Editing Yasunao Tone (section)

== Criticism and theory ==
Tone was also a prolific and important writer and theorist of art. In his 1961 “Toward Anti-Music,” for example, he describes a progression in Western music from “musical tone” to “abstract music.”<ref name=":3">Alexandra Munroe, ''Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky'' (New York, NY: H.N. Abrams, 1994), 376.</ref> From here it outlines its logical successor as “concrete music” in European [[musique concrète]] and American “indeterminate music,” invoking [[John Cage]].<ref name=":3" /> He writes, “They focused on concrete sonority (i.e., actual sound of instruments) in a rejection of the abstract musical tone.”<ref name=":3" /> In conclusion he noted that while these developments have certainly inspired experimental music in Japan, Japanese artists must not assimilate concrete music as “novel techniques.”<ref name=":3" /> “[W]e are making a fresh start after realizing that Japanese ‘avant-garde’ music always appropriated new Western trends only to imitate their techniques,” he declared.<ref name=":3" /> The text gives some insight into the aims of his concurrent activities with Group Ongaku activities that Tone and how they might diverge (through an emphasis on group improvisation, for example) from the European precedents of [[musique concrète]] and “indeterminate music.” 

Tone’s influence through his writing and theory may also be detected when art historian [[Reiko Tomii]] credits him with helping to solidify the term “gendai bijutsu” (contemporary art) to indicate the new idiom of postwar art in Japan as distinct from other terms such as “kindai bijutsu” (modern art) or “zen’ei” (avant-garde).<ref>Reiko Tomii, “Historicizing ‘Contemporary Art’: Some Discursive Practices in Gendai Bijutsu in Japan,” ''Positions'' 12, no. 3 (2004): pp. 611-641, 622.</ref> This articulation of a new idiom received textual form in “Chronology: Five Decades of Contemporary Art, 1916-1968” in 1972. For this text, Tone, along with [[Naoyoshi Hikosaka]] and Yukio Akatsuka, compiled a history of Japanese contemporary art, published in Bijutsu Techo.<ref>Reiko Tomii, “Concerning the Institution of Art: Conceptualism in Japan,” in ''Global Conceptualism'' (New York, NY: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), pp. 15-29, 22.</ref> Tone was an important friend and influence upon [[Naoyoshi Hikosaka|Hikosaka]], an important progenitor of conceptualism in Japan. Tone’s role as an influential theorist for young Japanese contemporary artists can be observed in his relationship Hikosaka more generally, to whom he introduced the works of [[Fluxus]] and [[John Cage]] as well as the philosophy of [[Edmund Husserl]].<ref>Reiko Tomii, “Infinity Nets: Aspects of Contemporary Japanese Painting,” in ''Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky'' (New York, NY: H.N. Abrams, 1994), 319 n.48.</ref> It was Tone who also suggested that [[Naoyoshi Hikosaka|Hikosaka]] use [[latex]] as the material for his important 1970 ''Floor Event'' piece instead of the conventional art material of [[plaster]], and who assisted in the work by pressing the shutter button on the 35 millimeter camera as [[Naoyoshi Hikosaka|Hikosaka]] brushed the latex over the floor of his home.<ref name=":4" /> Tone was one of the five original artists of [[Naoyoshi Hikosaka|Hikosaka]]’s “Bikyōtō Revolution Committee,” a continuation of “Bikyōtō,” a radical, leftist student protest group at [[Tama Art University]].<ref name=":4">Tomii, Reiko. “The Impossibility of Anti: A Theoretical Consideration of Bikyōtō.” In ''The Anti-Museum: An Anthology'', 474. Fribourg: Fri Art, 2017.</ref>

In 1970 Tone compiled and published a book of his writing titled ''Gendai geijutsu no isō''.<ref name=":0" />