In 1952, the New York–based critic Harold Rosenberg famously described a seismic shift taking place in American painting. No longer, he wrote, were artists coming to a canvas with a predetermined composition that they’d already worked out in a sketch. Now, a painter slathered on strokes and dribbled paint directly. 

A few years later, halfway around the world, two Japanese artists, Kazuo Shiraga and Akira Kanayama, took Rosenberg’s idea a step further—eliminating not just the sketch, but also the brush and the human hand. 

Shiraga and Kanayama, who are being showcased right now at New York’s Fergus McCaffrey gallery, both found canny ways to produce abstract paintings without lifting a finger during the mid-1950s. Both were associated with the avant-garde Gutai movement of the era. In their paintings, they subverted a notion that was common among the New York–based Abstract Expressionists: that gestural abstraction was deeply human, that it tapped into raw emotions via the artist’s hand. 

Kanayama’s paintings eliminate the human touch altogether. To craft his dense drizzles, the artist outfitted a toy car with cans of paint that leaked their contents, dispersing webs of black, red, green, and more across his medium-sized canvases. Kanayama steered his little vehicle around and around, left and right; overlaid swirls were the end result. Using this process, he touched the buttons on the remote control more than he did his own canvases. 

Shiraga’s approach verges on parody. Rather than pushing around paint with a brush in hand, he laid his canvases on his studio’s floor—a deliberate allusion to Jackson Pollock’s technique—and pulled around brown and maroon gobs with his feet. Set against white backgrounds, these shit-like messes of color are chunky and thick—so viscous that one can even sometimes spot the ridges formed by Shiraga’s toes. The dance-like choreography needed to make these abstractions replaces the fine motor skills associated with handiwork with more bumbling footwork—but the results don’t betray any lesser command of his materials. 

The Fergus McCaffrey show is titled “Plus Minus,” a reference to Shiraga’s assertion that his and Kanayama’s paintings were opposites. Kanayama’s paintings were “cold,” Shiraga said, while his were “hot.” And it is clear, based on this show, that Kanayama’s cold canvases went one step further past the Abstract Expressionist paradigm. Enlisting a little motorized vehicle, these paintings did away with the pretense of sublimity altogether. 

If Shiraga’s abstractions ultimately resemble those produced by some New York School artists, Kanayama’s appear totally anathema to the beefy abstractions of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. An untitled painting by Kanayama from 1965, included in this show, is composed of a lumpy circular form onto which a flat bed of red squiggles has been overlaid. Despite the blazing brightness of its hues, the painting does not inspire much in the way of transcendence. Instead, its strokes evince a mechanical quality. That is no accident. 

Kanayama’s paintings, as well as a few pen drawings that he also made with a remote-controlled car, look forward to questions being asked right now, during a time when AI is raising questions about our species’ role in the process of creating. Early on, Kanayama’s paintings asked these questions as almost everything was being made with the aid of a mechanized counterpart. But rather than stoking existential anxiety, automation seemed to bring the artist a kind of lightness and freedom. For him, it was a way to needle the centrality of human emotion that was so integral to modern art. Tellingly, many of his paintings bear affectless titles. Most of the ones in this show are simply called Work. 

Such elaborations on long-held assumptions about the primacy and superiority of (white) American and European abstract art within global modernism are repeated throughout “Slip Zone,” which assembles works not only from Gutai but also from Mono-ha in Japan, Dansaekhwa in Korea, and Neoconcretism in Brazil. The artists behind these movements emerged from distinct cultural contexts whose traditions and concerns suffused their work and, in turn, contributed to an international conversation about the untapped possibilities of material, form, and abstraction. Instead of presenting postwar modernism as a Euro-American export to other parts of the world, “Slip Zone” highlights the remarkably heterogeneous artistic cross-pollination that occurred during this period, both globally and across racial divides within the United States.

Works by canonical American artists such as Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, and Mark Rothko are indeed included in “Slip Zone,” but their presentation provides passing context more than it enshrines their positions, effectively showing how various artists contributed to distinctly modernist visual styles from vastly different reference points and backgrounds. An uncharacteristically bright Rothko painting, for example, accompanies a Frankenthaler work dominated by similar vermilion hues, visually echoed on the gallery floor in an early latex pour by Lynda Benglis titled Odalisque (Hey, Hey Frankenthaler), 1969. The psychedelic swirls of Benglis’s pour are themselves refracted nearby in Gutai artist Shozo Shimamoto’s 1965 oil painting Untitled – Whirlpool, which implies the influence of traditional Japanese paper marbling techniques such as suminagashi in its amoeba-like rings of overlapping color.

Jack Whitten: Slip Zone, 1971, acrylic on canvas, 39 inches square.

Arrayed with daubed lines of blue pigment rhythmically fading like a stamp losing ink, Korean artist Lee Ufan’s 1978 painting From Point combines repetitious Minimalist techniques with traditional Japanese materials such as nikawa, an animal-skin glue used in silk painting. Ufan’s prioritizing of fundamental material properties as much as Western notions of artistic expression is more dramatically demonstrated in his sculpture Relatum (1968/1969/2011), in which the artist dropped a stone on a plate of glass and left it for display on the broken surface, charged with a frisson of violence amid stillness. Such philosophical explorations of physicality and process-based attempts at “not making” were a hallmark of Mono-ha (or “School of Things”), a movement led by Ufan and Japanese artist Nobuo Sekine.

As part of its ambitious reevaluation of histories of modernism marred by imposed hierarchies and segregation, “Slip Zone” also highlights the under-acknowledged contributions of Black American artists working within various forms of postwar abstraction, including Color Field painting and Minimalism. The exhibition takes its title from a 1971 painting by Jack Whitten with a striated, textured surface that the artist created using implements such as combs and rakes. Suspended on the tallest wall in the exhibition’s central gallery, Leaf (1970)—one of Sam Gilliam’s signature unstretched canvases—majestically expands its painted folds, lending the space a reverent, chapel-like quality. Elsewhere, the triumphant, large-scale paintings Marcia H Travels by Frank Bowling and Intarsia by Ed Clark (both 1970) face each other across a gallery, each emitting its own distinctive, delicate aura through bleeding layers of color—Bowling’s soft and veil-like, Clark’s hard-lined and horizontal. Between them, the alluring cast polyester sculpture Untitled (Parabolic Lens), 1978, by California Light and Space artist Fred Eversley, serves as an energetic prism, alive with soft blue luminosity.

Few artists exemplify the truly intercultural legacy of postwar abstraction as well as Senga Nengudi, who spent a year studying Gutai at Waseda University in Tokyo before returning to the United States to participate in the Black avant-garde movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Using vinyl bags of vividly colored water to explore weight and fluid motion, Nengudi’s early work Water Composition I (1969–70/2019) reveals the direct influence of Gutai artist Sadamasa Motonaga’s 1956 installation Work (Water), in which vinyl sheets filled with dyed water were suspended between trees. Nengudi’s construction also anticipates the formal concerns of her later, best-known works in the “R.S.V.P.” series (1975–77), involving pantyhose tied together, pinned to walls, and weighted with sand. By drawing compelling and precise connections such as these, “Slip Zone” insists on a revised history of abstraction that acknowledges and celebrates the dynamic, multidirectional cultural exchanges to which these artworks attest.

During his lifetime, and especially at the height of his career in the 1950s through the mid-’60s, Mathieu was a controversial and polarizing figure. Born into a banking family in a French coastal town, he had a lifelong adherence to an eccentric royalist political stance that often provoked the ire of his avant-garde colleagues in America and Europe. The aristocratic posturing eventually caused him to be sidelined in the annals of recent American art; in an essay for this show’s catalogue, the late art historian and critic Germano Celant refers to Mathieu as “an antagonist who was at one and the same time reactionary and revolutionary.” This last descriptor might refer to Mathieu’s role in championing the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and other American Abstract Expressionists, who, in the late 1940s, were largely unknown in Europe. After visiting New York and seeing these young artists’ work firsthand, Mathieu was inspired to cofound the movement known today as Lyrical Abstraction or Tachisme—considered part of art informel, Europe’s answer to AbEx—with artists such as Hans Hartung, Wols, Jean Fautrier, and Pierre Soulages. Responding in anguish to the atrocities of World War II, these artists sought an abstract visual language that emphasized fervid gesture and the artwork’s raw, material properties. The group opposed the formal constructs and orderliness of geometric abstraction.

In the following years, under the umbrella of Lyrical Abstraction, Mathieu presented a series of live “painting actions” to considerable acclaim all over the world—including in Japan, where Gutai artists wrote in their manifesto that his work “reveals the scream of matter itself.” Documentary footage of these events, on view at Perrotin, shows Mathieu violently attacking the canvases with elongated paintbrushes as if engaged in a frantic sword fight. In contrast to this aggressive, macho delivery, Mathieu would often dress for these events in flamboyant outfits befitting his royalist dandy persona that were smeared with paint by the end. The convulsive, slashing brushstrokes combined with sinuous, richly textured lines made with pigment squeezed directly from the tube produced spontaneous yet elegant configurations resembling calligraphy. These elusive signs, typically centered in the composition and floating in an ethereal space, sometimes recall medieval heraldry.

Georges Mathieu, The Victory of Denain, 1963, oil on canvas, 108 ¼ by 275 ⅝ inches.

Mathieu often titled his works after medieval or pre–French Revolution battles, as with The Victory of Denain (1963), one of several stunning examples at Perrotin. Here, against a hazy, stained, coffee-hued background—modulated from deep umber on the lower right to muted beige on the upper left—thick, slashing brushstrokes of red, white, and blue thrust from left to right, traversing the central portion of the twenty-three-foot-wide canvas. In palette and composition, the work recalls Jean Alaux’s 1839 painting of the same subject, which depicts a 1712 French victory in the War of the Spanish Succession. In Mathieu’s painting, and in many of his other epic-scale compositions, he abstracts and critiques the tradition of grandiose history painting. The intensity of Mathieu’s gestures, and the resultant complex, layered cursive, also evokes wildstyle graffiti and certain works that Futura and Rammellzee produced in the 1980s.

One of the largest and most sumptuous Mathieu works at Perrotin, measuring nearly ten by thirty feet, is Paris, Capital of the Arts (1965), where a central configuration of highly textured, gestural markings in red, yellow, and white hover against a glowing cerulean ground. Here and there, Mathieu uses touches of black or other dark hues to underline the bright flourishes, thus creating subtle drop shadows. The illusionist device lends a 3D effect and a sense of solidity to the asemic signage that appears almost as a bas-relief. The technical refinements in this work reappear in some of the best paintings at Nahmad Contemporary, such as Hommage à Corelli (Homage to Corelli), 1970, a synesthetic work named after the Italian composer, and Sounion II (1976), with more architectural features reminiscent of the titular Greek temple. With their spiky or curlicue embellishments and novel color relationships, these efforts are visually seductive, and verge on the ornamental. (Indeed, Mathieu had great success in later years by lending his signature style to a range of applied arts.) Mathieu is still able to convey a sense of energy in these works, but they cannot match the visceral power of his early efforts related to action painting. In a stark composition like First Avenue (1957, at Perrotin), featuring only a few convulsive splashes and drips of white tossed at the center of a pitch-black background, with several poignant red slashing lines at upper right, Mathieu directly responds to the New York School of Pollock and Franz Kline, as a representative of Paris’s own brand of testosterone-driven, postwar angst.

Miguel Cabrera, El Divino Esposo (The Divine Spouse), ca. 1750, oil on canvas.

RAFAEL DONIZ/©MUSEUM ASSOCIATES, LACMA, AND FOMENTO CULTURAL BANAMEX, A.C./FUNDACIÓN CULTURAL DANIEL LIEBSOHN, A.C., MEXICO CITY

TUESDAY, APRIL 24

Exhibition: “Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici” at Metropolitan Museum of Art
“Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici,” which first debuted at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, brings together 110 works to trace stylistic and pictorial innovations of the era. Organized into seven thematic sections, the show considers the varied material production of 18th-century Mexico and artists’ crucial roles in society at the time. Featuring recently restored artworks, the exhibition focuses on the Mexican art world during a vibrant period in which painting schools were consolidated, academies were founded, and new iconographies were introduced.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Avenue, 10 a.m.–5:30 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 25

Opening: “Gutai, 1953–59” at Fergus McCaffrey
In its newly expanded space, Fergus McCaffrey gallery will showcase some 70 large-scale artworks from the Gutai movement, a Japanese avant-garde swell that experimented with ideas related to chance and performance. In its spirit, artists like Kazuo Shiraga, Saburo Murakami, Atsuko Tanaka, and Toshio Yoshida grappled with the atrocities and traumas of World War II and sought novel ways of creating art, engaging with materials, and experimenting with forms. “Gutai, 1953–59” will include works created in the time leading up to the collective’s establishment, in 1954; some pieces in the show are being exhibited in America for the first time.
Fergus McCaffrey, 514 West 26th Street, 6–8 p.m.

David Salle, Mingus in Mexico, 1990, oil and acrylic on canvas.

©DAVID SALLE/LICENSED BY VAGA, NEW YORK

THURSDAY, APRIL 26

Opening: David Salle at Skarstedt
Known for works that combine photography, painting, and collage techniques, David Salle is often considered one of the most important figurative artists working today. This show, titled “David Salle: Paintings 1985–1995,” surveys a period in which he created canvases that appear to include appropriated images, often layering them to create dense compositions that blur the line between original pictures and ready-made ones. However contemporary the results, Salle also had art history in mind as he was producing these paintings: reference points here range from Diego Velázquez to Alberto Giacometti.
Skarstedt, 10 East 79th Street, 6–8 p.m.

Talk: Iris Morales, Rosa Clemente, and Victoria Barrett at Brooklyn Museum
Coinciding with the museum’s exhibition “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985,” three Latinx activists will discuss strategies for community organizing in the United States and Latin America. Participants in the conversation include former Young Lords Party member and filmmaker Iris Morales, educator and activist Rosa Clemente, and environmental activist Victoria Barrett. The event will be moderated by Adjoa Jones de Almeida, director of education at the Brooklyn Museum.
Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, 7–9 p.m.

SATURDAY, APRIL 28

Dave Muller, S&D&RnR, 2018, acrylic and sign enamel on gessoed plywood.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND BLUM & POE

Gallery Walk: Madison Avenue Gallery Walk at Various Venues
In conjunction with the Madison Avenue Business Improvement District, ARTnews will present a day of gallery walks and events led by art-world experts. Forty-six participating galleries will host programs including curator talks, exhibition walkthroughs, guided tours, artist talks, and auctions. Among the day’s events will be a talk with ARTnews contributor Phyllis Tuchman at Van Doren Waxter about the collages of John McLaughlin, a walk-through of Dave Muller’s show at Blum & Poe, and a curated tour of various galleries by ARTnews editor-in-chief Sarah Douglas.
Various venues, consult website for details. RSVP necessary for certain events

Opening: Huang Yong Ping at Gladstone Gallery
For his fifth solo show at Gladstone Gallery—and his first in New York since Theater of the World, an installation that was to feature live animals, generated controversy for its inclusion in the Guggenheim Museum’s recent survey of contemporary Chinese art—Huang Yong Ping will exhibit his large-scale sculpture Bank of Sand, Sand of Bank (2000–06). The work, which weighs 20 tons, is modeled on the former HSBC Bank in Shanghai, a Neoclassical structure built in 1923 by a British architecture firm. Yet despite its weight, the work is extremely fragile; made of sand and a small amount of cement, it can crumble at any time—underscoring ways that major historical structures can come apart and reveal their history.
Gladstone Gallery, 530 West 21st Street, 4–6 p.m.

Opening: Takashi Murakami at Perrotin
Taking over three floors of Perrotin gallery’s outpost on the Lower East Side, Japanese artist Takashi Murakami presents a new suite of paintings inspired by the art of Francis Bacon along with other recent pieces. The “Homage to Francis Bacon” works, which Murakami began in 2002 and continued producing through 2016, feature some of the artist’s most familiar iconography—bulging eyes and mushrooms—in fields of color, all placed on platinum leaf. The exhibition also includes a 33-foot-long painting from 2017, Transcendent Attacking a Whirlwind, that is meant as a tribute to the Japanese artist Soga Shohaku. The painting continues Murakami’s ongoing interest in synthesizing styles culled from pop culture and more traditional Japanese forms.
Perrotin, 130 Orchard Street, 4–9 p.m.

Takashi Murakami, Homage to Francis Bacon (Second Version of Triptych (on light ground)), 2016, acrylic, gold and platinum leaf on canvas mounted on aluminum frame triptych (three panels).

©2016 TAKASHI MURAKAMI/KAKAI KIKI CO., LTD., ALL RIGHTS RESERVED/COURTESY PERROTIN

Opening: Marlene Dumas at David Zwirner
For her first solo exhibition in New York since 2010, the South African-born, Amsterdam-based artist Marlene Dumas presents the exhibition “Myths & Mortals,” which features a series of works on paper commissioned for a recent Dutch adaptation of the William Shakespeare narrative poem “Venus and Adonis.” The show will also include a series of new paintings that vary in size, from monumentally scaled nudes to more modestly sized canvases that explore bodies and facial features.
David Zwirner, 537 West 20th Street, 6–8 p.m.

SUNDAY, APRIL 29

Opening: “74 million million million tons” at SculptureCenter
The artists in this group show, curated by Ruba Katrib (formerly of SculptureCenter and now of MoMA PS1) and the artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan, attempt to articulate the elusive, abstract moments that often fill the time between major shifts in political, cultural, and technological consciousness. Among the works included are Shadi Habib Allah’s installation of cell phones playing recorded conversations of Bedouin smugglers and Carolina Fusilier’s abstract paintings, which explore the inner workings of mechanical devices. According to the curators’ statement for the show, artists here “anticipate and produce material documents even before the process has been deemed necessary.”
SculptureCenter, 44-19 Purves Street, Queens, 5–7 p.m.

In A.i.A.’s November/December 1968 issue, former Japan Times critic Martin Cohen, writing just 14 years after the movement’s launch, offered a penetrating assessment, both collective and individual, of the avant-garde “antics” of such “madcap” artists as founder Jiro Yoshihara and cohorts Atsuko Tanaka, Akira Kaneda, Sadamasa Motonaga and others. —Eds.

These men anticipated most of the far-out artistic activities of the sixties. Now that the far-out is in all over the world, will Gutai’s high-jinks seem low-yield?

What happens after the happening? Where do the participants doff mask and costume and assume normalcy as most people know it? What happens to art’s enfants terribles when they get older? Some take up chess, some continue as before and thus complacently cease real growth, and some mellow, like the late Leonardo Foujita, who had painted his penis decades before comparable undertakings in the moral turbulence of the 1960s.

It is well over ten years since Gutai members occupied a pine grove near the Ashiya River, not far from Osaka, there to drape the ground and trees with a three-hundred-meter roll of white vinyl stamped with outsize footprints, frame a narrow portion of sky and make it and the passing clouds the artist’s work, fire paint from a homemade cannon onto a ten-meter-square vinyl sheet, and suspend lond tubes of translucent vinyl, holding colored water, from tree to tree. Nothing outstanding today – but Gutai was doing it over a decade ago.

In 1956-57 (and at regular intervals later), Gutai presented stage shows, using structure and music in creating works, carefully voided of literary content, for the stage. The productions were planned and directed by Jiro Yoshihara, Gutai’s mentor, and featured acts which included Atsuko Tanaka’s appearance in a garment which as far as anyone could see consisted only of a jumble of fluorescent and incandescent light bulbs draped over her body, Akira Kaneda’s inflation of a giant vinyl balloon which soon filled the entire stage, and Sadamasa Motonaga’s inflation of a long plastic phallus which, led by a wire, rose past the proscenium and to the ceiling, puffing red smoke.

Gutai did not then and does not now look upon such antics as being consciously attempted happenings, but they are certainly among the interesting and important early attempts in postwar Japan to shake free of the traditional restrictions that paintings be rectilinear and utilize oil-based pigments and that sculpture be seen and not heard.

This sort of madcap activity drew attention from, as they say in the Far East, the eight directions but especially, at first, from the West, in the form of reportage by Life and, more important, the “discovery” of Gutai by Michel Tapié, who found a strong commonality between Gutai members’ work and that of his “informelle” clique. Tapié wrote an enthusiasti “Homage à Gutai” as an introduction to the catalogue for Gutai’s “L’Aventure Informelle” exhibition in 1957.

Perhaps because the Japanese have been inordinately sensitive to foreigners’ opinions about Japan, especially since Lafcadio Hearn, Gutai group shows in various Japanese cities became more common after Tapié’s endorsement. Outside Japan, in 1958, Gutai works were shown at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. In 1958, 1959 and 1960, Gutai artists showed their works in Turin (“Art Nuova” exhibition), Lissone (“Premio Lissone”) and in Paris at the same time, Gutai was introducing foreign artists to Japan; in the “L’Aventure Informelle” show, among the artists were Burri, Capogrossi, David Smith, Dubuffet, de Kooning, Fontana, Gottlieb, Hoffmann, Kline, Mathieu (who visited Japan with Tapié), Motherwell and Pollock (who had been very interested in Gutai’s activities).

But it wasn’t until 1962 that Gutai had a real headquarters from which to assail tradition, and it was Tapié who gave the musée-manifeste its name: Pinacotheca. In the heart of Osaka, and in the shade of new office buildings, the Pinacotheca is a thoroughly Japanese-appearing building, now out of place amid the frenetic highway and high-rise construction. A rice granary when first built some eighty years ago, the Pinacotheca, if considered to be a museum of modern art, is the only one in Osaka. Gutai members have one-man and group shows there, and foreign artists—Sam Francis being the most recent—also occasionally appear. In a city which, in the name of modernization for Expo 70, has sacrificed some good traditions like the “oyster boats”—fresh-oyster restaurants moored in Osaka’s canals—the antiquated Pinacotheca remains, now a tradition in itself, as combined museum, gallery and clubhouse for a remarkable band of madcap artists.

Gutai’s origin, according to Osaka industrialist Kunijiro Tamaki, a collector of Gutai members’ works, was a matter of natural coalescence, or even spontaneous generation. A number of artists with similar ideas found themselves in one place, Osaka, at one time, 1952; and under the leadership of Jiro Yoshihara the group has continued ever since. Yoshihara himself is generally taciturn and persistently modest when speaking about his connection with Gutai, partly because of his desire to keep his artistic activities distinctly separated from his business activities. There are no secrets; the Pinacotheca is across a narrow street from his Yoshihara Oil Mill, but stockholders might not take well to his association with avant-garde artists. It is also no secret that it has been the oil mill which has allowed him to be Gutai’s patron, by enabling him to provide the Pinacotheca and to defray costs of the annual Tokyo exhibition. Yoshihara is no dictator, but his opinion of members’ work carries the weight of a Supreme Court justice.

A pioneer in modern painting in Japan forty years ago, Yoshihara has abandoned action painting in recent years for Zen-like black and white circles and lines. Asked to define the requirements for membership in the Gutai group, Yoshihara said they have always been that the artist should not imitate anyone but express his own self, that he be involved in a pursuit of creativity and that he make what did not exist before. In practice, applicants and members alike must live in the Kansai area, which includes Osaka, Kobe, Kyoto and other cities; a member who moves to Tokyo or elsewhere outside Kansai becomes inactive. Membership has been kept stable at about thirty for several years.

But just how good is Gutai today? The question requires one answer for the group, one answer for individual members. As a group Gutai shows more stability and internal harmony than one might expect, considering the great disparity in methods, materials and basic attitudes shown by members. But critics, including the outsider who knows Gutai best, Yoshiaki Inui, curator-in-chief of Kyoto’s National Museum of Modern Art, feel that Gutai could be—has been—far better than it now is, even though a number of members can be singled out as doing exciting work. Exhibitions continue almost all year round at the Pinacotheca, and once a year the group comes up to the capital for a big and generally quite good, if eclectic, show. But the daring has grown dim. True, there is no need for Gutai to present what may be called or compared to happenings, or works for the stage; they have done this long ago, and are not apt to repeat themselves. Thus, since the “International Sky Festival” in 1960, when Gutai members and friends overseas had their works hung from balloons over an Osaka department store, no really big project has been attempted. Gutai still has itws own momentum and generates its own energy, but as a group it has become relatively tame. The Pinacotheca today is not only a gallery; it is also, as noted earlier, a clubhouse—and therein is one problem for Gutai.

But if the group has become weak, some individuals have become strong. None, it would seem, live on income from art alone, but then again Gutai is quite uncommercial. The Pinacotheca does not have anyone specifically charged with selling. Largely for this reason, members’ output is low, but there are other reasons, perhaps peculiar to Japan. When his one-man show at the Pinacotheca ended last June, painter Sadaharu Horio was willing to sell his ambitiously scaled works for the cost of materials. Otherwise, he said, he would burn them, because he had now room to keep them. Tokyo gallery owner Paul Watanabe, aghast not only at Gutai members’ low productivity but also at the prospect of needless destruction of the paintings, secured half a dozen and promptly when about selling them. Although some Gutai members have had one-man shows in the Tokyo Gallery in recent years, this is about the sum of their representation in Tokyo. In the case of Kazuo Shiraga, longtime Gutai member, he produces very little, he says, because of current directions in art. “My paintings are hot,” Shiraga says, “and these are cool times.” Shiraga paints with his feet, swinging over the canvas by a rope, to produce action painting packed with power and speed. He will also use a board to spread paint, once twisted his entire body in mud—total involvement!—and, even if his work is not well suited to this particular time, he is one of Gutai’s best.

Horio, twenty-nine, works in mixed media, likes to accordion-pleat strips and pieces of canvas and attach them to ordinary canvas, or give a canvas a navel-like dimple, or tie cloth to a wooden framework, add plaster, white paint and daubs of color to the rags to produce a Gutai-like playfulness. Slender Kumiko Imanaka, a housewife now, was an early op-art sculptor, fabricating vortices of sinuous plastic strips which, because of their two-ply, two-color construction, provided a color-in-motion appearance when one moved in front of them. The idea was commercialized for use in lighting fixtures, and she is now interested in working in a different vein.

Shuji Mukai made a mark for himself by making marks—mostly Xs, pluses, minuses, circles and others signs—not only on canvas and plastic, but all over his clothing and even a junked automobile. Mukai says he has just burned all the works that he had because he now considers them to be worthless. He is at present thinking in terms of electric circuits, flashers, light bulbs. For last summer’s miniature exhibition at the Pinacotheca, he sauntered in with a small white attaché case, ten-watt bulbs in rows covering one side. The attaché case, plugged in, became a signboard, flashing over and over a set sequence of—signs. He had not, after all, cut every link to his past work. But Mukai’s approach from now on, he said, would be different. Today, artists have to use other people’s specialized skills, and, he continued, “I’ve found a tremendous brain”—someone who will build what Mukai wants.

Toshio Yoshida (no relation to Minoru Yoshida) similarly has his bubble machines made to order by a plastics firm. Although he has succeeded in selling several large machines—which produce random sculptures, their forms determined by air currents, the extent that people take a swipe at the bubbles and other factors—he realizes that although the idea and its results are original, they are limited and limiting. He expects to try something else, probably sculpture, before long.

But two other Gutai artists, Minoru Yoshida and George Kikunami, steadfastly stick to the idea that the artist is the one who should make his works. Kikunami, who makes both immobile and moving optical sculpture, painstakingly cuts collars from mirrorlike Tetoron film, a plastic, and mounts them on fine nylon threads, or directly to a board. His moving works, which utilize two or more rotating screens and interior lighting, are hypnotic. Yoshida still creates his characteristic curvilinear, hard-edge paintings, but prefers moving mixtures of plastics and flashing colored lights, as raucous as Kikunami’s works are serene. Wearing round, blue glasses and sporting a spike of a beard, Yoshida looks like the man who made his works, and also lives the way one would expect, requiring taped rock or sitar music, volume up, when he works.

Saoula Raouda Choucair, Composition in Yellow, 1962–65, at CRG.

Some of the worst weather of the winter didn’t keep collectors away from the Seventh Regiment Armory building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side last night for the opening of the ADAA’s annual fair, The Art Show. Raymond Learsy, Martin Margulies, Howard Rachofsky, Agnes Gund, and other top art patrons braved the rainy, slushy night to have a first look at pieces ranging from paintings by household names like Bonnard and Matisse at Acquavella Galleries to small, delicate sculptures by Saloua Rauda Choucair, a Middle Eastern abstract artist whom CRG gallery is giving her first solo show in the U.S.

Michelangelo Pistoletto, Cordoni (Cords), 2015, at Luhring Augustine.

The fair, now in its 27th year, kicks off New York’s Armory Week, and in recent years it has been dominated by contemporary art, with booths featuring solo shows and, often, some daring installations. But compared to last year’s event, where artist Ann Hamilton created a pop-up photo booth in Carl Solway’s booth, this year’s is low on spectacle. The closest thing it has to that is a cleverly placed, far more subdued new piece by Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto. Entitled Cordoni (2015), it is a wall of mirrors with painted-on cordon ropes, the kind you might find at a line for a hot nightclub. The piece is at the booth of Luhring Augustine gallery, which faces the entrance to the fair, so that all arrivals catch a glimpse of themselves approaching Pistoletto’s velvet ropes. (“This is the best booth! The best booth!” a collector enthused.) A perhaps inadvertent metaphor for the art world’s current emphasis on event culture, the piece, priced at $1.2 million, was on reserve by the end of the night.

In general this year, galleries have tended to bring top-quality, but quieter art, like the elegant Brancusi sculptures at Paul Kasmin, and the suite of small, poetic paintings by Etel Adnan at Lelong, the latter priced around $30,000. As exclusive as its opening is, the Art Show is not a fair in which collectors seem to be in a rush to buy. Instead, the evening tends to be dominated by browsing, socializing, and lingering. In the booth of Chicago gallery Rhona Hoffman, several collectors were to be seen paging through a copy of painter Natalie Frank’s new book, hot off the presses, illustrating Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Drawings from the book go on view at New York’s Drawing Center in early April.

Donald Moffett, Lot 121814 (spore 1, radiant blue), 2014, at Boesky.

Besides the art, the theme of the night was the hours-long waits for Uber cars; due, apparently, to weather-related heavy traffic, the 5:30 p.m. opening, where visitors sipped from flutes of champagne and nibbled on squares of parmesan custard, was sparser than usual. But by 7:30 the aisles were packed, and artworks were spoken for. At Marianne Boesky, a group of new works by Donald Moffett, sea anemone-esque paintings on sculptural frames priced at $60,000 to $85,000, had sold out by evening’s end.

Painting is strong at the fair this year. Cheim & Read is offering abstracts by Al Held from the mid 1950s, 98 x 49 inch behemoths for $350,000 that show a strong Abstract Expressionist influence but have enough movement to compete with any of the young art being shown on the Lower East Side. Over at 303, small New England seascapes by Maureen Gallace are for sale for $47,000. These works are almost abstract, given their meaty brushstrokes. “In France we have a saying,” said the accented director Thomas Arsac, of the artist’s wet-on-wet style, “au premier coup.”

The Art Show’s booths, with low ceilings that give them the feel of a Park Avenue living room, are perhaps best suited to 2D works, like the proof edition of Lorna Simpson’s lithograph Wigs, on view at the Simpson solo show at Salon 94’s booth. Taking up an entire wall, the piece seems a steal at $200,000, especially since other editions are owned by MoMA and the Art Institute of Chicago. These booths don’t lend themselves to massive sculptures, but they work well for smaller ones. Marian Goodman has Tony Cragg sculptures, in a variety of materials from treated steel to unpolished marble. These range from $173,000 to $318,000 and a number sold during the opening.

Gianni Piacentino, Stereo, 1965, at Werner.

Luhring Augustine, with that show-stealing Pistoletto, wasn’t the only dealer showing Arte Povera. Michael Werner gallery had already sold one piece by Gianni Piancentino. Among the artists associated with Arte Povera, Piancentino, whose works are priced from $40,000 to $225,000 at Werner’s booth, may be less known, but he appeals to the connoisseur’s taste. “A lot of people don’t know him,” said Werner director Gordon Veneklasen, “but anyone who’s been involved in Arte Povera at all knows him.” The Prada Foundation, which opens a brand new building in Milan in May, has planned a show of Piancentino’s work. Rediscovered Italian postwar artists seemed to be having a moment at the fair, with Bortolami gallery showing sculptures in vitrines by Claudio Parmiggiani, who was also involved in the scene around Arte Povera.

Gutai, the mid-century Japanese movement, was also present. Dominique Lévy gallery, which is currently showing the work of Gutai artists Kazuo Shiraga and Satoru Hoshino at their location a few blocks from the Armory building, stocked their Art Show booth with works by Tsuyoshi Maekawa, abstract paintings that incorporate burlap, all from the 1960s, at the height of Gutai’s powers. The largest piece in the booth sold for $425,000.

The Armory Week action continues today, with the VIP preview day of The Armory show, on Piers 92 and 94.

For more Armory Week coverage, go here.

ALL IMAGES COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALLERY

Installation view of ‘Body and Matter: The Art of Kazuo Shiraga and Satoru Hoshino,’ currently on view at Dominique Lévy Gallery in New York.

TOM POWEL IMAGING/COURTESY DOMINIQUE LÉVY GALLERY

Gutai, the loose group of Japanese artists known for their work from the 1950s, is having a moment in America. Kazuo Shiraga, the abstract painter known for using his feet and hands in lieu of brushes, is the focus of not one but four American exhibitions in the first half of 2015. Shiraga’s work is currently the subject of a solo show at New York’s Mnuchin Gallery, and shown alongside Satoru Hoshino’s clay sculptures at Dominique Lévy (also in New York) and Sadamasa Montanaga’s paintings at the Dallas Museum of Art. In April, Chelsea’s Fergus McCaffrey will mount a show about Shiraga’s relationship with his assistant and wife, Fujiko Shiraga. With such interest in Shiraga and the Gutai movement, we turn back to our 1958 review of the first Gutai show in America ever, held at Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. At the time of the exhibition, Gutai was seen as a copy of Abstract Expressionism, and Thomas B. Hess’s review of the show, which appeared in the “New Names This Month” section, was also negative. (Gutai was not reconsidered in America until recently.) Hess’s thoughts on the show are reproduced in full below.

“Gutai”
By Thomas B. Hess

Gutai [Jackson] group, a number of Japanese artists much influenced by New York Abstract-Expressionism, and much in awe of Europe, were introduced in a fancy exhibition that was generally disapproved of as derivative and trivial. About five years ago, the Gutais sent some copies of their magazine to New York; it illustrated their extra-pictorial activities—creating earth sculpture by dancing and sliding in likes of mud, bustling through layers of paper stretched in front of a door; balloons filled with liquids, the soles of some one’s feet were painted—all highly esthetic in a California 1930s Frat-Rush-Week way. Their paintings showed no such verve, but a similar schizoid approach. The man splits himself in two—one half artist, one half Japanese intellectual. The artist half is kicked out of the personality and set to work flinging or blotting paint, after examples found in black-and-white reproductions from Paris or New York. The intellectual sits back and decides policy questions (a bit less Pollock, a bit more Still, add Kandinsky, what about Tobey… there is even a Mike Goldberg influence, I think). The artist is left to push himself through the wringers. The results are without personality. As such they will be interesting to many interior decorators who seek exactly this sort of chintz. Prices unquoted.

“A tap created a ripple, or you could draw a line. Things gravitated toward you while you were drawing—particles moved toward you,” says new-media artist Aaron Koblin, who created the piece with sculptor Janet Echelman. “You could get a sense of what people around you were doing on their phones based on what you’d see in the sculpture.” The phones also supplied an unearthly soundtrack. “Deep, bassy sounds came through big speakers set up around the plaza, and high-pitched sounds went through everybody’s phones,” Koblin adds.

Koblin and Echelman’s colossal work, titled Skies Painted with Unnumbered Sparks and commissioned for the 30th anniversary of the TED Conference, joins a recent spate of artist-orchestrated projects—in museums, galleries, public spaces, and online—that can only be completed by audiences. This crowdsourced-art movement reflects a growing desire by artists and viewers to connect with each other in tangible, meaningful ways.

Skies Painted with Unnumbered Sparks, 2014, sculpture by Janet Echelman, interactive art by Aaron Koblin.

EMA PETER/COURTESY STUDIO ECHELMAN

Moreover, it might just be the quintessential art form for our hyper-engaged era of social media and smart apps. In the digital realm, we expect to be able to affect the cultural products we consume. Everyone’s a published critic, in one way or another, on Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook. Through crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, anybody with a few bucks can be a patron. Why shouldn’t we all contribute to museum-grade artworks too?

An offshoot of social practice, crowdsourced art has roots in the communal idealism of the late 1950s and ’60s, when Fluxus artists such as Allan Kaprow started staging Happenings and other interactive performances with the public. Fluxus member Yoko Ono was (and still is) a major progenitor of collaborating with the crowd, as is evident in her six-decade survey “Half-A-Wind Show—A Retrospective,” at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain.

“Half-A-Wind” includes several recordings of Ono’s controversial Cut Piece (1964), a performance in which audience members snip off strips of the artist’s clothing until she’s naked on stage, and Mend Piece (1966/68), which consists of a shattered ceramic cup and a tube of glue. When confronting Mend Piece, “you can just contemplate the work, rebuild it in your mind, or reconstruct with your hands the broken pieces of a cup,” says Álvaro Rodríguez Fominaya, the show’s curator.

While those works were participatory, they weren’t exactly crowdsourced. Ono’s Wish Tree (1996/2014), on the other hand, requires museumgoers to add all the finishing touches. Participants write a wish, a hope, or a dream on a piece of paper and hang it from the branches of a tree installed in the museum. “For most members of the public, the tree embodies human traits, the tree becomes a listener. You can whisper to the tree, or you can write a message,” Rodríguez says. “It is a powerful metaphor of what today’s world is lacking, and in that sense it fills a gap in our consciousness.”

Slightly less famous pioneers of crowdsourced art are also getting their due with fresh retrospectives. The postwar Japanese collective Gutai was crowdsourcing as early as the 1950s. Last year, the Guggenheim Museum in New York mounted the Gutai survey “Splendid Playground,” which reconstructed Jirō Yoshihara’s 1956 installation Please Draw Freely. That work, originally placed in a park in Japan, invited visitors to scribble with markers all over a freestanding wooden structure. It was decades ahead of its time and has only now found international recognition as a major work of socially engaged art. In Los Angeles, the late printmaker, activist, teacher, and Catholic nun Corita Kent held workshops with students to produce many of her Pop-inflected images and text pieces in the 1960s and ’70s. She is currently the subject of a traveling exhibition organized by Skidmore College’s Tang Teaching Museum that will head to the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in January.

Jirō Yoshihara’s Please Draw Freely, 1956.

©YOSHIHARA SHINICHIRO AND FORMER MEMBERS OF THE GUTAI ART ASSOCIATION/COURTESY MUSEUM OF OSAKA UNIVERSITY

So for her recent exhibition at Michigan State University’s Broad Art Museum, Smith partnered with local teenagers to build “miniature works that they then curated into a miniature installation” to accompany her sizable pieces. “We talked about small things versus large things, macro versus micro, and accumulation in my work,” Smith says. She’s also planning to do “performance work involving sound and movement” with Boston-area students for her current show at the Museum of Fine Arts.

Other crowdsourced efforts bring together thousands of collaborators working with very few guidelines—and that’s where things can get ecstatically messy. Last year, Urs Fischer enlisted 1,500 volunteers to sculpt 308 tons of clay at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the resulting lumpy, misshapen, strikingly immediate sculptures were shown in their unfired state at the museum. Then, earlier this year, Fischer placed a selection of the artworks in two New York City storefronts under the auspices of Gagosian Gallery.

Those works had been cast in bronze and painted to look like raw clay or precious metals, but retained the amateur vibrancy of the original renditions. Inside an abandoned Chase Bank downtown, Fischer put up a mermaid fountain, a huge Napoleonic bust, a statuette of a man having sex with a pig, and other replicas of the clay sculptures. In an uptown storefront on Park Avenue was a rowdy interpretation of the Last Supper, with rats, cigarette butts, beer cans, pizza slices, and fast-food fries on the table. Many of the sculptures contained sneaker treads and handprints—traces left by Fischer’s collaborators that are now permanently enshrined in bronze.

During Paweł Althamer’s recent survey, “The Neighbors,” at the New Museum in New York, the Polish artist offered his audiences the entire fourth floor, where they could use paint, glitter, and other materials to mark up the temporary walls, the floors, and even the elevator doors. The room-filling piece was called Draftsmen’s Congress (2012/14). “There were not any strict parameters,” says New Museum curator Gary Carrion-Murayari. “The public could paint and draw whatever they liked, could paint over whatever they liked, or re-imagine what was already there.” And that they did—painting layer upon layer of cartoony faces, hearts, cats, phrases, and whatnot. Chunks of the walls were later distributed to the public, completing the cycle of egalitarianism.

The early stages of Paweł Althamer’s Draftsmen’s Congress at the New Museum, 2014.

BENOIT PAILLEY/COURTESY NEW MUSEUM, NEW YORK

Because crowdsourced art can require huge numbers of people, Internet artists have become some of its most prolific practitioners. Even the word crowdsource, coined by Jeff Howe in Wired magazine in 2006, has techy origins. In his article, Howe wrote about e-commerce companies that “tap the latent talent of the crowd. The labor isn’t always free, but it costs a lot less than paying traditional employees. It’s not outsourcing; it’s crowdsourcing.” One such enterprise is the Amazon-owned site Mechanical Turk, which Howe defines as “a Web-based marketplace that helps companies find people to perform tasks computers are generally lousy at.”

Koblin, who is now creative director of data arts at Google, beta-tested Mechanical Turk while he was a grad student at UCLA, and he has since used the site for several web works. Among the earliest was The Sheep Market (2006), for which Koblin asked Mechanical Turk users to simply “draw a sheep facing to the left.” Workers were paid two cents per sketch and were not told what their pictures would be used for. Koblin collected 10,000 sheep drawings of varying skill levels in 40 days and sold them online for $20 per jiggit, a sheep-farming term for 20 heads of livestock.

By employing the symbolically loaded motif of a sheep and reselling the crowdsourced works at a huge markup, Koblin was knocking the ethics of Mechanical Turk, which he calls a “utopian vision that became kind of a dystopic service,” because of its sometimes pitiful pay and nontransparency. He adds of The Sheep Market, “It was a critical art project inciting two reactions. The one from the workers was, ‘This smarmy capitalist person is selling our sheep drawings.’ And the reaction from viewers was, ‘This is so adorable.’”

Koblin has gone on to construct ever-more ambitious artworks with crowds. In 2012, he and Chris Milk launched the web piece This Exquisite Forest, wherein each participant uploads a short animation that branches out thematically from the one before it—like a 21st-century upgrade of the Surrealist game “exquisite corpse.” Tate Modern in London projected the constantly growing film inside the museum in 2012 and ’13. “Olafur Eliasson and Julian Opie started the first trees on the website,” Koblin says. “And so people could collaborate with world-famous artists and see their work on the wall of Tate Modern.”

Both the algorithmic nature of the Internet and its potential to amass distant collaborators allow artists to execute very big ideas. Using Instagram and Twitter, Ono has collected photos of smiling faces from every continent except Antarctica for her ongoing #smilesfilm campaign. And Eliasson and Ai Weiwei accumulated tens of thousands of crowdsourced drawings within weeks of introducing their web project, Moon, last year. For Borges: The Complete Works (2012), Daniel Temkin and Rony Maltz inserted every literary word published by Jorge Luis Borges into an online word-search puzzle, in English and in Spanish. People could find and circle the words on a website, and the results were projected in real time at the 3LD Art and Technology Center in Lower Manhattan. (It will be restaged at the Dumbo Arts Festival in Brooklyn later this month.) Temkin says that creating the massive puzzle “was actually easy. The hard part was the interactive element—to get it so that the circles would show up on the collective board.”

Daniel Temkin and Rony Maltz’s interactive word-search puzzle Borges: The Complete Works, 2012, projected on a wall in Manhattan.

COURTESY THE ARTISTS

The slideshow features numerous mundane photos of friends posing together and drinking beer, as well as the occasional nipple shot, line of cocaine, or catastrophic flood. “We didn’t select or edit the images, not even their sequence. Our only intervention is in the speeding up and slowing down of the slideshow” to simulate how a person flips through photos in real life, the Mattes said.

The ultra-voyeuristic exhibition, titled “By Everyone, For No One, Everyday,” also included the Mattes’ 2012 piece Emily’s Video. That film presented various people’s expressions of shock, horror, disgust, or amusement as they viewed a presumably disturbing video, which has since been destroyed. “The viewers are random volunteers who replied to our online call to watch ‘the worst video ever.’ If you’d answer, a girl named Emily—our assistant—would come to your home and show you the video, filming your reaction with a webcam,” the Mattes explained. Even the online press release for the show was crowdsourced, as a handful of paid amateurs read the release aloud in front of their computers’ cameras. All the hesitations and mispronunciations were left in.

A still from Emily’s Video, 2012, by Eva and Franco Mattes. Participants were recorded while watching “the worst video ever.”

COURTESY POSTMASTERS GALLERY, NEW YORK

Trent Morse is a contributor to ARTnews.

A version of this story originally appeared in the September 2014 issue of ARTnews on page 80 under the title “Working the Crowd.”

That’s the artspeak also known as International Art English, the scourge of artist’s statements, press releases, and catalogues, a language so riddled with semiotic buzzwords that any potential meaning is obscured.

ArtSpeak, the book, is not like that. It’s where you go to find out, quickly and clearly, what Semiotics means.

As its subtitle says, ArtSpeak (Abbeville Press) is a “Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords, 1945 to the Present.” It offers handy short takes on terms like commodification and formalism, along with the who, when, where, and sometimes why of Neo Dada, Neo-Expressionism, Neo-Geo, New Image, the New Leipzig school, New media, New Realism, New Wave, Nouveau Réalisme, Socialist Realism, Social Realism, Social Practice, Space Art, and Spatialism, to name some more of the 146 categories in the book. It also explains what separates Pathetic Art from kitsch, and how Abject Expressionism differs from Abstract Expressionism.

Atkins has been working at some of these definitions for a while. The first edition of ArtSpeak came out in 1990; the next in 1997. Since then the art world has globalized, digitized, and expanded from the studio and gallery to other disciplines. This new third edition has twice as many categories as the first one did, among them several movements from China and Japan, Contemporary Indigenous Australian Art, Tropicalism from Brazil, the Mission School of San Francisco, and categories including AIDS Art, Black Power Art, and Space Art.

Here are excerpts from 15 of the 30 new additions to the newest version of ArtSpeak. How many do you know?

’85 New Wave
The term ’85 New Wave was coined by critic Gao Minglu to describe a broad-based movement—really an explosion of avant-garde energy—in response to the lifting of the stultifying strictures of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s.

Xu Bing, Book from the Sky, 1987–91, books and ceiling and wall scrolls printed from wooden letterpress type using false Chinese characters.

INSTALLATION VIEW AT CROSSINGS, NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA, OTTAWA, 1998.

Targets of the Cultural Revolution included “outmoded” individuals, groups, and institutions—such as intellectuals and well-to-do peasants, universities and temples, and classical architecture and art. Artists were imprisoned or placed under house arrest and sent to labor camps or farms for “reeducation” through agricultural labor and “self-criticism.”

After the deaths of Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong in 1976, leadership of the by-then discredited Cultural Revolution was assumed by Jiang Qing (Madame Mao) and the Gang of Four, who were subsequently arrested and executed. In 1978 the pragmatic Deng Xiaoping became leader of the Communist Party, replacing Maoist zealotry with utilitarian platitudes such as “Seek truth from facts.” He enabled reforms ranging from the adoption of capitalist banking to the approval of (limited) debate at sanctioned sites such as the so-called Democracy Wall in Beijing, or the (brief and limited) tolerance for the Stars Group of artists.

Arnold Mesches, The Plaza Preacher, 1945, oil on canvas.

COLLECTION AMY AND ALLEN MUSIKANTOW, OCALA, FL.

Abject Expressionism
Coined by the critic and curator Michael Duncan for the subtitle of his exhibition L.A. Raw at the Pasadena Museum of California Art in 2012, Abject Expressionism is a term that points ahead to twenty-first century approaches to art: it refers to general affinities of tone, theme, and style, without suggesting more precisely what an artwork might look like (as with op art) or its genre or medium (as with body art).

Synonyms that are occasionally heard include Los Angeles Figurative Style and the more general figurative expressionism.

Abject Expressionism refers to works of painting, assemblage, sculpture, and photography produced after World War II by artists in Los Angeles. These dark and humanistic meditations in the wake of Hiroshima and Buchenwald were rendered in figurative styles that ran counter to the Abstract Expressionism that dominated New York. Abject Expressionism also undermines the view of Los Angeles as a backwater whose art scene emerged only in the 1960s….

AIDS Art
Echoing the intention of feminist art to truthfully represent the experiences of women, AIDS art arose from a similar concern about people with AIDS. After the initial onset of AIDS in the United States in 1981, only photojournalists produced images of it.

Frank Moore, Patient, 1997-98, oil on canvas on wood panel with red pine frame.

PRIVATE COLLECTION, THE GESSO FOUNDATION AND SPERONE WESTWATER, NEW YORK.

Invariably modeled on earlier news photos depicting famines or other catastrophes, these often grisly pictures depressed the spirits of those with HIV and terrified those who did not have it. To counter these “negative” images, activists advocated “positive” portraits of people living with AIDS—that is, images of smiling subjects who looked no different than the average Joe or Jane. This, too, proved an unsatisfying approach that conveyed little information. The modernist single image—the record of the “perfect moment”—was not up to the task of documenting AIDS or other complex subjects; AIDS was among the first signs of its imminent demise.

Black Arts Movement 
The Black Arts Movement is the aesthetic branch of the Black Power Movement…. Leaders of the Black Arts Movement, such as the playwright/poet LeRoi Jones (a.k.a. Amiri Baraka), built upon the political achievements of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s while demanding a more radical transformation in the arts—and all other aspects of society….

Barbara Jones-Hogu, Unite, 1971, screenprint.

FROM THE UPCOMING SHOW ‘CROSSCURRENTS‘ AT MUSEUM OF THE AFRICAN DIASPORA. COURTESY KENKELEBA GALLERY.

The movement’s effects on music, theater, poetry, literature, and art were profound: It revitalized the work of well-known older artists such as Elizabeth Catlett and Lois Mailou Jones and helped validate figurative imagery that almost invariably announced the race (and gender) of its producers. This catalyzed discussion about the racialized criteria of “quality” in art and about the potential of abstract art to convey complexity in the hands of accomplished practitioners like Jack Whitten or William T. Williams. It also paved the way for artists such as Benny Andrews, Barkley Hendricks, and Betye Saar to follow more easily the dictates of their sensibilities.

Contemporary Indigenous Australian Art
Also known as Aboriginal art, Indigenous Australian art has been made by the Indigenous peoples of Australia since time immemorial…. (Aborigines painted, carved, wove, or engraved sacred images and symbols on rocks, bark, stones, or cave walls.)

Christian Thompson, Black Gum #2, 2007, C-type print.

COURTESY HOOD MUSEUM OF ART, DARTMOUTH COLLEGE: PROMISED GIFT OF WILL OWEN AND HARVEY WAGNER.

As with translations of other indigenous peoples’ religious imagery onto more conventional (and commercially oriented “export”) formats elsewhere the world, the contemporary Indigenous Australian art movement sprang from a variety of impulses and motives both respectful and exploitative, held by players and agents both native and European, and both knowledgeable and ignorant of Indigenous peoples and their art. The process began in 1934, when painter Rex Battarbee taught the Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira the watercolor medium, with such success that he became the first Aboriginal Australian citizen. In the early 1970s artist Geoffrey Bardon urged Aboriginal people in remote Papunya to translate their “dreamings”—previously drawn on the sand in dots that encoded the locations of secret ceremonies—onto canvas. Despite indiscreet revelations of some tribal secrets, this has become perhaps the most recognizable style associated with Aboriginal Australian culture.

Liu Wei, Crazy Race, 2002, installation view.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN, NEW YORK AND HONG KONG.

The shared characteristics of the two styles can make representative examples of them difficult to distinguish.
…Like American pop art, this hyperrealistic style was put to untraditional ends. Cynical Realist works assault the idealization and groupthink of Socialist Realism through disturbing group portraits of nearly identical figures, such as the men in Yue Minjun’s works, with their identical idiotic smiles, or the families in Zhang Xiaogang’s Bloodline series, which underline the genetic similarity of the Chinese citizenry.

Yoshihara Jirō, Please Draw Freely, 1956, paint and marker on wood.

©YOSHIHARA SHINICHIRŌ AND THE FORMER MEMBERS OF THE GUTAI ART ASSOCIATION, COURTESY MUSEUM OF OSAKA UNIVERSITY.

Gutai
Gutai means “concreteness” and was the name chosen by the painter Jiro Yoshihara for the group of artists he founded in Ashiya (near Osaka) in western Japan. Comprising twenty artists at the time of its founding in July 1954, the Gutai Art Association spanned two generations and numbered fifty-nine artists over its eighteen-year existence. Yoshihara exhorted young artists to reject tradition and seek new and direct—that is, concrete—encounters with the materials of art, regarded as metaphors of forceful encounters with life itself. In the wake of postwar devastation, Yoshihara’s call to action was an antidote to existential despair. He concluded the Gutai Art Manifesto (1956) by stating that “our work is the result of investigating the possibilities of calling the material to life” and “we hope…that the discovery of new life will call forth a tremendous scream in the material itself.”

Barry McGee, Untitled (Pimple), 2008-2012, mixed media on four panels.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ROBERTS & TILTON, CULVER CITY, CALIFORNIA.

Mission School
The term Mission School was coined by art critic Glen Helfand and first appeared in print in the San Francisco Bay Guardian in 2002….the work of the Mission School artists would range from spray-painted tags to discreetly stenciled images with captions. The astonishing success of graffiti art in New York a decade earlier would also provide inspiration.

The members of the Mission School [Apek, CUBA, Bill Daniel, Chris Johanson, Margaret Kilgallen, Barry McGee, Ruby Neri, Dan Plasma, Rigo 23, Clare Rojas] were mostly graduates of the San Francisco Art Institute, a longtime incubator of countercultural approaches and attitudes. These artists did not, however, make up a formal group; they neither issued a manifesto nor pursued collective goals, with one exception: Around 1990 several of them collaborated on indoor installations in municipal venues including the Yerba Center for the Arts and the South of Market Cultural Center. These were their most engaging productions, taking the form of vivid three-dimensional “murals” composed of found objects and overlapping drawings applied directly to the wall, blurring the boundaries between the contributions of different artists.

A VHS tape projects multicolor images in Cory Arcangel’s 2008 Video Painting.

©2008 CORY ARCANGEL/SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM, MUSEUM PURCHASE MADE POSSIBLE THROUGH DEACCESSION FUNDS.

New media has acquired a second, more widespread, non-art meaning, referring to all forms of digital mass media, in contrast to “old media” such as print newspapers or magazines. Confusingly, it is also occasionally used in reference to private means of electronic communication, such as e-mail.

Outsider Art
Roger Cardinal coined the term outsider art for his book of the same name, published in 1972. Originally intended to describe the art of those outside of society, such as prisoners and psychotics, it has come to be used more broadly to describe art by self-taught or naïve artists.

Adolf Wölfli, Untitled (4), 1915-16, colored pencil on paper.

COURTESY ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY.

Although outsider artists lack formal training, they are often obsessively committed to their art making. Their works may appear to be innocent, childlike, and spontaneous, but this is usually deceptive. Outsider artists frequently borrow conventional compositions and techniques from the history of art, and many maintain a remarkably consistent level of quality.

There is a general outsider style. In painting this tends toward bright colors, abundant detail, and flat space. In sculpture (or architectural constructions), it often involves assembling junk or cast-off materials in exuberant constructions such as Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers in Los Angeles or in extravagantly decorated environments that have grown out of the artist’s living space, such as Grandma Prisbrey’s Bottle Village, also in Southern California.

Pictures Generation
The Pictures Generation takes its name from a 2009 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Pictures Generation, 1974–84), which in turn tips its hat to the 1977 show Pictures, curated by the art historian Douglas Crimp at the Artists Space gallery in New York.

Louise Lawler, Woman with Picasso, 1986, cibachrome.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND METRO PICTURES.

The Metropolitan Museum show included artists who were not represented in the initial exhibition—such as Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons—but all of them had been casually referred to as “pictures artists” since the 1990s, probably for want of a better name.

The artists of the Pictures Generation were mostly graduates of the California Institute of the Arts at Valencia (CalArts) and the Department of Visual Studies of the University at Buffalo (also known as SUNY Buffalo), both known for their adventurous curricula. When Artists Space director Helene Winer founded the Metro Pictures Gallery with Janelle Reiring in 1980, many of these artists would find a congenial home there.

Mel Chin, Revival Field, 1991-ongoing, plants, industrial fencing on a hazardous waste landfill.

COURTESY THE ARTIST.

Social Practice
The origin of the term social practice is a mystery. Synonyms for it are public practice, participatory art, dialogical aesthetics, and relational aesthetics, the last phrase from the influential 1998 book of the same name by the French art historian and theorist Nicolas Bourriaud. Although the definition of social practice is vague, the use of the term by art schools and universities has led to its rapid institutionalization. In 2005, the California College of the Arts in San Francisco established the first of many MFA programs in social practice, prior to the founding of SPARC (Social Practice Arts Research Center) at the nearby University of California, Santa Cruz. Support also comes from foundations such as the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, nonprofit arts organizations such as Creative Time, and some museums, most notably the Queens Museum of Art, New York, which commissions projects by social practice artists who work with immigrants.

Kahn & Selesnick, Earthrise, from the series Mars: Adrift on the Hourglass Sea, 2010, archival ink jet print.

COURTESY YANCEY RICHARDSON GALLERY.

Space Art
Space art refers not to sculptural or three-dimensional forms or illustrations of spacecraft, but to the theme of “outer space,” including not just its exploration but its cultural meanings.

Its earliest antecedents include the late-nineteenth-century astronomical research enabled by advances in telescopic technology and the concurrent publication of the imaginative novels of the French writer Jules Verne, a forerunner of the science fiction genre, whose tales of extraterrestrial, subterranean, and undersea adventure remain among the most widely translated books ever.

Staged Photography
Although the term staged photography suggests falsification or fakery, it actually means pictures conceived and constructed by the photographer for the purpose of being photographed.

James Casebere, Yellow Hallway #2, 2001, framed cibachrome print mounted to dibond.

COURTESY THE ARTIST AND SEAN KELLY, NEW YORK.

It is synonymous with the less frequently used set-up photography and encompasses the subset of fabricated photography.

The difference between fabricated and staged photography is one of subject matter. Fabricated photographs depict exclusively inanimate objects, ranging from Ellen Brooks’s feminist-inflected tableaux of Barbie-style dolls enacting suburban social rituals to John Divola’s documents of his spray-paint assault on an already vandalized lifeguard station, creating a contemporary ruin. Staged photography, on the other hand, includes images not only of inanimate objects but also of human or animal actors, such as Cindy Sherman’s pictures of herself in artful disguise, William Wegman’s photographs of his dressed-up dogs, and Gregory Crewdson’s enigmatic and elaborately staged images, which look like production stills from a multimillion dollar Hollywood production in the making.

Tropicalism
Tropicalism, an awkward-sounding translation of the Portuguese Tropicália, refers to a revolutionary movement (and moment) in Brazilian culture that dramatically affected all art forms—film, poetry, theater, and (especially) music, in addition to visual art.

Hélio Oiticica, Penetrável Filtro, 1972, mixed media installation.

COURTESY PROJETO HÉLIO OITICICA, RIO DE JANEIRO AND GALERIE LELONG, NEW YORK.

The name derives from artist Hélio Oiticica’s Tropicália, an environmental installation presented at Rio de Janeiro’s Museum of Modern Art in 1967….

Tropicalist works in all forms shared a monumental goal: to jettison the universalizing, colonialist view of Brazilian culture as a primitive work-in-progress completed by European “civilization” and replace it with a variegated tapestry mirroring the complexity of class, race, ethnicity, and natural environment that accounts for Brazilian culture’s singularity.
Texts from ArtSpeak © 2013 Robert Atkins. Reproduced courtesy of Abbeville Press, New York, NY.

Founded by Dublin-born Fergus McCaffrey in 2006, McCaffrey Fine Art will now be neighbors with venues like Robert Miller, James Cohan and Lehman Maupin. The renovated facility, which will also host Alexander Gray Associates (currently on the second floor of the same building) and another gallery, as yet unnamed, may open as soon as early March, according to McCaffrey.

“The opening show will be a groundbreaking exhibition of Natsuyuki Nakanishi, one of the most important figures in postwar Japanese art,” said McCaffrey, 42, speaking by phone recently with A.i.A. Nakanishi was a founding member of the collective Hi Red Center, founded about 1963, McCaffrey said. About a dozen Nakanishi works were included in the recent exhibition “Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde” at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, he added.

The 5,000-square-foot second-floor space formerly occupied by Nicole Klagsbrun will serve as a project room, McCaffrey said. He has already leased the space for about 18 months. “We lent space to various galleries after Superstorm Sandy so they had a place to let their art dry out,” he said.

Currently ensconced in modest quarters on East 67th Street—about 1,400 square feet on one floor of a brownstone—McCaffrey primarily shows work by Japanese artists, such as Koji Enokura, Sadamasa Motonaga and Kazuo Shiraga, who are associated with the Gutai group, the Hi Red Center collective and Mono-Ha. “But we’re by no means a Japanese gallery,” he was quick to clarify, explaining that he has been expanding his roster in preparation for his larger facility, adding contemporary European and American artists including Jack Early (former creative partner of Rob Pruitt) and the Glasgow-born Gary Rough.

The Upper East Side offers cheaper rents than Chelsea, according to New York real-estate broker Susan B. Anthony. While storefront space in Chelsea might command $90 to $100 per square foot annually, an uptown brownstone might go for $50-60 per foot. But it’s tougher to get curators and collectors to visit when you’re uptown, McCaffrey acknowledges. So why did he originally choose the Upper East Side location?

“I had worked both uptown and downtown,” McCaffrey said, “in Chelsea, where I worked five years at Gagosian, and the Upper East Side, where I worked four years with Michael Werner. I thought it was perhaps better, since I was working with historical material that was not so well known, to start in a context where more established material is shown. And that has served us incredibly well.

“But the idea of Chelsea has always been at the forefront of my thinking,” he said, “and the new location brings different dimensions of foot traffic and proximity to other galleries. We’ll have great north light and 15½-foot ceilings. We’re delighted to be able to occupy such beautiful space.”

Despite its location in a neighborhood that has undergone such extensive development, the ground floor at 508 has long been underused. The landlord, Gloria Naftali, wanted to put a restaurant there, McCaffrey said, but her plans never came to fruition. While those negotiations dragged on, amazingly, the area around the space rented by Harris Lieberman has remained for years a workshop and a place to store trash before moving it to the sidewalk. The Wolff Building was erected 1926-27 to house the H. Wolff Book Manufacturing Company, and during a recent visit to the space with McCaffrey, A.i.A. spotted an antique printing press standing in the ground-floor space, where a building staffer was assembling an acoustic guitar—as a gift for his grandson, he said.