Review of Money, Trains and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan by William Marotti

William Marottis book is a landmark study of political art and the politics of artistic expression in contemporary Japan. Marottis self-described microhistory (p. 312) immerses us in the world of avant-garde artistic production and performance in the wake of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo) protests of 1960 in an attempt to investigate the politics of culture and the everyday (p. 2). Through the eyes and experiences of artists such as Akasegawa Genpei, Marotti uncovers a fascinating, provocative, and sometimes-shocking history of political art in which the protagonists struggled to expose unconscious forms of domination in the everyday world and tried desperately to imagine and implement strategies for radical transformation which would bring some of them into conflict with the state (p. 28)