UNTITLED
KAZUO SHIRAGA, 1964
Get close to this one. Closer than you think you should. Because from across the room it reads as a painting, and it is, but up close it's a terrain. These ridges of paint are thick enough to cast shadows. Some of them are an inch off the canvas. You can see where the material piled up and where it got shoved aside, and if you look at that big sweeping arc on the right — follow it — that's not a brushstroke. That's the path of a body. Shiraga hung himself from a rope attached to the ceiling, swung over the canvas, and painted this with his feet. His feet. Not in some loose, free-spirited, wine-and-paint-night way. In a controlled, athletic, borderline insane way. He'd grip the rope, lower himself into the paint, and use his full body weight to drag and push pigment across the surface. For hours. He trained in martial arts — Enshin Itto-ryu, traditional Japanese swordsmanship — and you can feel that discipline in the marks. This isn't flailing. There's intention inside the chaos. Every ridge has direction. He was part of Gutai, a group of Japanese artists in the 1950s and 60s who decided the old relationship between artist and material was finished and the only honest thing left was to go through it. Physically. They punched through paper, they rolled in mud, one guy drove a car through wet paint. Shiraga chose the rope. And the weird thing is — for all that violence, look at the result. It's gorgeous. Stand back again. It's almost entirely red, but it's not one red — it's this churning, layered thing where crimson slides into burgundy slides into something almost orange underneath, and the whole mass of it barely stays inside the frame. The raw canvas showing through at the edges makes it feel like the painting almost didn't fit. Like it was bigger than the surface it landed on. And then down in the bottom left corner, these tiny black characters. His seal. Sitting there perfectly still and quiet next to all that wreckage. That's what stays with me. Not the force — you can see the force from twenty feet away. It's the control hiding inside it. The fact that somebody did something this reckless and landed it exactly right.