User:Tonywz/sandbox

The Hi-Red Center is a group of avant-garde artists who performed anti-art, anti-establishment happenings in Tokyo, Japan. The group members were Genpei Akasegawa, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, and Jiro Takamatsu. The name of the group is derived from the first kanji of their surnames, “高; taka” (high), “赤; aka” (red), and “中; naka” (center). The group was active from 1962 to 1964.

Works
Hi-Red Center is known for "breaking away from the urban centrality of the Tokyo art scene and the focus on the museum/gallery as the core location for the production and consumption of art."

Yamanote jiken (Yamanote Line Incident) (1962)
Staged on 18 October 1962, Natsuyuki and Takamatsu boarded a Yamanote loop line train heading counter-clockwise on its route, disrupting the normalcy of passenger's commutes through a series a performative actions.

Nakanishi positioned himself in the centre of the train carriage, his face painted white and seemingly absorbed in a book. He carried Compact Objects, transparent forms about the size and shape of an ostrich egg, with sundry items such as wristwatches, bits of rope, sunglasses, bottle caps and human hair encased in resin. Nakanishi proceeded to lick his objects while Takamatsu stood nonchalantly nearby. Other participants, such as Murata Kiichi, applied white face paint and brought additional objects, including rope, real eggs and a chicken foot. Murai Tokuji documented the happening with photography, depicting the puzzled expressions of commuters watching Nakanishi.

William Marotti characterises this work as an intervention into quietness (or calmness), Nakanishi and Genpei situating the work in the wake of large-scale post-war upheavals (such as the 1960 Anpo US–Japan Security Treaty protests). They saw the train systems as a "terrain of the everyday", using the individual bodies of the artists to demonstrate how these symbolic events have long-lasting effects on the citizen body, long after public political discourse and dissent wanes.

Mark Pendleton argues that this work, and its form of intervention into the everyday, has influenced the ethos of subsequent collectives in the 1970s, such as Video Earth Tokyo. They also situated their work in the Tokyo train system, installing a dining table and hosting a meal on a subway carriage in Shukutaku ressha/Video Picnic (1975).

Cleaning Event (officially known as Be Clean! and Campaign to Promote Cleanliness and Order in the Metropolitan Area) (1964)
The group is famous for its Be Clean or Street Cleaning event of 1964, where the members wore outfits used by laboratory technicians during the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games and started cleaning a street in Ginza with small brushes, as well as polishing any metal pieces they could find on the pavement. This was a parody of the government’s actions at the time, which was preoccupied with cleaning the streets in preparation for the Olympics.

Dropping Event (1964)
They also held other happenings involving the city’s infrastructures, such as the Dropping Event in 1964, where they dropped a suitcase and its contents off the building of Ikenobo Flower School’s headquarters and painting Waseda University’s toilet seats red in 1963.