Jiro Yoshihara installing the Gutai room at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1965
WHAT DOES “GUTAI” MEAN? |
In 1960 Henk Peeters visits Günther Uecker in Dusseldorf to discuss with him, Heinz Mack and Yves Klein. Yves Klein tells Peeters about an interesting group of artists with similar ideas in Japan. Klein promises Peeters that he will tell him more about this group after his planned visit to Japan. After Yves Klein dies Henk Peeters subsequently conducts his own research into the Japanese group, and invites them to participate in the second Nul exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. At the opening of the exhibition there was a tense situation between Henk Peeters and Rotraut Uecker, the widow of Yves Klein, as Peeters had placed a large balloon by the Japanese Gutai artist Akira Kanayama in the same space as the work of Yves Klein. What Henk Peeters didn’t know was that after many difficult questions about his sources of inspiration, Klein had decided to write a highly critical manifesto to clearly distance himself from the Japanese Gutai group. And what Henk Peeters and many other ZERO artists certainly didn’t know was that the leading members of the Gutai group had previously operated under the name ZERO. Until a few years ago, the combination of work by Yves Klein, the Gutai group and the international ZERO group was regarded as a groundless action of the “curator” Henk Peeters.
Works by Yves Klein and Gutai artist Akira Kanayama (ballon) at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1965
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The first time I heard about the Japanese was in the fall of 1960 in Dusseldorf.
Armando, Jan Henderikse (who still lived in Cologne at the time) and I were visiting Günther Uecker, when we met his sister Rotraut and her fiancé Yves Klein. It was not the first time I’d seen him, as we had discussed our exhibition plans several months earlier at his show at Larcade.
But now was the first time we talked about the Japanese. Yves didn’t know much about them, because when he was in Tokyo for his judo exams and simultaneously to exhibit, there was at most a spiritual kinship with the Japanese (he knew a lot about Zen philosophy) because it was 1953 and Gutai only began five years later.
But Klein was going to Tokyo for a solo exhibition (which would only open in 1962, four weeks after his sudden death) and he promised to give us a detailed report of what he could find out there.
It involved an international exhibition at the Stedelijk, about which I had already spoken with Sandberg and which would take place as the first “Nul” exhibition in 1962.
Yves would not participate then and the differences of opinion had already been clearly revealed to us. First of all, Yves had no wish to be hitched to the “ZERO” wagon and rejected this name as the title for the exhibition.
“ZERO,” embodied by Mack and Piene, sat sulking in a pub a few streets away, where we picked them up a few hours later after Klein had left.
So the dissolution of “ZERO” had actually already begun, though Mack and Piene were still sworn comrades (guideline for the art historian: ZERO existed from 1958–’62).
But back to the Japanese: when it became apparent that Sandberg did not have a penny to spend on the Nul exhibition, we abandoned the plan to invite them.
When De Wilde proved more forthcoming for the second Nul exhibition (1965), I got in touch, as I was already more familiar from the recently published book by Michel Tapié on “L’art Japonnais d’aujourd’hui,” which Mack had shown me.
Tapié had already been in Japan on several occasions and his first contact with Gutai was in 1957 when he visited them together with Georges Mathieu—who had just exhibited there—and was introduced by the Parisian Japanese Imai.
For those who wonder why this apostle of Tachism was interested in Gutai: the Japanese were also working in that style at the time. That’s why Tapié showed their work at Stadler and why during the installation of the exhibition Nul 1965, we looked a bit perplexed when all the Gutai crates contained oil paint, applied in drips and splashes to linen in frames.
What Gutai actually is became (slightly) clearer to us when I had some (arduous) conversations with Jiro Yoshihara in the restaurant of the Stedelijk, while dining during the installation of the Nul exhibition.
Small, slim, yellow and smiling through strong glasses, a mouth full of gold, a complete Japanese outfit like a mini camera, transistor radio and a son who looked not a year older.
Those conversations were extremely polite from his side, but offered little information.
Later, their New York congener Yayoi Kusama provided more gossip: he was immensely rich, had an oil factory in Osaka, put a lot of money into art because it was tax-deductible. I was unable to discover whether “Gutai” was a brand of edible oil or meant something purely cultural. I did, however, find out that they began in 1955 as a group of young artists around the purse of Yoshihara. They speak of him with great respect, as I experienced last year, for instance, during a TV-show in Bellevue when I met Murakami, who incidentally always answered in Japanese, which Kusama refused to translate, either because it did not concern her or the Japanese understood her just as poorly as we did when she spoke so-called English, however, Murakami kept saying: respectful greetings from the very respectful mister Yoshihara (which was imprinted in his mind in the expectation that this would open every door in Europe), for the rest he wrote everything down in his native language, which I then sent to the Japanese embassy for clarification, but never heard back from them, so I still don’t know what Gutai actually is.
What we saw in Tapié’s book were photos of an outdoor exhibition dedicated to the midsummer sun in the parks of Ashiya in 1955. Large nylon sheets were stretched slightly above the ground and moved by the wind; hanging between the trees were strips of polished metal and plastic tubes filled with colored water, wooden poles in which notches were cut with an axe, there were colored balls, in short: here was an exhibition with the integration of the art object in nature as its theme, as it would be understood only later in Europe. Nonetheless, the people who made this show (incl. Tanaka, Motonaga, Shimamoto, Murakami, who would exhibit such objects later at the Nul exhibition in Amsterdam) were painters, who made the Tachistic paintings common for that time. I only found out later that this playing with all kinds of materials, displayed in parks and intended to amuse people with movement and sound, is a centuries-old tradition. The lantern and the kite are not just children’s toys there, the playing continues of course, even after puberty.
Here it is clear to what extent we are actually dealing with a different culture. The pointless manipulation of useless things, which is essentially “play,” is something we are (still) unfamiliar with in Europe.
A Japanese man explained this to me on the basis of the relationship between men and women and from our side a somewhat excited curiosity about what Geishas actually are.
He explained to me that the difference between Japanese and Europeans is most clearly evident in this: a European heads directly to the end result and seeks to get such a lady in bed. A Japanese man doesn’t even get to that stage, because he already experiences so much with the game of tea drinking and chatting that this is often enough for him.
At school over there, the children waste precious time folding paper, creating joints without glue, constructing lanterns and kites, making letters that are not statements, or informing us about things that do not make us any wiser.
In that sense, a contemporary development in art suddenly demonstrates a strong relationship with what was already an ancient tradition for the Japanese: the game with visible things, the unprofitable optical communication, “op” and with us now also “art.” A wonderful idea from the first exhibition in the air: the sky festival above Osaka, where enormous objects hung from balloons, including a perforated canvas by Fontana.
In 1962 the Gutai Pinacotheca opened in Osaka and staged a sort of happening together with the Morita Dance Company under the title “Don’t worry, the moon won’t fall down,” with large illuminated puppets and huge plastic balloons.
The group has a constantly changing lineup; in Amsterdam we had objects by eight people, but their group exhibitions feature some thirty names.
Last year, the Orez Gallery in The Hague exhibited a small collection of their work, which revealed that they have also bid farewell to painting and now make objects that display striking similarities to our work from the ZERO era. It is unfortunate that Scheveningen missed the unique opportunity to see their work in large format on the pier, when people there canceled the exhibition “zero-op-zee.”
An exhibition of the unrealized projects, which the Orez Gallery presented anyway, showed designs which revealed that the Japanese would have shown their forte here. A great mix of the given elements: the water was hung in the air, the footpaths floated on balloons in the sea.
I hope that the Gutai group, now under more favorable conditions, receives the attention it deserves.
And our friend Jiro the praise.
You don’t organize something like that purely as an expense item, because if expenses are pointless they are not tax-deductible for us.
And that makes no sense.
Henk Peeters,
May 1967
Armando, Jan Henderikse (who still lived in Cologne at the time) and I were visiting Günther Uecker, when we met his sister Rotraut and her fiancé Yves Klein. It was not the first time I’d seen him, as we had discussed our exhibition plans several months earlier at his show at Larcade.
But now was the first time we talked about the Japanese. Yves didn’t know much about them, because when he was in Tokyo for his judo exams and simultaneously to exhibit, there was at most a spiritual kinship with the Japanese (he knew a lot about Zen philosophy) because it was 1953 and Gutai only began five years later.
But Klein was going to Tokyo for a solo exhibition (which would only open in 1962, four weeks after his sudden death) and he promised to give us a detailed report of what he could find out there.
It involved an international exhibition at the Stedelijk, about which I had already spoken with Sandberg and which would take place as the first “Nul” exhibition in 1962.
Yves would not participate then and the differences of opinion had already been clearly revealed to us. First of all, Yves had no wish to be hitched to the “ZERO” wagon and rejected this name as the title for the exhibition.
“ZERO,” embodied by Mack and Piene, sat sulking in a pub a few streets away, where we picked them up a few hours later after Klein had left.
So the dissolution of “ZERO” had actually already begun, though Mack and Piene were still sworn comrades (guideline for the art historian: ZERO existed from 1958–’62).
But back to the Japanese: when it became apparent that Sandberg did not have a penny to spend on the Nul exhibition, we abandoned the plan to invite them.
When De Wilde proved more forthcoming for the second Nul exhibition (1965), I got in touch, as I was already more familiar from the recently published book by Michel Tapié on “L’art Japonnais d’aujourd’hui,” which Mack had shown me.
Tapié had already been in Japan on several occasions and his first contact with Gutai was in 1957 when he visited them together with Georges Mathieu—who had just exhibited there—and was introduced by the Parisian Japanese Imai.
For those who wonder why this apostle of Tachism was interested in Gutai: the Japanese were also working in that style at the time. That’s why Tapié showed their work at Stadler and why during the installation of the exhibition Nul 1965, we looked a bit perplexed when all the Gutai crates contained oil paint, applied in drips and splashes to linen in frames.
What Gutai actually is became (slightly) clearer to us when I had some (arduous) conversations with Jiro Yoshihara in the restaurant of the Stedelijk, while dining during the installation of the Nul exhibition.
Small, slim, yellow and smiling through strong glasses, a mouth full of gold, a complete Japanese outfit like a mini camera, transistor radio and a son who looked not a year older.
Those conversations were extremely polite from his side, but offered little information.
Later, their New York congener Yayoi Kusama provided more gossip: he was immensely rich, had an oil factory in Osaka, put a lot of money into art because it was tax-deductible. I was unable to discover whether “Gutai” was a brand of edible oil or meant something purely cultural. I did, however, find out that they began in 1955 as a group of young artists around the purse of Yoshihara. They speak of him with great respect, as I experienced last year, for instance, during a TV-show in Bellevue when I met Murakami, who incidentally always answered in Japanese, which Kusama refused to translate, either because it did not concern her or the Japanese understood her just as poorly as we did when she spoke so-called English, however, Murakami kept saying: respectful greetings from the very respectful mister Yoshihara (which was imprinted in his mind in the expectation that this would open every door in Europe), for the rest he wrote everything down in his native language, which I then sent to the Japanese embassy for clarification, but never heard back from them, so I still don’t know what Gutai actually is.
What we saw in Tapié’s book were photos of an outdoor exhibition dedicated to the midsummer sun in the parks of Ashiya in 1955. Large nylon sheets were stretched slightly above the ground and moved by the wind; hanging between the trees were strips of polished metal and plastic tubes filled with colored water, wooden poles in which notches were cut with an axe, there were colored balls, in short: here was an exhibition with the integration of the art object in nature as its theme, as it would be understood only later in Europe. Nonetheless, the people who made this show (incl. Tanaka, Motonaga, Shimamoto, Murakami, who would exhibit such objects later at the Nul exhibition in Amsterdam) were painters, who made the Tachistic paintings common for that time. I only found out later that this playing with all kinds of materials, displayed in parks and intended to amuse people with movement and sound, is a centuries-old tradition. The lantern and the kite are not just children’s toys there, the playing continues of course, even after puberty.
Here it is clear to what extent we are actually dealing with a different culture. The pointless manipulation of useless things, which is essentially “play,” is something we are (still) unfamiliar with in Europe.
A Japanese man explained this to me on the basis of the relationship between men and women and from our side a somewhat excited curiosity about what Geishas actually are.
He explained to me that the difference between Japanese and Europeans is most clearly evident in this: a European heads directly to the end result and seeks to get such a lady in bed. A Japanese man doesn’t even get to that stage, because he already experiences so much with the game of tea drinking and chatting that this is often enough for him.
At school over there, the children waste precious time folding paper, creating joints without glue, constructing lanterns and kites, making letters that are not statements, or informing us about things that do not make us any wiser.
In that sense, a contemporary development in art suddenly demonstrates a strong relationship with what was already an ancient tradition for the Japanese: the game with visible things, the unprofitable optical communication, “op” and with us now also “art.” A wonderful idea from the first exhibition in the air: the sky festival above Osaka, where enormous objects hung from balloons, including a perforated canvas by Fontana.
In 1962 the Gutai Pinacotheca opened in Osaka and staged a sort of happening together with the Morita Dance Company under the title “Don’t worry, the moon won’t fall down,” with large illuminated puppets and huge plastic balloons.
The group has a constantly changing lineup; in Amsterdam we had objects by eight people, but their group exhibitions feature some thirty names.
Last year, the Orez Gallery in The Hague exhibited a small collection of their work, which revealed that they have also bid farewell to painting and now make objects that display striking similarities to our work from the ZERO era. It is unfortunate that Scheveningen missed the unique opportunity to see their work in large format on the pier, when people there canceled the exhibition “zero-op-zee.”
An exhibition of the unrealized projects, which the Orez Gallery presented anyway, showed designs which revealed that the Japanese would have shown their forte here. A great mix of the given elements: the water was hung in the air, the footpaths floated on balloons in the sea.
I hope that the Gutai group, now under more favorable conditions, receives the attention it deserves.
And our friend Jiro the praise.
You don’t organize something like that purely as an expense item, because if expenses are pointless they are not tax-deductible for us.
And that makes no sense.
Henk Peeters,
May 1967
