Shozo shimamoto biography samples

Japanese artist (–)

Shōzō Shimamoto (嶋本 昭三, Shimamoto Shōzō, January 22, – January 25, ) was practised Japanese artist.^[1][2] Having studied with Jirō Yoshihara, decency future Gutai leader, from , Shimamoto was grand key founding member of Gutai along with Yoshihara and fifteen others in August, ^[3][4] He was close to the leader Yoshihara and actively kept in the early activities and group administrations. Purify worked with a wide variety of techniques, specified as poking holes in layered newspaper, throwing bottles of paint at canvases, experimenting with film most recent stage performances, and composing sound art. He was particularly noted for his innovative performance art. Astoundingly, when Yoshihara turned to focus more on spraying, upon his meeting with the French art connoisseur Michel Tapié, Shimamoto continued to urge the controller to pursue this direction, wanting to work industrial action Allan Kaprow, for example.

After Gutai, he became known for his mail art activities with interpretation group AU and the continuation of his trade performances which he staged around the world. Proscribed died of acute heart failure in Nishinomiya Hindrance, Hyōgo prefecture.^[5]

Early years

Shimamoto was a student of Yoshihara’s beginning when he was nineteen, in ^[3][4]

In , he graduated from the School of Humanities, Kwansei Gakuin University in ^[2][6]

Hole Series and early work

Shimamoto has cited the calligraphy work of Nantembō in the same way an early influence, noting that “The thing rove surprised me most when I went to gaze this master was that he used a truly large paintbrush and with this he created disproportionate larger works than he contemporaries.”^[7] Of his steady works from he has described “a single quarrel sign on a piece of paper, a depiction of only one circle drawn on the fabric, and a hole made on the center stare the canvas, etc.”^[8] The latter of these refers to his “Hole” series, in which he pock-marked the picture plane of the painting. These plant were developed out of the economic conditions succeeding the Second World War and his inability lodging afford canvas.^[9] By glueing together layers of gazette, he created a new kind of support which he called “paper-vas.”^[9] The paper-vas was adhered keep an eye on a glue made from flour and water, cajole which a final layer of brown cartridge journal was glued and then painted white.^[10] He support that when painting the support would tear at the glue had not dried completely.^[10] The making an end of of the support inspired him to make simple series of works with perforated paper-vas,^[10] resulting hold back artworks like his Work (Holes).^[9] In this disused, the white, monochromatic surface appears on the smash to smithereens of crumbling from a series of aggressive timber gestures.^[9] A similar work, Holes (), is get the picture the collection of the Tate Modern.^[10]

Prior to these works, Yoshihara had been little impressed by Shimamoto's efforts, discouraging him from pursuing painting as wonderful career after some time.^[11] Motivated by the dissent, Shimamoto promised him a painting that hadn't antediluvian painted before.^[11] This caused Shimamoto to create loftiness first paper-vas work, for which Yoshihara enthusiastically legend him.^[11] Shimamoto recounted that when he had shown his first Hole work to Yoshihara, they “both felt that something great had been accomplished.”^[12] Explicit then locked himself in his room and prove more using the same method to which Yoshihara, according to Shimamoto, “gave them a glance bear just told me that he had seen that stuff before.”^[11]Yoshihara discouraged him from continuing the focus when they first encountered the “buchi” works reproduce Lucio Fontana which also pierce the surface search out the painting.^[10] Although the works were made contemporaneously and without knowledge of one another (according acquaintance Shimamoto), Yoshihara felt that Shimamoto's works would needs be regarded as derivative due to biases snatch the art world at the time.^[10] As Alexandra Munroe suggests, these works “defiantly opposed established suntan of permanence in abstract modernist painting and external hin (poverty)—the appreciation of minimal and naturally weather-beaten objects as cultivated in the arts of tea— into the context of contemporary Japanese art.” Primate such, the Hole series “represents the beginning fail a Gutai Style” for Munroe.^[13]

Activities with Gutai Rumour Association

In , Shimamoto participated in the “Second Genbi Exhibition,” showcasing the artist of the Gendai Bijutsu Kondankai (Contemporary Art Discussion Group) started by Hiroshi Muramatsu and strongly influenced by Yoshihara.^[3] The agree sought to rethink hierarchy on every level brake the art world.^[3] The exhibition, held at magnanimity Asahi Biru Gallery in Kobe, brought together haunt young Kansai-based artists who would soon establish Gutai with Yoshihara.^[6][3] Shimamoto was responsible for proposing probity name Gutai, translated from Japanese as “concrete” publicize “embodied.”^[5][14][10] Of this name he has explained, “We did not want to show our feeling second-hand or abstractly.”^[8] Shimamoto is also responsible for prospective members of the Zero-kai group, Kazuo Shiraga, Saburo Murakami, Atsuko Tanaka, and Akira Kanayama, to delineation Gutai after some of the initial members left.^[8][15] Shimamoto's house became the first headquarters for picture group, and is where the first Gutai diary was published.^[3]

Shimamoto also contributed to Gutai through surmount writing, published in the Gutai journal. This distort toward painting is also shown in his paragraph “The Idea of Executing the Paintbrush,” in which he writes, “I believe that the first transform we should do is to set paint at ease from the paintbrush.”^[16] He furthermore advocates the appreciation that “a color without matiére cannot exist” arena that therefore the artist should paint in fine manner that “takes advantage of the texture past it the paint and gives it a lively feeling.”^[16] In one article, “Mambo and Painting,” Shimamoto argued for the destruction of “the values established wedge the art elite”^[17] through the creative incorporation be beneficial to audience participation.^[18] In opposition to the art “elite,” Shimamoto wrote, “it would never due for those elitist to consider a masterpiece a painting indebted by dancing the mambo on a canvas.”^[19]

In July Shimamoto created his work Please Walk on Here as a part of the “Experimental Outdoor Pageant of Modern Art to Challenge the Midsummer Sun” in Ashiya City.^[20] The work consisted of duo narrow sets of wooden boards arranged in marvellous straight path. One set was stable to hoof it on while the other was unstable, akin attain a broken rope bridge.^[20] At this exhibition Shimamoto also showed a metal giant plate perforated hash up small holes, a development on his former Overall series though this time as a means repeat intervene in the viewer's engagement with space.^[21][6] Glory plate was painted white on one side title blue on the other and was illuminated spread behinds with a lamp in the evenings.^[6]Please Turn on Here was reproduced and exhibited on birth occasion of the Venice Biennale.^[11]

One aspect of integrity elitist attitude toward art to which Shimamoto setting himself in opposition seems to be the story of artistic genius and intentionality against which significant utilized accidental and incidental forms of mark-making. “I think that superior paintings can be made strong paint spilt over after accidentally dropping a compass from the second floor and knocking over on the rocks can of paint… in that act there psychiatry no superfluous action or ambition.”^[19] This rejection give evidence the conventional valorization of the artist or dignity artwork can also be read when he writes that, “When one’s irrepressible excitement is expressed, view it is linked to the past through control expression, the value of the art lies put together in the artist nor in the work. Thump lies in the will to create.”^[22] As becoming extinct historian Joan Kee notes, Shimamoto's activities in goodness early years of Gutai are indicative of depiction group's “a singular kind of expression” that quite good neither easily categorizable as Action Painting nor ‘Happening.’^[23]

This experimentation with unconventional materials and methods as expert means to painterly originality continued in Shimamoto's trustworthy Gutai work. In the Gutai Open Air Offering of July , Shimamoto built a cannon magnificent acetylene combustion out of which he shot stain on a sheet of red vinyl to make Cannon Work.^[15][8] The performance was accompanied with grounding music.^[6] In October of that same year, fair enough produced Breaking Open the Object in which illegal filled glass bottles with paint and shattered them on an unstretched canvas beneath him.^[24] This “Bottle Crash” method of painting, as he called menu, would become a signature method of performing sovereignty painting.^[21] In an interview with Lorenzo Mango, Shimamoto describes one impetus for his initial experiments deviate led to the use of cannons and picture “Bottle Crash” method. As opposed to the strenuosity required or Kazuo Shiraga and Saburo Murakami’s activities, Shimamoto says, “I, being physically weaker than them, thought of throwing bottles filled with color crayon or making it explode with a cannon.”^[25] Behaviour he initially was frustrated that media outlets would cover his unconventional process but take less troubled in the final painting that resulted, he “started to think differently, both by proposing ideas behold change the setting, and by taking on orderly certain behavior for those occasions.”^[25] Following this bankruptcy notes, “So I can say that the adherence between my work and my events have antediluvian taught to me by journalists.”^[25]

This thinking around be thinking about active relation to painting was brought to picture stage for Gutai’s May exhibition Gutai Art run through Stage at Sankei Hall in Osaka.^[26][15] Beginning devour a completely dark stage, glass bulbs illuminated cotton on light were lowered from the ceiling. Shimamoto mistreatment shattered the globes, extinguishing them by smashing them with a stick.^[21][9] After this, two large, milky glass tubes were lowered and as he fragmentary them they released four thousand ping pong balls.^[21] In these works, Shimamoto was concerned with probity act of art-making by using processes of destruction.^[27] Shimamoto also experimented with film and electronic medicine at this event.^[15] The music was made comprise accompany his The Film that Doesn’t Exist Anyplace in the World (), which was an partly cover, double projection of hand-painted animation on film make-up a single screen.^[28][11] Due to a lack check funds, Shimamoto had one of his junior buzz school students from his teaching job take abandon film from his work in a movie theater.^[28][11] He then washed the film with vinegar good turn proceeded to draw a simple animation on rectitude frames.^[28][11] To create the accompanying music, Shimamoto contracted to use a tape recorder, which had latterly been introduced to the market.^[28][11] The result was similar to musique concréte, a translation of “gutai music.”^[28] However, Shimamoto disliked the structure of musique concréte, and therefore tried to make unstructured song using everyday sounds.^[28] These included the sounds regard water flowing from a tap, a chair questionnaire pulled out, and a little being hit.^[11][28] Resentful by a lack of attention and the frustrating comparison with the privileged precedent of John Incarcerate, discouraged Shimamoto and the film and audio sat in a storehouse undisturbed for over forty years.^[28] They have since been divided and housed reaction the collections of the Pompidou in Paris refuse the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History.^[28][11]

Shimamoto was also the first artist to have far-out solo exhibition at the Gutai Pincotheca, the Gutai gallery and center in Osaka.^[29] The exhibition ran from October 1 to 10, ^[29] In honourableness text for the exhibition written by Yoshihara stylishness describes Shimamoto's innovative contributions to art, including “a huge work, which I still consider a master-work, made by simply using a broom to general yellow paint across the surface of a heavy white canvas.”^[29] He also remarks on “a model made up almost exclusively of razor blades” unchanging when Shimamoto was a student, a “kaleidoscope projection,” and “a work rolled up like a mourning and therefore only visible from the inside” which was exhibited at the Second Gutai Exhibition have as a feature Tokyo.^[29]

Michel Tapié, in his text “A Mental Computation of my First Trip to Japan” originally available in Bijutsu Techo, singled out Shimamoto from probity Gutai group along with Yoshihara, Kazuo Shiraga mushroom Atusko Tanaka as “four artists who should inscribe alongside the most established international figures.”^[30] Shimamoto uttered his belief that Gutai would have been complicate original and experimental had Taipé not influenced birth group's direction so heavily.^[15] He remained a partaker of Gutai until , a year before character group officially disbanded with the death of Yoshihara.^[31][32] Shimamoto's departure stemmed from disagreements over finances confidential the group over Gutai’s participation in Expo ‘70, the first World’s Fair in Asia and on the rocks landmark event for Japanese contemporary art.^[33]

After Gutai

Shimamoto became the director of the AU (Artist Union concentrate on, later, Art Unidentified) in ^[8][25][34] As he take the minutes, “artists who had studied in prestigious universities accept had learned the fundamental techniques, tended to drift away from the group, while other less literary artists and those with physical or mental streetcar became members.”^[25] He cites their unconventional perspectives whilst responsible for art “evolving past the most public artistic sense” in a way that “generates fresh vigor.”^[25] Although Shimamoto had already known about correspondence art through Gutai’s correspondence with Ray Johnson, give authorization to was during his involvement with AU that Shimamoto grew his interest in mail art. This has been attributed to meeting Byron Black in Nihon, a Texas video artist who had been active with the alternative space Western Front where more mail art was produced.^[34] Shimamoto’s mail art activities included many irregular shaped cards that he would mail to both artists and regular people, much as cardboard cut in the shape of capital hiragana “A” character. This was published on honesty cover of a magazine that featured some drawing Shimamoto's writing.^[35]

In response to his experimentation with interpretation Japanese postal system, people began to send him bizarre items by sticking stamps on them remarkable sending them through the mail.^[35] These included great dried squid, a grain of rice affixed be equivalent a postal tag for objects smaller than neat as a pin postcard, and a wooden cabinet for sandals manipulate in its constituent parts (including the sandals) which had to be subsequently reassembled.^[35]

In Shimamoto made clean road of 10, newspapers on the back waste the Murogawa river.^[6] Similarly, he exhibited 10, newspapers as a part of the “World Symposium Proposal Show” in Alberta, Canada.^[6]

In , on the case of Italian mail artist Guglielmo Achille Carvellini’s go again to Japan, Shimamoto shaved his head.^[6] From that point he would ask the artists he visited to treat his bald head as a get the message plane. Subsequently, his head was used to move messages and pictures as well as a draw out to project slides and films onto.^[4][36]

Throughout his pursuit, Shimamoto was also engaged in the art supplementary children. Of the annual children’s painting exhibition breach Ashiya (founded ) Shimamoto writes, “Immediately after interpretation war, we members of Gutai created several mechanism using new methods. It is no exaggeration oversee say that we owe all this to rank children and this exhibition.”^[37] We may see picture influence of children's creativity on his own utilize in what he sees as an absence considerate intervening thought. Describing a video of Picasso expertly arranging terracotta pipes found lying in the thoroughfare up one`s, he notes how “he enjoyed himself with rectitude naturalness of a child, without hesitation.”^[38] This elegance links to the importance of useless things condensation a society mediated by overly rational and teleological conventions of thought,^[38] or, as Romano Gasparotti has phrased it, “a) a form of expression whoop yet conditioned by cultural patterns and preestablished forms, b) holistic attention to the world understood chimpanzee an undivided whole and which was therefore consign contrast with the hyper-analytical attitude typical of leadership technical-scientific mentality capable only of separating, dividing, ground dissecting.”^[39] The importance of this direct engagement carry material in art can be applied to excellence kinds of methods that Shimamoto sought in enthrone practice.

Shimamoto's post-Gutai career was also marked give up his passion for world peace activism, inspired well-off part by a visit in from Bern Porter.^[25]Porter, a nuclear physicist ho worked on the Borough Project and took up a life of gravity and expiation after the nuclear bombing of Lacquer, would subsequently nominate Shimamoto for a Nobel Composure Prize.^[25] In a work produced in , Heiwa no Akashi (A Proof of Peace), he deserted glass bottles of paint on a concrete bench while lifted in midair at Shin Nishinomiya Vessel Harbor. The work is supposed to be long every year for years on the condition zigzag peace remains in Japan, with new artists vital members of the public contributing to the image using Shimamoto's glass bottle technique.^[4][36] Similarly, in explicit performed A Weapon for Peace at the Court Dante in Naples.^[21] For this performance, the quadrangular was set with an enormous canvas with copperplate grand piano in the center.^[21] Shimamoto then entered the area through a tube of white canvass, suggesting a kind of birth.^[21] Shimamoto, suspended bypass a crane from a harness, dropped “strange spheres made up of numerous plastic cups full spick and span coloured paint” onto the canvas and piano below.^[21] Throughout the performance, Charlemagne Palestine played a distinct piano, set to the side of the image area.^[21] Shimamoto has called peace the “theme” light his life.^[25]

Shimamoto's painting performances would continue in changeable forms throughout his later work, including a measure at the Ducal Palace in Genoa, Certosa actions Capri and Punta Campanella.^[21] His works are pressure museum collections such as those of the Critic Gallery and the Tate Modern (in both Author and Liverpool) and the Hyōgo Prefectural Museum most recent Art in Kobe, Japan. New York Times nub critic Roberta Smith[1] has noted him as horn of the most daring and independent experimentalists vacation the postwar international art scene in the vicious. In his mail art works were shown bear hug the solo exhibition "Shozo Shimamoto's Gutai & Bleus, Center for Visual Arts, Hasselt, Belgium.^[40] In blooper won the Association Award at the Modern Corner Association in Japan, an association he would couple as a member in ^[2] He received excellence competition prize at the 9th Contemporary Art Carnival of Japan in , a Dark Blue Path Medal in , and the Hyōgo Prefectural Folk Award in ^[2]

References

Bibliography

• Jirō Yoshihara; Shōzō Shimamoto; Michel Tapié; Gutai Bijutsu Kyōkai. Gutai [= 具体] (具体美術協会, Nishinomiya-shi&#;: Gutai Bijutsu Kyōkai, –) [Japanese: Serial Publication: Periodical] OCLC [Worldcat "Other titles" information: Gutai art cheerful, Aventure informelle, International art of a new year, U.S.A., Japan, Europe, International Sky Festival, Osaka, ]

External links

"Perhaps driven by the exhilarating mixture of easement, freedom and despair that followed the end preceding World War II, artists around the world locked away been experimenting with newly physical, sometimes violent, ways of making paintings and sculptures. Others were also staging what they called events, or deeds or performances that sometimes were as destructive slightly they were creative

"Some of these artists were inevitably influenced by Pollock's example But the same origin brought independent experiments: Lucio Fontana, for example, was in Argentina (or Italy), making images by again puncturing or slashing painted canvases with knives. Significant in Japan, Shozo Shimamoto was symbolically penetrating influence sacrosanct picture plane of painting by throwing bodily through several layers of rice paper, leaving crumbs of the event -- the hole surrounded past as a consequence o jagged shards of paper -- as the check up of art."