[1] Composed of a small group of young, up-and-coming artists who met periodically at Yoshimura's "White House" atelier in Shinjuku, the Neo-Dada Organizers engaged in all manner of visual and performance artworks, but specialized in producing disturbing, impulsive spectacles, often involving physical destruction of objects, that the art critic Ichirō Hariu deemed "savagely meaningless," and that inspired another art critic, Yoshiaki Tōno, to coin the term "anti-art" (han-geijutsu).
[2] Examples included filling galleries with piles of garbage, smashing furniture to the beat of jazz music, and prancing the streets of Tokyo in various states of dress and undress.
[4] The Neo-Dada Organizers held three official exhibitions in 1960, as well as a number of bizarre "actions," "events," and "happenings" in which they sought to mock, deconstruct, and in many cases, physically destroy conventional forms of art.
Many of the group's members and participants would go on to become noted artists in their own right, including Genpei Akasegawa, Shūsaku Arakawa, Sayako Kishimoto, Tetsumi Kudō, Natsuyuki Nakanishi, and Ushio Shinohara.
[12] By adding the English word "organizers" to their name, the group indicated their interest in appropriating (and possibly mocking) the left-wing jargon of the ongoing Anpo protests.
[22] At the "White House," they spent day and night discussing, writing leaflets, organizing performances-cum-parties, and working towards the Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition and other group shows.
[29][27][30] On June 18, 1960, just three days after student activist Michiko Kanba was killed in a clash with police at the National Diet as part of the ongoing Anpo protests, group members convened at Yoshinobu's "White House" atelier and staged a performance called Anpo Commemoration Event (安保記念エベント) for gathered reporters and television cameras, supposedly to "commemorate" the failure of the protests to stop the passage of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty.
[3] Yoshimura appeared with a massive erect penis and testicles made of cloth, paper, and string tied to his loins, white arrows painted on his chest, and a gaping red wound painted on his stomach that looked as if he had just disembowled himself in a seppuku suicide ritual, and Arakawa appeared in a grotesque, monster-like costume and gulped directly from a bottle of strong shōchū while dancing around and making strange noises.
In a performance filmed by television station TBS, male members carried out sadistic acts against women associated with the group, including Sayako Kishimoto.
[34] Masunobu Yoshimura wrapped his naked body with the group's exhibition flyers and Kinpei Masuzawa covered himself in fragile glass lightbulbs before proceeding to stroll through downtown Tokyo.
[37] During the evening, several performances followed one another: Masunobu Yoshimura brushed his teeth for about 30 minutes until his mouth ran with blood, Shō Kazakura stood on a chair and pressed a hot iron to his chest as part of a "ritual to execute the will of the Marquis de Sade," Yasunao Tone and Group Ongaku gave a concert of experimental music, and Tatsumi Hijikata stripped naked and performed Butoh, among others.
These events became the source of media spectacle, and were avidly documented by photographers, including Kenji Ishiguro, Takeo Ishimatsu, Masanori Kobayashi, Shōmei Tōmatsu, William Klein and Jacqueline Paul.
As curator Raiji Kuroda has pointed out, members of Neo-Dada seemed to know the value of getting themselves seen; with the mass audience in mind they performed in front of photographers and television camera crews.
[43] Although the Neo-Dada Organizers never officially disbanded, they did not hold any major public events after the fall of 1960, after which time many of the group's leading members began to pursue their own individual artistic activities.
In October 1960, five female dancers from the Nobutoshi Tsuda Dance Studio in Meguro visited the White House, and Yoshimura shocked everyone by suddenly proposing to and marrying one of them.
[45] Shūsaku Arakawa, Tetsumi Kudō, and a bit later Ushio Shinohara, despairing of the reception of their work in their own country, similarly went into exile in New York or Paris.
Although short-lived, Neo-Dada's bizarre and spectacular performances received outsized media attention, and proved influential on a number of Japanese artistic collectives active later in the 1960s and associated with the "anti-art" movement, including Zero Jigen, Group Ongaku, and Hi-Red Center.