Post-Traumatic Art 2: Gutai at the Guggenheim

-- By Tom Phillips

Post-World War Two Japanese art was on display recently at the Museum of Modern Art, and the show “Tokyo Avant-Garde 1955-1970” was harrowing to contemplate.   Nearly every piece was shadowed by the mushroom clouds that ended the war, and images of atrocities, monstrosities, decapitation, torture, destruction, helplessness and sudden death were everywhere.   Reviewing it I wrote “Japan is sick to this day from the effects of the bomb, and Japanese art reflects it.” 

 

But that’s not all that post-war Japanese art reflects.  Hundreds of miles from Tokyo, in a small village near Osaka, another school of art was springing up, a polar opposite to the themes of victimization and despair.   The Gutai movement was another response to ruin – a search for goodness, wholeness and even joy in the rubble.  The artists of this avant-garde collective found it in the “new life of matter” – or “the scream of matter” in the words of Gutai founder Yoshihara Jiro -- and also in the creative freedom of the artist, and in the freedom of people’s experience of art.    

Electric Dress (1956) by Atsuko Tanaka

By happy coincidence, the Tokyo Avant-Garde show at MOMA is followed up by a full-scale exhibit of Gutai works at the Guggenheim Museum.   “Gutai: Splendid Playground” fills Frank Lloyd Wright's uniquely playful space with playful, rebellious works of raw energy.   There isn’t a self-pitying note in the entire show.  Even 40 years after the Gutai movement dissolved in 1972, their work is daring and refreshing.   
 

Gutai means “concreteness,”   the thing itself rather than representation.   Jiro’s 1956 Gutai manifesto condemns the art of the past as nothing but hoaxes  – paint, cloth, clay and stone tricked out to look like something they are not.   Gutai art, he wrote, would not change the material but bring it to life.  “If one leaves the material as it is, presenting it just as material, then it starts to tell us something and speaks with a mighty voice.”   

Post-Traumatic Art

Tokyo Protest 1968  photo by Tomatsu Shomei

-- By Tom Phillips

Of all the horrors of the 20^th century, the most traumatic must be the atomic bombing of Japan.  The Holocaust in Europe was more destructive in terms of lives, and more evil in its intentions.   But the atomic bombs were more psychologically searing and disfiguring.  The Nazi extermination campaign took place over years, and some of its victims were able to mount a human response in the face of death, responses that endured as the Nazi dream died.   But Hiroshima took place in an instant, and that instant has never died.  The white flash that vaporized the center of the city came with no warning, no precedent, no context for those on the ground.  And it was followed, not by redemption or revenge, but by unconditional surrender, occupation, and a slavish identification with the American conquerors.  Harry Truman famously said he never lost any sleep over Hiroshima, and Americans to this day tend to see it as a necessary evil that put an end to a terrible war.  But Japan is sick to this day from the effects of the bomb, and Japanese art reflects it.  Americans who care to contemplate those effects can see them in a harrowing show of post-war Japanese art now at the Museum of Modern Art.