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116-500: The group, today one of the most internationally-recognized instances of 20th century Japanese art, is best known for the broad range of experimental art forms combining painting with performance, conceptual, interactive, site-specific, theatrical and installation artworks, which its members explored in unconventional venues such as public parks and on stage. The members’ engagement with the relationship between spirit, human body and material, often concretized in artistic methods that involved

232-728: A 100 m long sheet of vinyl, onto which he had painted Footprints throughout the park, and Tanaka created Stage Clothes , consisting of giant geometrically abstracted humanoid forms with electric bulbs on the front side that were lit every evening. Gutai continued to organize and participate in further open-air projects, such as the International Sky Festival on the rooftop of the Takashimaya department store in Osaka (1960), at which reproductions of works by American Abstract Expressionist and European Informel artists were hung from balloons,

348-569: A broader understanding of picturing embodied in the Japanese term e (picture), which allowed them to overcome conventions of painting. Gutai was founded in 1954 by artists under the leadership of the Ashiya-based painter and businessman Jirō Yoshihara, who was an influential figure in the revitalization of cultural life in Japan in the post-World War II years. Yoshihara, a member of Nika-kai, had co-founded

464-410: A certain type of documentary photography newly present in Japan that had affinities with the work of Western documentary photographers Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand . Exemplified by two photo books published in 1971 – Hibi (Day to Day) by Ōtsuji’s student Shigeo Gochō , and A Sentimental Journey by Araki Nobuyoshi – konpora photography’s clear, steady images were a contrasting response to

580-573: A contemporary art sale, 74 of the 77 lots offered sold. Kiyoji %C5%8Ctsuji Kiyoji Ōtsuji ( 大辻 清司 , Ōtsuji Kiyoji , 1923–2001) was a Japanese photographer , photography theorist, and educator. He was active in the avant-garde art world in Japan after World War II , both creating his own experimental photographs, and taking widely circulated documentary photographs of other artists and art projects. He became an authority in Japanese photography, extensively publishing commentaries and educating future generations of photographers. Ōtsuji

696-401: A contemporary beauty in the art and architecture of the past ravaged by the passage of time or natural disasters. Although their beauty is considered decadent, it may be that the innate beauty of matter is reemerging from behind the mask of artificial embellishment. Ruins unexpectedly welcome us with warmth and friendliness; they speak to us through their beautiful cracks and rubble—which might be

812-403: A desire to embody nature as opposed to creating representational art. Yoshihara accepted being in the same aesthetic realm as Pollock, however, he aggressively strived to create a distinct style. Prone to the assumption that Japanese artists follow Western artists, Yoshihara insisted Gutai artists create an extremely distinguished style. One thing Yoshihara did to try to avoid derivative accusations

928-482: A genre that was beyond classification in pursuit of true originality despite these earlier accusations. In 2013, the Gutai group's artworks were collectively ranked by Dale Eisinger of Complex as the fifth greatest work of performance art, with the writer arguing, "Jiro engaged in correspondence with American Happenings artist Allan Kaprow, resulting in engaging multimedia art that traded ideas across an East-West dialog in

1044-461: A global new trend towards the integration of technology, kinetics, natural elements, and electric light in art. In contrast to Tapié, Peeters was only interested in Gutai’s early three-dimensional installation works from between 1955 and 1957, such as Murakami’s 6 Holes , Yamazaki’s painted tin cans, Kanayama’s balloon or Shimamoto’s wooden object to walk on, which were all reproduced on site by and under

1160-569: A new beginning". In 1961 Günther Uecker joined the initial founders. ZERO became an international movement, with artists from Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Switzerland, and Italy. Mack, Piene, and Günther Uecker began the ZERO movement. Participants hailed from France ( Arman , Yves Klein and Bernard Aubertin ), Italy ( Lucio Fontana , Piero Manzoni ), Belgium ( Pol Bury ), and Switzerland ( Christian Megert , Jean Tinguely ). Many of

1276-611: A new group under the name of Gutai (the name was proposed by Shimamoto) and to issue a journal under the same name. The founding members were Sadami Azuma, Kei Iseya, Tamiko Ueda, Chiyū Uemae, Hiroshi Okada, Hajime Okamoto, Shōzō Shimamoto, Yoshio Sekine, Shigeru Tsujimura, Tōichirō Fujikawa, Hiroshi Funai, Masanobu Masatoshi, Tsuruko Yamazaki, Toshio Yoshida, Hideo Yoshihara, Jirō Yoshihara and his son Michio Yoshihara. The first issue of Gutai appeared in January 1955. In March 1955, several founding members showed paintings all entitled Gutai at

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1392-509: A performance in which he painted archaic signs over the faces of participants who stuck their heads through holes in a standing board while they were singing scat. At the Expo ‘70 in Osaka, Gutai staged the spectacular entertainment show Gutai Art Festival . In 1957, the French art critic Michel Tapié learned about Gutai from two Paris-based Japanese painters, Hisao Dōmoto and Toshimitsu Imai. Inspired by

1508-602: A photography studio run by Takabayashi Takafusa and Takabayashi Yasushi. In 1946, he met the artist Yoshishige Saitō , who invited him to join the magazine Katei Bunka (Home Culture) . Ōtsuji worked as a staff photographer for Katei Bunka for one year. In 1947, he opened his own photography studio in Sendagaya , Tokyo . In 1949, Ōtsuji joined the modernist exhibition society Bijutsu Bunka Kyōkai ("Art and Culture Association") and showed his photograph Itamashiki Buttai ("Painful Object"). The same year, he and other alumni from

1624-399: A preference for abstract art and had a strongly international scope fueled by their ongoing engagement with European and US-American artists, which became also a key aspect for Gutai. In late 1954, Yoshihara and 16 artists, including his students (e.g. Tsuruko Yamazaki and Shozo Shimamoto , his students since 1946 and 1947), Genbi and Ashiya City Exhibition participants, decided to create

1740-481: A process and discipline. His series Hitohako no kako ("Past of One Tin Can " ) was created for his first solo exhibition in 1977, and featured a 23-photograph sequence showing a can of memories being unpacked and individual elements examined by the camera – including old photographs. The series can be seen as a prolonged meditation on the object, which had interested him since his early career. Although no longer working on

1856-458: A response to the prevailing political situation in Japan in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Munroe, for instance, speculated that they engaged in their actions in order to make faster the introduction of American-style Democracy in Japan. Their deliberate ambiguity in painting released the artists from tyranny which espouses one kind of attitude, and therefore an escape towards "freedom". The Gutai group's work can be divided into two separate phases,

1972-412: A revenge of matter that has regained its innate life. … We believe that by merging human qualities and material properties, we can concretely comprehend abstract space.” Stressing the importance of artistic creativity to individual autonomy and freedom, Yoshihara in the first Gutai issue claimed: “What matters most to us is to ensure that contemporary art provides a site enabling the people living through

2088-450: A ritualistic social interaction, which reflects the Gutai goal of giving spirit to the typically inanimate. Motonaga Sadamasa sent what is believed to be the first Gutai nengajõ to Tsuruko Yamazaki in 1956. The card showed green, blue, red, yellow, and black pigments, which were then smudged to animate the markings. The mailing imparted the paintings with life and also pushed the limits of painting in regard to time and space. It also expanded

2204-479: A serialized section of Asahi Graph . Each artist constructed a three-dimensional assemblage containing the letters "A," "P," and "N" and Ōtsuji photographed the object. Each photograph was printed as a small header in the top corner of the Asahi Picture News double-page spread. After this project , Ōtsuji joined the group as an official member. He contributed photographs made into autoslide projections for

2320-439: A strange, almost lifelike view of the dead animal. Another early series of photographs, shot in the leading Bijutsu Bunka member Nobuya Abe's studio in 1950, depict the future Jikken Kōbō member Hideko Fukushima and other women, both clothed and nude, posing within a geometric network of strings, thus appearing like dolls or puppets. Following these examples, for the rest of his career, Ōtsuji's individual work continued to explore

2436-403: A vinyl bag filled with coloured water from the branches of a tree; Yasuo Sumi set up wire mesh covered with enamel paint; Atsuko Tanaka’s pinned a pink nylon sheet just above the ground that rippled in the wind; Kazuo Shiraga built a tent-like structure with wooden poles, which he slashed with an axe from inside. Tsuruko Yamazaki’s Danger consisted in a row of sharply-edged tin plates hanging from

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2552-447: A way never before realized." Gutai had a very important political message. They tried to do what has not been done before in the history of Japan. In the 1950s modern Japanese art was dominated by the theme of Social Realism. During that time refined abstraction (in particular, post-war Nihonga ) was exported to foreign exhibitions as Japanese art that is representative of their artistic expression. A growing desire to escape this monotony

2668-429: A way of doing something, while 'tai' means body. The individual artistic approaches of many members were characterized by unconventional, experimental methods of applying paint, which they soon extended to three dimensional objects, performance, and installation works. Yoshihara constantly urged his younger fellows to “Create what has never been done before!”, and by proposing unconventional exhibition formats, he stimulated

2784-401: Is deliberate and composted within rectilinear bounds. Whereas Yasuo worked by "going recklessly wild" and splattering paint. Gutai was also called Dadaistic in which Yoshihara addressed in the manifesto, "Sometimes, at first glance, we are compared with and mistaken for Dadaism, and we ourselves fully recognize the achievements of Dadaism. But we think differently, in contrast to Dadaism, our work

2900-561: Is the result of investigating the possibilities of calling the material to life." Gutai specialist Fergus McCaffrey said, "Shiraga and other members of the Gutai Art Association had their work dismissed as derivative of second-generation Abstract Expressionism when showing at Martha Jackson Gallery in New York in 1958, and it is only recently that we have been able to shake off that terrible misunderstanding." Jiro Yoshihara sought to create

3016-480: The 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition. Kazuo Shiraga performed his own modern version of the traditional Sanbasō dance from traditional Kyōgen and Noh theater, wearing a red costume with exaggeratedly extended sleeves and hat. Motonaga shot rings of smoke into the hall with a canon-like apparatus. Sound and music played an important role in these performances with Shimamoto, Michio Yoshihara and Motonaga experimenting freely with electric sounds and sounds from everyday life. Over

3132-590: The 3rd Yomiuri Independent Exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum in March 1955, but until the summer of 1955, more than half of them had left the group (some disappointed by the priority that Yoshihara gave to the Gutai journal instead of actual exhibitions). However, the group took a stronger, more conceptual direction following this break with the addition of new members such as Sadamasa Motonaga , and

3248-476: The Expo ‘70 , which took place in Osaka from March 15 to September 13, 1970, works by Gutai members were included in the main art exhibition, but also a special Gutai group exhibition with futuristic and technology-inspired mixed-media works was held in the entrance of the Midori Hall. The group also contributed a collaborative outdoor installation work Garden on Garden . Furthermore, on three successive days during

3364-501: The Floriade garden festival in Amsterdam. Subsequently, the group’s members unanimously decided to end Gutai and publicly announced the dissolution in March 1972. Gutai’s art historical assessment was strongly affected by the shifts in global art discourses on modernism and avant-garde, from abstract gestural painting of the 1950s to experimental and performative and conceptual approaches of

3480-523: The Martha Jackson Gallery in 1958 faced many accusations from critics exclaiming that the art was imitating Jackson Pollock . However, Gutai art did not copy from Pollock but rather took what inspiration it needed to be able to address the issue of freedom after the world war in Japan. Yoshihara praised Pollock as the greatest living American painter and admired his pure originality and concrete interpretation of freedom. Yoshihara shared with Pollock

3596-575: The Museu Oscar Niemeyer (Curitiba, Brazil) showcased Zero , the largest exhibition ever held in Brazil featuring this group present works by key artists of the movement, alongside Latin American artists such as Hércules Barzotti , Lygia Clark and Abraham Palatnik from Brazil, Gertrud Goldschmidt (GEGO) from Venezuela, and Gyula Kosice from Argentina, all of whom used the same visual languages than

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3712-519: The Museum of Old and New Art (Hobart, Tasmania) organized a large show around the theme of Vibration , with historical old and reconstructed installations, the first major show of ZERO in Australia. The exhibition included large installations by Castellani, Gianni Colombo, Mack, Peeters, Piene, Soto, Tinguely, and Uecker. A separate section was, for the first time in a ZERO show, dedicated to "father figures" of

3828-615: The Zero op Zee (Zero on Sea) exhibition planned by the Dutch group Nul as a large scale show at the Scheveningen Pier in The Hague in 1966 (which was never realized), and Gutai’s collective large-scale garden sculpture for the Expo ‘70 . Adapting the practice of established art associations, Gutai held its own annual group exhibitions to display their works in indoor settings beginning in 1955. Until

3944-510: The 'are-bure-boke' ( 'grainy/rough, blurry, out-of-focus') style of documentary photography published in Provoke . Instead of Provoke ’s negative, anti-establishment attitude, konpora photographers attempted to capture the world dispassionately, with simple, straightforward snapshots of commonplace, ordinary subjects. By the 1970s, Ōtsuji’s authority in the Japanese photography world had solidified, and in addition to publishing frequently, he

4060-400: The 1960s and 1970s, he also continued to experiment with his individual works and publish them, often alongside his texts. In the 1970s, his published works became increasingly theoretical. A series of photographs for Asahi Camera , "Ōtsuji Kiyoji Experimental Workshop of Photography" (1975), featured both essays and photographs that considered the theoretical issues surrounding photography as

4176-500: The 1960s. At the beginning, Gutai artists’ experimental creative methods that were often violent yet playful, were not valued by mainstream art criticism, but rather reported on as spectacular stunts. [1] In 1957, Gutai’s position within the Japanese art world improved, when European and US-American artists and art critics, who had learned about Gutai through intermediaries, the Gutai journal and articles in major newspapers such as The New York Times , began to manifest their interest in

4292-601: The 2nd Graphic Group Presentation. The film, produced with Yasuhiro Ishimoto and Saiko Tsuji, with a score by Tōru Takemitsu , involved painting directly onto film to create purely abstract effects. It was an early example of abstract film in Japan. From 1956 to 1959, Ōtsuji worked as a part-time photographer for the art magazine Geijutsu Shinchō, contributing photographs for articles covering art , design , architecture , music , theater , dance and film . His photographs ranged from portraits of artists to documentation of performances, putting him in contact with some of

4408-405: The 5th Experimental Workshop Presentation in 1953, and continued to photograph the group's events and rehearsals until they split up in 1957. In 1953, Ōtsuji also joined Gurafikku Shudan ("Graphic Group"), a group of photographers and designers, with whom he exhibited photography and collaborated on publications and other projects. In 1955, Ōtsuji screened the experimental film Kine Calligraph at

4524-619: The Ashiya City Art Association in 1947, engaged in the establishment of the Ashiya City Exhibitions, and mentored young artists. In 1951, he co-founded the Gendai Bijutsu Kondankai (Contemporary Art Discussion Group, known as Genbi), a forum for interdisciplinary exchange and discussion of East-Asian and Western modern and traditional arts, including ikebana , calligraphy and pottery . Genbi artists shared

4640-555: The Dōbiten (Young children art exhibition) organized by the Ashiya City Art Association, and contributed to the children free poetry magazine Kirin , where they advocated for the fostering of children’s free creative expression. When published in Geijutsu shinchō in December 1956, the text of the “Gutai Art Manifesto” was framed with pictures of Gutai members showing their creative procedures at

4756-852: The Future was on display at the Multimedia Museum in Moscow, and in Sakıp Sabancı Museum in Istanbul, Turkey. Later that year, the Guggenheim Museum showcased the group's work in ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s-60s , an exhibition that featured more than 40 artists from over 10 countries. This was the first large-scale historical survey of the group's work in the United States. The exhibition

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4872-583: The German artist group Nul and the Dutch artist group Zero, or by US-American performance artist Allan Kaprow. In 1962, Gutai’s own art space Gutai Pinacotheca opened on the Nakanoshima sandbank in the center of Osaka . It consisted of three old storage houses owned by Yoshihara, which had been converted into a fashionable modern gallery space. With an exhibition space of app. 370 qm, the Gutai Pinacotheca became

4988-547: The Martha Jackson Gallery in New York in fall 1958, retroactively renamed the 6th Gutai Art Exhibition , was the group’s first exhibition outside of Japan. Tapié and Yoshihara mainly selected Informel-style paintings for this exhibition, which were criticized by US art critics as being derivative of Abstract Expressionist art. Recognizing the risks of this unfavorable reception, Yoshihara began to distinguish Gutai from Tapié’s Informel. For example, in his essay published in

5104-649: The Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf presented an overview exhibition of the international ZERO movement, with paintings and installations from many countries. Mack, Piene, and Uecker curated their own areas. Jean-Hubert Martin and Mattijs Visser organized the exhibit, with input from Henk Peeters. The exhibition covered several aspects of the exhibitions from the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in the form of reconstructions of former installations. Also in 2006,

5220-629: The Museum der Moderne Salzburg presented 120 works by 50 Zero artists. The works were loaned by the German collectors Gerhard and Anna Lenz, who had been involved with the Zero movement almost from its beginnings. Gerhard had first encountered the Zero group at an exhibition of Piene's work in a Düsseldorf bookshop more in 1963. Starting in 1974, the couple exhibited the collection in 12 shows over 25 years, including in Frankfurt, Barcelona, Moscow, and Warsaw. In 2013,

5336-607: The Museum of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf. In addition, for the first time, works by several artists were shown: Manzoni, Verheyen, Fontana, Tinguely, Klein, Mack, and Piene. The highlight of the collaboration was the space-saving historical installation Lichtraum (Hommage à Fontana) by Mack, Piene, and Uecker, which was presented for the first time at the Documenta III 1964 exhibition. Mack presented an installation as an homage to his ZERO friends. Exhibitions and events were documented using previously unpublished photos and videos. In 2018,

5452-502: The Stage that were presented at the Asahi Halls in Osaka and Tokyo. The shows consisted of a dramaturgically staged suite of individual performances by the members. During the show in 1957, Kanayama painted red and black lines on a large balloon resulting in a web-like pattern. This balloon was inflated slowly, becoming a sculptural piece that rotated under lights of changing colors. The balloon

5568-526: The Tokyo Professional School of Photography began to publish the magazine Fotogurafii ("Photography"), to which Ōtsuji contributed several written essays on photography. Ōtsuji's early individual works are often viewed as a re-exploration of prewar Surrealist photography in Japan. For example, his work Aishi ni tsuite ("About Feet") (1949) captures a raw chicken positioned upside down with its legs dramatically crossed in mid-air, thus offering

5684-580: The ZERO artists are better known for their affiliations with other movements, including Nouveau Réalisme , Arte Povera , Minimalism , Op Art , Land Art , and Kinetic Art . In 1959, artists Pol Bury , Paul van Hoeydonck , Jean Tinguely , and Daniel Spoerri organized Motion in Vision – Vision in Motion , an exhibition at Hessenhuis in Antwerp that for the first time gave ZERO an international audience. This show

5800-549: The ZERO era. Visser went on to found the 0-Institute, focused on presenting the works and documents of international artists associated with ZERO, in a contemporary context. In 2010, Sotheby's auctioned off part the collection of Gerhard and Anna Lenz in London. Initially valued at 12 million pounds ($ 19.5 million), the 49 paintings, drawings and low-relief panels made up from a variety of media were sold in an evening auction reaching £54.07 million, or about $ 84.5 million; unusual for

5916-419: The ZERO period comprising photographs, correspondence, invitation cards, newspaper clippings, and other documents. The foundation was set up by Mattijs Visser , who led it from 2009 to 2017. The foundation was established in 2008, with a founding mission to preserve, present, study, and support the work of the international ZERO movement. The founding artists donated numerous works and their archives from

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6032-501: The ZERO period, including photographs, correspondence, posters, invitations, press articles, and magazines. Additional works and documents were collected and shared through exhibitions and publications. These efforts include both the initial period (1958–1966) and the continuing impact of the work. The foundation's archive and library are available for research purposes. The living artists whose work it covers are actively involved in its work, an continue to share first-hand information about

6148-404: The art department at the Tokyo Professional School of Photography (today Tokyo Polytechnic University ). In 1943, in the middle of his studies, he was drafted into the army and trained as an aircraft mechanic. He later graduated from the Tokyo Professional School of Photography in 1944. In 1945, after World War II, Ōtsuji returned to Tokyo and began work as a photographer at Takabayashi Studio,

6264-406: The art historical assessment of Gutai following the group’s dissolution has often oscillated between an understanding of Gutai works as paintings or as performances. However, since the mid-1990s, scholarship has shed light on the concept of e (picturing), which allowed the Gutai artists to overcome narrow Euro-American art conventions and concepts of art genres. Gutai's first American appearance at

6380-507: The artists he promoted, art dealers Martha Jackson in New York and Rodolphe Stadler in Paris, the Dutch artist group Nul, the German artist group Zero , and individual artists including John Cage , Christo Coetzee , Merce Cunningham , Paul Jenkins , Ray Johnson , Isamu Noguchi , and Robert Rauschenberg . Until the group’s dissolution in 1972 following Yoshihara’s death, around 60 artists were involved as members. The critical reception of Gutai

6496-454: The artists of Zero-kai (Zero Society) Akira Kanayama , Saburō Murakami , Kazuo Shiraga , and Atsuko Tanaka . By choosing the Japanese term gutai , which means concrete, as opposed to both abstract ( chūshō ) and figurative ( gushō ), the group distinguished themselves from contemporary figurative art, such as Surrealism and social realism, as well as from formalist geometric abstraction. The kanji used to write 'gu' meaning tool, measures, or

6612-536: The artists, without curatorial assistance. The exhibition was accompanied by a jointly developed catalog. Between 1993 and 1999, four ZERO exhibitions took place at Galerie Villa Merkel in Esslingen, curated by art historian Renate Wiehager. The exhibition series, which was specific to the NUL Group from the Netherlands, ZERO Italy, and ZERO Paris, was completed in 1999 with the exhibition Zero Deutschland 1960 . Apart from

6728-468: The artist’s body and violent gestures. Fueled by Yoshihara’s ambitions, global scope and strategic awareness, Gutai’s exhibitions and publications reached audiences around the world, realizing what Yoshihara called an “international common ground” of art. Gutai exchanged and collaborated with many artists, art critics and curators from Europe, the US and South Africa, among them the French art critic Michel Tapié and

6844-527: The canvas or punching holes in Japanese paper screens to exemplify rupture and fragmentation and their desire for transformation. The second phase of Gutai works, starting in 1962, were responding to the cultural shift happening in Japan as a result of rapid population growth and technological advances. Zero (art) Zero (usually styled as ZERO ) was an artist group founded in the late 1950s in Düsseldorf by Heinz Mack and Otto Piene . Piene described it as "a zone of silence and of pure possibilities for

6960-557: The context of the shift of the New York art scene from abstract expressionism towards …, led to criticism of their works as being derivatives of Pollock, (Dore Ashton) However, Tapié’s European networks provided Gutai the opportunities to exhibit in art spaces in Turin in 1959 and 1960. Their group exhibition at the Galleria Arti Figurative in Turin in 1959 was renamed as 7th Gutai Art Exhibition . The Gutai Art Exhibitions provided

7076-449: The creation of radically innovative works that transcended conventional definitions of artistic genres. This dynamic artistic relationship between Yoshihara and his younger fellow members over the years engendered Gutai’s “culture of experimentation”. In the “Gutai Art Manifesto”, published in the December issue of the art magazine Geijutsu shinchō in 1956, Yoshihara stated that Gutai Art aspired “to go beyond abstraction” and “to pursue …

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7192-542: The developing solo careers of individual members such as Shiraga, Tanaka, and Motonaga around 1960, Yoshihara, managed to keep the group together by constantly recruiting and bringing in new and younger members. More than half of the founding members had quit in the first months of 1955, and first-generation members, Tanaka and Kanayama in the mid-1960s, and Murakami and Motonaga around 1970, began to detach themselves from Gutai, but maintained their membership. In February 1972, Yoshihara died while preparing Gutai’s participation in

7308-434: The early 1960s. By the mid-1960s, Gutai, now disposing of its own exhibition space Pinacotheca, had established itself as a fixture of the Japanese art world, as a group of painters as well as performance artists, particularly after Allan Kaprow in his seminal publication Assemblage, Environments, and Happenings (1966) framed the group’s early performative works as “prototypes” of happenings. Echoing these artistic exchanges,

7424-450: The emergence of commercial art galleries for contemporary art in Japan, members such as Yoshihara, Shiraga, Motonaga, and Tanaka increasingly participated in other major group exhibitions of contemporary Japanese art in Japan as well as abroad. The Ashiya City Exhibition continued to provide an important platform, however, for most Gutai members throughout the years. In 1957 and 1958, Gutai presented two live stage shows entitled Gutai Art on

7540-481: The expo, the group staged the “extravaganza” Gutai Art Festival: Drama of Man and Matter at the Festival Plaza, a show composed of a sequence of individual performances which included men floating on giant balloons, remotely controlled toy dogs, and men in bubble blowing fire trucks. As a large group of many artists with individuals approaches, shifts and tensions within the group were a constant factor. Also facing

7656-477: The first lasting from 1954 until 1961, and the second beginning in 1962 and lasting until Gutai's dissolve in 1972. Gutai's first phase and original intention upon forming was to create works in new media and expand painting to become more performative. Artists of this phase of Gutai focused on the aesthetics of destruction as an art form to respond to postwar Japan. The artists blended artist and material for psychological relief by smashing paint-filled bottles against

7772-680: The first outdoor exhibition and from the 1st Gutai Art Exhibition in fall 1955 became part of a photoshoot for LIFE magazine. The One Day Only Outdoor Art Exhibition (April 1956) took place at the Yoshihara Oil Mill Factory’s grounds in Nishinomiya and in the ruins of the company’s factory in Amagasaki, and featured Gutai member performances and staged demonstrations of their creative processes. The photographs were never published in LIFE , but

7888-480: The group. Additionally, the Gutai members’ dynamic gestural visual language resonated with a hype for Informel art in Japan in the mid-1950s. However, this association backfired when Abstract Expressionism, Informel art and Tapié came under attack as being outdated with the rise of post-painting performance, Happenings, and installation art. Yoshihara, aware of the shifts in the global art discourse, managed to align his group with new artistic allies such as Nul and Zero in

8004-608: The group’s dissolution, 21 Gutai Art Exhibitions were held at venues such as the Ohara Hall in Tokyo, the Municipal Museum of Art of Kyoto, and gallery spaces of the Takashimaya and the Keio department stores in Osaka and Tokyo. The Gutai Art Exhibitions at the Ohara Hall in Tokyo in 1955 and 1956 are particularly known for the public performances by some members, which emphasized the use of

8120-677: The group’s exhibition projects through plates, photographs and articles. While the first issue of Gutai , published in January 1955 as first official act of the group, mainly consisted of photographic plates of members’ works, beginning with the second issue (October 1955), the journal adapted a square format and lavish design that freely arranged drawings, graphic prints, photographs, and texts. The issues experimented with different qualities of paper, included cutouts and original paper works. In total, between 1955 and 1965, 12 of 14 issues of Gutai appeared, with issues numbers 10 and 13 never having been published. As evidence of Yoshihara’s global ambitions,

8236-755: The human body engaging with various materials in violent gestures. At the 1st Gutai Art Exhibition in October 1955, Kazuo Shiraga stripped to his underwear and wrestled a heap of mud, leaving the traces of his struggle in the kneaded material ( Challenging Mud , 1955). In the exhibition rooms, Saburō Murakami used his body to punch and tear through sets of large paper screens ( 6 Holes , 1955), which remained on display. Other exhibits included paintings, paper works, Motonaga’s stone objects and little vinyl bags filled with tinted water in different colors, Kanayama’s huge red room-filling balloon, Yamazaki’s tin cans painted in pink paint, and other unconventional works that challenged

8352-457: The journal Notizie published by the Circolo degli Artisti in Turin in 1959, he presented the group’s broad range artistic production and emphasized its unprecedented innovativeness. The distribution of knowledge about Gutai, which was facilitated by Tapié by these exhibitions and publications, however, provided the basis for Gutai’s recognition in avant-garde and experimental art circles, such as by

8468-403: The limits of exhibition spaces, which was another goal of the Gutai group. As stated by Dick Higgins , "There are two ways you can introduce time into a piece: turn it into a performance, or allow it to reveal itself slowly, through the mail." At the 11th Gutai Art Exhibition, visitors could pay ten yen to a Gutai Card box to receive a nengajo from one of the Gutai members inside of the box. This

8584-510: The main venue for Gutai’s smaller group shows and solo exhibitions of members, as well as European and US-American artists such as Lucio Fontana, Giuseppe Capogrossi, and Sam Francis. The Gutai Pinacotheca became a go-to-place for artists, art critics and curators from abroad visiting Japan, such as Lawrence Alloway, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Francis, Clement Greenberg, Peggy Guggenheim, Jasper Johns, Paul Jenkins, Billy Klüver, Isamu Noguchi, Robert Rauschenberg, Pierre Restany, Jean Tinguely. Thus,

8700-654: The main venue for the members to show their works, supplemented by the Gutai Art Small-Works Exhibitions , the Gutai Art New Artists Exhibitions , and the Gutai Art New-Work Exhibitions , as well as the members’ solo exhibitions at the group’s own gallery Gutai Pinacotheca in Osaka, which was opened in 1962. The 21st Gutai Art Exhibition in 1968 was the last show. With the growing recognition of members as solo artists and

8816-523: The most prominent figures in the Japanese art world. He notably photographed works by Gutai members at the 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition in 1956, as well as Tatsumi Hijikata ’s performances of Butoh , among other major events. Throughout the 1950s, Ōtsuji continued to experiment both with photographic expression and with the photographic apparatus. In 1956, he took a series of close-up photographs of Lake Ōnuma , focusing on such images as slanted lines left behind on its frozen surface by ice skates. With none of

8932-406: The movement: Victor Vasarely , Marcel Duchamp , and Lucio Fontana . The ZERO Foundation is a German cultural institute established in December 2008, with support of Düsseldorf-based ZERO artists, Heinz Mack], Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker (or their estates), along with Museum Kunst Palast . It is funded by the state capital, Düsseldorf . The artists donated works as well as their archives from

9048-412: The names of the members were written in roman letters, and Gutai issues included texts written by Gutai members with English, and later also French, translations, as well as contributions by artists and critics from abroad. The edition of the issues nos. 8, 9 and 10 were supervised by Yoshihara and Tapié. A facsimile edition of the Gutai journal, supplemented by English translations and scholarly essays,

9164-490: The occasion of the 9th Gutai Art Exhibition at the Takashimaya department store in Osaka in April 1960, Gutai set up The International Sky Festival on the building’s roof top, “exhibiting” works by 30 US-American, European and Japanese artists that were copied onto banners by the Gutai members and lifted into the air by advertising balloons. Thanks to Tapié’s support and extensive network of artists, collectors and galleries around

9280-554: The occasion of the 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition in Tokyo in October 1956, shot by the magazine's photographer Kiyoji Ōtsuji . The group's journal Gutai served as an important vehicle to promote members’ works and to connect with art audiences all over the world across art genres, including artists, critics, art historians, book dealers, such as Jackson Pollock , Ben Friedman, George Wittenborn, Ray Johnson , Michel Tapié, Martha Jackson, Henk Peeters , Jean Clay and Allan Kaprow . The journals consisted of documentations of members’ works and

9396-494: The opening of Gutai Pinacotheca marked the group’s establishment within the globalizing art world. The Pinacotheca was closed in April 1970 due to an urban planning project. Yoshihara’s plans for a new Pinacotheca were not realized, except of a short-lived art space called Mini Pinacotheca, which opened in 1971. The Gutai artists utilized nengajo, or New Years postcards, for their mail art. Nengajo were more than just greeting cards. They have long traditional significance and serve as

9512-1004: The opening of the Gutai Pinacotheca, the shift of global art discourses towards experimental approaches, the expansion of Gutai’s collaborations and the growing critical recognition of members as fixtures of contemporary (Japanese) art, Gutai became an institution until the mid-1960s. To stimulate and rejuvenate the group, Yoshihara actively recruited emerging younger artists from the Hanshin region as so-called second and third generation members of Gutai. Artists such as Sadaharu Horio, Norio Imai, Kumiko Imanaka, Tsuyoshi Maekawa, Takesada Matsutani, Shūji Mukai, Yūko Nasaka, Minoru Onoda and Minoru Yoshida brought in new approaches, while around that time many first-generation Gutai members such as Yoshihara Motonaga, Shiraga, and Yamazaki adopted new methods, material and styles of painting, shifting from their earlier gestural abstraction to more simplified visual languages that resonated with hard-edge painting, pop and op art. At

9628-412: The original concept was further developed. This was the result of a 1962 exhibition which, besides monochromy, also concerned itself with color, vibration, light, and movement. There were works by European artists, works from North and South America, as well as from Japan. The exhibition was initiated, organized, and financed by the artists themselves. The selection of the participants took place likewise by

9744-728: The original members in the same time period. This venue traveled to Iberê Camargo Foundation at Porto Alegre, RS, Brazil, and finally was shown in 2014 on Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo at São Paulo, Brazil. Also in 2013, an exhibition at the Neuberger Museum of Art included works from the museum's permanent collection by artists who were part of or exhibited with Group Zero, including Getulio Alviani , Hartmut Böhm, Enrico Castellani , Gianni Colombo , Lucio Fontana , Heinz Mack, Almir Mavignier, Henk Peeters, Otto Piene, Jesús Rafael Soto , Jean Tinguely, Luis Tomasello, and Günther Uecker. In 2015, an exhibition titled ZERO: Countdown to

9860-485: The participants, who also included amateurs and school children, had to follow the exhibition committee’s requirements to withstand weather conditions such as sun, rain and wind as well as take into consideration the characteristics of the exhibition venue, and the risks of damage and theft. In response, they created large-scale three-dimensional works made of industrially produced materials for everyday use, construction materials, and scrap material: Sadamasa Motonaga suspended

9976-400: The photos shot by the photographer Kiyoji Ōtsuji at this occasion were used to frame the “Gutai Art Manifesto”, which was published in the art magazine Geijutsu shinchō in December 1956. The Gutai Group Exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York in fall 1958, which was retroactively renamed the 6th Gutai Art Exhibition , was the group’s first exhibition outside of Japan. The show

10092-563: The photoshoot is evidence of an early international interest in Gutai, as well as the scale of the group’s ambition. At the Outdoor Gutai Art Exhibition in summer 1956, again held at the Ashiya Park, the participants further explored the interactivity of their works with visitors and the natural environment, including works that used the effects of electric light in the dark, such as Yamazaki’s large cube of red vinyl hanging from

10208-506: The possibilities of pure creativity,” rejecting conventions and the limits of genres. Also, that Gutai Art envisioned a dynamic relationship between the human spirit and matter, which enabled matter to speak for itself and celebrate the process of damage or decay as a way of revealing its inner life: “Gutai Art imparts life to matter. Gutai Art does not distort matter. In Gutai Art, the human spirit and matter shake hands with each other while keeping their distance. […] Now, interestingly, we find

10324-406: The presence of objects (もの, mono ) – ready-made or found objects – and to capture their ephemerality with his camera. Additionally, Ōtsuji continued to take on contract jobs, including photographing the pianist Alfred Cortot during his visit to Japan. In 1953, Ōtsuji collaborated with the avant-garde art collective Jikken Kōbō on a project for the weekly graphic magazine Asahi Picture News,

10440-567: The severe present to be set free. We firmly believe that the creations accomplished in that free site can contribute to the progress of mankind. […] We hope to present concrete proof that our spirits are free. We never cease to pursue fresh emotions in all types of plastic arts. We look forward to finding friends in all visual arts.” Many of the Gutai artists, such as Yoshihara, Shimamoto, Yamazaki, Yōzō Ukita, Murakami, and Tanaka participated in art education, particularly for young children. They gave art classes, assisted with child art exhibitions such as

10556-408: The staff of Geijutsu Shinchō , Ōtsuji continued to take on contract work for the magazine and others, including S D and Bijutsu Techō. He also began photographing artwork for books and exhibition catalogues , and continued to do so until late in his career. In 1968, he famously coined the term konpora, derived from kontenporarī fotogurafī (contemporary photography), which he used to describe

10672-437: The supervision of Yoshihara and his son Michio. The more recent gestural canvas paintings Yoshihara had brought with him were not shown. The NUL 1965 show marked a turning point towards a recognition of Gutai as pioneer of global art trends of the 1960s, distinct from and originating prior to other participating artists, as Yoshihara, for example, made sure that the early production dates of Gutai works were clearly stated. With

10788-616: The surrounding landscape depicted, the icy surface resembled gestural abstraction. He built his own camera and even devised a cinematic device called an "autoscope" that was used to project images at the Sekiya Industries booth at the Japan International Trade Fair in Tokyo in 1957. Ōtsuji began to spend more time teaching in the 1960s. From 1960 to 1970, Ōtsuji was a lecturer at the Tokyo College of Photography . This

10904-506: The three protagonists of the German ZERO movement, Weihager devoted herself to a further twenty artists whose works ranged from the late 1950s to the 1990s. Unlike in the 1960s, this series of exhibitions was not initiated, organized, and financed by the artists themselves. A series of four publications was issued, with a first comprehensive overview of ZERO as a European movement, in four languages: German, English, Dutch, and French. In 2006,

11020-647: The three-dimensional space. At the Martin-Gropius-Bau, artists from Germany, Italy, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Venezuela, Switzerland, Japan, the US, and Brazil were represented with around 200 works and ten space-filling installations. Among them were some rare works from renowned collections such as the Georges Pompidou Center, the Morsbroich Museum, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and

11136-420: The tree, or Jirō Yoshihara’s column made of paper lanterns, Light Art , or Michio Yoshihara’s work in which electric bulbs were set up in the ground. Shōzō Shimamoto created a painting by hanging a fifty-foot-long canvas hung from the trees and shooting paint out of a canon; Motonaga created a large version of Work (Water) by suspending long vinyl sheets with colored water between trees; Akira Kanayama rolled out

11252-465: The trees. Engaging with natural and technical conditions, the participants created numerous experimental works including performative, interactive and installation artworks that explored the relationship between object, site and beholder and which pre-dated artistic tendencies that arose in Europe and the US in the 1960s, such as performance, site-specific, earth, environmental and installation art. Works from

11368-417: The very notions of painting and art. At the 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition (fall 1956), Gutai members presented their artistic processes for the press/photographers. On the building’s rooftop, Shimamoto shattered glass bottles filled with paint on canvases/paper laid on the ground, Murakami tore and stumbled through 24 paper screens Passage (1956), and Shiraga demonstrated his method of foot painting. Also, some of

11484-511: The works printed in the Gutai journal, Tapié travelled that year to Japan to meet Gutai and other artists in Japan. Tapié was a promoter of European gestural abstract art under the term Informel and US-American Abstract Expressionism , including works by artists such as Jean Fautrier , Jean Dubuffet , Lucio Fontana , Giuseppe Capogrossi , Jackson Pollock, Helen Frankenthaler , and Robert Motherwell . For Tapié, Gutai, with their innovative and dynamic gestural and material approach to painting,

11600-477: The world, Gutai members’ works were shown in numerous group and solo exhibitions in cities in the US and Europe, including the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, the Galerie Stadler in Paris, to which Tapié served as advisor, and art spaces in Turin. Gutai members such as Shiraga, Tanaka and Motonaga signed contracts with Tapié or the art dealers to deliver works on a regular basis. The Gutai Group Exhibition at

11716-794: The years, Gutai engaged in further stage productions in addition to collaborating on fashion shows. In November 1962, Gutai presented the stage show Don’t Worry, the Moon Won’t Fall at the Sankei Hall in Osaka in collaboration with the Osaka-based Morita Modern Dance company of dancers Masahiro and Masuyo Morita. In the first part, staged by Gutai, the members presented works from their stage show in 1957 such as Kanayama’s Balloon (1957) and Shiraga’s Ultra-Modern Sanbasō (1957) or from other previous exhibitions such as Murakami’s Passage (1956). Shūji Mukai, who had just joined Gutai, made

11832-533: Was a professor at Kyushu Sangyō University until 1996. He spent the later decades continuing to publish his photographs and essays widely, but his contract work decreased and he began to show his own works in such prominent venues as the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography , the Chiba City Museum of Art, Meguro Museum of Art, Tokyo , and others. In the last few years of his life, an initiative

11948-523: Was asked to become a regular guest in a series of roundtable discussions published in Asahi Camera titled "Roundtable: On Talked-About Photographs," where he was joined by other prominent photographers. He participated in these discussions in 1974, from 1976 to 1978, and again in 1985. Ōtsuji's students include Yutaka Takanashi , Shinzō Shimao , Tokuko Ushioda , Shigeo Gochō and Naoya Hatakeyama . After leaving University of Tsukuba in 1987, Ōtsuji

12064-533: Was born in the Kōtō ward of Tokyo on July 27, 1923. He first became interested in photography when he purchased back issues of the photography periodical Photo Times from a used book store. Through Photo Times he first encountered avant-garde photography from Europe , the United States , and Japan , and was deeply inspired by the photography criticism of Shūzō Takiguchi and Abe Nobuya. In 1942, Ōtsuji enrolled in

12180-555: Was established to preserve his negatives, and he received recognition through several major solo exhibitions and the publication of the photo book Kiyoji Ōtsuji (Japanese Photographers 21) by Iwanami Shoten in 1999. Ōtsuji’s photographic archives are held by the Musashino Art University Museum & Library. Prints of his photographs are also held in the collections of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo ,

12296-448: Was evident. Jiro Yoshihara really pushed the young members of Gutai to escape this Artistic/political oppression, seek individuality, and to resist oppression. This definition of Freedom is inescapably found in the idealistic rights-based model that requires an escape from political oppression. Yoshihara did not directly imply or announce a political agenda for Gutai. Art historian Alexandra Munroe and curator Paul Schimmel read Gutai art as

12412-505: Was facilitated by the French art critic Michel Tapié, who, having learned about Gutai via Japanese painters Hisao Dōmoto and Toshimitsu Imai in Paris, had travelled to Japan in fall 1957 to meet the group. Tapié at that time was promoting Informel as a global art movement and was advising the New York art dealer Martha Jackson. Yoshihara travelled to the US to participate in the preparations. Tapié and Yoshihara mainly selected Informel-style paintings by Gutai artists for this exhibition, which, in

12528-584: Was his first teaching position. He also lectured at the Musashino Art University in the 1960s, and was appointed a professor at Tokyo Zōkei University from 1967 to 1976. Ōtsuji became a professor at University of Tsukuba in 1976, where he taught until 1987. Around 1965, Ōtsuji began to frequently contribute essays and articles to photography magazines such as Camera Mainichi , Camera Jidai, S D: Space Design, and Shashin Hihyō, among others. Throughout

12644-482: Was initiated by the ZERO foundation. In 2015 and 2016, this exhibit toured to the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Various subjects – articulated in time, space, color, reflection, vibration, light, and movement – showed works of art from the central years of the ZERO movement from 1957 to 1967. With around 40 artists, the exhibition followed the ZERO spirit, from two-dimensional paintings to

12760-608: Was published in 2010. Gutai organized and participated in several experimental outdoor art projects, such as the Experimental Outdoor Exhibition of Modern Art to Challenge the Midsummer Sun at the Ashiya Park in July 1955, an open-air exhibition that was open twenty-four hours a day for two weeks. In this exhibition, which was officially organized by the Ashiya City Art Association, but de facto realized by Gutai members,

12876-430: Was strongly affected by the shifts in art discourse from the 1950s to the late 1960s, particularly from gestural painting to more performative approaches and so-called anti-art movements of the 1960s. While Gutai works are recognized for anticipating ideas and approaches of European and US-American art of the 1960s, such as performance, happening, pop, minimal, conceptual, environmental and land art, Gutai artists referred to

12992-415: Was the first major ZERO exhibition, after previous shows held at their studio by Mack and Piene in 1957. In the early 1960s, the artist Henk Peeters presented the international director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Willem Sandberg, with monochromatic works of the young European artists' generation. In a close exchange with Mack, Piene, and Günther Uecker , as well as Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni ,

13108-456: Was the ideal partner to prove the global relevance of Informel. Gutai’s collaboration with Tapié resulted in publications and exhibitions that Yoshihara and Tapié supervised and curated jointly, such as the Gutai journal no. 8 (1958) and the exhibition International Art of a New Era: Informel and Gutai , which took place at the Takashimaya department store in Osaka in April 1958 and subsequently travelled to Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Kyoto and Tokyo. On

13224-437: Was then cut and deflated, almost returning to it its original state. Shimamoto hit electric bulbs hanging from the ceiling with a stick, and Murakami adapted his method of paper-tearing into a stage version of hitting large paper screens with a stick. Tanaka ripped and stripped off multiple layers of clothes in a performance, but she also set up her giant Stage Clothes from the outdoor exhibition 1956 and her Electric Dress from

13340-561: Was to have his pupils study in his library to learn about contemporary issues so that their work could compete with the art of the center. Gutai work made from bodily processes did find inspiration in Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, yet expanded on these concepts drastically. At a glance, Gutai's early paintings may look like Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, however their approach and methods were radically different. If one compares Jackson Pollock's, Number 7 to Sumi Yasuo's work. Pollock's

13456-459: Was viewed as a performance, not consumerism, and the money went to a children's charity, which furthered the nengajo idea of a gift. Having seen photographs of Gutai’s outdoor and stage works in Tapié’s book Continuité et avant-garde au Japon (1961), the Dutch artist Henk Peeters invited Gutai to participate in the exhibition NUL 1965 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1965, which aimed to show

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