The Gutai Art Association, A Post WWII Japanese Art Movement

                The Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai 

                (Gutai Art Association)

   The Second World War caused massive impacts and devastations to several countries; Japan was one of the top countries that suffered many casualties. In the 1950s, Japan began working to rebuild following the destruction ww2 caused and restoring diplomatic relations with America following their departure from Japan in 1952. The Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai, also known as the Gutai Art Association, is considered the most critical post ww2 movement in Japanese culture.                   

   Founded by Jiro Yoshihara, it was highly encouraged not to mimic other art styles and to think outside the box of normalcy by experimenting with various nontraditional objects and actions to create art. Gutai artists embraced their newfound freedoms of self-expression through performance artwork after the effects of totalitarianism and being defeated in ww2. 

   Gutai, meaning concreteness, perfectly depicts the group's distinctive traits to be physically engaged with the materials used to craft artwork. This Mid-Modernism post-war art movement of avant-guard was meant to favor or introduce experimental or unusual ideas. Artists incorporated paint with tar, ripped paper, glue, a naked body rolling in a mud concrete mixture, painting with feet, and firing pigments from a cannon at a canvas. The movement mimics a cross between abstraction, surrealism, and Dada and is inspired by American abstract artist Jackson Pollock and the European Art Informel movement; the Gutai movement perfectly depicts Mid-Modernism styles. 

                     "Do what has never been done before!"- Jiro Yoshihara

    Following the end of ww2, Jiro Yoshihara began the Gutai Art Association in Ashiya, near Osaka, in 1954. Being a generation older than most members, Yoshihara wanted to inspire the new concept of individual freedom, not a growing young democracy. He tried to reach artists internationally by creating The Gutai Journal in 1954. Translated into American and French, the journal showed Gutai members' artwork and articles they wrote, art shows, and works by fellow international artists. Like an art exhibit of its own, the journal was the Gutai's best resource to spread and share their movement and techniques with other artists worldwide.

    

    When the group was formed in 1954, it comprised about 16 young artists who had been art students of Jiro Yoshihara and others he met at cultural events in Ashiya during the postwar years. Yoshihara led the Gutai Art Association until he died in 1972. Despite some differences among artists who wanted to attend more art shows rather than showcase them through the journal, the movement was highly successful and impacted modern art in Japan and worldwide.   

                         

                                                             The Gutai Journal Entries
                      

                       

                                            

                         Gutai Artists

Kazuo Shiraga (1924-2008)

     Kazuo Shiraga was born in 1924 in Amagasaki, Japan. After studying traditional Japanese painting by attending the Kyoto City University of Arts, he was bored and disillusioned. Before joining the Gutai Art Associate, he co-founded an avant-garde conceptual group called the Zero Society in 1952, merging with the Gutai movement in 1955. Shiraga created performance paintings testing his bond between body and matter, creating works that depict an abstract expressionism style. Most of the pieces he crafted during his time with the Gutai movement brought new expression to Japanese art that displayed his desire to let loose after the let-up of authoritarian rule suffocated the country during ww2. 

    

    Wildboar Hunting II is one of Shiraga's darker depictions of self-expression he crafted. The textures, thick areas of paint, and patches of fur sticking up in random places make the animal appear to have been run over. One of his signature performance painting techniques was painting with his feet. He would use his feet to paint his works, suspended over his canvas attached to a wire. In this piece, he obtained a natural boar hide and used natural shades of red he painted softly with his feet across the fur, giving the illusion of fresh blood. Shades of dark brown and black pressed firmly into deep spots for the element of clotting blood. The heavy paint and fur lumpiness looks like squished organs that exploded. Different textures, light-to-dark contrast, and techniques were used with his feet; some areas were firmly pressed, and others lightly. Shiaraga's artwork depicts abstract expressionism and investigation of primal instincts and masculinity.

    Shiraga performance painted Challenging Mud three separate times at the first exhibition of the Gutai Art Association in 1955. In an attempt to escape traditional painting on canvas, Shiraga, dressed only in a loin cloth, throws himself into a hefty pile of dense cement, stone, sand, gravel, clay, plaster, and twigs, only using his body to mold and move it around. As Shiraga thrashed violently back and forth in the heavy concoction of natural elements, causing injury to himself and being utterly exhausted, he showed his deep desire for personal freedom and the ability for self-expression. Challenging Mud was photographed while he painted and after; in an article for The Gutai Journal he wrote, "How can an action by me, a living body, confront a dead material? I should use materials that are lifeless-so that the trace of an action is concrete." (Earthman, The Art Story).   

                     Wild Boar Hunting II, 1963. 

                   Boar hide, wood plank, and oil paint

              Challenging Mud (Doro ni idomu), 1955 (2nd execution)

The dramatic overhead shot captures Shiraga Kazuo covered in mud, wearing only white boxers. Kazuo creates irregular streaks and blobs in the mud atop a gravel surface with his body. The artist struggles to free his left leg from the pile of thick muck.
           

                      

                      Challenging Mud. (Doro ni idomu), 1955 (3rd execution)

In the pile of muck sitting in the center of a gravel field are an array of marks, indentions, cavities, and smears made by Shiraga Kazuos's body. The man in the picture photographed painters next to their finished canvases at the convention but poses for a photo with Kazuo's unique work, Challenging Mud.

Atsuko Tanaka (1932-2005)

    Atsuko Tanaka was born in Osaka in 1932 and died in 2005 in Nara, Japan. She entered the Japanese art scene in 1950 by enrolling at the Art Institute at the Osaka Municipal Museum of Art. After studying art in Kyoto, Tanaka, for five years and meeting classmate Kazuo Shiraga she joined his new movement Zero Society; In 1955, she joined the newly formed avant-garde group Gutai when it merged with Zero Society.

    Atsuko Tanaka described her artwork Bell as painting with sound; this technique was an interactive way for the viewers to help craft artwork. Electric bells were placed in various areas on the floor, attached to a long, snaking cord. They were pressed every hour by a gallery attendant that would shrilly ring out in sequence around the exhibit—time, space, sound, and movement throughout the exhibit space instead of working with color and form. While painting the exhibition, Tanaka used fast-drying vinyl paint for lovely gloss and depth while on the floor, bringing her paintbrush to the center of the painting, working outwards. She created large circles and organic forms in bright colors interlinked with various intertwining lines that are not straight and mimic calligraphy. Tanaka shared in a 1955 interview that "in my work I would like to destroy safe beauty." Work (Bell) depicts realism style in a surrealist art style. 

    Electric Dress was a magnificent wearable art costume that Tanaka created using modern technology and designed to resemble a kimono robe in traditional Japanese culture. Constructed of flashing incandescent light bulbs painted vibrant red, green, yellow, and blue, this piece's inspiration came from Japanese cityscapes of the 1950s. Tanaka balanced the Gutai movement well by using not traditional ways to create art but keeping a bit of her traditional culture slightly in her works. Tanaka wore the dress at art exhibitions while walking around; the light bulbs would flicker according to the body's circuitry. She was the first Gutai artist to merge modern technology with art; the dress would give small shocks when worn. This gave the wearer a firsthand encounter with the material properties of light bulbs. The Electric Dress was often shown with paintings crafted from Work (Bell) reminiscent of wire diagrams similar to the thousands of wires networked together in the dress.     

On the left Bell,1957 vinyl paint on canvas . In the middle, Atsuko Tanaka installing Work Bell at the 3rd Genii Exhibition,Kyoto,1955. On the right Bell,1957 vinyl paint on canvas.

"Please feel free to push the button, Atsuko Tanaka"

Atsuko Tanaka wearing her Electric Dress suspended from the ceiling at the 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition in Ohara Hall, Tokyo, 1956

Flashing incandescent light bulbs painted vibrant red, green, yellow, and blue constructed together with thousands of wires.

Takesada Matsutani (1937-present)

    Takesada Matsutani, born in 1937 in Osaka, Japan, is 85 years old, living and working back and forth between Japan and France. He entered Japan's art scene in 1954 in a traditional painting class at the Osaka Municipal High School of Crafts Arts. Due to missing many school days due to tuberculosis, he decided to drop out and study Japanese painting solo. By discovering textures and Western contemporary art from books and magazines, surrealism art styles sparked his interest. Matsutani joined the Gutai Art Association at the midway point of its existence in 1963; Jirô Yoshihara was not impressed with his art firsthand and was reluctant to allow the young artist to join. His first solo exhibition was the Gutai Pinacotheca in Osaka; he always participated in Gutai art shows after that. Matsutani switched from contemporary Japanese painting styles in the 1960s to abstract expressionism and surrealism by experimenting with materials, finding that vinyl adhesive is his favorite to work with.

    Matsutani is a mixed media artist; he experiments with different materials to see what kind of effect of texture he can achieve. He uses more than one medium in  Work 63-10-1 and Work 65-Daiwa he incorporates his favorite and signature medium of glue with different types of paint. Matsutani experimented with glue methods in his works; he dripped it over the canvas and moved it around, giving it time to form a shape. He experimented with drying time and thickness of the glue, which gave the objects a different color in specific lighting. He learned to use a straw to blow the glue into a bubble and would often pop it when it was nearly dry. Sometimes he would allow them to take on organic shapes by collapsing. Work 63-10-1 emulates an organic design of female genitalia or an open mouth. Other works resembled eggs with runny yolks or decaying seed pods. Work 65-Daiwa shows the different techniques used for the glue to give different textures. He allowed several bumps to harden but gave a draping effect by playing with a large portion of one side. The artwork has more texture than Work 63-10-1. 

    When I glance at Matsutani's works, it reminds me of Found art. Vinyl glue became available in Japan in the post-war period, and as a Gutai artist, he rejected traditions and art norms and incorporated new materials never used before.     

  Work 63-10-1, 1963 

Vinyl glue, acrylic and oil on canvas, mounted on plywood board

Work 65-Daiwa,1965

Poly vinyl acetate adhesive, acrylic and enamel on canvas, mounted on plywood board

Conclusion

The conclusion of World War II brought peace and a lot of change worldwide. Japan was a country that suffered much devastation from the effects of the war, but the movements and changes made are some of the most important that ever occurred. The Gutai Art Association strived to be out with the old and in with the new. They dare to be different and yearn to express themselves freely after years of authoritarianism. They did not only work on promoting their ideas to Japan but to the entire world. “Don’t copy anyone! Do something no one’s ever done before!” Jiro Yoshihara would demand his Gutai artists.

I had a blast exploring post-war Japanese artwork, especially the Gutai artists. Not having a strong artist's eye myself, I often look at abstract art and believe it all to be the same or see it as paint splattered on a canvas. The Gutai works all had elements of abstract expressionism in them. Further research about the devastation from ww2 and the shift in Japanese culture to promote freedom of self-expression made the artwork more meaningful than interesting to peruse. These artists' ideas and built up creativity poured over once they were allowed to express themselves freely, and what better way to do so than through artwork? I would love to time travel and attend one of the art exhibits they hosted and ring one of Atsuko Tanaka's bells or watch Kazuo Shiraga violently struggle to move in the heavy pile of muck he was presentation painting in.      

Works Referenced 

The Art Story, Contributor's. “The Gutai Group Overview.” The Art Story, 3 Nov. 2015, https://www.theartstory.org/movement/gutai/. 

Friedrich Muller, Galerie. “Takesada Matsutani - Overview.” Japan Art - Galerie Friedrich Müller, 2022, https://www.japan-art.com/en/artists/42-takesada-matsutani/overview/. 

Moderna, Musset. “On Some of the Works in the Exhibition Atsuko Tanaka.” Moderna Museet i Stockholm, 2022, https://www.modernamuseet.se/stockholm/en/exhibitions/atsuko-tanaka/works-exhibition-atsuko-tanaka/. 

Horisaki-Christens, Nina. “Shiraga Kazuo, Challenging Mud (Doro Ni Idomu).” Smarthistory, 2 July 2021, https://smarthistory.org/shiraga-kazuo-challenging-mud/. 

Baeza, Manon. “Gutai, the Daring Japanese Post-War Movement.” Pen Magazine International, 8 Jan. 2019, https://pen-online.com/arts/gutai-the-daring-japanese-post-war-movement/?scrolled=0. 

Gómez, Edward M. “Takesada Matsutani's Art of Expressive Textures and Ambiguous Blobs.” Hyperallergic, 8 Dec. 2015, https://hyperallergic.com/257721/takesada-matsutanis-art-of-expressive-textures-and-ambiguous-blobs/.