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.

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.

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