GUTAI DICTIONARY

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One-day open-air exhibition

The exhibition was held in April 1956 at the request of the famous American magazine "Life”. This exhibition was held for the purpose of taking photographs to be published in the magazine and was not open to the public. Akira Kanayama contacted Life, which expressed interest and dispatched two journalists to the exhibition.
On April 6 and 9 the exhibition was held at a warehouse of Yoshiwara Oil in Nishinomiya, and on the 9th at the former site of oil tanks in Amagasaki City, which had been bombed at the end of the Pacific War and remained untouched.
The works were mainly from past open-air exhibitions.
Kazuo Shiraga performed "Please Come In" by swinging an axe down on a log painted red and assembled in a conical shape. Saburo Murakami's work featured a large yellow painted box floating in a tank of water, next to which floated a rubber boat with Yoshihara in it. Many photographs were taken and various works were presented. In spite of that, due to the poor quality of the photographs, the coverage of this event was not published. The following year, however, an article was written in the "New York Times," which was read by a large number of readers, and Gutai's activities became well known. One of the readers of this article was Allan Kaprow, who later published his own book on Gutai.

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