Please Walk on This: Gutai and the Emergence of Walkable Art

Abstract This essay traces the emergence of ‘walkable art’, a term used to describe works of fine art made to be walked on by audiences. Focusing on the two earliest examples of such works, created respectively by Gutai artists Shōzō Shimamoto and Akira Kanayama in 1955 and 1956, it argues that the rise of walkable art evinced an attempt to mediate the reconstruction of human subjectivity in postwar Japan through a close engagement with bipedalism. By offering a new model for conceptualising a spectator’s relationship to ground-based works, the category of walkable art that emerged in mid-1950s Japan challenges canonical, Euroamerican-centric narratives of horizontality. It also attests to the expanded interest among postwar artists from the Americas, Asia and Europe in using the ground to develop new approaches for displaying and experiencing art.