The Guggenheim opened “Gutai: Splendid Playground” yesterday, a retrospective of 145 works by 25 artists who were part of the optimistic collective that lifted the spirits of the postwar art scene in Japan between 1954 and 1972. The exhibition is the first major North American survey of Gutai, which the museum’s Asian art curator Alexandra Munroe recently called “the most influential postwar Avant-Garde collective.”
Elevating everyday materials to art supplies, Gutai members — of which there were 59 in its 18-year legacy — stitched expanses of fabric into monochrome “canvases,” painted their bodies with mud, and threw bottles of pigment onto paintings.
“[T]he great lives of the Renaissance are nothing more than archaeological relics,” wrote founder Yoshihara Jiro in his “Gutai Manifesto” as he called for a return to materiality (the word “Gutai” translates to “concreteness”). He went to write that “Gutai aspires to present exhibitions filled with vibrant spirit, exhibitions in which an intense cry accompanies the discovery of the new life of matter.”
Guggenheim curators expect that this lively spirit will translate across nations and generations to speak to America’s own postwar, post-crash society. Stressing this point, co-curator Ming Tiampo mentioned during the press preview that Japanese conceptualist and recent Guggenheim subject Lee Ufan had stopped by earlier in the week and commented on how “fresh and contemporary” the show looked.
In at least one case the art has been literally adapted for its new context. The first piece greeting visitors as they enter the museum is an updated version of Motonaga Sadamasa’s “Work (Water),” a lattice of clear plastic tubes crisscrossing the heights of the rotunda, each seeming to bend under the weight of colored water pooled in the center. The artist first conceived of the work as an outdoor installation in 1956 and reimagined it for the museum in 2011, shortly before he died.
“Gutai: Splendid Playground” is open through May 8.
— Rachel Corbett
(Photos: Motonaga Sadamasa, “Work (Water),” 1956/2011; Yamakazi Tsuruko, “Work (Red Cube),” 1956; Yoshida Minoru, “Bisexual Flower,” 1969.)
Tags: Alexandra Munroe, Exhibitions, Guggenheim, Gutai, Lee Ufan, News, Rachel Corbett, Yoshihara Jiro
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Most of this stuff is the same as Surrealism, literariness concocted into a false visual language. Jiro was the wannabe Breton of his age. It’s dated and shallow, done as soon as performed as it is selfish exhibtionsim, not seeking the essence of humanity and the universal of creative art.
Like Miro and often Ernst, who were poetic and musical, Shiraga elevated out of them. His classical Japanese arts training and spirituality come through. He refused to be limited by proscribed “happenings’ and literary psychobabble, and sought the inner peace of Zen but in the aftermath of total destruction of physical and spiritual life.
Shiraga was ritual, the same as hereditary caligraphers it wasn’t selfish performance, but updating the sacred ceremonies of Zen and Shinto legacies. His use of body, hands and feet, and incredible use of color often on the white as paper ground of cultural heredity, brought forth the Spiritual which Jiro wished dead. As it was Man’s Hubris that laid low Empire and Reich.
But sowed the seeds for the Capitalist Ego of superiority and seperated Individualism that the reborn Academies latched onto in their failure to actually teach art and feed their nouveaur riche patrons. Librarians and Pharisees are not Prophets. But the museo/academic/gallery complex of business had to be fed, and so the Spritual ignored or ridiculed as benath them. When true creative art is always the blending of Mind, Body and Soul as One.
As those like Shiraga, Soulages, de Stael, Diebenkorn, Tamayo Bearden and Kiefer continued. Modern art never died, that of Cezanne, Gauguin, Braque and others, all spiritual men. It was shunted aside and ignored as was Jazz, it’s musical equivalent, has been by the pop industry of marketed Meism. Its still here, but few can see in the visual langauge in the artscene, it has been made for those of no vision. As was this group.
art collegia delenda est
Alexandra Munroe @akmunroe /#Samsung concealed the #violences to #YoshidaMinoru’s Bisexual Flower by #korean activists @Guggenheim, #Gutai.