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Kazuo Shiraga
Paintings and Watercolours
1 November - 20 December 2007
In October 1955 at the first Gutai exhibition in Tokyo
Kazuo Shiraga enacted his renowned performance, ‘Challenging Mud’.
It involved him wrestling with a truckload of clay mixed with cement
that had been emptied into the courtyard of the exhibition venue. The
performance, which he repeated three times during the course of the exhibition,
survives only in the form of photographs and film footage. It was an
actualisation of the exhortation made by the leader of the Gutai group,
Yoshihara Jiro, to ‘create paintings of a kind that nobody has
ever seen before’. At the time of the Gutai exhibition Shiraga
had already started to paint with his feet. This substitution of the
human body for the paintbrush was totally revolutionary. Shiraga was
trained as a traditional Japanese painter but had developed a taste for
the unctuous quality of oil paints in preference to the mineral pigments
he had previously used. The use of his own body was ‘a totally
logical way of painting’ that suggested the need to leave the confines
of the studio and to work outdoors. Shiraga’s performance at the
1955 Gutai exhibition was the first fully-fledged realisation of this
new direction in his work. His use of clay had its precedent in the piece
he had created three months earlier for the ‘Modern Art Outdoor
Experimental Exhibition to Challenge the Midsummer Sun’. This was
a round form made of clay wrapped in vinyl sheeting. While Shiraga claims
he had no plans for ‘Challenging Mud’ at the time, there
is no doubt that Yoshihara’s outdoor exhibition spurred Shiraga
and other Gutai artists to think radically about the use of materials
and space. Impoverished and faced with the challenge of creating outdoor
installations, they turned to familiar everyday materials or at that
time new products such as vinyl sheeting, thereby expanding the vocabulary
of contemporary art. The result was a flurry of experimentation with
new materials and alternative ways of working which in Shiraga’s
case, as noted above, survive only as documentary traces. Shiraga’s
interest at this time was less in producing permanent works of art than
in alternating moments of frenzied interaction with clay with periods
of quietude following the dismantling and clearing away of his installations.
Shiraga is justly famous as the only important artist in the world to
paint with his feet. In actuality he paints not just with his feet but
with his whole body, an approach he discovered through his engagement
with clay. While anybody could have thought of working in this way, we
are indebted to Shiraga for having done so in such a compelling and dramatic
manner.
In about 1964 Shiraga started to use wooden boards to paint with. The
resulting fan-shaped works were charged with a sense of speed and centrifugal
energy different from but no less powerful than the dynamism of his feet
paintings. He adopted this method as a way forwards from what he felt
to be the staleness creeping into his work. Yoshihara, however, was critical
of Shiraga’s fan-shaped paper objects and his desire to experiment
with alternative ways of painting. He admonished him firmly with the
words, ‘Shiraga is a nobody if he doesn’t paint with his
feet.’
The current exhibition’s main focus is on Shiraga’s paintings
of the past two decades. One is amazed by the timeless quality of his
work, the pieces he produced in his seventies being no less vital than
those dating from when he joined the Gutai group in his early thirties.
A powerful tension has always imbued his work. I have heard him remark
that, ‘whenever I stand on the canvas ready to paint, I am filled
with the same feeling of engagement’. It is as if his body is remembering
how to paint. When, as in this exhibition, we see a group of Shiraga’s
paintings displayed together, we immediately sense the consistency of
the energy with which he has worked. It is meaningless to try to identify
a stylistic progression in his oeuvre. Whenever I look at his paintings,
the thought that comes to mind is that he has always been one and the
same person. ‘A painting never seen’ becomes ‘a painter
never encountered’ and so starts a new chapter.
Kawasaki Koichi,
Chief Curator, The Ashiya City Museum of Art, Hyogo, Japan.
September 2007
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