In the period immediately after World War II Japanese contemporary artists who had already been active before the war were continuing to exhibit works of distinctive character and bringing them to greater maturity. On the other hand, those artists disposed to directing their artistic gaze inward created works in which they presented their own inner worlds in diverse, experimental ways. Both types of artists possessed fresh, new sensibilities and committed themselves to deep, rigorous thinking, turning these into definite formal ideas that governed their works.
It was around this time that SaitoYoshishige drew sudden notice in art circles when he won the Mr. K's Prize (The Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura, Award) with Demon (cat.no.57-2),which he exhibited at The 4th International A rt Exhibition, Japan (1957). As a result of this award, moreover, he was chosen to exhibit at such venues as the Bienal de Sao Paulo of 1959, as well as the Biennale Internazionale d'Arte Venezia and the Guggenheim International Award exhibition of 1960. In that sense, Demon is a work that has monumental meaning for Saito.
Sakai Tadayasu once described Demon as having something like the crystallization of the artist's thoughts existing solidly behind it. Indeed we can feel in this work Saito's “demonically" intense artistic will lying concealed behind an indefinable humor.
Saito discovered Russian avant-garde art and Dadaism early in his career. This experience caused him to begin feelings doubts about established values of art and to become increasingly disaffected with painting. His resulting rejection of the fundamental character of painting, that is, of the expression of space as an illusion, and his adoption of an anti-painting attitude probably derived from such Dadaistic tendencies. Indeed, Saito's subsequent creative activities can all be described as having arisen from this anti-painting attitude.
For example, soon after Demon, he embarked on his 1960s style of carving scratch-like marks on the surface of plywood panels using a drill. No doubt this was his way of avoiding “depicting" in a painterly sense. From there, his work developed into his Four Positions and Dissymmetry series of the 1970s, which are wood relieves composed of even simpler, monochrome shapes. Finally, his works took the form of connected pieces of black painted timber in his Complex series of the 1980s.
Saito's shapes evolved from the planar to relieves, and from there they lib Crated themselves from the frame and wall, to rise up from the floor as three-dimensional works. His colors, too, gradually became more monochromatic, until finally, his works came to be painted in a single, inorganic black. As I mentioned above, he eliminated illusion from artistic expression and presented the actual "object" itself as a work occupying a definite space.
In the summer of 1999, Saito said: "For me, there is the process of creation. and the work exists as the result of that process. What is important is not the 'thing' but the 'occurrence.' I am not trying to make the work that is the result; I am satisfied if I succeed in communicating the process."
These words bring to mind the nineteenth-century German philosopher G.Simmel. In an essay, Simmel asserted that the significance of philosophical thought lies not in the drawing of some kind of conclusion regarding content and, from there, the development of a system or dogma, but in the process or act of thinking itself. I believe that this offers a very meaningful suggestion for increasing our understanding of the art of Saito Yoshishige, who spent a lifetime questioning the very foundations of the history of modern Japanese art. |
