Gutai

In 1954, a group of young artists gathered in the Kansai region and launched a journal called Gutai. Kazuo Shiraga held onto a rope hung from the ceiling and painted with his feet; Atsuko Tanaka stood wearing Electric Dress, wrapped in roughly two hundred light bulbs. On this map, style names have usually been handed down from outside — often as insults: Gothic, Baroque, Impressionism, Cubism, all of them. Gutai is different. They chose their own name and called themselves by it. The one thing Jiro Yoshihara, at the center of the group, kept repeating was this: never imitate others. And they did not wait to be discovered. They crossed the sea themselves. In 1956, a member of the group living in Paris handed a copy of Gutai to the critic Michel Tapié. Tapié came to Japan the following year, and the year after that, exhibitions pairing Art Informel with Gutai opened across the country. It is, a hundred years later, the same move ukiyo-e made at the 1867 Paris World's Fair — going to be seen, rather than waiting. In 2013, the Guggenheim Museum in New York held the group's first retrospective in North America.