Artists › Kazuo Shiraga › Articles
Available articles about Kazuo Shiraga
- 1. Kazuo Shiraga: Japanese artist, one of the of the "Zero Group"
- 2. Kazuo Shiraga: Avant-garde artist who painted barefoot and hanging from a rope
- 3. Philippe Vergne discusses Kazuo Shiraga's Untitled (1959)
Kazuo Shiraga: Japanese artist, one of the of the "Zero Group"
From The Times
June 17, 2008
Kazuo Shiraga was a distinguished Japanese avant-garde artist noted for his unusual method: using his own body to apply paint to the canvas. Revolutionary in the 1950s, this technique now seems to anticipate later international developments in performance art and conceptual art.
Born in Hyogo Prefecture in Western Japan, Shiraga initially studied Japanese-style painting at the Kyoto City Specialist School of Arts (now the Kyoto City University of Arts).
After graduating in 1948, however, he gravitated towards Western styles, taking up oil painting. In the aftermath of Japan's wartime defeat, the time was ripe for iconoclasm, and in 1952 he became a founder member, along with Akira Kanayama, Saburo Murakami and Keiko Tanaka, of the "Zero Group", so named because of the artists' belief that every work of art is created from nothing.
By 1955, he and his fellow Zero Group artists had joined a more significant avant-garde movement: the Gutai Art Association, led by Osaka-based artist Jiro Yoshihara, who encouraged his fellows "to create paintings of a kind that nobody has ever seen before". The word "gutai" means "concrete" or "embodiment", and the movement sought to avoid both social engagement and pure abstraction, seeking instead "to combine human creative ability with the characteristics of the material".
Shiraga's contribution to this movement rested in his uniquely physical involvement in the creation of his artworks. The medium for much of his early work was clay, and at the first Gutai exhibition in 1955, he presented a famous performance entitled Challenge to the Mud, in which he writhed in and wrestled with a truckload of clay and cement until overcome by exhaustion. Subsequently, he began to use his own body as a substitute for a brush, painting directly with his hands, head and feet.
His most characteristic technique, first displayed at the second Gutai exhibition in 1956, entailed pouring paint onto a canvas on the floor, and making strokes with his feet while hanging and swinging from ropes suspended from the ceiling. Thus, his work incorporated the choreography and random motions of his body into the design, a fact which gave his work its distinctive visual dynamism and its characteristic bold arcs and slashes of colour. Shiraga commented that he hoped that the finished painting would display "traces of action carried out with speed".
During the Sixties Shiraga occasionally experimented with new techniques and new implements, for instance, painting with wooden boards, and creating a number of fan-shaped objects in paper. Otherwise, however, his technique and style changed little through his 50-year career. Indeed, despite the physical demands of the process, he continued to paint with his feet into old age. Nor was his artistic career interrupted by his decision to become a Buddhist monk in 1971.
Shiraga was generally considered the most distinguished artist to emerge from the Gutai Art Association, and in his later years, as his reputation grew, he was the subject of various exhibitions both in Japan and in European countries. In late 2007, only months before his death, he was honored with a substantial exhibition in Britain, at the Annely Juda Fine Art Gallery in London. He is survived by his wife Fujiko, also an artist and former member of the Gutai group.
Kazuo Shiraga, artist, was born in 1924. He died on April 8, 2008, aged 83.
Source : www.timesonline.co.uk
Kazuo Shiraga: Avant-garde artist who painted barefoot and hanging from a rope
Friday, 25 April 2008
By Charles Darwent
The Independent
The artist Jiro Yoshihara may have been a touch mean-spirited when he sniffed that Kazuo Shiraga was "nobody if he didn't paint with his feet", but history has taken much the same view. In May 1957, Shiraga, dressed in a red Pinocchio suit, suspended himself by a rope from the ceiling of a gallery in Osaka and, dangling in space, began to kick oil paint around on a piece of paper lying on the floor. The resultant image was, roughly speaking, an action painting, although of a highly specialised kind. For all that came afterwards, this was to be the genre of work for which Shiraga would be remembered, the defining moment of his art.
The show - "Art Using the Stage" - in which the event took place was the second by a recently formed group of Japanese avant-gardists called the Gutai. (The word translates roughly as "concrete", in the sense of concrete poetry.) Although Shiraga was one of Gutai's founders and its artistic leading light, the group was bankrolled and run by Yoshihara, the oldest and richest of its 11 members. In the tradition of Japanese art, Yoshihara was the Gutai's master and sage: it was his urging to make art "of a kind that no one has ever seen before" that led to Shiraga's first foot-painting performance, which he called Sambaso Super-Modern.
At the original Gutai show, held in Tokyo two years before, Shiraga had staged an action called Challenge to Mud which consisted of the artist hurling himself into a pile of clay on a stage and wrestling it into sculptural shapes. Although Yoshihara had insisted that the performance was what mattered and that any physical remnants were mere "residue", Shiraga was careful to preserve these body-sculptures, as he was his later foot-paintings on paper. Excited by the critical acclaim for these, he began to work on canvas from 1959 onwards, hanging from a rope in his own studio rather than in front of an audience. This pro-object heresy irked Yoshihara, although it also paved the way for Shiraga's international success in the 1960s.
As Mary McCarthy had remarked of American action painting, "You can't hang an event on a wall." By contrast, Shiraga's canvases could be hung, and were. They could also be bought by the French critic Michel Tapié, and shipped to Europe and, eventually, the United States. When the Sixth Gutai Art Exhibition took place in September 1958, it was held not in Tokyo or Osaka, but at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. The work Shiraga showed there was far more solid and thought-through than before, its sophistication marking an end to the nihilistic spontaneity that had marked the Gutai experiment.
By the end of the Sixties, the work of the group as a whole had become stale and repetitive. Numbers dwindled with in-fighting and desertion, and when Jiro Yoshihara died suddenly in 1972, the Gutai quietly disbanded.
In many ways, the group's story paralleled that of post-war Japan in its struggle between tradition and modernity. Shiraga himself had trained in Kyoto as a classical Japanese painter; Yoshihara's distaste for objects (and his role as Gutai's sage and master) arguably had its roots in Buddhist thinking.
There were cultural echoes, too, of Japan's commercial success in Western markets. Given the vogue for Eastern philosophy among European and US artists of the late 1950s, the work of the Gutai was bound to be warmly received in the West, and it was.
Even if he did not use the word himself, Shiraga's rope-hanging performances were "Happenings"; they preceded those of Allan Kaprow, the alleged inventor of the genre, by at least two years. (Kaprow owned up to having seen Gutai performances in New York, and acknowledged his debt to them.) Yves Klein, too, may have taken Shiraga on board, Klein's body paintings of 1958 on bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Japanese artist's.
While Jackson Pollock had pioneered action painting in the years before Gutai's founding, he was certainly aware of the group's work. Copies of its manifesto, published in English in the Japanese art magazine Geijutsu Shincho were found in Pollock's library after his death in August 1956. And Shiraga's legacy lives on most vividly in the work of a younger Japanese artist called Yoko Ono, and in the madcap, performance-based work of the Fluxus group - the arguable font of all modern conceptualism.
For all this, Shiraga and his group are largely forgotten. Neither the Tate nor the Museum of Modern Art in New York holds any of his works, and it is a decade since a major Gutai exhibition was held in Europe, at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. None of this is likely to have bothered Kazuo Shiraga very much. In 1971, shortly before Yoshihara's death, he had entered the Buddhist priesthood at the Enryaku Monastery on Mount Hiei, near Kyoto. Under his monk's name, Sodo, he continued to paint until the end of his life; a show of his late works, held last December at the Annely Juda gallery in London, showed an energy undiminished by age.
Source: www.independent.co.uk
Philippe Vergne discusses Kazuo Shiraga's Untitled (1959)
Author Philippe Vergne
Date September 1999
Institution Walker Art Center
When Kazuo Shiraga started to work post-war, too in the 1950s, with the Gutai Group in Japan, in the same way then, the Viennese artists from the Aktionist Movement were considered as one of the first modern movements in Vienna, we can think that Gutai could be considered as the first modern movement in the history of twentieth century art in Japan. It was a group of people in the same way they were willing to challenge painting through action.
As you can see in this painting by Kazuo Shiraga, it's something which is related to action. The painting is a trace, is a record, of something which was done live. In the same way that Otto Muehl is no more about representation, it's about a dynamic movement, just to inform you about the way the painting was made, Shiraga was painting with his feet, which can seem funny but it was a statement to show how the painting could ...testify of something which was linked to the body of the artist, which is important in this painting, in this movement in that we are dealing with a group of artists who are offering from a total other part of the world something which was challenging a modern model.
It's important for us also to have this painting in the institution, because it's not Pollock but it's something which is challenging Pollock, which is offering an option to Pollock. It's linked to performing art among all the activities that the Gutai Group was doing: performing art, theater, music. People like composer Takehisa Kosugi ... all these people were working together.
When we know the history of the Walker with performing art ... we know, for example, that Kosugi is now the official composer for Merce Cunningham. You have an history which is coming together through these different names. I think it's also an important piece for the Walker because the Walker will do, in a few months, a Gutai retrospective and, also, because if we start to look at Gutai, you cannot take away what was the historical situation, what was also literature in Japan, and I think when you look at this kind of painting you cannot not think about someone like Mishima. And when you look at Muehl, for me, it's the same thing, you can think about the same political protest.
