Fifty-five years have passed since the Gutai Art Association (Gutai) was founded in Ashiya, Japan, west of Osaka, in 1954. The group’s aspiration to “present gutai-teki (concrete) proof that our spirit is free” resulted in an amazing body of work, ranging from gestural abstraction to performances, outdoor and indoor installations to Conceptual art. Already in the 1950s, Gutai’s work prefigured many of the newest and most important tendencies of 1960s art. Their radical experimentalism was enabled and disseminated by leader Yoshihara Jirō’s engagement with the international art world. Using his extensive library and connections, he kept the group in dialogue with artists internationally, even bringing the group’s journal Gutai to the library of Jackson Pollock, among others. Today, as the contemporary art world becomes more globalized, Gutai’s transnationalism feels even more compelling and relevant than before. In the panel, art historians working at the forefront of Gutai scholarship will explore Gutai’s transnationalism in a “concrete” manner.

Moderator: Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator of Asian Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Participants: Paul Jenkins, artist; Ming Tiampo, Associate Professor of Art History, Carleton University, Ottawa; Judith Rodenbeck, Noble Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History, Sarah Lawrence College; Reiko Tomii, independent scholar and curator, and cofounder of PoNJA-GenKon

With support from the Japan Foundation and the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, East Hampton, New York, this program is conceived by PoNJA-GenKon in conjunction with “Under Each Other's Spell”: Gutai and New York, on view at New Jersey City University’s Harold B. Lemmerman Gallery through Dec 16.

Free to students, reservations recommended.