Opening the Glue: Matsutani Takesada’s Self-Reflexive Engagement with Surfaces

Bodily engagement with surfaces, while actively incorporating new materials, was a compelling way for artists of the Gutai Art Association (1954–1972) to interact with communities. Matsutani Takesada—a Paris-based visual artist who joined Gutai in 1960—used a white vinyl adhesive, spreading it on the canvas surface, drying it, turning the canvas over, and cutting surface open to a globe shape. This adhesive enabled what he imagined: a three-dimensional cubic design. Matsutani’s surface demonstrates his self-reflexive engagement while waiting for the surface to gradually take its form;artwork organically emerged through experimenting with the new material, freed from the “spirit-matter dualism” of Gutai.

The late 1950s and early 1960s, when Gutai artists transitioned between performances and tableaux, represented a key moment in understanding the body as being more than autonomous, rethinking the spatial function of material surfaces in postwar Japan. As Clement Greenberg calls attention to sculpture’s weight in its self-sufficiency, the sense of surface and spatial configuration becomes unfixed in an object’s placement and contact with the ground via its own weight. As part of my ongoing work to position performance at the center of phenomenological thinking as a gestural form of writing—that is, externalizing a subject’s trajectory in time and space—I consider what was at stake in Matsutani’s engagement with the surface, pondering the weight of the surface as well as the weight on the surface. I argue that surfaces intersect materials, time, people, and space, extending and condensing their dimensions.