブック

In 1966, Tanaami published Portrait of Keiichi Tanaami, a pop art book which blended Japanese manga with American hero comics, as a "piece of art that is a book, that does not adhere to exhibition on a gallery wall". In the book he wrote the following statement.

"I want us to break away from the fixed notion that printed material facsimile, and to comprehend it rather as the existence of an infinite number of original works. The notions of the quality or the rarity value of a painting are a myth from an era dominated by the idea that only the single piece containing the trace of the artist and every thought within, constituted as art, the pure form of painting."In 1967, Tanaami changed his mind with conviction upon seeing some of Andy Warhol's works in person during his first trip to New York.

Deformed Universe in the Fishbowl 2007

MY NAME IS KEIICHI TANAAMI

"At the time, Warhol was in the process of transitioning from commercial illustrator to artist, and I both observed and experienced firsthand his tactics, his method of incision into the art world. What I felt then was that the strategies he employed were identical to the strategies employed by advertising agencies. He used contemporary icons as motifs in his artwork, and put the various

mediums of films, newspapers, and rock bands together in his activities; Warhol's existence equaled selling artwork to the art market. This was shocking to me, and at the same time I embraced him as the perfect case model for myself. Like Warhol, I decided then not to limit myself to any one medium, to just design or fine art, but to instead do what I wanted using a variety of methods."

IMAGINARY 虚数

Inspired, Tanaami went on to tirelessly create a great number of experimental pieces. In 1968, he designed album jackets for the Japanese releases of albums such as legendary rock band Jefferson Airplane's After Bathing at Baxter's and the MonkeesPisces, Acquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. He contributed work to the No More War poster special feature in the American magazine Avant Garde that same year. Then, in 1969, under the title of Image Director, he published the legendary book, Illustrated Book of Imaginary Tomorrow, a compilation of the underground art scene in Tokyo in the 1960's.

The images included in the book had no boundaries: Marilyn Monroe, underground New York newspapers, Pinky & Killers, GeGeGe no Kitaro, American comic book heroes, Self-Defense Force personnel, Gewalt students, Hitler and the Nazis, groups of naked men and women staging happenings, cursed dolls, wartime Asahi newspaper clippings, the Apollo 11 moon landing, and so on.

It was an experimental work, using every conceivable technique of graphic design to edit together the virtual images emitted by the mass media with the myriad images wriggling about inside Tanaami's brain. In an interview that appears in the book, Tanaami says with enthusiasm.

Cat

FIRST ANIMATION FESTIVAL

第1回アニメーションフェスティバル

Tanaami was tackling an enormous workload during this period, and at the same time was vigorously at work to realize his long-held dream of making animation. Tanaami created his first animated piece in 1965.

"In the 1960'S, events that traversed and intersected many diverse genres took place regularly at the Sōgetsu Art Center in Akasaka. Happenings staged by Yoko Ono, videos by Nam June Paik, and experimental American films hit the stage one after the next. The Sōgetsu Art Center was truly the ‘shrine' of the avant-garde. For the young artists searching for ‘new forms of expression' at the time, each one of those activities was inspiring. It was around that time that I heard the news that the First Animation Festival, developed by the Animation Group of Three (Yōji Kuri, Ryōhei Yanagihara, Hiroshi Manabe), whose works I had seen at Sōgetsu, was to take place in 1964.

I wanted so badly to make animation, I begged Yōji Kuri's Experimental Animation Studio to help me create ‘Marionettes in Masks'. It was the first studio I saw in person at the animation stand, we looked over the frame tables I had spent all night drawing up and then started shooting. Every day was an uphill battle, as I had no comprehension of any filmmaking terminology or technique, not even the 24 frame per second timing or the movement of the pictures to go along with that overlapping; shooting frames fading in and out and so on. Up until that point, my everyday work had almost exclusively dealt with still images, and still unable to fully grasp that sense of time, filming came to an abrupt end. This was back when the word animation itself was not yet commonplace."

"At this point in time, I entertain absolutely no notion that design could transform the world. Politics are a force design is not. I'm talking about demonstrations and placards. Making a placard isn't going to stop the war.

This is how I know that designers think of themselves as social elites. I comprehend mass society as a measure of oneself. To that end, we must first tear apart the way of thinking known as design. I think it's complete nonsense that we are still stuck on the impotence of modern design."

年 1960'S