A return to utopian and anti-capitalist authenticity?
In the light of two upcoming Gutai-centered shows and auctions in Hong Kong this fall, Art Radar investigates the resurrection of this historic art movement.
Yoshihara Jiro, ‘Circle’, 1971. Image courtesy Sotheby’s Hong Kong.
A giant reawakens
In February 2013, a groundbreaking Guggenheim show entitled “Gutai: Splendid Playground” disrupted a longstanding narrative in the history of contemporary art. Deconstructing the myth of Europe being the uncontested epicentre for modernist artistic innovation, an obscure second-tier city in Japan, Ashiya, revealed itself as equally if not more important to global artistic creation in the 1950s to 1960s postwar period.
A besotted international art world rediscovered the enormous allure and far-reaching importance of the 1955-1972 Gutai movement in Japan, and commenced a frenzied scramble for coveted Gutai works – a scramble that has escalated exponentially until this very day. As Pascal de Sarthe, founder of de Sarthe Gallery, recounts to blouinartinfo:
10 years ago, a great painting by Kazuo Shiraga was $50,000, while today the same painting sells for $3 million [...] The highest prices stayed between $400,000-1,000,000 until November 2013, when a major painting from 1961 sold at auction in New York for $27,000 short of $4 million. That happened seven months after the Guggenheim exhibition ended. In 2013, three great paintings each sold for between $2 to 4 million. Last year, 3 paintings from the 60s each sold for between $4 to 5.3 million, the latest breaking the auction record in Paris.
Tsuyoshi Maekawa, ‘Untitled’, 1975, acrylic, saw on burlap, 160 x 125 cm. Image courtesy de Sarthe Gallery.
Riding on this surge of global fascination, de Sarthe Gallery in Hong Kong is launching a timely and cutting-edge survey exhibition of the historical movement in October 2015. In addition to well-known first generation Gutai artists including Shiraga, Shozo Shimamoto, Atsuko Tanaka and Chiyu Uemae, the show introduces important works by as yet lesser-known second generation artists such as Tsuyoshi Maekawa. Pascal de Sarthe tells Art Radar about Maekawa’s rising market importance:
Major Gutai and post-war art collectors have been focusing on Maekawa works since the Guggenheim exhibition and we are very fortunate to have a selection of great paintings from the 60’s and 70’s in our exhibition [...] Maekawa is known for his works using burlap, a woven cloth created from hemp fibers with a coarse large weave that was usually used for bags of grain. He would paint on it, using its rough, natural character to draw attention to the work’s materiality.
The forgotten master
Also in October 2015, Sotheby’s Hong Kong is hosting a much-anticipated sale entitled “Full Circle – Yoshihara Jiro Collection” as part of their fall auctions. Following Sotheby’s March 2015 selling exhibition “Avant Garde Asia: Gutai and its Legacy”, which introduced Gutai to Hong Kong audiences, the upcoming pioneering sale spotlights for the first time Gutai’s iconic yet long forgotten founder.
Evelyn Lin, Head of the Contemporary Asian Art Department at Sotheby’s, explains to Art Radar:
With the international market gaining a more mature understanding of [...] [Gutai], interest in [...] artists such as Shiraga Kazuo, Motonaga Sadamasa, Shimamoto Shozo and Tanaka Atsuko are soaring and auction records are being rewritten season by season. While the market of its disciples is thriving, that of its grand master is under-promoted and under-studied. Thus far, the market for Yoshihara has trailed behind that of his students – in large part due to a lack of knowledge and exposure [...] This collection thus has as much a commercial purpose as it does an educational one.
Portrait of Yoshihara Jiro. Image courtesy Sotheby’s and Tokyo Gallery.
A wealthy industrialist and food-oils millionaire, Yoshihara was simultaneously an eccentric painter and guru who encouraged his followers to rebel against wartime autocracy. According to blouinartinfo, Yoshihara’s motto was: “Never imitate others! Make something that has never existed!” The Economist writes:
In place of the wartime slogan, “one hundred million hearts beating as one”, Yoshihara championed an art of radical individualism summed up by his battle cry: “Create what has never been done before!”
Annihilation and innovation: What was Gutai?
Under Yoshihara’s leadership, Gutai lasted for 18 years from 1954 to 1972 as “a coterie of roughly 59 artists grappling with the annihilation of the past [and] looking towards the glories and hidden trappings of an imagined technological future”. Experimenting with and forging radical approaches such as non-art materialism, spontaneity, performance and unconventional exhibition spaces, Gutai rejected all tradition in order to sever art’s complicity with institutional systems of wealth and power. Hyperallergic writes:
No movement was more primal than Gutai (which translates as “concreteness”), for no other culture on earth had been incinerated by the nuclear bomb. Rising phoenix-like from the ashes of Allied occupation, they upended convention through remarkable developments in painting, performance, installation, experimental film, and sound, kinetic, light, and environmental art.
Kazuo Shiraga in his studio, 1960. Image courtesy Amagasaki Cultural Center.
As Sotheby’s recalls, Gutai was initially dismissed as derivative of Abstract Expressionism. However, renewed studies have revealed that Gutai in fact predated many of its European and American counterparts. Furthermore, the word ‘gutai’, meaning ‘concreteness’, was chosen by Yoshihara precisely “to signify the opposite of abstraction – or a rebellion against the modernist embrace of abstract painting”. Contextual studies of Gutai’s political, cultural and intellectual backgrounds shed light on its unique revolutionary power which proposed a potent dialogue between viewer and artwork, man and material. Gutai’s manifesto reads, as quoted by Hyperallergic:
[...] materials such as paint, pieces of cloth, metals, clay or marble are loaded with false significance by human hand [...] so that [...] they take on the appearance of something else. Under the cloak of an intellectual aim, the materials have been completely murdered and can no longer speak to us. Lock these corpses into their tombs. Gutai art does not change the material but brings it to life. Gutai art does not falsify the material. In Gutai art the human spirit and the material reach out their hands to each other, even though they are otherwise opposed to each other.
A transcendent heroism
At the centre of Sotheby’s October Yoshihara sale is the guru’s celebrated final “Circle” series, which comprises arresting works featuring large calligraphic circles painted on rich monochrome backgrounds. Evelyn Lin tells blouinartinfo that the iconic circles represent the spirit of freedom, and that Gutai
transcends boundaries between East and West, using art as a universal language [...] an embodiment of Gutai as an ‘international common ground’ for avant-garde art.
Yoshihara Jiro, ‘Circle’, circa 1961-1963. Image courtesy Sotheby’s Hong Kong.
Perhaps even more fundamental than Gutai’s transcendence of geographical and cultural boundaries is its transcendence beyond today’s commodified and market-driven materialism. Notwithstanding the irony of its current soaring market prices, the return of Gutai represents a return to utopian and anti-capitalist authenticity. As Pascal de Sarthe tells blouinartinfo, “[a]t a time when the market dictates art history, it is refreshing to see that art history can also dictate the market”. The Economist writes that Shigara’s works “not only ooze [but] ooze authenticity–a precious commodity in an increasingly jaded global art world”. In other words, Gutai great allure lies in its:
refus[al] to succumb to the demands of capitalism [and its commitment to art] that could not possibly be bought or sold, that offered nothing but the spectacle of a heroic struggle against meaninglessness. It seems that many well-heeled collectors today find such total commitment irresistible.
Michele Chan
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Related Topics: Japanese artists, painting, performance, installation, gallery shows, museum shows, auctions, globalisation of art, Asia expands, events in Hong Kong
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