Kazuo Shiraga

signed in Japanese and dated 1960.9; signed in English, titled in Japanese and English on the reverse, framed

Private Asian Collection
Sotheby's, Paris, 7 December, 2010, lot 26
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

 

 

Kazuo Shiraga: Painting Born Out of Fighting, Toyoshina, Azumino Municipal Museum of Modern Art; Amagazaki Cultural Center; Yokosuka Museum of Art, Japan, 2009, p. 126

This work is generally in good condition. Upon close inspection, there are minor craquelures and paint losses along the left edge, with the most noticeable one measuring ca. 2cm wide. Few areas of pinpoint paint losses have been consolidated and cleaned.
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“Let me do it with my hands, with my fingers. Then, as I ran and ran, believing that I was moving forward, it occurred to me: Why not feet? Why don’t I paint with my feet?”

Water Margin and the Ethics of Individualism
Kazuo Shiraga

In 1955, the artist Kazuo Shiraga staged one of the most iconic performances of postwar art history. In the landmark performance Challenging Mud, Shiraga took his painting practice, done with his feet, to its logical conclusion, throwing his entire body into the act of expression. After creating a pile of wall mud (kabetsuchi) and cement, he stripped down to his shorts and leapt in. In the struggle that ensued,  Shiraga punched, kicked, threw, and kneaded the mud with his entire body, creating a composition, a “painting” that he left on display for the duration of the 1st Gutai Art Exhibition at the Ohara Kaikan Hall in Tokyo (1955). 

The brutal energy of Challenging Mud animates Shiraga’s paintings before 1970,¹ pulsing through arteries of paint worked directly on canvas by his feet as they slid and twisted across the surface in a dance between violence and beauty. This forceful expression of self was an assertion of the importance of individualism and independent thinking to Shiraga, and was in part a stance against the group-think of Japanese wartime Fascism. In an article entitled “The Establishment of the Individual,” Shiraga explained that “without establishing psychic individualism, we cannot establish any worthwhile culture for the whole. In politics, Totalitarianism fails; in culture, that which is unfree and akin to Totalitarianism must be purged.“²

It is therefore particularly significant that Shiraga created a series of paintings named after characters from the Water Margin, a classical Chinese story about 108 hero outlaws fighting for the cause of justice and battling a corrupt government. He began the series in 1959, and completed the last painting in the series in 2001. Each painting in the series was named after a character from the Water Margin, and was not named until after the painting was completed, after its character had been fully revealed. The significance of this series has long been understood as a straightforward allegory of masculinity and heroism. Interpreted in the context of Shiraga’s writings about individualism, however, the Water Margin’s violent anti-corruption narrative takes on the character of political critique, and serves as a conceptual frame for understanding the paintings in this series.

Chitaisei Honkōshin (Lot 137) is a painting from the Water Margin series, and is named after the warrior Tong Meng’s star of destiny. Tong Meng, one of the Water Margin’s most ethical characters, was a hero of the 69^th rank whose nickname was River Churning Clam. He was a salt trader who fought in the Liangshan navy, and was an excellent swimmer and boatman. It is perhaps because of the painting’s prominent blue section, evoking water quenching the churning red of the work’s lower register that Shiraga named it after Tong Meng. 

Despite its possible narrative interpretation, Chitaisei Honkōshin is, like all of Shiraga’s foot paintings, primarily about an assertion of physicality and a recourse to the body as source of expression. For Shiraga, the physical body was the locus of the individual, and the paintings a partnership between the body and the material, allowing the “artist and the material to shake hands with one another.”³ As for many postwar artists internationally, such as Jackson Pollock and Jean Fautrier, this stance was an embrace of painting’s most fundamental elements and a refutation of ideology that had taken humanity to the brink of disaster in the last war. Moreover, the violence of Shiraga’s work itself was a response to the war, and an exploration of the outer limits of human affect.

Painted in 1960, Chitaisei Honkōshin is a relatively early work in Shiraga’s oeuvre, and part of the first group of paintings that he did in the Water Margin series. It is similar in scale and ambition to Chikatsusei Maunkinshi at the Art Institute of Chicago, also from the Water Margin series and painted in the same year. Chitaisei Honkōshin is an unusual painting for its period, in that it departs from the typical red and black palette of his early works, and experiments with a juxtaposition of blue, which becomes much more prominent in his work after 1970. Although the work foreshadows Shiraga’s celestial turn, it remains rooted in his early obsession with the materiality of violence.

Shiraga was born in 1924 in Amagasaki, just west of Osaka, to a kimono merchant family. His passion for Chinese literature and painting began in middle school, when he was introduced to Japanese  translations of classical Chinese literature. At the age of eighteen, he went to the Kyoto Municipal Special School of Painting and specialized in Nihonga (Japanesestyle painting using ink or colour on silk or paper). One year before the end of the war, Shiraga was drafted into the imperial army, but was never deployed abroad. Instead, he tended to the wounded at Osaka Castle, where he experienced the unsettling effects of violence first-hand; an experience that would color his artistic practice for many years.

After the war, Shiraga returned to painting, and began participating in two groups, Shin Seisaku Kyōkai (New Production Association) and Gendai Bijutsu Kondankai (Contemporary Art Discussion Group). In 1952, Shiraga formed Zero-kai (Zero Society) with artists Kanayama Akira and Murakami Saburō. Shortly thereafter, Tanaka Atsuko also became a member. It is in the context of Zero-kai that Shiraga first began making abstract paintings, painting first with a palette knife, then with his hands and fingers in an attempt to free himself from his Nihonga training. In 1954, he began painting with his feet, describing the revelation as follows:

“When I discovered what might be called my own shishitsu (character), when I began to contemplate taking off all ready-made clothes and becoming naked, forms were smashed into smithereens, techniques slipped off my palette knife and broke into two. An austere road to originality—run forward, run and run. It won’t matter if I fall down. Before I knew it, my palette knife was replaced by a piece of wood, which I then impatiently threw away. Let me do it with my hands, with my fingers. Then, as I ran and ran, believing that I was moving forward, it occurred to me: Why not feet? Why don’t I paint with my feet?”⁴

In 1955, Shiraga and his Zero-kai colleagues were recruited to join the Gutai group. Gutai was an art movement active from 1954-1972 in western Japan, whose work in painting, performance, installation, conceptualism and participatory art were on the forefront of their generation internationally. The group comprised 59 members over 18 years, and was led by the charismatic Yoshihara Jirō, a senior artist who was known for his Surrealist-inflected abstractions before the war.

After having spent the war in retreat, Yoshihara emerged on the post-war scene with utopian ideas of individualism and internationalism. Yoshihara led Gutai with the exhortation, “Do what no-one has done before!”⁵ stressing both the ethical and artistic importance of defining a distinctive voice. For Gutai, whose name means concrete, as opposed to abstract or figurative, making art that addressed the postwar world necessitated experimenting with new materials and techniques—not the materials of high art, but rather the stuff of everyday life: Gutai works used old newspapers, sheet metal, masking tape, synthetic fabrics, wood, inner tubing, light-bulbs, plastic sheeting, water, mud, sand, light, smoke, and other materials.⁶ Even when they used paint, their techniques were irreverent. While Shiraga applied paint using his feet, Kanayama Akira used an automatic toy car, and Shimamoto Shōzō threw glass bottles that shattered bursts of color onto the canvas.

More powerful than his words, however, were the innovative exhibitions that Yoshihara designed to provoke Gutai artists to rethink their artistic assumptions. Set in parks, in the sky, and on the stage, their unusual formats lifted art out of formal exhibition spaces and pushed Gutai artists to think differently about space, time, and medium. Yoshihara explained in 1958, “I have been a teacher who teaches nothing… My role, if anything, has been to introduce to them one new form of manifestation after another.”⁷

Shiraga flourished within this collective culture of creativity, experimenting with new artistic strategies and writing important discursive treatises about his artistic practice for the Gutai journal. In dialogue with Yoshihara’s revolutionary exhibition formats, Shiraga created pioneering works outdoor and on the stage such as Challenging Mud (1955) and Ultramodern Sanbasō (1957).

Shiraga was also the greatest beneficiary of Yoshihara’s visionary internationalism, which extended the group’s networks to four continents.⁸ As the group’s best-known artist, Shiraga’s work was included in all of the group’s legendary exhibitions abroad. As a result, by 1965, his work had been exhibited in Tokyo, New York, Paris, Turin, Amsterdam and Capetown.

The significance of Shiraga’s groundbreaking work and global reach is only now beginning to be understood by scholars, curators, and collectors internationally. Until quite recently, the Gutai group’s legendary activities were obscured by politicized narratives of art history that focused solely on the putative centers of art production: Paris before 1945, and New York after. However, with the growth of world art history and the importance of experimental practices in contemporary art, it is not long before this extraordinary artist’s work is recognized as one of the leading voices of his generation anywhere in the world.

1 In 1970, Shiraga becomes a monk of the Tendai sect at Enryakuji. After this, his painting takes on an equally energetic, but more peaceful sensibility.
2 Shiraga Kazuo, “Kotai no kokuritsu,” [The establishment of the individual] Gutai 4 (July 1956), unpaginated. Translated by Ogawa Kikuko and reprinted in Ming Tiampo and Alexandra Munroe, Gutai: Splendid Playground, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2013), 279-280. I elaborate upon this argument in much greater detail in Ming Tiampo, “‘Create what has never been done before!’ Historicising Gutai Discourses of Originality,” Third Text 21, no. 6 (November 2007): 689–706.
3 Yoshihara Jirō “Gutai bijutsu sengen” [Gutai Art Manifesto], Geijutsu Shinchō 7 (December 1956): 202-4. Reprinted and translated by Reiko Tomii in Ming Tiampo and Alexandra Munroe, Gutai: Splendid Playground, exh. cat. (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2013), 18-19.
4 Shiraga Kazuo, “Kōi koso” [Action only], Gutai 3 (1955): n.p, translated and reprinted in Reiko Tomii, Kazuo Shiraga (New York: McCaffrey Fine Art, 2009), 60.
5 Yoshihara Jirō, “Gutai Gurūpu no 10 nen: sono ichi” [10 years of the Gutai Group: part one], Bijutsu Jyānaru 38 (March 1963). Reprinted in Gutai Shiryōshū: Dokyumento Gutai, 1954-1972/ Document Gutai (Ashiya: Ashiya City Museum of Art & History, 1993), 324.
6 The name Gutai was coined by Shimamoto in 1954.
7 Yoshihara Jirō, “On the ‘International Art of a New Era’ dedicated to ‘Osaka International Festival,’” trans. Kuroda Jyūichi, Gutai 9 (April 1958): 7.
8 For more on Gutai’s internationalism, see Ming Tiampo, Gutai: Decentering Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Ming Tiampo
Associate Professor, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada
Co-Curator, Gutai: Splendid Playground, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
This essay was written as an appreciation to Sotheby’s for their charitable support of the Curatorial Studies Lecture Series at Carleton University.