The critical reception of Gutai 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.
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.
[1]: 81 However, the group took a stronger, more conceptual direction following this break with the addition of new members such as Sadamasa Motonaga, and the artists of Zero-kai (Zero Society) Akira Kanayama, Saburō Murakami, Kazuo Shiraga, and Atsuko Tanaka.
[4] 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!”,[5] and by proposing unconventional exhibition formats, he stimulated the creation of radically innovative works that transcended conventional definitions of artistic genres.
… We believe that by merging human qualities and material properties, we can concretely comprehend abstract space.”[6]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 the severe present to be set free.
We look forward to finding friends in all visual arts.”[8] Many of the Gutai artists, such as Yoshihara, Shimamoto, Yamazaki, Yōzō Ukita, Murakami, and Tanaka participated in art education, particularly for young children.
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,[18] the Zero op Zee (Zero on Sea) exhibition planned by the Dutch group Nul[19] as a large scale show at the Scheveningen Pier in The Hague in 1966 (which was never realized),[20] 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.
[7]: 59–65 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 the human body engaging with various materials in violent gestures.
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.
The show 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 and Yoshihara mainly selected Informel-style paintings by Gutai artists for this exhibition, which, in 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.
Shūji Mukai, who had just joined Gutai, made 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.
In 1957, the French art critic Michel Tapié learned about Gutai from two Paris-based Japanese painters, Hisao Dōmoto and Toshimitsu Imai.
For Tapié, Gutai, with their innovative and dynamic gestural and material approach to painting, was the ideal partner to prove the global relevance of Informel.
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.
[1]: 98–119 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 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.
They have long traditional significance and serve as a ritualistic social interaction, which reflects the Gutai goal of giving spirit to the typically inanimate.
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.
[1]: 54–61 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 a global new trend towards the integration of technology, kinetics, natural elements, and electric light in art.
[23]: 19–23 [1]: 127–128 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 the supervision of Yoshihara and his son Michio.
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.
Furthermore, on three successive days during 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.
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.
One thing Yoshihara did to try to avoid derivative accusations 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.
[28]: 47–54 Gutai work made from bodily processes did find inspiration in Jackson Pollock's drip paintings, yet expanded on these concepts drastically.
[35] 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.