Gutai
Founded in Ashiya (near Osaka) by Jiro Yoshihara (and Shozo Shimamoto) in 1954, Gutai was a Japanese avant-garde movement known for their early experimental performances and outdoor exhibitions as well as for their Informel and tachist paintings. The group published an art magazine, partly in English, to create an “international common ground” and reached artists such as John Cage, Yves Klein and Jackson Pollock as well as critics like Clement Greenberg and Pierre Restany. The group was introduced to Italy and France by the publicist and critic Michel Tapié and to America by Happening artist Allan Kaprow. As its influence on subsequent artists remains unclear, this short essay will focus on some of the aspects of “mal communication”, a term used by Kaprow near the end of an essay discussing the idea of malfunctioning.1
Mal Communication
Tokyo, 1953. Yves Klein is in Japan, primarily to obtain his Judo belt. At the same time, he organizes various exhibitions for his parents, both also artists, at a number of galleries including the renowned Bridgestone Gallery in Tokyo. Jiro Yoshihara, who establishes Gutai in 1954, is also active on the city’s art scene at this moment, exhibiting with one of the many artists’ groups. From Yves Klein’s diary, however, it appears that, although he met many artists, Yoshihara was not among them. Yoshihara lived far from Tokyo, in Ashiya, a small suburb of Osaka, not far from the temple of Toju Nantembo in Nishinomiya (fig. 1). The Zen priest and artist Nantembo (1839-1925), who was famous for his wild drip calligraphy (fig. 2), wrote about “the living brush” and had a significant influence on the Gutai artists.2 According to the well-known French art critic (and close friend) Segi Shinichi,3 it is clear that Yoshihara admires Klein’s work and is interested in meeting him: he therefore urges the Tokyo Gallery to contact Klein and offer him an exhibition in Japan. Pierre Restany informs Klein of the interest, in Japan, for his work; Yoshihara is believed to have mailed, via Restany, a number of Gutai periodicals to the eminent artist.4 Klein responds to the interest in kind, but, nearly ten years later, just before his Tokyo Gallery5 debut opens, he dies. Yoshihara never gets to meet Yves Klein.
Osaka, 1957. Several Gutai members are present at Michel Tapié’s first visit to Japan, as well as Georges Mathieu who had arrived one week earlier. Tapié had just published his essay L’Aventure informelle with many reproductions from Gutai’s activities, and brought Mathieu in contact with Jiro Yoshihara, who offered him to work in one of the many warehouses. Mathieu had once painted for a small public in Paris, and now realizes, with Yoshihara’ help, one of his first large public performances. He attracts strong attention, not only from the Gutai members, but also from the media, when he paints large 6-8 metre canvasses with heroic titles, wearing a white traditional Japanese costume, on the roof of a department store. Yoshihara, impressed by Mathieu’s performative way of painting, acquires the 8-metre long La Bataille d’Hakata for his own collection. Over forty years later, Daniel Abadie interviews Georges Mathieu on the occasion of the large Gutai exhibition at Jeu de Paume in Paris: “Je dois dire que je ne pouvait pas adherer a ce qui m’apparaissait comme un jeu, qui, pour moi, ressemblait plus a un carnaval avec un caracter de guignol, de farce, avec des ballon. Je veux bien que le mouvement Gutai releve de la fete, mais il ne releve pas de l’art a mes yeux”. And his reaction to Kazuo Shiraga, the Gutai artist who staged public painting actions in the early 1950s, was: “Je ne considere pas les toiles de Shiraga comme oeuvres d’art... il est assez montrueux d’imaginer qu’on peigne avec ses pied… ce n’est pas la peine d’avoir vingt siecle de civilation derriere soi, ou plus, come les Japonais, pour en arriver la…” (figs. 3, 4).6
Paris, 1958. Upon his return to France from Japan, Klein sets up a small temple in his studio and – together with composer Claude Pascal and artists Arman and Ben Vautier – reads the French translation of Daisetsu T. Suzuki’s book on Zen.7 In his writings, Suzuki refers to Toju Nantembo’s autobiography, in which the Zen priest describes how he painted with his body, how he was one with his own brush and became a living brush.8 Klein makes his first body prints, first by crawling in the pigment himself,9 later by getting a paint-smeared life model to press the substance into a large sheet of paper laid on the ground (fig. 6). At that time, Klein owned several Gutai periodicals that Yoshihara has sent him, with an article giving Kazuo Shiraga an account of his experiences in painting with the body (fig. 5). According to Ben Vautier, Yves Klein was very irritated that Gutai was making similar works and therefore received Klein’s set of Gutai periodicals to sell in his bookshop.10 But Vautier kept several issues, fascinated by Gutai, and has since exhibited photos from the magazines as part of his own installations.11
Chelsea Hotel, New York, 1961. Klein comes to the famous artist’s hotel at the invitation of the Leo Castelli Gallery, where he shows his blue monochrome paintings. During his stay in New York, Klein receives many inquiries from journalists about his experiences in Japan. However, they also annoy him with questions about his interest in Gutai and similarities between his work and that of the Japanese group’s members. Gutai also exhibited in New York, through the mediation of Michel Tapié. The Sixth Gutai Art Exhibition was held at the renowned Martha Jackson Gallery (fig. 7), the gallery exhibiting Jackson Pollock works, and then toured to several other cities. More shows with Japanese artists followed and were reviewed by various art magazines and newspapers.12 Irritated, Klein writes a Manifesto in the Chelsea Hotel: “I would never have believed, fifteen years ago at the time of my earliest efforts, that I would suddenly feel the need to explain myself – to satisfy the desire to know the reason of all that has occurred and the even still more dangerous effect, in other words – the influence my art has had on the young generation of artists throughout the world today.” In his manifesto, Klein defensively presents himself as the first artist to combine immateriality, emptiness, fire, water, architecture, and music in an artistic practice. He also suggests that the use of the body as a living brush is his invention. Yet, here he makes a major and important distinction. He does not see himself as an action painter, but rather he is completely detached from all physical work during the time of creation. Klein adds: “Just to cite one example of the anthropometric errors found within the deformed ideas spread by the international press – I speak of that group of Japanese painters who with great refinement used my method in a strange way. In fact, these painters actually transformed themselves into living brushes. By plunging in color and then rolling on their canvases, they became representative of ultra-action-painters!”.13
Düsseldorf, 1962. The Dutch Zero movement artist Henk Peeters (fig. 8) first hears about Gutai from Klein. Klein and Peeters are visiting the German Zero movement artists Günther Uecker and Heinz Mack, who shows Henk Peeters the recently published book Continuité et Avant-Garde Au Japon (Avant-Garde Art in Japan) by the French critic, dealer and curator Michel Tapié. The volume features illustrations of work by the Gutai group, amongst others.14 Although Klein had spent time in Japan and knew the country’s avant-garde art scene well, he says that he does not know much about Gutai and vows to find out more on a subsequent visit. At that time, under Tapié’s influence, Gutai is in an Informel phase. However, it is the illustrations of works for the Gutai open-air exhibitions, including the plastic water bags by Sadamasa Motonaga, that interests Peeters. He decides to make contact with Tapié, who puts him in touch with Yoshihara.15
Osaka, 1962. In a warehouse owned by his family, Yoshihara opens the Gutai Pinacotheca. This becomes the Gutai group’s new social headquarters and also serves as the host of temporary exhibi- tions by the Gutai group itself as well as by European artists such as Lucio Fontana and Enrico Castellani, and by American artists Sam Francis and Alfred Leslie. Peggy Guggenheim who arrives with John Cage (fig. 9), buys a work by Yoshihara’s son Michio, who thus becomes the first Gutai artist with a piece in a major foreign collection. Cage – who returns several times to the Pinacotheca – announces that he feels very good in this place.16 Prompted by the international interest for the Yoshihara group, Gutai organizes a 3rd Gutai Art on Stage night, when Tsuruko Yamazaki makes “music” using hammers and electric drills on rotating silver tubes (Cage and Guggenheim are in the audience). When Merce Cunningham’s dance group appears together with Rauschenberg and Cage in 1964 in Osaka, a collaboration takes place: one of Shimamoto’s films is projected onto the stage.17 Following his visit to the Pinacotheca, Rauschenberg (fig. 10) exclaimed: “Voilà l’origine du happening!”.18
Amsterdam, 1965, Stedelijk Museum. Yoshihara and Peeters are present in the Stedelijk Museum as the boxes with Gutai’s contributions to the NUL65 exhibition (fig. 13) – recent paintings – are unpacked. Until the moment when the boxes are opened, Peeters had only seen the works in photographic reproductions. To Peeters’s great alarm, the works that come out of the crates are absolutely not in the style of Zero; they are wet, Informel paintings.19 Together with Yoshihara, he decides to reconstruct old works, as planned, from the early Gutai’s period, in which emptiness, air, decay, time, light, water, and smoke play an important part. Peeters sees similarities between these older Gutai pieces and the work of his Zero colleagues, including Klein.20 In addition to the room with the Gutai works, he decides to juxtapose a piece by Akira Kanayama, a large air-filled balloon, with Klein’s works Anthropometry (fig. 11).21 This gives rise to a fierce discussion with Klein’s widow Rotraut Uecker. In a later interview, Peeters said that Klein was against Gutai’s participation in the exhibition for fear that visitors might think that Western artists had been influenced by the Japanese.22 Yoshihara (fig. 12), still in Amsterdam, receives a letter from Tapié asking him to come to Paris as quickly as possible and clarify why Gutai is not exhibiting the Informel paintings (out of a concern that the market for Informel Gutai works could be adversely affected).23
New York, 1965. In the same year when the large international Zero exhibition opens in Amsterdam, Kaprow finishes his writing for his publication Assemblages, Environments & Happenings: “I knew nothing of Gutai’s activities until [the artist] Alfred Leslie mentioned them to me two years later, and it was not until late 1963 that I obtained the information presented here [in the publication]”.24 Although Kaprow attended Cage’s class at the Black Mountain College to learn more about combining artistic disciplines, he learned nothing about the experiments by Gutai in film, theatre, music, painting and performance. In a detailed chapter dedicated to Gutai, Kaprow presents photographs of oneday exhibitions, theatre performances, open-air environments and the International Sky Event (fig. 14) organized by Yoshihara (figs. 15, 17); in Gutai, he sees an as-yet unrecognized precursor of the Happening. Kaprow ends his chapter on Gutai, noting his tardy discovery of the group’s work, with the words: “This is a rare case of modern communications malfunctioning.”
Gutai’s constantly changing output may be one of the many reasons why the group has never gained the fame it deserved. Its members created performances, Happenings, one-day exhibitions, Action Painting, open-air shows, exhibitions with Informel paintings, theatre and dance events, exhibitions on rooftops, installations in industrial landscapes and parks, exhibitions with artworks by children, a periodical for children and for the international art world, and mail and body art. The means used varied from thick layers of paint on canvas to holes in monochrome paper panels, from the sound of tinkling bells to classic kabuki-like theatre costumes, from mud, wind, light, and water to emptiness. And as soon as interest from abroad was growing in one aspect of its work, the group had already moved on to another phase. Above all, because art history is inclined to treat its painting and performance strands separately – a tendency that stems here in Europe and America from the break between Michel Tapié and Allan Kaprow – the fame of Gutai has (sometimes intentionally) remained limited to a small group of art connoisseurs.
Tijs Visser, published in Painting with Time and Space, Silvana Editoriale, 2010
This text is based on various conversations with Ben Vautier, Atsuo Yamamoto, Takeshi Matsumoto, Kazuo Shiraga, Koichi Kawasaki, Shozo Shimamoto (fig. 16), Laurence Yoshihara and Henk Peeters between 2004 and 2010. Thanks to them I have been able to bring in some new thoughts about Gutai. Thanks also to Ming Tiampo and Andrea Mardegan for their precise corrections.
Mal Communication
Tokyo, 1953. Yves Klein is in Japan, primarily to obtain his Judo belt. At the same time, he organizes various exhibitions for his parents, both also artists, at a number of galleries including the renowned Bridgestone Gallery in Tokyo. Jiro Yoshihara, who establishes Gutai in 1954, is also active on the city’s art scene at this moment, exhibiting with one of the many artists’ groups. From Yves Klein’s diary, however, it appears that, although he met many artists, Yoshihara was not among them. Yoshihara lived far from Tokyo, in Ashiya, a small suburb of Osaka, not far from the temple of Toju Nantembo in Nishinomiya (fig. 1). The Zen priest and artist Nantembo (1839-1925), who was famous for his wild drip calligraphy (fig. 2), wrote about “the living brush” and had a significant influence on the Gutai artists.2 According to the well-known French art critic (and close friend) Segi Shinichi,3 it is clear that Yoshihara admires Klein’s work and is interested in meeting him: he therefore urges the Tokyo Gallery to contact Klein and offer him an exhibition in Japan. Pierre Restany informs Klein of the interest, in Japan, for his work; Yoshihara is believed to have mailed, via Restany, a number of Gutai periodicals to the eminent artist.4 Klein responds to the interest in kind, but, nearly ten years later, just before his Tokyo Gallery5 debut opens, he dies. Yoshihara never gets to meet Yves Klein.
Osaka, 1957. Several Gutai members are present at Michel Tapié’s first visit to Japan, as well as Georges Mathieu who had arrived one week earlier. Tapié had just published his essay L’Aventure informelle with many reproductions from Gutai’s activities, and brought Mathieu in contact with Jiro Yoshihara, who offered him to work in one of the many warehouses. Mathieu had once painted for a small public in Paris, and now realizes, with Yoshihara’ help, one of his first large public performances. He attracts strong attention, not only from the Gutai members, but also from the media, when he paints large 6-8 metre canvasses with heroic titles, wearing a white traditional Japanese costume, on the roof of a department store. Yoshihara, impressed by Mathieu’s performative way of painting, acquires the 8-metre long La Bataille d’Hakata for his own collection. Over forty years later, Daniel Abadie interviews Georges Mathieu on the occasion of the large Gutai exhibition at Jeu de Paume in Paris: “Je dois dire que je ne pouvait pas adherer a ce qui m’apparaissait comme un jeu, qui, pour moi, ressemblait plus a un carnaval avec un caracter de guignol, de farce, avec des ballon. Je veux bien que le mouvement Gutai releve de la fete, mais il ne releve pas de l’art a mes yeux”. And his reaction to Kazuo Shiraga, the Gutai artist who staged public painting actions in the early 1950s, was: “Je ne considere pas les toiles de Shiraga comme oeuvres d’art... il est assez montrueux d’imaginer qu’on peigne avec ses pied… ce n’est pas la peine d’avoir vingt siecle de civilation derriere soi, ou plus, come les Japonais, pour en arriver la…” (figs. 3, 4).6
Paris, 1958. Upon his return to France from Japan, Klein sets up a small temple in his studio and – together with composer Claude Pascal and artists Arman and Ben Vautier – reads the French translation of Daisetsu T. Suzuki’s book on Zen.7 In his writings, Suzuki refers to Toju Nantembo’s autobiography, in which the Zen priest describes how he painted with his body, how he was one with his own brush and became a living brush.8 Klein makes his first body prints, first by crawling in the pigment himself,9 later by getting a paint-smeared life model to press the substance into a large sheet of paper laid on the ground (fig. 6). At that time, Klein owned several Gutai periodicals that Yoshihara has sent him, with an article giving Kazuo Shiraga an account of his experiences in painting with the body (fig. 5). According to Ben Vautier, Yves Klein was very irritated that Gutai was making similar works and therefore received Klein’s set of Gutai periodicals to sell in his bookshop.10 But Vautier kept several issues, fascinated by Gutai, and has since exhibited photos from the magazines as part of his own installations.11
Chelsea Hotel, New York, 1961. Klein comes to the famous artist’s hotel at the invitation of the Leo Castelli Gallery, where he shows his blue monochrome paintings. During his stay in New York, Klein receives many inquiries from journalists about his experiences in Japan. However, they also annoy him with questions about his interest in Gutai and similarities between his work and that of the Japanese group’s members. Gutai also exhibited in New York, through the mediation of Michel Tapié. The Sixth Gutai Art Exhibition was held at the renowned Martha Jackson Gallery (fig. 7), the gallery exhibiting Jackson Pollock works, and then toured to several other cities. More shows with Japanese artists followed and were reviewed by various art magazines and newspapers.12 Irritated, Klein writes a Manifesto in the Chelsea Hotel: “I would never have believed, fifteen years ago at the time of my earliest efforts, that I would suddenly feel the need to explain myself – to satisfy the desire to know the reason of all that has occurred and the even still more dangerous effect, in other words – the influence my art has had on the young generation of artists throughout the world today.” In his manifesto, Klein defensively presents himself as the first artist to combine immateriality, emptiness, fire, water, architecture, and music in an artistic practice. He also suggests that the use of the body as a living brush is his invention. Yet, here he makes a major and important distinction. He does not see himself as an action painter, but rather he is completely detached from all physical work during the time of creation. Klein adds: “Just to cite one example of the anthropometric errors found within the deformed ideas spread by the international press – I speak of that group of Japanese painters who with great refinement used my method in a strange way. In fact, these painters actually transformed themselves into living brushes. By plunging in color and then rolling on their canvases, they became representative of ultra-action-painters!”.13
Düsseldorf, 1962. The Dutch Zero movement artist Henk Peeters (fig. 8) first hears about Gutai from Klein. Klein and Peeters are visiting the German Zero movement artists Günther Uecker and Heinz Mack, who shows Henk Peeters the recently published book Continuité et Avant-Garde Au Japon (Avant-Garde Art in Japan) by the French critic, dealer and curator Michel Tapié. The volume features illustrations of work by the Gutai group, amongst others.14 Although Klein had spent time in Japan and knew the country’s avant-garde art scene well, he says that he does not know much about Gutai and vows to find out more on a subsequent visit. At that time, under Tapié’s influence, Gutai is in an Informel phase. However, it is the illustrations of works for the Gutai open-air exhibitions, including the plastic water bags by Sadamasa Motonaga, that interests Peeters. He decides to make contact with Tapié, who puts him in touch with Yoshihara.15
Osaka, 1962. In a warehouse owned by his family, Yoshihara opens the Gutai Pinacotheca. This becomes the Gutai group’s new social headquarters and also serves as the host of temporary exhibi- tions by the Gutai group itself as well as by European artists such as Lucio Fontana and Enrico Castellani, and by American artists Sam Francis and Alfred Leslie. Peggy Guggenheim who arrives with John Cage (fig. 9), buys a work by Yoshihara’s son Michio, who thus becomes the first Gutai artist with a piece in a major foreign collection. Cage – who returns several times to the Pinacotheca – announces that he feels very good in this place.16 Prompted by the international interest for the Yoshihara group, Gutai organizes a 3rd Gutai Art on Stage night, when Tsuruko Yamazaki makes “music” using hammers and electric drills on rotating silver tubes (Cage and Guggenheim are in the audience). When Merce Cunningham’s dance group appears together with Rauschenberg and Cage in 1964 in Osaka, a collaboration takes place: one of Shimamoto’s films is projected onto the stage.17 Following his visit to the Pinacotheca, Rauschenberg (fig. 10) exclaimed: “Voilà l’origine du happening!”.18
Amsterdam, 1965, Stedelijk Museum. Yoshihara and Peeters are present in the Stedelijk Museum as the boxes with Gutai’s contributions to the NUL65 exhibition (fig. 13) – recent paintings – are unpacked. Until the moment when the boxes are opened, Peeters had only seen the works in photographic reproductions. To Peeters’s great alarm, the works that come out of the crates are absolutely not in the style of Zero; they are wet, Informel paintings.19 Together with Yoshihara, he decides to reconstruct old works, as planned, from the early Gutai’s period, in which emptiness, air, decay, time, light, water, and smoke play an important part. Peeters sees similarities between these older Gutai pieces and the work of his Zero colleagues, including Klein.20 In addition to the room with the Gutai works, he decides to juxtapose a piece by Akira Kanayama, a large air-filled balloon, with Klein’s works Anthropometry (fig. 11).21 This gives rise to a fierce discussion with Klein’s widow Rotraut Uecker. In a later interview, Peeters said that Klein was against Gutai’s participation in the exhibition for fear that visitors might think that Western artists had been influenced by the Japanese.22 Yoshihara (fig. 12), still in Amsterdam, receives a letter from Tapié asking him to come to Paris as quickly as possible and clarify why Gutai is not exhibiting the Informel paintings (out of a concern that the market for Informel Gutai works could be adversely affected).23
New York, 1965. In the same year when the large international Zero exhibition opens in Amsterdam, Kaprow finishes his writing for his publication Assemblages, Environments & Happenings: “I knew nothing of Gutai’s activities until [the artist] Alfred Leslie mentioned them to me two years later, and it was not until late 1963 that I obtained the information presented here [in the publication]”.24 Although Kaprow attended Cage’s class at the Black Mountain College to learn more about combining artistic disciplines, he learned nothing about the experiments by Gutai in film, theatre, music, painting and performance. In a detailed chapter dedicated to Gutai, Kaprow presents photographs of oneday exhibitions, theatre performances, open-air environments and the International Sky Event (fig. 14) organized by Yoshihara (figs. 15, 17); in Gutai, he sees an as-yet unrecognized precursor of the Happening. Kaprow ends his chapter on Gutai, noting his tardy discovery of the group’s work, with the words: “This is a rare case of modern communications malfunctioning.”
Gutai’s constantly changing output may be one of the many reasons why the group has never gained the fame it deserved. Its members created performances, Happenings, one-day exhibitions, Action Painting, open-air shows, exhibitions with Informel paintings, theatre and dance events, exhibitions on rooftops, installations in industrial landscapes and parks, exhibitions with artworks by children, a periodical for children and for the international art world, and mail and body art. The means used varied from thick layers of paint on canvas to holes in monochrome paper panels, from the sound of tinkling bells to classic kabuki-like theatre costumes, from mud, wind, light, and water to emptiness. And as soon as interest from abroad was growing in one aspect of its work, the group had already moved on to another phase. Above all, because art history is inclined to treat its painting and performance strands separately – a tendency that stems here in Europe and America from the break between Michel Tapié and Allan Kaprow – the fame of Gutai has (sometimes intentionally) remained limited to a small group of art connoisseurs.
Tijs Visser, published in Painting with Time and Space, Silvana Editoriale, 2010
This text is based on various conversations with Ben Vautier, Atsuo Yamamoto, Takeshi Matsumoto, Kazuo Shiraga, Koichi Kawasaki, Shozo Shimamoto (fig. 16), Laurence Yoshihara and Henk Peeters between 2004 and 2010. Thanks to them I have been able to bring in some new thoughts about Gutai. Thanks also to Ming Tiampo and Andrea Mardegan for their precise corrections.
