1950s

A galaxy of published materials related to PRES

“I have not graduated from Gutai’s way of thinking. I still want to do something new, that which has not existed before.” Motonaga Sadamasa was eighty-six when he made this reflection on Gutai in 2008, thirty-six years after the group had disbanded. Gutai was not a collective bound by rules of art-making. Rather, it was…

What were the main issues at stake in Brazilian modernism? How did the necessities and demands of the national context shape the country’s modernist art practices in the twentieth-century? These questions are addressed by Tadeu Chiarelli, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art – University of São Paulo, who surveys the major figures in Brazilian…

Initiated in the late 1950s in Zagreb, in the former Yugoslavia, and dissolved less than a decade later, the Gorgona Group continues to fascinate. Since the group’s first exhibition in 1977, generations of artists and art historians from Eastern Europe have viewed its ephemeral, collective artistic practices as the foundation for the later development of…

Iako raspuštena vec desetljeće nakon svog osnivanja u kasnim 50-im godinama 20. stolječa u bivšoj Jugoslaviji, grupa Gorgona još uvijek fascinira. Od njihove prve izložbe 1977. godine, generacije umjetnika i povjesničara umjetnosti iz Istočne Europe smatrali su da je kratkotrajno umjetničko djelovanje ove grupe temelj kasnijeg razvoja konceptualizma koji je u šezdesetim godinama cvjetao u…

The featured APN (Asahi Picture News) portfolios are comprised of modern photographic prints showing sculptures made in 1953 and 1954 by Yamaguchi Katsuhiro and Kitadai Shozo, members of the avant-garde collaborative Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop). Founded in Tokyo immediately after World War II, Jikken Kobo’s intermedia, cross-disciplinary works helped to foster the rebirth of the…

From Juilliard to Fluxus and traditional Japanese music, this essay, which traces the multifaceted music of Toshi Ichiyanagi, is based on a C-MAP workshop led by Yayoi Uno Everett in January 2012. [1] This presentation explores Ichiyanagi Toshi’s philosophy and aesthetics during the years 1961–64, when he was composing indeterminate music and graphic scores, and…

Throughout a career that spans the late 1940s to the present, Yamaguchi Katsuhiro has consistently proven to be one of Japan’s most visionary artists, distinguished by his restless curiosity about new media and means of artistic expression, and a powerful intellect that has been expressed not only through artworks but also through the organization of…

The Sogetsu Art Center (SAC) in Tokyo was a major hub for avant-garde activities between 1958 and 1971, a period of concentrated energy for the experimental arts in Japan. Artists, musicians, designers, critics, writers, and performers gathered at the SAC to test out new experimental practices and to engage in dialogue about new directions in…

As environmental and media ecologies changed drastically in 1960s urban Japan, how did artists respond to rapid growth and prosperity, and to their byproducts and side effects?