As anticipated in the previous post Brief history of Performance Art in the 20th century, the live relationship between the performer, the performance and the viewer is not new to art history since the dawn of our ancestors’ tales around the fire. In the 20th century, however, performance acquires its own identity and vocabulary within the history of art, identifying itself as an artistic practice during which the performer is the artist who establishes its presence in society. Here is a brief guide to Performance Art in the 1950s.
Gutai: Performance Art in Japan
The historical avant-gardes experiment the ideas of their posters through events during which the body and the presence of the artist begin to be protagonists. In 1954 in Japan a group of artists composed, among others, by Jiro Yoshihara, Kazuo Shiraga, Shozo Shimamoto, Saburo Murakami, Shigeko Kubota and Atsuko Tanaka met in 1954 under the name Gutai[1], or “concrete”, which aimed to overcome all forms of abstraction by virtue of a new, free and original art. In addition to intervening in space through installations and environments in which the spectator entered the work of art, the Gutai organized evenings during which the artists performed actions, anticipating Kaprow’s Happenings.
In 1955 in Six Holes, Murakami perforates large canvases by throwing himself into them; Shiraga struggles with mud in Challenging Mud and then exposes the traces left by his gesture and on other occasions uses his body to paint; Yasuo Sumi places a transparent glass between himself and the public, throwing colour towards it. It was the French critic Michel Tapié who contacted the Japanese group between 1956 and 1957, organizing an exhibition in New York the following year, another one in Turin in 1959 at the Notizie gallery and helping to make the Japanese group known in Europe and the United States.
In 1948 Eugen Herrigel published the successful book Zen and Archery[2], emphasizing the importance of concentration in Eastern calligraphy and martial arts and helping to spread this Eastern doctrine in the West, which aimed to hide the rigour of practice behind an apparent naturalness. With respect to this philosophy, the action of the Gutai Group becomes particularly interesting not only because it dialogues with the discipline and spontaneity of the artistic gesture, highlighting the role of chance and the indeterminate, but also because it highlights the creative impulse of the artist, who through his gesture gains a certain presence with respect to technique. The weight of the artist’s presence will be – as we shall see – a founding element of the performance.
Yves Klein: not only Anthropometries
Eastern Zen philosophy and an interest in the notions of discipline, chance and indeterminacy were also sources of inspiration in the West, both for Cage and Cunningham at Black Mountain College, but also for the artistic practices of European artists, including Yves Klein, who was also a Judo practitioner.
Between the second half of the fifties and the early sixties, the French artist with his Anthropometries painted canvases through the bodies of his models, conducting them as if he were a conductor, while some musicians played the Monotone Symphony. In the early 1960s Klein conducted a series of actions called Immaterial Pictorical Sensitivity Zones, during which the artist threw gold leaf into the senna while the buyer burned his receipt after buying it from the artist.
Everything that belonged to the seven transactions between artist and buyer was destroyed, leaving in the history of art and between the two subjects of the transaction an “immaterial quality” of the action. These actions give the artistic gesture an ephemeral character, which focuses on the relationship between the artist and the buyer, in the latter case, or between the artist and the painting gesture, in the former.
In addition to their intrinsic spiritual character, Klein’s works are not without sarcasm and irony, especially with regard to the art market. The tormented relationship between artists and art dealers is certainly not new in the history of art, but – as we will go into more detail – performers will on many occasions reflect on the relationship between artists, art, public, market and context through violent, spiritual or even ironic actions[3].
Piero Manzoni: Marcel Duchamp’s pupil
With a sensitivity similar to Klein and an irony similar to the action of Paik in 1961, the Italian Piero Manzoni is part of our reflection on the buds of performance, also bonding with the historical avant-garde. In 1961 he opened an exhibition in Milan entitled Living Sculpture[4], which exhibited models signed by the artist with a certificate of authenticity, considering them “real works of art”.
Manzoni also bottled his own breath in balloons and canned his own feces, making these scraps of his body works of art by virtue of his gesture. Through Manzoni’s reference to art, we highlight how the actions just described, through the artist’s body and gesture, become evidence of authenticity so that the result is considered a “work of art”.
Surely we are not far from the ready-made and irony towards the art market of Marcel Duchamp, who in 1919 had bottled the air of Paris in a small bottle, among his many ready-mades. Now, however, it is not only the gesture of the artist and his signature that makes the work of art “art”, but the artist’s body becomes a central element that will characterize the very definition of performance.
Fundamentals of Performance Art in the Fifties
Thanks to these three brief examples we have been able to find in the history of art of the fifties three elements that will be fundamental for the vocabulary of performance in its period of maturity inaugurated with the performers of the seventies:
- the use of the artist’s body,
- the ephemeral character of the artistic action – which translates into spirituality or irony depending on the artist – and
- the presence of the artist.
To put it simply, we could give credit to Manzoni for having used the artist’s body to make the work of art, to Klein for having emphasized the ephemeral nature of the artistic gesture and to the Gutai group for having established a new weight for the presence of the artist with respect to technique. The Gutai group also seems to be interested in the relationship between the artist’s presence and the public, both through actions such as that of Yasuo Sumi and through the creation of environments in which viewers immerse themselves in the work of art[5]. These environments affect the history of performance above all because of the artists’ interest in the experience lived by the public, which is understood as an active and not passive part in co-creation and not only in the enjoyment of the work of art[6].
[1] Yoshihara J., Gutaj Manifesto, in Geijutsu Shincho, 1956 betrayed Cossu M., Monferini A., Osaki S.
[2] Herrigel E., Zen and Archery, Adelphi, 1975.
[3] Sometimes irony and sarcasm were also directed against the artists themselves, suffice it to say that, in 1962, South Korean artist Nam June Paik painted a long strip of paper after dipping his hair in a tomato-mixed color in the Zen for Head action.
[4] A term that we will find again in the heart of the history of the performance of the seventies with the famous performer couple Gilbert&George.
[5] Even artistic experimentation in space by artists is nothing new in 20th century art history. As far as the 20th century is concerned, we remember in 1923 the Proun Ambience by El Lissitzskij and the Merzbau by Kurt Schwitters; in the 1950s the space environments by Lucio Fontana and the environments created by the Gutai group; the two exhibitions at the Paris gallery by Iris Clert Le vide (1958) and Le plein (1960), respectively by Klein and Arman; finally, in 1959, the Antimatter Cavern by Pinot Gallizio. Kaprow, Oldenburg, Segal, Judd, Flavin, Morris, Le Witt, Nauman, Graham and Buren are some famous names who continued the investigation of the space before the great exponents of Land Art in the season between the 1960s and 1970s (see Turrell, Heizer, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, De Maria, Smithson).
6] Be careful not to understand the “active” public only in the fruition of the work of art, in fact many artists during the 20th century and even more so in the 21st century will be attentive to the “spectators” of their works as co-creators. One of the most famous examples of this concept, to which we will return later in the course of the argument, will certainly be Joseph Beuys and his Social Sculpture.
