Gutai

Gutai, meaning concreteness, was a Japanese avant-garde group founded in 1954 in the Kansai region by painter Jiro Yoshihara, who urged members in the group's manifesto to do what has never been done before and to pursue a direct, unmediated encounter between material and the human spirit, without imitating Western art or prior Japanese tradition. Members staged physically extreme, performative acts of painting years before Western Happenings or Performance Art: Kazuo Shiraga painted by wrestling in mud with his own body, Saburo Murakami burst through paper screens stretched on frames, and Atsuko Tanaka wore a dress wired with blinking electric lights. The group also pioneered large-scale outdoor and stage exhibitions treating raw materials like water, smoke, vinyl and light as art in themselves, and though largely overlooked internationally at the time, Gutai was recognized decades later as a genuinely independent forerunner of Happenings, Performance Art and Conceptual Art, active until Yoshihara's death in 1972.