This publication is produced in occasion with the exhibition of the same title organised by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum from February to May 2013. 

The exhibition presents the Japanese artist group Gutai, an avant-garde collective active in the postwar era. Its members explored new art forms combining performance, painting, and interactive environments and created an international common ground of experimental art through the worldwide reach of their exhibition and publication activities, as a response to the aftermath of Japan's wartime totalitarianism. They are well-known for their radical methods of art making, and in particular the ways in which they reinvented painting, organised exhibitions at various public sites, and made closer the distance between art, the public, and the everyday.

Organised around 6 themes, each of which represents an aspect of the group's project, the exhibition showcases an overview of the group's practices and puts it into a historical context within an international framework. It emphasises the elements of exchange between Gutai and its contemporaries around the world, showing that late modernism after the war was not so much only an Euro-American story as a network crossing the whole world.

Includes an anthology of Gutai artists' writings (compiled and translated by Reiko Tomii), a chronology of the collective, a list of Gutai artists, biographies of artists in the exhibition, and a select bibliography. 
Access level

Onsite

Location code
EX.USA.GSP
Language

English

Publication/Creation date

2013

No of pages

316

ISBN / ISSN

9780892074891

No of copies

1

Content type

catalogue

Chapter headings

Gutai Art Manifesto - Jiro YOSHIHARA, 吉原治良

All the Landscapes: Gutai's World - Alexandra MUNROE

Please Draw Freely - Ming TIAMPO, 蔡宇鳴

Plates

Play: An Uninhabited Act

Network: To Introduce our Works to our World

Concept: Can a Piece of Cloth be a Work of Art?

The Concrete: The Scream of Matter Itself

Performance Painting: Pictures with Time and Space

Environment: Gutai Art for the Space Age

New Perspectives on Gutai

Prewar Kansai Cosmopolitanism and Postwar Gutai - Shoichi HIRAI, 平井章一

An Experiment in Collectivism: Gutai's Prewar Origin and Postwar Evolution - Reiko TOMII, 富井玲子

Abstract Space in Concrete Terms: Reconsidering Gutai Painting - Mizuho KATO, 加藤瑞穂

Limitless World: Gutai's Reinvention in Environment Art and Intermedia - Midori YOSHIMOTO, 由本みどり

Communication Malfunction: Happenings and Gutai - Judith RODENBECK

Gutai and Brazilian Concrete Art - Pedro ERBER

Gutai: Splendid Playground
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Gutai: Splendid Playground

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