Museum paper

Niasia Brown

Art 11

Museum Paper

The Gutai Art Association was founded in 1954. The group had an eighteen-year history, and through ought that history they covering over fifty artists(Gugenheim 6). Not only was Yoshihara Jiro an influential artist; he was a powerful educator, plus criticizer.  Gutai broke through boundaries between painting and performance. Gutai also crossed the lines between arts and the public, with everyday life.  The group looked at art making as an act of liberty, a sign of individual spirit.  They felt they had the right to create something new. Gutai artists experimented with new methods and materials: they painted with watering cans, remote-control toys, homemade cannons, and bare feet; made brief  art work using the sky, water, sand, light bulbs, and torn paper screens; and staged exhibitions in parks that where open to the public, and even on the beach. Gutai artists gained serious attention for their use of the body and for the different work they did with technology and nature. (Guggenheim, 5)

(Bisexual Flower of 1969) Plexiglas, motors, electrical circuitry, ultraviolet tubes bath salts, water and sound, this design was so amazing, I know sometime artist take some designs to extreme well that was not the case in this piece. This piece really does make you think how far technology and art have come and how one piece can bring both of these things together. Although people were said to criticized this piece I loved it. This piece was very controversial in japan. Which I think for this reason it caught so much attention in America. This piece seemed to be individual identity. . Artists frequently motorized their sculptures, turning exhibition spaces into dens of screeching, pulsing, machinelike organisms. Yoshida‘s erotic machine-sculpture Bisexual Flower (1970) mines the mind-altering effects of this approach. (Guggenheim 8)

Kanayama Akira Akira Kanayama’s painting machine was a four-wheeled device that Kanayama could remote-control to create paintings .The canvas placed on the floor while a machine dripped and poured paint on the picture .The painting machine is an early example of the machine verses man in comparison to the in the role of artist. Kanayama’s remote-controlled painting machine mimics other artist who used the drips painting method .At the same time the machine follows the idea of automation and the physical detachment between artist and painting, bringing it to a new level, but at the same time it makes fun of how far art has come when there are no more live models and artist with a paint brush; art had changed to a man created machine assisting the artist in his or her vision.

(Shiraga Kazuo untitled 1957) oil watercolor and Indian ink on paper mounted on a canvas. The piece I saw was stated to be one of the earliest examples of his foot paintings done before he began to use a canvas. I feel he was such a free artist. This Piece could defiantly be related to historic identity years later he performed one of his best known works, in which he struggled to the point of exhaustion a to using muddy mixture of several tons of clay and concrete. By looking at this painting you can tell the method of using ample amounts of oil paint to large sheets of paper. Also laying the canvas on the floor, and manipulating the paint with only your hands and feet while suspended from a rope attached to the ceiling. Through these movements, some moves became more composed others were spontaneous, Shiraga created vibrant, unique paintings throughout his lengthy career. For Shiraga, painting with his feet enabled an encounter with the material and a direct bodily form of artistic expression, seen, the artist “painted” with his entire body in a pile of grit, directly engaging with raw matter.

Splendid Playground seeks to show Gutai’s beautiful strategies in the cultural and context of postwar Japan and to further establish the group. Gutai constructed self-expression as an statement of the individual against the mass-conformist heritages of wartime .Not only did they lead by example, performing powerful acts of self-expression, but they sought to develop the autonomy of others—of their onlookers, the general public, and especially of families by forcing them to think, create, and imagine for themselves. Exploring the relationship between art, its environment, and the viewer. (Guggenheim, 5)

Cite Page

Artist Name: Yoshida Minoru

Title: Bisexual Flower

Year completed: 1969

Artist Name: Shiraga Kazuo

Title: Untitled

Year completed: 1957

Artist Name: Kanayama Akira

Title: Untitled

Year completed: 1957

Guggenheim