In this lesson, it was more of a self-study/research deal and I was mostly focused on Gutai and Group Ongaku.
Gutai or Gutai Art Association was basically a movement that tried to get away and differ itself from musique concrete by being interactive, less manipulated and less composed. An artist by the name of Atsuko Tanaka was a part of Gutai from 1955 to 1965, in which she made probably her 2 most influential pieces, “Bell”, and “Electric Dress”. Bell was the first of her sound art pieces, despite being self-described as a painting. Bell was an interactive piece in which a series of bells were hooked up to each other so that when one would ring one, the rest would be played sequentially. Something of note throughout the 1950s and 60s is the performance aspect of Tanaka’s work. In its first outing in an exhibition held by Gutai, viewers were apparently quite timid in ringing the bells (only ringing bells once) and would refrain from interacting with the piece in its entirety.
From Bells’s interactive nature through the viewer/listener ringing the bells themselves, to her performance/film piece ‘Round on Sand’, performance and diegetic sound play a key role in her work in making it digestible for the public to view as the simplification of ideas and form makes her works understandable on a surface level. However, I am probably wrong about the idea of it being digestible for Atsuko Tanaka was a part of Gutai, an avant-garde group, meaning that her work was probably pushing the boundaries of attitudes of art during the time. So while it could be seen as digestible now, it was most probably extremely confusing to witness in 1955.
An artist that I’ve actually researched before that could have been inspired by Gutai is Yuki Suzuki. With a lot of his installations, interactivity plays a major role, usually being quite similar to Bell in the way that the viewer is at the forefront of the creation of an art piece. An example of that would be the 2019 installation at the Turner Contemporary “The Welcome Chrous” that transformed lyrics live using an AI.
Group Ongaku is about rejecting 12 tone music, which uses a lot of tape manipulation and non-western music as the main dogma (it was founded and started being active in 1960). I didn’t have time to look into Group Ongaku during the lesson, but as I do have a great interest in tape manipulation and Pierre Schaffer, I’m sure I’ll look more into them at a later date.