Gutai Art Association

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The Gutai Art Association (具体美術協会, Gutai Bijutsu Kyōkai, or, short, Gutai) was a Japanese avant-garde artist group founded in the Hanshin region by young artists under the leadership of the painter Jirō Yoshihara in Ashiya, Japan, in 1954. It operated until shortly after Yoshihara's death in 1972.

The group, today one of the most internationally-recognized instances of 20th century Japanese art, is best known for the broad range of experimental art forms combining painting with performance, conceptual, interactive, site-specific, theatrical and installation artworks, which its members explored in unconventional venues such as public parks and on stage. The members’ engagement with the relationship between spirit, human body and material, often concretized in artistic methods that involved the artist’s body and violent gestures.

Fueled by Yoshihara’s ambitions, global scope and strategic awareness, Gutai’s exhibitions and publications reached audiences around the world, realizing what Yoshihara called an “international common ground” of art.^{[1]: 2, 76} Gutai exchanged and collaborated with many artists, art critics and curators from Europe, the US and South Africa, among them the French art critic Michel Tapié and the artists he promoted, art dealers Martha Jackson in New York and Rodolphe Stadler in Paris, the Dutch artist group Nul, the German artist group Zero, and individual artists including John Cage, Christo Coetzee, Merce Cunningham, Paul Jenkins, Ray Johnson, Isamu Noguchi, and Robert Rauschenberg. Until the group’s dissolution in 1972 following Yoshihara’s death, around 60 artists were involved as members.

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. While Gutai works are recognized for anticipating ideas and approaches of European and US-American art of the 1960s, such as performance, happening, pop, minimal, conceptual, environmental and land art, Gutai artists referred to a broader understanding of picturing embodied in the Japanese term e (picture), which allowed them to overcome conventions of painting.