Description
The chart is an interactive lineage map. Gutai group sits at the center, on a timeline that runs from older movements at the top to newer ones at the bottom. The movements that influenced it appear above it, any parallel movements it developed alongside sit on its own row, and the movements it later influenced appear below. Every line is a real, cited connection between two movements: a solid line is an influence historians broadly agree on, and a dashed line is an indirect, parallel, or contested link.
For Gutai group (1954 – 1972), it traces two movements that shaped it, a mix of well-established and looser, indirect links: Abstract expressionism and Dada; it fans out to two movements it went on to influence, all well-established links: Fluxus and Happening.
The Gutai Art Association (具体美術協会, Gutai Bijutsu Kyōkai; or, short, Gutai) was a Japanese avant-garde artist group founded in the Hanshin region by young artists under the leadership of the painter Jirō Yoshihara in Ashiya, Japan, in 1954. It operated until shortly after Yoshihara's death in 1972.
The group, today one of the most internationally-recognized instances of 20th century Japanese art, is best known for the broad range of experimental art forms combining painting with performance, conceptual, interactive, site-specific, theatrical and installation artworks, which its members explored in unconventional venues such as public parks and on stage. The members’ engagement with the relationship between spirit, human body and material, often concretized in artistic methods that involved the artist’s body and violent gestures. Read more ↗