Some time ago, I was greatly affected by a single postcard displayed in an exhibition of the Gutai - a group of Japanese avant-garde artists that became famous both in Japan and abroad in the third quarter of the twentieth century. The sepia postcard depicted "Paper Tearing" as performed by Murakami Saburo (1925-96) at the first Gutai group exhibition. However, what was shown in that postcard was not the well-known scene in which Murakami, with his hair in a bob and a pair of round, black-rimmed glasses on, tears layers of brown kraft paper spread over a wooden frame.Instead it showed the torn kraft paper after that act was finished, as a finished product or an 'objet'. This made me wonder, 'what was the point of showing only the "ruins" of that performance?'; the significance of the work must have been the action of tearing paper itself. Indeed, the format of a postcard with an image of an art work with its title and the name of the artist may be commonly seen as a medium at painting exhibitions in Japan. I thought that the very act of entrusting this image to such a set record format allowed a glimpse of Gutai, an avant-garde troupe, and their unexpectedly orthodox positioning of art works, or mono, objects.
  Thorough investigation of this "paper tearing" scene revealed that the "ruins" of torn kraft paper created in the performance were actually displayed, in almost tableaux format, during the run of the exhibition. On the other hand, Murakami's "action" of tearing paper was captured on film by journalists, including a photograph of Murakami, exposing through a hole in the paper created by his fist. The experiments by Murakami and his colleagues were introduced overseas as predecessors to what would become the happenings and performance art of the 1960s, and such photographic records provided an even closer view of Gutai's avant-garde edge. For myself, a beginner in the field of contemporary art, I had already been accidentally drawn to such images. However, present -day Japanese scholars seem to share the view that Gutai members made such experiments as Murakami's paper tearing, denying and overcoming the expressive form known as tableaux.
  I wonder what became of the ruins, indeed, the art work, of "Paper Tearing" photographed on the postcard, after the performance. It seems that Murakami himself had no interest in conveying such things as semi-eternal art works to later generations. Therefore he distanced himself from a sense of the old style of tableaux, but on the other hand, the leader of the Gutai group, Yoshihara Jiro, long kept Murakami's torn paper in the shed at his own house. Conversely, Murakami repeatedly performed the paper tearing act after that first Gutai exhibition, and those performances were accompanied by articles, photographs and video imagery, thus engraving a transitory performance on people's memories. The torn papers were discarded as worthless, but even so, it seems that the Pompidou Center, the sanctuary of contemporary art, preserved the remains of Murakami's 1994 paper tearing as "art work," mono or object. Indeed, is it a case of the original remaining vested in the object, or does it rather lie vested in the memory? I know well the difficulty to distinguish between these two cases in the first place. Even so, in this world there are those who attach a sense of "object" to the intangible memory, and those who don't. Indeed, there are objects that are preserved and handed on, and those that are discarded.