He worked with a wide variety of techniques, such as poking holes in layered newspaper, throwing bottles of paint at canvases, experimenting with film and stage performances, and composing sound art.
Indeed, when Yoshihara turned to focus more on painting, upon his meeting with the French art critic Michel Tapié, Shimamoto continued to urge the leader to pursue this direction, wanting to work with Allan Kaprow, for example.
[13] In 1954, Shimamoto participated in the “Second Genbi Exhibition,” showcasing the artist of the Gendai Bijutsu Kondankai (Contemporary Art Discussion Group) started by Hiroshi Muramatsu and strongly influenced by Yoshihara.
[6][3] Shimamoto was responsible for proposing the name Gutai, translated from Japanese as “concrete” or “embodied.”[5][14][10] Of this name he has explained, “We did not want to show our feeling indirectly or abstractly.”[8] Shimamoto is also responsible for approaching members of the Zero-kai group, Kazuo Shiraga, Saburo Murakami, Atsuko Tanaka, and Akira Kanayama, to join Gutai after some of the initial members left.
[11] One aspect of the elitist attitude toward art to which Shimamoto set himself in opposition seems to be the myth of artistic genius and intentionality against which he utilized accidental and incidental forms of mark-making.
“I think that superior paintings can be made by paint spilt over after accidentally dropping a ball from the second floor and knocking over a can of paint… in that act there is no superfluous action or ambition.”[19] This rejection of the conventional valorization of the artist or the artwork can also be read when he writes that, “When one’s irrepressible excitement is expressed, and it is linked to the past through direct expression, the value of the art lies not in the artist nor in the work.
It lies in the will to create.”[22] As art historian Joan Kee notes, Shimamoto's activities in the early years of Gutai are indicative of the group's “a singular kind of expression” that is neither easily categorizable as Action Painting nor ‘Happening.’[23] This experimentation with unconventional materials and methods as a means to painterly originality continued in Shimamoto's early Gutai work.
[6] In October of that same year, he produced Breaking Open the Object in which he filled glass bottles with paint and shattered them on an unstretched canvas beneath him.
[21] In an interview with Lorenzo Mango, Shimamoto describes one impetus for his initial experiments that led to the use of cannons and the “Bottle Crash” method.
As opposed to the athleticism required or Kazuo Shiraga and Saburo Murakami’s activities, Shimamoto says, “I, being physically weaker than them, thought of throwing bottles filled with color paint or making it explode with a cannon.”[25] While he initially was frustrated that media outlets would cover his unconventional process but take less interest in the final painting that resulted, he “started to think differently, both by proposing ideas to change the setting, and by taking on a certain behavior for those occasions.”[25] Following this he notes, “So I can say that the relation between my work and my events have been taught to me by journalists.”[25] This thinking around an active relation to painting was brought to the stage for Gutai’s May 1957 exhibition Gutai Art on Stage at Sankei Hall in Osaka.
[28][11] Due to a lack of funds, Shimamoto had one of his junior high school students from his teaching job take discarded film from his work in a movie theater.
[29] Michel Tapié, in his 1957 text “A Mental Reckoning of my First Trip to Japan” originally published in Bijutsu Techo, singled out Shimamoto from the Gutai group along with Yoshihara, Kazuo Shiraga and Atusko Tanaka as “four artists who should appear alongside the most established international figures.”[30] Shimamoto expressed his belief that Gutai would have been more original and experimental had Taipé not influenced the group's direction so heavily.
This has been attributed to meeting Byron Black in Japan, a Texas video artist who had been involved with the alternative space Western Front where much mail art was produced.
Of the annual children’s painting exhibition in Ashiya (founded 1949) Shimamoto writes, “Immediately after the war, we members of Gutai created several works using new methods.
Describing a video of Picasso artistically arranging terracotta pipes found lying in the street, he notes how “he enjoyed himself with the naturalness of a child, without hesitation.”[38] This he links to the importance of useless things in a society mediated by overly rational and teleological conventions of thought,[38] or, as Romano Gasparotti has phrased it, “a) a form of expression not yet conditioned by cultural patterns and preestablished forms, b) holistic attention to the world understood as an undivided whole and which was therefore in contrast with the hyper-analytical attitude typical of the technical-scientific mentality capable only of separating, dividing, and dissecting.”[39] The importance of this direct engagement with material in art can be applied to the kinds of methods that Shimamoto sought in his practice.
Shimamoto's post-Gutai career was also marked by his passion for world peace activism, inspired in part by a visit in 1986 from Bern Porter.
[25] In a work produced in 1999, Heiwa no Akashi (A Proof of Peace), he dropped glass bottles of paint on a concrete slab while lifted in midair at Shin Nishinomiya Yacht Harbor.
[21] Shimamoto, suspended by a crane from a harness, dropped “strange spheres made up of numerous plastic cups full of coloured paint” onto the canvas and piano below.
[2] He received the competition prize at the 9th Contemporary Art Exhibition of Japan in 1969, a Dark Blue Ribbon Medal in 1999, and the Hyōgo Prefectural Cultural Award in 2000.