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The Stakes of Exposure: Anxious Bodies in Postwar Japanese Art by Namiko Kunimoto

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Works by Kazuo Shiraga

John Cappetta

Contributor

Shiraga was one of the earliest practitioners of action art, predating even “the grandmother of performance art.”

Pollock kept Shiraga books in his studio but nobody could read the titles because of all the paint everywhere, and so he remained largely unknown outside of Japan and Hong Kong during his lifetime.  The one thing people seem to remember about Shiraga was that he dressed like a red Pinocchio with matching wings and hung himself with ropes to paint from the sky like an art demon.

They also remembered that time he wrestled a mound of clay on stage in his underwear, a pre-Kaprow “happening” called Challenging Mud. It’d be convenient to make a joke about sumo wrestling because Shiraga was actually a sumo wrestler but we’ll just skip it. Who was challenging whom in that timeless battle of human v. earth? We’ll never know, but he did manage to turn some of the clay into sculptures so take that, dirt!?

Shiraga was classically trained in traditional Nihon-ga style of painting, but claimed that he became frustrated with thin inks. He might also have been frustrated with an American occupation, atomic bomb, dissolution of the Japanese military...a whole bunch of things. Given all that, Shiraga explained that “the only thing [he] could do was get inside the canvas.” Meaning literally stand on it with his body.

Once he put the paintbrush down in 1953 he didn’t paint with one again. From that point forward Shiraga explored the abstract corners of Japanese history, Chinese mythology, and Buddhism with his feet, and sometimes with plates and metal poles.

Shiraga once stated that he wanted “to make paintings as slippery and as uncatchable as a sea cucumber, pieces with no center what so ever.” I don’t know if you’ve ever poured paint on the floor but he definitely achieved the slippery part.

He abandoned painting for a while to dabble in stereotypical performance art and live on top of a mountain, training as a monk. But he returned to art when his friend and also chief detractor Jiro Yoshihara (who said Shiraga “was nobody if he didn’t paint with his feet”) died suddenly, after which Shiraga painted with what appears to be bottomless energy until he died in 2008.

 

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Here is what Wikipedia says about Kazuo Shiraga

Kazuo Shiraga (白髪 一雄, Shiraga Kazuo, August 12, 1924 – April 8, 2008) was a Japanese abstract painter and the first-generation member of the postwar artists collective Gutai Art Association (Gutai). As a Gutai member, he was a prolific, inventive, and pioneering experimentalist who tackled a range of media: in addition to painting, he worked in performance art, three-dimensional object making, conceptual art, and installations, many of which are preserved only in documentary photos and films.

Shiraga is best known for his abstract paintings, or the so-called “foot painting”, which he created by spreading oil paint initially on paper and later on canvas with his feet. Through this original method he had invented in 1954, he made a critical engagement with the tradition of painting, the result of which resonated with European and American gestural abstraction of the 1950s, such as Informel and Abstract Expressionism. In the 1960s and 1970s, he reintroduced tools such as boards and spatulas for spreading the paint.

His experiments outside painting, such as Challenging Mud and Ultramodern Sanbasō, were closely associated with the notion of “picturing,” derived from e (絵), or “picture” in Japanese, that Gutai members shared in exploring new ways of painting. At the same time, his innovations were at times associated with his embrace of violence and the grotesque, which Shiraga had been fascinated with since his childhood.

Among the Gutai members who were promoted by the French art critic Michel Tapié in Europe and the US, Shiraga was most recognized after the leader Jirō Yoshihara and most commercially successful as a solo artist as early as the late 1950s; and his success continues to date with in the international auctions.

Check out the full Wikipedia article about Kazuo Shiraga