GUTAI DICTIONARY

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Paper tearing (Saburo Murakami)

This work is representative of Gutai's early action tendencies.
Murakami pasted paper on a wooden frame and crashed his body into the frame, breaking through it. It was a momentary action, and what is on display is the hole created by the action, or in other words, the traces of the action. At the first Gutai exhibition, the work was presented as six holes, but it was later carried out on a larger scale. At the 2nd Gutai Art Exhibition held at the Ohara Kaikan in Tokyo, he gave a public performance in which he thrust one arm up through 21 wooden frames covered with paper. The famous photograph taken at the time became a synonym for Gutai's early work.

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