{"id":1820,"date":"2013-03-05T08:58:53","date_gmt":"2013-03-05T13:58:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artopia\/?p=1820"},"modified":"2014-02-13T12:30:26","modified_gmt":"2014-02-13T17:30:26","slug":"gutai-center-stage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/artopia\/2013\/03\/gutai-center-stage.html","title":{"rendered":"Gutai: The First Happenings Were Japanese!"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"Suburo<\/a>

Suburo Murakami, Passing Through, 1956<\/p><\/div>\n

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\u201cGutai: Splendid Playground\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 (Guggenheim to May 8) forces a rewrite of \u00a0art history. \u00a0The co-curators, Alexandra Munroe and Ming Tiampo, in their catalog essays meet the issues head-on. The subject matter demands it, for Gutai is the unfairly scorned \u00a0post-War Japanese avant-garde movement devoted to the kinaesthetics of painting, the spiritualization of matter, and interactive art.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Kazuo Shiraga made paintings with his bare feet. Saburo Murakami hurled himself through layers of paper. Sh\u014dz\u014d\u00a0 Shimamoto\u00a0 threw bottles of paint. Akira Kanayama used remote-controlled robot toys to make etherial drawings on vinyl. These are the true heirs of Jackson Pollock. Not Helen Frankenthaler and Jules Olitski. Why has this authentic descent been repressed?<\/p>\n

Munroe, whose Scream Against the Sky<\/i> (Abrams, 1994) is the standard survey of Post-War Japanese art, charts a bit of\u00a0 Guggenheim history, citing the 1963 Japanese trip of\u00a0 curator Lawrence Alloway. Alloway was the \u00a0Brit who coined the term Pop Art. He included both Gutai founder\u00a0 Jir\u014d Yoshihara and Atsuko Tanaka in the Guggenheim International Awards exhibition of 1964.<\/p>\n

Munroe also outlines the support for Gutai in terms of the Post-War, anti-Soviet propaganda push that used Abstract Expressionism as a symbol of freedom of expression under democracy.\u00a0 Gutai, at least in its kinaesthetic painting phase, was intended to show what could happen in art when totalitarianism, such as that under the wartime Hirohito regime, was removed. Indivdualism was to be the new Japanese motto. Even the artists themselves thought this was a great idea.<\/p>\n

In the U.S., however, \u00a0American artists apparently had little knowledge of how their paintings were being used by the State Department, the United States Information Agency,\u00a0 and perhaps the C.I.A.<\/p>\n

Munroe, in an essay that is exceptionally forthright for an exhibition catalog, \u00a0goes right to the point:<\/p>\n

The leading university textbook in use today, Art since 1900, reserves a scant five of its 816 pages to \u201cthe dissemination of modernist art through media and its reinterpretation by artists outside the United States and Europe.\u201d The authors cite Gutai and the Brazilian Neo-Concretists but misread both as derivative, disregarding their critical agency. Indeed, their terms \u201cdissemination\u201d and \u201creinterpretation\u201d preserve the construct of Euro-America as the dominant center and Western modernism as the master narrative, perpetuating a kind of canon that other disciplines have long since dismantled. Such closed, geocentric views of the history of modernism perpetuate the West\u2019s stronghold on avant-garde originality, relegating modern art made outside the putative centers as belated and derivative.<\/p>\n

Why Was Gutai Marginalized?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nationalism? Americanismo and Eurocentricity are not enough to explain the Big Silence. I think the sources of both are racism and the lust for power and profit. This more fully explains, alas, the shunning of Art Informel and Tachisme on this side of the Atlantic, as well as the marginalization of Gutai in both Europe and the U.S.<\/p>\n

When I was writing for Artnews in the very early \u201860s, the editor forbade even a mention of Pierre Soulage, \u00a0Jean Fautrier, George Mathieu, \u00a0Nicholas de Stael, or Hans Hartung.\u00a0 Jolly Jean Tinguely and Niki de St. Phalle\u00a0 were o.k. I internalized this, but still somehow managed to grab a cover story on Jean Dubuffet. I particularly liked Dubuffet\u2019s championing of Outsider Art and detectected an all-overness in his later paintings that connected to Pollock.<\/p>\n

Now, as a painter as much as a critic, I hope\u00a0 I can look at these shunned European artists with new eyes. And at Gutai.<\/p>\n

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\"footpainitn\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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Heirs Apparent<\/b><\/p>\n

Aspiring to liberate painting from the museum, the wall, the frame and even the paintbrush, Gutai artists moved in radical directions.\u00a0 Early experiments focusing at first on process, investigating a variety of both art and nonart materials, ultimately resulted in \u201cperformance paintings\u201d that incorporate time and space into their very being.<\/em><\/p>\n

Ming Tiampo, Co-curator, Gutai, 2013.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/b><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Do what no one has done before!<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Jir\u014d Yoshihara, Founder of Gutai, \u00a01955.<\/i><\/p>\n

The Gutai Art Association was the victim of what \u00a0in technical terms is called the double-whammy. Gutai (meaning \u201cconcreteness\u201d or perhaps \u201cembodiment\u201d) was associated by the N.Y. art establishment with Art Informel, Taschism, and other anti-formal styles in Europe. These were dismissed as being inferior to American Abstract Expressionism, \u00a0deemed the only ligitimate heir to European modernism. If you could prove paternity then there was money to be made. To put it bluntly, the market had to be cinched; American hegemony had to triumph on the cultural as well as the political and economic fronts.<\/p>\n

Exceptionalism and the special mission of America needed to be maintained or once again all hell would break loose.<\/p>\n

New York was the new Paris. But even Paris had been fed by and had off-shoots in Munich, Berlin, Amsterdam, Vienna, Moscow. Oh, sorry, \u00a0we conventiently forgot about that.<\/p>\n

Gutai dared to propose that a major art incubator could exist outside Paris or New York, and, yes, even Tokyo. The 59 artists of Gutai were located along the Hanshin Belt between Osaka and Kobe.<\/p>\n

The import of Gutai goes on and on. Not only must we obliterate the master narrative, we must look at the situation that Gutai pre-saged: decentralized world culture. Everyone once wondered what the new New York would be. Just as New York became the new Paris, surely New York would eventually be superceded. Sorry, no such thing has happened.<\/p>\n

All points on the globe are the same distance from the cloud and thus at no distance from each other. There are auction sites here and there, but there is no Paris. There is no New York. There is no capital of art. Even art museums and galleries whose numbers once could authenticate an art capital are migrating to the web.<\/p>\n

\"Kazuo<\/a>

Kazuo Shiraga, Work II, 1958l.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Decentering Power<\/b><\/p>\n

What was Gutai\u2019s secret? The art was sensational. And they had their own \u00a0magazine to promote the cause. Jackson Pollock himself had two issues of the Gutai magazine in his library when he died. Gutai — for better or worse \u2013 reached out and formed alliances with two other artist groups on the so-called periphery — \u00a0Zero in Dusseldorf and Nul in Amsterdam. There were also connections made with Allan Kaprow, John Cage, Fluxus, and Experiments in Art and Technology. Like Futurism, de Stijl, Constructivism, Dada, and Surrealism, Gutai had an international outreach.<\/p>\n

In an era of post-Performance painting, it would serve art well to look at Gutai, which in Phase One proposed no difference between painting and theater and, in fact, predated Kaprow\u2019s first U.S. Happening\u00a0 (1959). Monroe gives as an example Jaurakami Sabur\u014d\u2019s paper-penetration Work (Six Holes),<\/i> 1955, but the catalog reveals even earlier Gutai candidates for world\u2019s first happening\/performance.<\/p>\n

But we must also find a theoretical basis for global art-culture as it has now formed. \u00a0The Cold War narrative has proved inaccurate, unhelpful, restrictive, ungenerous, and uninspired, leading to the \u201cdeath of painting\u201d at the hands of the Greenbergian formalists who championed flat color and their descendents, the Artforumalists, who prefer photography and words to art, forgetting that photography is the mother of all lies and words must be translated.<\/p>\n