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As Allan Kaprow reported in his 1962 book Assemblage, Environments and Happenings, before performance art emerged in Europe and North America, there was the Gutai. The group, whose name means concreteness or embodiment, defined a new practice of artmaking in 1950s Japan that put an emphasis on enabling materials to speak freely in their works rather than being silenced by imperious artistic interventions. This conceptual starting point, in which "the artist and the materials shake hands," where site specific art was not a radical notion, but a moral necessity, gave birth to a wide variety of artistic practices that foreshadowed movements in performance art, earthworks, conceptual art, and minimalism.
In 1957, the group was "discovered" by the French Art Informel critic, Michel Tapié, whose fascination with exoticized notions of movement and form in Japanese Calligraphy had been nurtured by Pierre Alechinsky and André Masson. Tapié was searching for a Japanese Art Informel in order to bolster his theory of hot abstraction as an international "language" of painting and traveled to Japan in order to make contact with the group. There, he was captivated by Gutai painting, whose emphasis on materiality and raw energy was well suited to Tapié’s tastes and theoretical priorities. Ignoring the remainder of the Gutai’s experimental activities, Tapié promoted the paintings in Paris, Turin and New York, giving the Gutai at once international exposure and a false identity—an identity which has endured to the present day both inside and outside of Japan. The long-awaited retrospective, Kazuo Shiraga: Action Painter at the Hyogo Prefectural Musem of Modern Art in Kobe, Japan is disappointingly, the most recent victim of Michel Tapié’s significant legacy.
The exhibition is the first retrospective at a Japanese museum dedicated to the artist Kazuo Shiraga, one of the most exciting and versatile members of the Gutai whose search for new modes of expression resulted in an artistic project that included startling, violent performances as well as a unique, explosive style of painting with his feet. Kazuo Shiraga: Action Painter sees Shiragathrough Tapié’s eyes, however, and concentrates on his paintings. These are well chosen, drawing heavily from Hyogo’s superior permanent collection, and show a representative and important selection from the artist’s career, including recent works. In particular, the early paintings shown at this retrospective are not often seen, intelligently selected, and give a sense of Shiraga’s early interest in texture and formlessness as well as his obsession with the colour, crimson lake. This colour endures through many of his paintings in the 50s and early 60s and is a colour eerily suggestive of freshly drawn blood, in particular when applied with fingers and feet. The visceral effect of these markings—deep crimson traces and imprints are inseparably linked to Shiraga’s war experiences as well as his childhood fascination with the violent and often bloody "Danjiri" festivals in his hometown of Amagasaki.
Despite its importance to Shiraga however, the theme of violence in these post-war paintings is barely evident in the installation, which could have been much more evocative had it included good video or photographic documentation of the artist’s performances set in relation to the paintings, with which they were contemporary, and deeply related. Instead, in this essentially chronological exhibition, of the three performance pieces that were shown, two were taken out of context and placed at the beginning and end of the exhibition, as if timeless curiosities rather than being an integral part of Shiraga’s artistic project. Furthermore, they were shown as skeletons—a stage costume and a leftover sculpture with little attempt made to conjure up the wild, ecstatic events that they came from.
The stirring piece Please Come In (1955) was, for example, exhibited as a static arrangement of nine red logs in the stairwell of the museum. Originally an outdoor work, this piece was a performance in which Shiraga stood inside a cone made of red-painted logs armed with an ax, making marks by literally wounding the surface of the structure balanced precariously around him. Afterwards, the structure was exhibited, and viewers invited to "Please Come In," to experience the danger and violence of the artist’s act, as well as to see the skyframed by the intersecting logs.
Only Challenging Mud (1955) was exhibited with some success, the performance that was a logical extension of the artist’s painting practice. In this work, Shiraga threw his entire body into the picture plane, stripped bare and wrestling with the earth which acted upon him as he acted upon it. One of the most stirring photographs of the event (shown here) was enlarged and shown on the ground, giving the viewer some sense of the relationship to both the scale and horizontality of the work.
If the performances were minimized in importance, it was because every effort was being made to compare Shiraga to Pollock. (The curator of the exhibition, Shouichi Hirai started his career as a Pollock scholar). Even more striking than the title of the exhibition, which transparently seeks to characterize the artist as a member of the tribe, was a recreation of his studio that resembled the one reconstructed for the Pollock exhibition at MoMA in 1998, in which a Hans Namuth-like video of Shiraga painting with his feet was projected onto the back wall.
With a bilingual catalogue, Kazuo Shiraga: Action Painter is clearly trying to re-introduce the work of this important artist to the world stage. It, and the Atsuko Tanaka exhibition at the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History (with a superb bilingual catalogue) this summer represent a greatly needed first step towards investigating the work of individual artists in the Gutai, a group of breathtaking originality, which has yet to be fully revealed.
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