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"Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949-1979."
ArtForum, Sept, 1998 by Bruce Hainley
While certain artists or groups were singled out, what became apparent was the way in which artists everywhere and around the same time started to mess things up. Despite my newfound affection for the Viennese Actionists, particularly the domestic settings for many of their most salubrious acts, perhaps the wild inventiveness of various Japanese artists and art collectives most astounded. The majority of the radical Japanese actions grew out of (or flowed into) the Gutai Art Association. Formed around 1954, the association resulted first in the publication of a journal, Gutai (fourteen issues appeared from 1955 through 1965), and then in exhibitions and actions. Whatever else art may be, the interventions of the various Japanese movements - the Gutai, Group Zero, Hi Red Center, and those crucial, eccentric loners, Yayoi Kusama and Tatsumi Hijikata - situate art as a temporal intervention within a particular spatial environment. Many of the works retain, even presented as artifactual residue, an explosive, kinetic energy: Saburo Murakami's Work Painted by Throwing a Ball, 1954; Atsuko Tanaka's Electric Dress of colored lightbulbs, swarming around her like fantastic insects; her vibrant schematics for the costume, accretions of spots mapped in wandering, sectional grids (both 1956). In their work, these artists shatter and recombine categories of social, political, aesthetic, and environmental experience. Complicating such categories most rivetingly may be the Hi Red Center, whose actions ranged from hosting dinner parties to dropping bedsheets and baggage from the tops of buildings (The Ochanomizu Drop, 1964) and mopping city streets (Movement to Promote the Cleanup of the Metropolitan Area [Be Clean!], 1964). "Out of Actions" provided an outstanding range of these heretofore elusive activities and, given the rich archive of Japanese work on display, it was strange that more was not shown of Hijikata and his attenuated movement, Butoh, created partly in response to Kazuo Shiraga's Challenging Mud, 1955, in which the artist crawled through a field, leaving marks as if Jackson Pollock's painting implements had become human.
For better or worse, Pollock, or rather the photographs and film of him painting by Hans Namuth, was seen here as the stone dropped in the lake of art; the ripples arced out all over. His paintings do pulse energetically, and their influence circulated with an almost viral-like thoroughness due in part to Allan Kaprow's brilliant contextualization of Pollock's practice in his 1958 Art News essay "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock": the painter left artists "at the point where we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be, the vastness of Forty-Second Street." By placing Pollock as an innovator, even impetus, curator Paul Schimmel structures all the works on display as (safely) art and brackets performance as the legacy of AbEx painting - the museum in this sense inoculating art from what in the end might bring it down (which is the point, after all). But what is thrilling about this show is that it documents works by artists who at root tried to push art-making to a point beyond which there may be no return. Many of the works destroyed themselves in the process of realization; that the artists are remembered - or what remains is considered art - depends on the fact that they survived whatever daredeviling they put themselves through. Chris Burden retains the name "artist" because having someone shoot him did not kill him; the monk who sets himself aflame, the suicide, does not acquire the designation. Art historian Kristen Stiles, in the catalogue's final essay, concludes: "How much reality can we bear? Whatever one's response, the artists who have made action art received, transmitted, and made visual more reality than we knew before their actions, creating new worlds, new cosmologies of human experience." But this begs the question as to what relation any premeditated act - staged in a performance space or on the street - has to reality. To have yourself shot as some sort of aesthetic act has a sweeter relation to "reality" than being shot and dying; those who mourn would probably deny that Burden's piece has any relation to reality - which is not to say that it does not remain a breathtaking aesthetic performance.
Reality does not have to be dire to be real. With few exceptions (the wonderfully loopy and yet elegant Singing Sculpture, 1969, by Gilbert & George; Tom Marioni's beer-drinking piece; Lynda Benglis' notorious November 1974 Artforum ad; Piero Manzoni's Merda d'artista, 1961; early performances by Bruce Nauman; Kelley's and McCarthy's scatalogical antics and punk seizures, which mark a point-blank return of what Disney repressed) was any giggle, any madcap frivolity, any ribald vulgarity, any hyperbolic swooning registered - especially by the catalogue's commentators - on what must have been incredibly exuberant and funny events. Even the abject evokes laughter, which is part of what makes it abject. As if in a putsch invalidating too many of life's less strident emotions, agon dictated.
