Kazuo Shiraga

Kazuo Shiraga was one of the leading members of the Gutai Art Association, a Japanese post-war avant-garde movement that lasted for eighteen years, from 1954 until 1972. Gutai’s activities were centred around its co-founder and leader, Jiro Yoshihara, who encouraged the group’s members to “be original” and “do what no one has done before”. It was the artists’ goal to start anew from a blank space after the disasters of the World War.

The word gutai means “concreteness” or “embodiment”. This term reflected the group’s strong interest in matter and the creative process. Gutai artists delved into developing new processes of making artworks, crisscrossing various artistic media and techniques. Each member of the group broke through the boundaries of the traditional definition of painting, performance and sculpture. As much as they tried to respond to the climate of post-war Japan, their works still speak to us.

In his work, Shiraga's artistic quest was driven by the desire to materialise spiritual and body energy without denying the essential qualities of matter. This led him to invent his own form of action painting and live art happenings. In 1954, he decided to step onto a canvas with his bare feet and to paint by sliding across the canvas, while holding onto a rope that was suspended from the ceiling. This technique became his artistic trademark. From the beginning of his career, Shiraga’s philosophy and revolutionary techniques have been a great influence to many European and American artists, such as Yves Klein and Robert Motherwell.

In the performance, Challenging Mud in 1955, Shiraga dove into a pile of mud and sculpted it with his body. This was a groundbreaking attempt to replace the conventional notion of painting with the idea that the action itself generates art. Shiraga’s “painting” was a field of pure action. This idea not only made him a predecessor of the development of happenings and performance art, but also linked his work to Abstract Expressionist painting, then prominent in the United States.

By radically abandoning the paintbrush and starting to paint with his feet, Shiraga eliminated deliberate composition—one of the fundamental elements of painting in a traditional sense—and consciousness from his work. The relation between the artist’s body, the paint and the canvas is direct and not hierarchical. He let the unconscious power of the body’s dialogue with matter, take over the creative process and determine the result.

When he was painting, Shiraga ritually and repeatedly overcame the self. He experienced what he called his “shishitsu”, the driving force behind the shaping of the self. Shishitsu literally means “innate characteristics and abilities of individuals”. Our shishitsu is our ever-evolving sensory psyche. It’s like a pre-shaped sponge in our unconsciousness, absorbing our personal body and spiritual energies, holding them as memories and shaping us into who we are. According to Shiraga, it should be everybody's quest in life to come into direct contact with their personal shishitsu, and express it in the fullest possible way.

Shiraga’s works are free of social criticism and political implication. His paintings can be appreciated through the pure act of seeing. Whether he painted with his feet, or with the tools that he adopted in later years, he imbued his canvas with his own shishitsu. The movement, energy, and spirit of time were recklessly spread all over the canvas, and are present still today.