ZERO – Gutai– ZERO
The concept of ‘zero’ seems to exert an extraordinary fascination over artists. Many art movements founded in different epochs and nations have used it in their names.1 The German Zero group and the Dutch group Nul are typical examples of this – and, in fact, both are indirectly connected with a further group under the name ZERO.
The Japanese ZERO group was active for only four years, between 1952 and 1955. When the European ZERO and Nul groups came into being, one shortly after the other, the Japanese movement had already changed its approach and moved over to another group that had formed around Jiro Yoshihara, an artist from Osaka. Apart from the motto that gave the group its name – ‘The creativity of art must unfold from the point of absolute emptiness, of zero’ – we really know very little. The group was founded in 1952, and its sole collaborative exhibition took place in 1954 in the shop windows of the Sogou Department Store in Osaka. There is also a lack of information concerning the approximately 15 members of the group; we only know that the core group consisted of Kazuo Shiraga, Sanburo Murakami, Akira Kanayama, Atsuko Tanaka and Fujiko Shiraga (the wife of Kazuo Shiraga).2
Gutai was founded in 1954, but about half of the 17 founding members left the group only a short time afterwards. Thrown into a crisis that threatened its continued existence, the Gutai group survived by headhunting the prominent members of the ZERO group whose names are mentioned above. This hastened the break-up of the ZERO group, and caused Gutai to undergo a transformation. Aside from Shozo Shimamoto’s ‘hole’ works, which are often compared to the work of Lucio Fontana, the group’s artistic style had previously been loosely affiliated to the compositional and ab- stract representation that was popular at the time. The change that had taken place became evident at the ‘Experimental Open-Air Exhibition “Modern Art challenges the high summer sun”’ (July 1955), which was held shortly after Gutai absorbed the ZERO group.3
The association of ZERO with the emptiness that brings forth abundance inevitably reminds one of Eastern philosophy as represented in Zen. On this subject, however, we Japanese are generally wary of saying too much. For one thing, the current Westernized (or rather Americanized) Japanese society tends to place the emphasis on reality, and many people with a deep understanding of Zen abhor oversimplified verbalizations due to a respect for the inexpressible.
Jiro Yoshihara, Gutai’s leader, was certainly a man who was wary of hasty verbalizations. It is true that his library provides no particular evidence of an interest in Eastern thought; in fact, Yoshihara, who tended towards moder- nism, collected a volume of Western art literature that was unusual for his day and age and for his financial means. However, when one looks at his work, certain aspects remind one of a priest. The Yoshihara family attended the Zen Buddhist Kaisei temple in Nishinomiya, a house of the Rinzai community where a famous priest named Nantenbo once lived.4 There are many amazing stories about this priest, and some incredibly impressive calligraphy and ink paintings by him are preserved in the temple. It is said that in the case of some works of his that were painted with a huge brush, the ink stuck to the surface and the priest applied his foot to the brush in order to be able to complete the calligraphy. Nantenbo could be said to be a pioneer of Action Painting.
When Yoshihara saw Nantenbo’s calligraphies for the first time in April 1952, the audacious sprays of ink intrigued him. ‘This simple ink blot has the same magic exuded by the beautiful flow of Klein’s ink and the blots of Pollock’s enamels.’5 After the founding of the Gutai group, he and other members of the group visited the Kaisei temple, where they discussed the problem of temporality in spatial art. Nantenbo provided substance for this discussion; his works express the significance of materiality (gutai in Japanese) and action.
Yoshihara’s Informal works of art can be seen as an attempt to take the problem of temporality from Eastern painting and to render it in picture form. He was the kind of artist who would not leave his work alone until every spray of ink expressed his intentions. Perhaps due to the generation gap, his deconstruction of the conditions under which a work of art is reali- zed is not as successful as that of other members of the group. After coming into contact with central Art Informel figure Michel Tapié in 1957, the Gutai movement suddenly turned away from a focus on action to address the picture itself. As other members of the group increasingly prioritized the picture, Yoshihara, who was plagued by major internal contradictions, was brought to a low point. This was not helped by the fact that despite his status as the leader of the group his own works of art were far from the best being produced within the group at the time.
By the time he presented his Hard Edge Circle to the public at the 16th Gutai art exhibition (October 1965), Yoshihara had finally broken free. Ironically, the temporality immanent in the picture was ultimately overcome by the one member of the group who had previously appeared unable to escape from this theme, and he achieved the feat by finding a way to hide the picture’s temporality. Viewed superficially, the circular form references Zen Buddhism. In reality, however, Circle is the result of the artist’s escape from the influence of Eastern painting. What led to this dramatic transformation was, in fact, the artist’s discovery of artists and works of the international ZERO movement: the second international Nul exhibition, which was organized by Henk Peeters, took place in April of that year, and he asked to exhibit work from Gutai’s early years, the mid-1950s. Jiro Yoshihara and his son Michio, who had also been a member of Gutai since the beginning, went to Amsterdam [with a briefcase full of concepts, sketches and instructions to reconstruct these works of art – eds.]. Jiro Yoshihara had shipped, at his own expense, a case containing recent paintings by air, just in case Henk Peeters would be interested to present these. But when the boxes were opened at the Stedelijk Museum, the ZERO artists present couldn’t believe their eyes; what they were seeing was typical Informal painting.
The ZERO/Nul artists attracted attention with their rejection of corporeality and striking subjectivity, which could be said to be of an expressionist nature. This group painted pictures with patterned surfaces and were interested in light and movement, believing that the way forward for art lay in dethroning Art Informel. They had a high opinion of Gutai, seeing them as their own predecessors. Unsurprisingly, this new work was not exhibited, and Yoshihara himself never mentioned this incident.6
During this period, Yoshihara certainly suffered from working in the wrong age; after his return, the style of his own pictures changed. Gutai acquired a number of new members and the situation changed in crucial ways, and just as in Europe, most of the younger members developed more in the direction of optical art. Within Japan, the early Gutai group did not have a monopoly on combining expression and technology: at the 1970 World Exhibition in Osaka, the convergence of works of art in this spirit created a whole large-scale artistic environment. Technology was increasingly becoming a tool used by artists to give their plans space to unfold, and the works thus produced tended to smooth over the divide between idea and experiential reality and, in some cases, to become mere ‘tricks’. One could perhaps say that Gutai’s late work is not so much indirectly influenced by ZERO as a ‘mistranslation’ of it.
To return to Nantenbo: it is possible that Yoshihara applied Zen Buddhist methods to the early incarnation of the Gutai group, methods that contras- ted with the visual methods he explored in his own work. Above all, he fundamentally rejected verbal thinking. Yoshihara emphatically turned away from the introduction of literary elements into art – entitling his own work, as a matter of principle, Work and Untitled. When young artists asked him to provide criticism, his comments were usually restricted to ‘Hm’ and ‘Non- sense’, or, occasionally, ‘Don’t imitate other people’ or ‘Do something that has never been done before’. He could not always be described as a polite leader – rather, his rejection of fixed terminology and his use of communication forms that encouraged artists to discover things for themselves are reminiscent of a brainstorming session in Zen Mondô form – a form of guidance that often appears irrational or absurd.
However, we should be careful here. It would be wrong to say that Yoshihara made deliberate use of Zen. At the time, this philosophy was widely known, and was part of the cultural consciousness of Japan’s academics. Modernists who placed a high priority on novelty may also have hoped that a new movement to overcome the spirit of the times could arise from Zen’s rejection of logical consistency and pre-stabilized harmony.
Inspired by Yoshihara, the early Gutai artists developed a pictorial concept in which works of art emerged from the picture space, eroding the space of reality and opening a virtual space. Atsuko Tanaka’s Work Bell (1955), for instance, is a rather daring experiment with the spatial proper- ties of the work of art itself. In his Please Come In (1955), also known as Red Logs, Shiraga smashes the inner side of a walk of columns with an axe to give the viewer the impression of a 360o, endless surface. Then there is Shiro Ita (1955) by Fujiko Shiraga, which is often mistaken for a three- dimensional object. In fact, the intention is to make cracks in the sky, and it results in a magnificent two-dimensional work: a simple wooden plank about 10 m long, ripped open by a whipsaw over its full length. In this case, technical and financial limitations are by no means a disadvantage. The stark divide between the idea and the experiential truth itself is significant.
In late 1964, the Gutai group made contact with Henk Peeters, a member of the Dutch Nul group, in order to take part in the large Nul exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam the next year. In April of the following year, Sabiro Murakami travelled to The Hague for another planned international exhibition in the Galerij OREZ there. In the same year, he presented a plan for a work to be shown at the planned open air exhibition ‘Zero on Sea’, an exhibition that was to be held on the beach, the pier and at sea, but which never took place. In January 1972, the word was that Gutai was to take part in an open air exhibition at the Floriade in Amsterdam, but Yoshihara suffered an unexpected collapse during a telephone conversation with the Dutch consulate. One wonders: How would he have used his ideas to fill the empty spaces with art?7
With Yoshihara’s death, the curtain fell on Gutai, after 18 years of the movement. He was buried at the Kasei temple – Nantenbo’s temple. His posthumous name is: SHU TOKU ZEN IN EN RYO E KO JI.8
Atsuo Yamamoto
See for the notes: nul=0, The Dutch Nul Group in an International Context.
Published by the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam and NAi Publishers, Schiedam, 2011
The Japanese ZERO group was active for only four years, between 1952 and 1955. When the European ZERO and Nul groups came into being, one shortly after the other, the Japanese movement had already changed its approach and moved over to another group that had formed around Jiro Yoshihara, an artist from Osaka. Apart from the motto that gave the group its name – ‘The creativity of art must unfold from the point of absolute emptiness, of zero’ – we really know very little. The group was founded in 1952, and its sole collaborative exhibition took place in 1954 in the shop windows of the Sogou Department Store in Osaka. There is also a lack of information concerning the approximately 15 members of the group; we only know that the core group consisted of Kazuo Shiraga, Sanburo Murakami, Akira Kanayama, Atsuko Tanaka and Fujiko Shiraga (the wife of Kazuo Shiraga).2
Gutai was founded in 1954, but about half of the 17 founding members left the group only a short time afterwards. Thrown into a crisis that threatened its continued existence, the Gutai group survived by headhunting the prominent members of the ZERO group whose names are mentioned above. This hastened the break-up of the ZERO group, and caused Gutai to undergo a transformation. Aside from Shozo Shimamoto’s ‘hole’ works, which are often compared to the work of Lucio Fontana, the group’s artistic style had previously been loosely affiliated to the compositional and ab- stract representation that was popular at the time. The change that had taken place became evident at the ‘Experimental Open-Air Exhibition “Modern Art challenges the high summer sun”’ (July 1955), which was held shortly after Gutai absorbed the ZERO group.3
The association of ZERO with the emptiness that brings forth abundance inevitably reminds one of Eastern philosophy as represented in Zen. On this subject, however, we Japanese are generally wary of saying too much. For one thing, the current Westernized (or rather Americanized) Japanese society tends to place the emphasis on reality, and many people with a deep understanding of Zen abhor oversimplified verbalizations due to a respect for the inexpressible.
Jiro Yoshihara, Gutai’s leader, was certainly a man who was wary of hasty verbalizations. It is true that his library provides no particular evidence of an interest in Eastern thought; in fact, Yoshihara, who tended towards moder- nism, collected a volume of Western art literature that was unusual for his day and age and for his financial means. However, when one looks at his work, certain aspects remind one of a priest. The Yoshihara family attended the Zen Buddhist Kaisei temple in Nishinomiya, a house of the Rinzai community where a famous priest named Nantenbo once lived.4 There are many amazing stories about this priest, and some incredibly impressive calligraphy and ink paintings by him are preserved in the temple. It is said that in the case of some works of his that were painted with a huge brush, the ink stuck to the surface and the priest applied his foot to the brush in order to be able to complete the calligraphy. Nantenbo could be said to be a pioneer of Action Painting.
When Yoshihara saw Nantenbo’s calligraphies for the first time in April 1952, the audacious sprays of ink intrigued him. ‘This simple ink blot has the same magic exuded by the beautiful flow of Klein’s ink and the blots of Pollock’s enamels.’5 After the founding of the Gutai group, he and other members of the group visited the Kaisei temple, where they discussed the problem of temporality in spatial art. Nantenbo provided substance for this discussion; his works express the significance of materiality (gutai in Japanese) and action.
Yoshihara’s Informal works of art can be seen as an attempt to take the problem of temporality from Eastern painting and to render it in picture form. He was the kind of artist who would not leave his work alone until every spray of ink expressed his intentions. Perhaps due to the generation gap, his deconstruction of the conditions under which a work of art is reali- zed is not as successful as that of other members of the group. After coming into contact with central Art Informel figure Michel Tapié in 1957, the Gutai movement suddenly turned away from a focus on action to address the picture itself. As other members of the group increasingly prioritized the picture, Yoshihara, who was plagued by major internal contradictions, was brought to a low point. This was not helped by the fact that despite his status as the leader of the group his own works of art were far from the best being produced within the group at the time.
By the time he presented his Hard Edge Circle to the public at the 16th Gutai art exhibition (October 1965), Yoshihara had finally broken free. Ironically, the temporality immanent in the picture was ultimately overcome by the one member of the group who had previously appeared unable to escape from this theme, and he achieved the feat by finding a way to hide the picture’s temporality. Viewed superficially, the circular form references Zen Buddhism. In reality, however, Circle is the result of the artist’s escape from the influence of Eastern painting. What led to this dramatic transformation was, in fact, the artist’s discovery of artists and works of the international ZERO movement: the second international Nul exhibition, which was organized by Henk Peeters, took place in April of that year, and he asked to exhibit work from Gutai’s early years, the mid-1950s. Jiro Yoshihara and his son Michio, who had also been a member of Gutai since the beginning, went to Amsterdam [with a briefcase full of concepts, sketches and instructions to reconstruct these works of art – eds.]. Jiro Yoshihara had shipped, at his own expense, a case containing recent paintings by air, just in case Henk Peeters would be interested to present these. But when the boxes were opened at the Stedelijk Museum, the ZERO artists present couldn’t believe their eyes; what they were seeing was typical Informal painting.
The ZERO/Nul artists attracted attention with their rejection of corporeality and striking subjectivity, which could be said to be of an expressionist nature. This group painted pictures with patterned surfaces and were interested in light and movement, believing that the way forward for art lay in dethroning Art Informel. They had a high opinion of Gutai, seeing them as their own predecessors. Unsurprisingly, this new work was not exhibited, and Yoshihara himself never mentioned this incident.6
During this period, Yoshihara certainly suffered from working in the wrong age; after his return, the style of his own pictures changed. Gutai acquired a number of new members and the situation changed in crucial ways, and just as in Europe, most of the younger members developed more in the direction of optical art. Within Japan, the early Gutai group did not have a monopoly on combining expression and technology: at the 1970 World Exhibition in Osaka, the convergence of works of art in this spirit created a whole large-scale artistic environment. Technology was increasingly becoming a tool used by artists to give their plans space to unfold, and the works thus produced tended to smooth over the divide between idea and experiential reality and, in some cases, to become mere ‘tricks’. One could perhaps say that Gutai’s late work is not so much indirectly influenced by ZERO as a ‘mistranslation’ of it.
To return to Nantenbo: it is possible that Yoshihara applied Zen Buddhist methods to the early incarnation of the Gutai group, methods that contras- ted with the visual methods he explored in his own work. Above all, he fundamentally rejected verbal thinking. Yoshihara emphatically turned away from the introduction of literary elements into art – entitling his own work, as a matter of principle, Work and Untitled. When young artists asked him to provide criticism, his comments were usually restricted to ‘Hm’ and ‘Non- sense’, or, occasionally, ‘Don’t imitate other people’ or ‘Do something that has never been done before’. He could not always be described as a polite leader – rather, his rejection of fixed terminology and his use of communication forms that encouraged artists to discover things for themselves are reminiscent of a brainstorming session in Zen Mondô form – a form of guidance that often appears irrational or absurd.
However, we should be careful here. It would be wrong to say that Yoshihara made deliberate use of Zen. At the time, this philosophy was widely known, and was part of the cultural consciousness of Japan’s academics. Modernists who placed a high priority on novelty may also have hoped that a new movement to overcome the spirit of the times could arise from Zen’s rejection of logical consistency and pre-stabilized harmony.
Inspired by Yoshihara, the early Gutai artists developed a pictorial concept in which works of art emerged from the picture space, eroding the space of reality and opening a virtual space. Atsuko Tanaka’s Work Bell (1955), for instance, is a rather daring experiment with the spatial proper- ties of the work of art itself. In his Please Come In (1955), also known as Red Logs, Shiraga smashes the inner side of a walk of columns with an axe to give the viewer the impression of a 360o, endless surface. Then there is Shiro Ita (1955) by Fujiko Shiraga, which is often mistaken for a three- dimensional object. In fact, the intention is to make cracks in the sky, and it results in a magnificent two-dimensional work: a simple wooden plank about 10 m long, ripped open by a whipsaw over its full length. In this case, technical and financial limitations are by no means a disadvantage. The stark divide between the idea and the experiential truth itself is significant.
In late 1964, the Gutai group made contact with Henk Peeters, a member of the Dutch Nul group, in order to take part in the large Nul exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam the next year. In April of the following year, Sabiro Murakami travelled to The Hague for another planned international exhibition in the Galerij OREZ there. In the same year, he presented a plan for a work to be shown at the planned open air exhibition ‘Zero on Sea’, an exhibition that was to be held on the beach, the pier and at sea, but which never took place. In January 1972, the word was that Gutai was to take part in an open air exhibition at the Floriade in Amsterdam, but Yoshihara suffered an unexpected collapse during a telephone conversation with the Dutch consulate. One wonders: How would he have used his ideas to fill the empty spaces with art?7
With Yoshihara’s death, the curtain fell on Gutai, after 18 years of the movement. He was buried at the Kasei temple – Nantenbo’s temple. His posthumous name is: SHU TOKU ZEN IN EN RYO E KO JI.8
Atsuo Yamamoto
See for the notes: nul=0, The Dutch Nul Group in an International Context.
Published by the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam and NAi Publishers, Schiedam, 2011
