In Fukushima, récit d’un désastre (2012) Michaël Ferrier, a French academic and writer based in Tokyo, recounts his experience of the triple catastrophe of the earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear catastrophe that shook the To\hoku region of Japan on 11 March 2011. After having experienced the earthquake in Tokyo, he traveled to the site of the disaster to aid in the recovery effort. Since then, he has devoted great efforts to try and grasp these momentous events and militate against the outdated nuclear policies of Japan, most recently in Dans l’œil du désastre, a collective volume of interviews with Japanese and French artists concerned with the catastrophe. Such a densely documented and illustrated volume can hardly be summarized, so a few emblematic examples must suffice.

In “L’inesthétique,” his postface to the volume, philosopher Hervé Couchot—echoing Paul Klee’s claim that “Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible”—demands “an aesthetic understood not as the conception of art but as the tangible [Fr: sensible] restitution of an event through artistic production” (239). After Fukushima, this “tangible restitution” takes on monumental (I use the word advisedly) proportions. For while the earthquake and tsunami created an unspeakable but hyperbolically visible destruction, the meltdown at the power plant not only caused an intangible radioactive catastrophe, but in doing so radically transformed our experience of time (the millennia it will take for the disappearance of the radioactivity, a temporality incommensurate with human experience), space (where causality becomes a function of the invisible, without theological or transcendental sources), and representation. Hence the subtitle, “To Create with Fukushima,” for there will be no after Fukushima. This situation provokes a double regime of iconography: either reproduce the visible ruins or restitute the invisible menace of the ongoing nuclear catastrophe by revealing its various regimes of invisibility. There follows a double scandal of this invisibility, of both radioactive dangers and the consequent governmental and societal censure of discussing the problem.

Prior to the 20th century, almost all construction in Japan was of wood, thus there exists no traditional romanticism of ruins corresponding to that of Europe; the ravages of war and the destruction unleashed by natura naturans were long sublimated into the profound feeling of mono no aware—the melancholy of the passing of things—that pervades Japanese poetry and literature. This changed with the realist representations made possible by photo-reportage, as in the heart-wrenching documentation of the survivors of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by photographer Domon Ken in the 1950s. Both selective viewing and comprehensive cataloging of such horrors—whether affecting body, landscape, or cityscape—became possible, a shock that could not be dissimulated by recourse to either the Western sublime or Japanese mono no aware.

Grappling with invisibility is nothing new, since art—as a manifestation of the sacred—has always been about making the invisible visible. Like the gods, radioactivity is inaccessible to the senses. The artist may engage with visible effects or invisible causes. Concerning visible manifestations, the discordance between traditional aesthetic categories and the novel exigencies of current catastrophes is particularly disquieting: the daguerreotypes of Arai Takashi, where the discrepancy between an outdated technique and a novel cataclysm demands a reconsideration of the history of photography; the low-resolution photos by Minato Chihiro retouched by Marie Drouet, using acrylic inks impregnated with salts that result in a troubling transformation of disaster into the picturesque, indeed the beautiful; the series of photographs of steles by Thierry Girard, evoking 19th-century photographic landscape illustrations; or the allegorical theatre of Brigitte Mounier, Fukushima, terre des cerisiers (2014), where the very symbol of the ephemeral, the cherry flower, is contrasted to the practically interminable life of certain radioactive isotopes. Such works thrust us between “beauty and disquietude” (183).

But we need a new art to reveal these deadly invisible causes, as well as a new vocabulary (neither theological nor metaphysical, since the local gods—the Japanese genii locorum, the kami—are replaced by an intransigently universal radiation) to signify them. We are far from Godzilla, that allegorical archetype revealing the anguish and anxiety following the origins of the nuclear age at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, the creature’s huge eye comes back to haunt us into self-awareness in Yanagi Yukinori’s Project Godzilla—Landscape with an Eye (2016), as it stares out of the ruins. As Couchot insists, one needs a revised vocabulary to signify this new regime of images, such as the spectraculaire (240), where spectacle gives way to a spectral presence; or the subliminaire (241), a deconstruction of the sublime in relation to the infinitely small, indeed invisible, agents of radioactivity, and their consequently subliminal, if deadly, effects. Art and science combine to document the ongoing catastrophe in the most subtle and abstract photographic effects, caused by radiation directly affecting the unexposed film, such as the abstract chronoradiogrammes, medical x-ray film exposed outdoors in a radiation zone for a period from 3 days to 4 weeks, of Hélène Lucien and Marc Pallain (149, 240) and Kawakubo Yoi’s series If the Radiance of a Thousand Suns Were to Burst at Once into the Sky (2014–2016), where the abstract images were created by burying the film directly in the contaminated earth.

However, it is perhaps the performative transformation of human interactions that will have the greatest effect on art and society. Members of the Tokyo artists’ collective Chim↑Pom describe themselves as practitioners of guerilla art, or “perpetrators of art,” and have recently used self-funding and crowdfunding to escape both gallery restrictions and government censure. One of their works following the Fukushima catastrophe, Don’t Follow the Wind (2011–), is emblematic of their project and indicative of a possible future—collective, critical, contentious—for Japanese art. The project consists of an exhibition curated for the works of a dozen internationally known artists, including such luminaries as Ai Weiwei, all shown in the exclusion zone at Fukushima, thus rendering spectatorship impossible. In this and other works of Chim↑Pom we find a slippage of genres crucial to our era—curating as art as performance as criticism as theory as activism—which imposes the imperative that the artwork establish relations between artist, victim, and spectator—art not only as interpretation, representation, and revelation, but also as the militant reorganization of vision, volition, agency, and witness. We exist between two possible regimes of representation, two possible modes of salvation: the representational and the performative.

Minato, an artist profoundly affected by the catastrophes of Fukushima, poignantly exclaims, of a village totally destroyed by the catastrophe: “In fact, at Iitate, the museum is there before our eyes, it’s the entire village” (164). In contrast, following a heart-wrenching description of the ruins of the Tōhoku landscape in Fukushima, récit d’un désastre, Ferrier recounts the reserved gestures of some former residents who had returned to the site of their total loss, searching for scraps of memory. He wonders how hope can be renewed amidst the rubble, as he notes: “There is grass and it grows, there had been dreams and there will be traces: death is not the end point” (Ferrier Reference Ferrier2012:186). Not nostalgia, but rebirth. Not a search for time lost, but a path through the wreckage.