Nothing is better than walking into a museum with visitors lying on the floor. The entrance to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s exhibition Gutai: Splendid Playground was not filled with performers or installation actors, instead museumgoers- both tourists and academics – splayed on the ground in order to get a better view of the installation hanging from the ceiling. All at once, and from every level and angle in the main rotunda, visitors are confronted with the celebration of Japanese modern art. From February 15-May 8, 2013, the Guggenheim Museum bursts with incredibly playful and innovative installations, sculptures, performances and paintings that will make you reconsider your preconceived notions of modern art hung in museums. Painted linen and canvases float off of walls, colossal plastic tubes filled with colored water stretch and intertwine overhead, and a red cube is accessible for entrance into a state of pure color; and this is just enough of art to list to whet your artistic appetite. This diverse list of works is especially fitting since Japan’s most influential avant-garde collective of the postwar era, The Gutai Art Association (active 1954-1972), also known as simply Gutai, tried to create and spread creative freedom through their art.
As you walk up the ramps, you will be walking in stride with the group’s founder Yoshihara Jirō, who will take you back to a time before Andy Warhol was mainstream. Since the group’s founding in 1954, with its Gutai Manifesto and its abolishment of the paintbrush (and its academic traditions), each Gutai member screams with individuality but also works in correlation with one another. Their strategic use of publications and outdoor installations enabled them to infiltrate into Japanese culture, and soon Western art, too. Decades later, the Gutai work still feels avant-garde. You will take more than one double-take on each piece of art and sometimes question aloud: Are those really footprints on this canvas? Am I really allowed to draw on that wooden board? The invitations that the museum offers continually and consistently will enable the viewer to not just view the art, but also to participate with it.
After meeting with Ming Tiampo, co-curator of the exhibition, I became better acquainted with the art inside the walls of the museum. Although the art tried to break down the walls of its society, the art can now serve as a didactic experience for its New York visitors. Tiampo stresses the importance of the group’s publication. Its accessibility and wide-ranging audience touched, especially in relation to the response to the war. This is displayed throughout the museum’s use of wall text, split into sections and using words of the group to emphasize that Gutai was not just a precursor to contemporary art but an important movement in its own right. Tiampo explained that after World War II, nobody could trust human thought. They could only trust bodies, matter and mud. The name “Gutai” literally means “concreteness” and this highlights their choice of materials and associations with art. Gutai members wanted to execute the paintbrush and its association with control. So, they decided to use their bodies, but some artists used glass bottles filled with paint or toy cars with ink attached to it. Mud and body being used as artistic media is especially seen in Shiraga Kazuo’s Challenging Mud, 1955- the artist creates his piece by rolling around and kicking and punching the mud on the ground. The violence and beauty in the piece references the war, but also the future of modern art.
