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If the Shiraga exhibition suggested that the battle for Gutai is still stubbornly stuck in the annals of history, the performance by Sadaharu Horio at the Fukui International Art Festival on August 18th reminded us to think in the present tense and to notice that the Gutai belongs not only to scholars and curators, but also to the artists, 29 years after its official end. It is as if in his continuing project, Horio, one of the youngest former members of the group, attempts a material exegesis of the Gutai, laying claim to that precarious zone between performance and painting which has so often been obscured out of taxonomic zeal.
Horio maintains the fundamental philosophical issues of Gutai, but demonstrates their flexibility and endurance by pairing them with a level of community engagement and a concern for everyday life that gives the project a sense of energy, contemporaneity, and relevance. This is art as an ethical project, a way of making art out of daily life, and daily life out of art, like the layer of paint applied as part of his quotidian ritual to an assemblage of ordinary objects in the entryway to his home—objects which have undergone a sculptural metamorphosis under 10 years of accumulated paint.
In his performance for the Fukui Festival, Horio tied together 200 sheets of brilliant blue tarp, and had the audience help him to stretch this over one kilometer of riverbank, cutting through the drab landscape with a disquieting plastic vitality. It was the experience of the performance however, that was the most engaging aspect of the piece—the transformation of a pile of plastic tarps into a giant fluttering kite, as our ephemeral community worked towards a common goal. It was a goal which took just over an hour to achieve, a lot more cooperation and a lot more physical effort than any of the audience had expected. It was just that—the effort involved and the sheer scale of the work, which served as a poignant reminder of the unequal, and often brutal relationship that exists between man and nature in Japan, a series of volcanic islands victim to an astonishing number of earthquakes, tsunami, typhoons, and hurricanes each year. The fact that the tarps were exactly the same material that was used to create makeshift shelters after the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995 further enhanced those layers of meaning.
Functioning as a scar, the work not only cleaved open the landscape and revisited old wounds, but also served as a reminder of the new possibilities of community that emerged out of this trauma. Although remembered as an event that shattered the lives of many of the participants and their friends, it is also recognized as the moment that gave birth to volunteerism and brought out charity, and community in an urban society that before, rarely looked beyond the boundaries of the nuclear family. For Horio, it is because of these touchingly human links that we survive, building layer upon layer of ordinary friendship and community to which he gives form somewhere between performance and the plastic arts.
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