Untitled T33

One of Japan’s preeminent avant-garde painters and a progenitor of performance art, Kazuo Shiraga’s influence on the trajectory of action painting cannot be understated. Working to realize a dynamic balance between material and artist in the wake of World War II, his paintings challenged notions of masculinity while grappling with both formal and cultural concerns throughout the latter half of the Twentieth Century. Painted in 1962, Untitled T33 is a clear representation of Shiraga’s groundbreaking oeuvre. That same year the artist had his first solo exhibition outside of Japan at the Galerie Stadler in Paris, and the influence this show had within the art communities of Europe, America, and his native country was immense. Yves Klein had already been introduced to the works of Shiraga and the Gutai Group while traveling in Japan, and their lasting influence on his Anthropometries is unmistakable. In his Chelsea Hotel Manifest, Klein referenced these Japanese pioneers, noting: “In fact, these painters actually transformed themselves into living brushes. By diving themselves in color and then rolling on their canvases, they became representative of ultra-action-painters!” (Y. Klein, The Chelsea Hotel Manifesto, 1961). Expanding outward from centuries-old traditions, Shiraga and his fellow artists broke down formal structures in an effort to cope with a world being born anew.

Rendered with great energy and internal motion atop a bare canvas, Untitled T33 echoes the work’s dramatic origins in the sweeps and splatters of oil paint on its surface. Small areas of the support are visible in the corners, but the impasto swirl that takes over the central composition is so thick that it borders on sculptural. Applied directly and then manipulated with the artist’s feet, each arc represents a full pass of the body above the canvas as Shiraga whirled past on a rope, his feet and toes passing through the paint in a sliding motion. Dark areas of blue, black, and a bodily dark red careen into each other with visual violence. Yellow and white strokes pierce these muddy mixtures and offer a reprieve from their depths. A spray of droplets explodes around the central mass, evidence of the work’s aggressive birth.

Untitled T33, like many of Shiraga’s paintings, is the record of a performance in which the artist would be suspended from a rope above a canvas and paint with his feet. Artist Antonio Saura, who also showed with Galerie Stadler, once recounted the process: “After a few minutes of reflection in front of a small altar, and having separately deposited several oil colours on the white canvas on the floor, the Japanese painter Shiraga, in bare feet, attached to a rope hanging from the ceiling, began to dance on the oily material with rapid, rhythmic and precise movements” (A. Saura, “Shiraga ne peint pas avec les pieds” in Kazuo Shiraga, exh. cat., Refectoire des Jacobins, Toulouse, 1993). By doing so, Shiraga cast aside the taught motions of the hand and the long tradition of calligraphic line in Japanese art. Instead, he was able to more actively commune with the paint and surface in a manner not dissimilar from the horizontally painted canvases of Jackson Pollock. Indeed, Shiraga was inspired by the Abstract Expressionist when a 1951 traveling exhibition in Osaka introduced him to Pollock’s work and those of Mark Rothko. However, Shiraga took his own tact and, by creating a pure marriage between action, material, and artist, broke down painting into its component parts and reassembled them in a bold new manner.

Shiraga, though widely lauded as a painter, was one of the first true performance artists. In 1952, he was instrumental in founding the group Zero-kai with Akira Kanayama, Saburō Murakami, and Atsuko Tanaka. The collective and their new ways of thinking about art-making were a response to the cultural and physical shock of World War II. Looking to accurately convey these emotions in a more apt manner, Shiraga and his colleagues reduced the traditions of painting down to “ground zero” in an effort to build them up again from the rubble. In 1954, the group joined with Jirō Yoshihara and the practitioners of Gutai. It was at this time that the members were credited with making some of the first performance artworks. In their manifest from 1956, they declared: “Gutai Art does not alter the material. Gutai Art imparts lift to the material. Gutai Art does not distort the material … In Gutai Art, the human spirit and the material shake hands with each other, but keep their distance. The material never compromises itself with the spirit; the spirit never dominates the material” (Y. Jiro, Gutai Manifesto 1956, quoted in A. Munroe, Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, New York 1994, p. 84). Finding a sublime balance between artist and material, these groundbreaking Japanese artists set the stage for countless artists in the future.