Women making art and Japan's electronic age : case studies of Kubota Shigeko, Idemitsu Mako, and Mori Mariko

Abstract

This thesis adds to the ongoing rethinking of Japanese art history through a gendered lens by presenting a woman-centered narrative. I aim to expand the research scope by bringing the history of Japan’s Electronic Age into the discussion of Japanese women making art in the second half of the twentieth century. Three women artists are examined here as three cases of intersections between the two histories: Kubota Shigeko (久保田成子, 1937-2015), Idemitsu Mako (出光真子, 1940-), and Mori Mariko (森万里子, 1967-), who share a common concern with women’s issues while engaging with electronic technology as artistic tools or concepts. Emerging respectively in the 1960s, the mid-1970s, and the 1990s, the three Japanese women stood at three moments in history when women’s artmaking gained currency in either art historical, social, or cultural currents: the avant-garde movement in the 1960s, the emerging women’s movements in America and Japan in the 1970s, and the rise of identity politics and multiculturalism alongside globalization in the 1990s. Meanwhile, looking into electronic technology, they engaged with three crucial moments in the history of Japan's electronics industry: the global expansion of Sony and the success of Portapak, the further popularization and socialization of electronic devices in Japanese society, and the intensified geopolitical tensions around Japan’s triumph as a technological powerhouse. The three chapters provide close readings of their production of individual works of art, strategies for establishing their careers, and approaches to female identities. I focus on the relationship between their respective art practices and the changing technological sphere shaped by Japan’s electronics industry. Demonstrating women’s artistic activities within the industry’s emergence, triumph, and decline, I propose to rethink the often coupled understanding of female empowerment and technological progress in current art historical narratives. As I will show through the three cases, particularly in the Japanese context, women’s artmaking and technological change are interrelated in a more dynamic and sometimes ambivalent way, in which we see both confluence and conflicts between their own ideologies. Furthermore, I discuss the three cases not as a narrative of a monolithic development but as individual intersections taking place at different historical moments and in different directions. In so doing, I delineate a broader art historical, social, and cultural landscape that women artists draw upon in their artmaking beyond feminist contexts. What follows is the multiple ways women artists and technology entangle in the field of art, both in and outside Japan.