In war-ravaged Japan, the post-WW II years were riddled with existentialist concerns. The call for concreteness, voiced by the Osaka-based Gutai Group, was concerned with the reconstruction of the basic notion of human existence in a way that was different from the wartime notion of the national body or kokutai and ‘its hundred million hearts beating as one.’ The Japanese word for individual, understood as a psycho-physical entity – kotai – comprises the character tai, which is present in the word gutai and stands for ‘body’ in the physical, carnal, spatial and environmental sense of the word. This concrete and embodied approach to environmental existence can be seen in Kazuo Shiraga’s 1955 Challenging Mud as well as in his 1956 Please Come In. In Challenging Mud, performed at the First Gutai Art Exhibition at the Ohara Kaikan Hall in Tokyo, Shiraga jumped into a mound of mud full of rocks, gravel and sand. As can be seen from the above positive and negative images, he wrestled with the resistant matter, whirling, rolling, jumping, diving, kicking and flicking, creating contorted dynamic shapes in the process.
When he emerged from this battle with the mud, he was bruised and had several open wounds. The same visceral engagement can be seen in Please Come In, performed at the One Day Art Exhibition on the Imazu Beach, Nishinomiya, in April 1956. Just as physically demanding as Challenging Mud, this work consisted of Shiraga hacking the interior of a conical structure made of logs and making a dwelling with no reliance on tools other than an axe. After he had created a precarious dwelling, audience members were invited to come in and feel the kinaesthetic echo of Shiraga’s efforts.
As Martin Heidegger suggests in ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking,’ dwelling is entwined with rediscovering existentially important things and a sense of place. This existential-environmental fabric includes ‘things’ as well as ‘events,’ matter as well as energy. It is called ‘the fourfold’ and comprises the earth, the sky, the mortals and the divinities. Heidegger uses the word ‘thing’ (rather than ‘object’) for material (infra)structures that are conducive to creating the fourfold – understood as the interrelation between some, or all of the elements of the fourfold. A log, a hut or a bridge – none of which have a single, delimited, strictly utilitarian purpose – are things, rather than objects. Dwelling, likewise, is a form of being with things that cues an ecological relation to the world.
A hut or a house mediates between the earth and the sky, the divinities and the mortals. The path to the hut or the house, the entrance, the garden or the backyard, emerge as ‘path’ or ‘entrance’ only when the hut or the house creates such a relation. Given that first villages and cities were built around graveyards, dwelling is historically associated with the life and passing of other human beings. A hut or a house additionally weathers the sky and the seasons because it exists in complex relations to physical forces such as gravity, and to affective qualities, like atmospheres and moods. This is why any constructive activity ought to be driven by care for how the fourfold manifests itself, not as four different elements, but as a ‘oneness with four expressions.’
The Japanese notion of (dwelling in) space doesn’t have a name like ‘the fourfold’ but similarly refers to emplacement, movement, time and the divinities. As architect Isozaki Arata notes, all spaces receive kami (the spirits) when they descend upon them with their ki – the Japanese rendition of the Chinese chi or vital energy, as in the term tai chi, which refers to the emplacement of the vital energy in a body.
For example, the moment when space is moved and becomes time has been at the forefront of Japanese art and architecture for many centuries. As a unique form of spatial perception related to events that took place in it, evident in Shiraga’s Challenging Mud and Please Come In, space-becoming-time is attuned to transformation, such as the moment when flowers begin to wilt or a shadow appears on water. This energetic propensity of space can also be seen in a common architectural form called ganko, which stands for the flight pattern of wild geese and takes the shape of several buildings joined in succession along a diagonal axis. Key in this design is that while each part of the building preserves its own sense of emplacement, the buildings are related to a shifting axis, based on the diagonal, dynamic view.
What appears to be solid and static – a building – is always related to motion, the cycles of life and death, the sky and the earth. In Japanese, this complex web of temporal-ecological relations is often conveyed in a single-letter form: e. E means ‘picturing’ but doesn’t refer to commodified visual imaging that often reduces the world to a picture, as in Heidegger’s well-known phrase ‘world as picture,’ but rather to aurally, kinaesthetically and/or propriocentrically (relating to the body’s sense of balance) vibrating images. Vibrating images modulate the temporal dimension either through reverberation, as in Please Come In, or through a physically felt indication of potential or future movement, as in the ganko composition.
The emphasis of e on imperceptible energetic relations, which may include the weather, the tides, the soil, plants and animals, articulates geological and deep-ecological interactions at different temporal scales and orders of in/visibility. This is why the Gutai Group’s commitment to practising e in everyday life included not only adults but also children and animals, thus pointing to the need for a multispecies imagistic conversation about undercurrent energetic relations. Playful assemblages of bizarre materials assembled by toddlers, cats, dogs and birds were exhibited alongside adult ruminations on the energetics of dwelling at many Gutai exhibitions such as the 1955 and 1956 Ashiya exhibitions Challenging the Midsummer Sun.
Natasha Lushetish