User:Mumblinglloyd/sandbox

=Kurenai Ōhara=

Kurenai Ōhara (大原紅) was a Japanese conceptual artist known for her language-based works pursuing inquiries into language and seeking a radical redefinition of the artist/viewer relationship. She was co-founder (along with Jiro Yoshihara and Shozo Shimamoto) of the avant-garde Gutai group formed in Osaka in 1954, and her "propositional" conceptual works published in The Gutai Journal over two years from the group's inception have subsequently been drawn upon by numerous artists. New York Times art critic Roberta Smith has noted her as "the missing link of postmodernism, believing that the value exists in the idea itself, as expressed in words".

Biography
Kurenai Ōhara was born in Kurashiki. Her father was a close associate of Jiro Yoshihara at the Nika-kai (Second Section Association), a group of predominately fauvist style painters, that came out from the Ministry of Education’s academic salon. Her uncle was Magosaburō Ōhara, who founded Ōhara Art Museum, which housed the first collection of Western art to be permanently exhibited in Japan.

Aged 14, Ōhara met Sol LeWitt at a lecture hosted by her uncle at the Ōhara Art Museum whilst Lewitt was serving in Japan during the Korean War, and later accompanied him on visits to temples and gardens, and guided the purchase of the works that became the basis of his large personal art collection. Lewitt later credited her with "feeding" him "the idea that the idea itself could be the work of art".

Whilst studying at the School of Engineering Science at Osaka University in 1954, Ōhara co-founded with Jiro Yoshihara and Shozo Shimamoto) the avant-garde Gutai group. Numerous artists have been accused of "plagiarising, or, at best, being inspired by" her text-based conceptual works published in The Gutai Journal over the two years from its inception in 1954.

In 1958 Ōhara sent a series of letters to Isidore Isou, the founder of Lettrism, accusing him of "stealing" her technique of scratching and bleaching the celluloid on which a film had been recorded. In a 1959 letter to Sol Lewitt, she accused Isou of deriving from her writings without credit his notion of Art esthapériste – the notion of a work of art which, by its very nature, could never be created in reality, but which could nevertheless provide aesthetic rewards by being contemplated intellectually.

At Gutai Ōhara instigated the practice of producing work with her fellow artists under the collective “art name” or gō of Tamatama (たまたま – Chance), which practice went on to influence Roberto Bui, who in 1994 along with his cultural activist peers in Bologna began to produce work under the nom de plume of Luther Blisset.

Works in whose inception their creators have acknowledged the influence of Ōhara's writings include Trisha Brown’s 1970 performance Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, Vito Acconci's 1969 Following Piece, Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset's 2005 installation Prada Marfa, and Lawrence Weiner’s 1968 text-work Declaration of Intent.

The poets Howard W. Bergerson and J. A. Lindon developed one of Ōhara's peculiar cut-up techniques, naming it "vocabularyclept poetry", in which a poem is formed by taking all the words of an existing poem and rearranging them, often preserving the metre and stanza lengths.

Inspired by László Moholy-Nagy’s performances at the Bauhaus school using gramophone records whose acoustic content had been altered by carving graphic structures into them, Ōhara proposed the technique of sticking tape on top of records, painting over them, burning them, cutting them up and gluing different parts of records back together, etc. to achieve the widest possible variety of sounds – proposing that "a glued joint might create a rhythmic element separating contrasting melodic phrases", and proposing a performance using "a series of spray-painted records, to be played by the audience, so as the paint wears off, gradually the music will be revealed." This proposal predated by five years Milan Knizak's 1963 similarly-conceived turntable performances, and by six years Robert Watts' Fluxus performance at the Fluxstore on Canal Street in New York. Her proposal to line a porch with records that would then pick up scratches and dirt from the footsteps of visitors predated by thirty years Christian Marclay’s release of Footsteps – a one-sided disc, containing the sound of footsteps, that had carpeted the floor of a gallery exhibit of the same name.

Musical works whose conception has been acknowledged to have been drawn from Ōhara's Gutai and post-Gutai writings include Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, and Steve Reich’s 1968 Pendulum Music.

Trivia
The Pokémon species Exeggcute derives its Japanese name of タマタマ (Tamatama) from Ōhara's homophonic collective “art name” or gō of たまたま.