Gutai

GUTAI is a work by net.art that arises from reading Allan Kaprow’s text “happenings in the New York scene” where the Japanese performance group Gutai is named, as an example. This word Gutai arouses curiosity in me and I begin to investigate what they were proposing. The images I chose are documentation of the “challenging Mud” performance performed by one of its members named Kazuo Shiraga in 1955.

Technical, aesthetic and conceptual development

GUTAI is a work by net.art that arises from reading Allan Kaprow’s text “happenings in the New York scene” where the Japanese performance group Gutai is named, as an example. This word Gutai arouses curiosity in me and I begin to investigate what they were proposing. The images I chose are documentation of the “challenging Mud” performance performed by one of its members named Kazuo Shiraga in 1955.

My interest is that whoever observes the work is captured by the image, that I reach the sensation of immersion, a kind of trance generated together by movement and audio. Be attentive to the moment to later be surprised, shaken, uncomfortable.

As for the code of the work, I kept it simple. Use WebGL for three-dimensional primitive figures. An if() structure and an else() structure for changing the images, which was triggered by using the currentTime() method.

In the second part of the work there appears a phrase that I extracted verbatim from the text Happenings on the New York scene (Allan Kaprow, 1961) that I sympathize with, it seemed accurate for both art and life.

I made the decision that the images occupied the entire canvas to achieve the feeling of immersion. To involve the viewer. And I specifically chose these images because they are, in my opinion, perfect examples of what a happening is. These actions where the human body is used as another material object and where you know that something is happening that cannot be kept in a little box and kept on a shelf; “The painter or sculptor who makes happenings does not produce anything that can be bought (…) He is consumed on the spot” (Susan Sontag, 1962)

In the first instance I had the intention of using a video document of the artist in full action, however I privileged the fluidity achieved. Adding a video would have broken that harmony. The speed would have been different and the range of colors would also have been altered.

Biography

• Kaprow Allan, Happenings on the New York scene (1961).
• Susan Sontag, The Happenings; An art of radical juxtaposition (1962).