Shozo Shimamoto

‘There was a sense of collapse right after the war. The late 1940s was a painfully dark time when the whole nation seemed to be doomed to despair,” said Shimamoto, a leading member of Japan’s avant-garde Gutai group of artists. “I was a student of sociology in 1947, but the defeat brought me an unaccountable urge to create.”

Shimamoto became a student of Jiro Yoshihara, founder of Gutai. Recalling the spirit of the time, Shimamoto said he and his colleagues were motivated to “go beyond Mondrian,” the Dutch Modernist “who had captured time and space on canvas.” With the intent of embodying a longer progression of time and his own physical effort in his work, he began to cut through his paintings, gouging holes in stacks of paint-drenched paper.

But Japanese response to his early experimental work was disastrous, he said. “None of the critical authorities accepted my attempts. From their point of view, it could never be considered painting.”

A Gutai magazine put the movement’s advanced ideas out into the world, however, and outdoor events where the artists created site-specific works attracted the attention of the international press in 1955-56. For one exhibition, Shimamoto hurled glass jars of paint at a huge canvas stretched out on the roof of a building. Both the splattered paint and broken glass became part of the finished work. In other theatrical productions, he shot paint out of a cannon.

At the “Second Outdoor Exhibition,” staged in a Tokyo pine grove, Shimamoto suspended canvas from trees before shooting the paint from a cannon. “The wind blew my work and twisted it around the trees,” he said. But he cheerfully took the change in stride, as one more way to bring art to life.

Vito Acconci

Acconci, 58, will be represented by “Command Performance,” an interactive video installation, and photo-documentation of other public activities. He spoke from New York.

Acconci began his professional life as a writer but became known in the late 1960s for actions incorporating social criticism.

“What interested me at the time was that art seemed to be a sort of non-field field,” he said. “Writing could be a lot of things, but it always involved words. Art could involve anything. You could import things from other fields--psychoanalysis, history, science, news. And of course this was the end of the ‘60s, when any kind of authority figure was questioned. In the field of art, galleries, museums and art magazines were seen as authority figures.”

In various self-abusive performances that tested Acconci’s endurance--and his audience’s tolerance--he masturbated in quasi public, bit himself repeatedly or shadow-boxed himself into a state of exhaustion.

“Command Performance” announced the end of his live performances in 1974, Acconci said.

“The earlier pieces had to do with notions of meditation chambers, finding the self and person-to-person relationships,” he said. By 1974, I knew it wasn’t the ‘60s anymore, so I wanted stuff of mine to no longer be wrapped in that kind of cocoon-like space.”

He designed “Command Performance” as an audience-participatory piece, in which he appears upside down on a video monitor urging viewers to sit on a white stool in front of a video camera, while other visitors watch on another monitor.

“I’m talking to the viewer, saying, ‘It’s your turn now. I don’t want to do it anymore. You can be in the spotlight instead of me,’ ” said Acconci, who has long since moved on to making sculptural installations.

Gustav Metzger

Metzger, 71, is represented by a cloth artwork he intentionally destroyed with acid

as a social protest. He spoke from London.

Metzger, who fled to England from his native Germany in 1939 at the age of 12, rose to international prominence in the late 1950s as the maker of artworks that warned against nuclear holocaust and as the leading theoretician of “auto-destructive art”--a form of socially critical public art designed to disintegrate or self-destruct.

“South Bank Demonstration,” his major work in MOCA’s exhibition, re-creates an outdoor piece produced in 1961. Protected by a gas mask, Metzger sprayed hydrochloric acid on three large nylon tarpaulins--black, white and red, in a reference to Russian Kasimir Malevich’s early abstractions, known as Suprematist paintings. The nylon dissolved within 15 seconds, leaving only the frames that had supported the cloth.

Metzger had proposed the piece in conjunction with a conference of the International Union of Architects. The idea was accepted and scheduled as an opening day event. “But it turned out that one or two people in the organization didn’t want me to do this,” Metzger said. “They said, ‘What’s it got to do with architecture? We want to build, not to destroy.’ So I was told not to do it, exactly one week before the date.”

Metzger decided to proceed with a team of young architecture students. “We had to go into hiding. We even were prepared for them to call the police. But we did it as a sort of guerrilla action, and it went off very well.”

He defined auto-destructive art in 1959, in the first of three manifestoes. “The theory is very, very political,” he said. “First, it’s a reflection of the danger of nuclear annihilation, an obsession with worldwide destruction. Another central strand is an opposition to the capitalist system and related social problems. This probably won’t be very welcome in America, but there it is.”

Metzger initiated the Destruction in Art Symposium, an international gathering held in London in 1966. “It seemed that if we could bring artists and psychologists and other academics together, we might create a discussion of the question of war and social violence on an individual plane,” he said. During the preceding 10 years many artists had incorporated destructive elements in their work, “like tearing canvas or using explosives or fire,” he said. “It seemed to me it would be very, very interesting to face up to this development. So two basic strands fused together in the symposium: the social/political and the artistic/aesthetic/art historical.”

Continuing to address social issues in his work, Metzger is finding an increasingly appreciative audience. “People are waking up,” he said. “My work no longer seems as extreme as it did in the ‘60s and ‘70s.”

Nam June Paik

Paik, 65, will show two pianos and a keyboard that he has transformed into unorthodox sculptures. He spoke from Miami.

‘John Cage changed my whole life in one evening,” said Paik, looking back to his student days, when he first witnessed a performance by the experimental musician.

Paik, who was born in Korea and has been based in New York since the 1960s, is probably best known for massive installations of television sets, containing everything from live goldfish to digital pictures. But he has a multitude of professional identities--including video artist, performance artist, sculptor, filmmaker and teacher--and he got his start in music.

In 1956, after completing his thesis on composer Arnold Schoenberg at the University of Tokyo, he moved to Germany to continue his studies. “John Cage came to Darmstadt in 1957 as a teacher of summer school [the International Vacation Course for New Music],” Paik said. “We met there. I was very impressed by his performance. After that I became obsessed with pianos--as art objects and objects to be destroyed.”

Taking a cue from Cage’s “prepared pianos,” altered by various devices inserted between the strings, Paik took the idea to new extremes. He glued sharp objects onto keys to produce varying degrees of pain when those keys were struck, and poured sticky materials on keyboards before performances. One of his favorite pieces, “Piano K,” has all the keys stuck together. “You can’t play anything on it. I like that very much,” he said.

“Integral Piano,” on the other hand, is a veritable disaster zone littered with ordinary objects, including a brassiere, a feather duster and barbed wire. How did he choose the junk? “It’s instinctive,” he said. “I don’t have a theory.”

Hermann Nitsch

Nitsch, 59, will be represented by mixed-media paintings and photo-documentation of controversial performances using blood and animal carcasses in rituals. He spoke from Vienna.

‘Traditional means of artistic expression seemed very stretched and exhausted,” Nitsch said, recalling the origins of his performances evoking the crucifixion and Dionysian rituals. “I could not continue working with color and language. I needed to work with real events, using intense, sensual knowledge of reality as a method of making art.”

A painter, writer, composer and performance artist, Nitsch said he aims to create a multidisciplinary “total art” that can be experienced by “all five senses.” He integrated American action painting into theatrical events in the 1960s, then began to use blood, animal flesh and his own body as he “moved from the picture plane to reality.” Unorthodox materials are necessary to bring art into the realm of real life, he said.

Affiliated in the 1960s with the Viennese Action Group, whose members became known as practitioners of the most extreme form of performance art--intended to produce catharsis--Nitsch has been arrested and even jailed in Austria for breaking local laws regarding public events, but he is internationally recognized for his ongoing body of work “Orgies-Mysteries Theatre.”

“I never wanted to violently break taboos,” he said. “Using the idea of dramaturgical psychoanalysis, I have tried to find reasons for and roots of taboos, to bring them to consciousness and overcome them. I have never been interested in political provocation, but fighting for a new reality is not easily accepted.”

Carolee Schneemann

Schneemann, 58, has re-created a studio installation where she performed as a nude component of painted constructions in 1963. She spoke from New York.

‘It was a thrilling time. We felt we were on this immense wave of transformation and excitement and a vital kind of erotics,” Schneemann said, recalling her work during the early ‘60s in New York. “It was a very transgressive period, in which thoughts became action and images went into real live time. Inappropriate materials began to have tremendous value. We were all working with so-called garbage, and looking at the interior gestalt and relationships of disparate materials.”

Driven by “the implied energy of the Abstract Expressionists,” she and her colleagues were concerned with kinetic aspects of painting, she said. “One question for me was how to increase [the perception of movement]. The second question was how to get the female nude off its traditional, frozen position in Western history. And since I was a painter who supported myself as a life model, I was in the middle of this historic dilemma: How could I have authority if I was only a young artist having to pose? How could I reposition the meaning of the body?”

The answer was “Eye Body,” a 1963 studio installation/action involving the nude artist in painted constructions, recorded in 36 photographs. “I decided to transform myself for every frame, so I would have to go fast and improvise and feel that I was completely a part of the elements I would use,” she said. “So I’m painted, I’m stained, I’m drawn on. I climb on my work, I crawl on it, I lie on it. I wanted my action to be really physical--not self-conscious posing.”

Schneemann thought she was onto something big, but curators disagreed. “They all said, ‘This is ridiculous. If you want to paint, paint. If you want to run around nude, that’s something else.’ ” But about 15 years later she was embraced as a leading light of the feminist avant-garde. Now she hopes “Out of Actions” will clarify the movement she sees as a “wellspring for everything that happened afterward.”