Japanese ART * Gutai Art and the tradition of Action Painting.

We've already got some information about Japanese art in recent blogs of arts-on.de - especially the reason for the women's worldchampionship in soccer (football) has been taught to our readers by Politician, who suggests, that the exactability of motion as shown in the use of shoutings and screams in Japanes culture is something aesthically special of asian cultures and very usable. We've watched the foot-management of the Japanese goalkeeper and are assured that Politician is right.

Now we like to remember an aspect of European Culture, the Abstract Expressionism and hazard int the new abstract art after the second world war. In european art history an apporach has been made to look at the abstract experessionist as artists in the tradition of impressionism, thinking about the sense data impressions in eyes and brains - this approach was first and foremost driven by the conservative aversion against the materialistic idea of giing up conventions of picture production to reach a new sensibility and awareness for the materials of painting itself.

As haiku poetry by the abstract expressionist's musician John Cage shows the musical function of intonation, his scores show in their moments of unnecessity not the disposal of an author but the accidentiality of hazard and the possibility of creating systems with points and lines on paper and similar systems as instruments to mediate and transfer the others. But the "materialism" in these ideas is not marxist,  - although is it arguable whether the artists of abstract expressionism would have mind this - but typical for Japanese art. The prinicples of "Wabi" and "Sabi" emphasize the traces of time in objects and aesthetics in general, not in the European (christian) sense of vanity, but as something that instigates respect for an even simple object's being. In a way, these principles cover with the more snobbi emphasis for "patina" and other traces of sumptuousness in the European culture of the fifties, which let Jackson Pollock and the others emerge while shivering with relish. As we think about stillifes of the Netherlands, with all their manky spots on nature's death-born beauty, the Japanese spots on the existence (not necessarily *life*) of something seems really atheistic. Well, even if buddhism is its religious background, this principle of Japanese art transgressed its possible religious foundations into a philosophical perspective on perceptual beings in the outer world of our daily use.

The shift from the traditional Wabi and Sabi into the pop-cultural concepts of Super Deformed and Superflat, is, as the concept as name shows to the art historian, perhaps a result of this awareness of the way we use *things*  and create them in a way within this use and perception. "Superflat" reminds on the Clement Greenberg demand to create flat pictures which respect the flatness as specific property of the pictorial genre.  His ideas were taken as fitting the abstract expressionist's and colourfield-painter's art of the late forties and fifties in and around New York.  Likewise, Japan and the US connected art works and ideas. The famous Gutai art group of Yoshihara Jirō und Shimamoto Shōzō performed with Jackson Pollock, both became the most distinguished artists of action painting in the western and eastern tradition.

Our small collection of videos of performances by Shimamoto Shozo (with some infos about Pollock and Gutai) show as further aspect how the emphasis on the painting's materials really emerges into a kind of monumental impressionism, linke in one of the latest bottle crash performances, when the arena of splashed colours reminds at the structure of vibrating lines we love in Monet's Waterlillies. Furthermore, the art public descovered a similarity in the projects to Niki de Saint Phalle's and Jean Tinguely's Shooting-Paintings - she and her partner really shot on their paintings in the desert in sometimes very risky performances.

Aesthetically, shooting and bottle crashing keep the idea of presence and the moment-in-time, as the *Kire* in Japanese art and the poetry of Haiku.  It's a principal of creating discontinuity in continuity and thus, to get awareness of the being and beings at the very special moment of the Kire's "cut".

We hope to get some comments on this short sketch by our Japanese friends ! Soon we'll continue with examples of the Super Deformed and Superflat, to draw nearer and nearer to the REAL contemporarians in Japan like Tanaka Atsuko and our Facebook-Friends-Collection. Meanwhile, -> THIS.

More about Tanaka Atsuko's documenta 12 context