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Gutai came late to the party, but what a party! That could describe the entire course of postwar Japanese art, in a nation with deeper shocks on its mind than Modernism.

It could have left a stale, tepid rehash of Abstract Expressionist New York. (Remember the scathing tone with which critics once pronounced Joan Mitchell or Helen Frankenthaler “second generation”?) It could have meant a subtle revisioning of western art through eastern eyes, much as the Guggenheim in 2009 pronounced a view in the opposite direction “The Third Mind.” It could have imbued abstraction’s splashes, drips, and tears with echoes of devastation and rebuilding.

Now the Guggenheim finds all three, but something else as well. The Gutai Art Association, founded in a town near Osaka in 1954, had the advantage of its distance from both Tokyo and the west. It could start relatively fresh—fresh enough to see one change after another in western art and to relish the turmoil. Its collective activities parallel not just painting, but Fluxus, Black Mountain, Yves Klein, and the happenings of the 1960s still to come.

In this mad scramble of places, times, and movements, one spends most of the show in the 1950s while “Somebody to Love” plays from across the ramp. Gutai came late, but it partied like there was no tomorrow.

To be sure, the group started with Jackson Pollock. Its publication featured Pollock’s spread in Life magazine, and it invited Life to come document it as well. When the founder, Yoshihara Jirō, set out a chalkboard with the invitation to “draw freely,” he was collectivizing Abstract Expressionism. And visitors have responded by spilling color onto the wooden frame and support. Jirō bows to tradition, too, as with a calligraphic black painting broken by a white impasto circle. It is hard not also to think of destruction after a bomb.

Gutai’s manifestos, though, have almost no trace of deference, tradition, or darkness. They speak to “today’s consciousness” and “a new autonomous space for pure creativity.” Some projects reached out to children. “Gutai: Splendid Playground,” through May 8, invites one to step inside Yamazaki Tsuruko’s red vinyl cube from its outdoor exhibition of 1955. It uses video to track the making of art right down to The Drama of Man and Matter in 1970. One can hardly complain if the museum’s crowds and their cell phones ruin the contemplative and collective spirit.

Maybe one has to ruin the spirit in order to appreciate it. The installation runs chronologically, while each floor has a nominal theme such as “play” and “performance.” Yet something serious underlies the glib optimism and helps connect the movement’s competing versions of eastern and western art. Its name means concreteness, and it spoke from the beginning of not separating spirit and matter. Where conceptual art often leaves a physical or documentary record, it can make a point instead of its own vanishing, like the invitation from Yoko Ono to cut away her dress. Although Mukai Shūji burned all his work in 1961, Shiraga Kazuo’s mud wrestling left a work of art.

So did Yoshida Toshio’s burns in a panel, Tanak Atsuko’s sand drawing, Montonaga Sadamasa’s nails coming out of a pillar, Shiraga Fukiko’s bullet holes, Uemae Chiyū’s glue and sawdust, Shimamoto Shōzō’s hurled bottles of paint, or Murikami Saburō’s passing right through the canvas—and the leftover unsettles the closure of a performance just as deconstruction would predict. The colors and compositions can seem as heavy as any second generation’s, much like Tachisme in France and Arte Povera in Italy—but then the first does derive from a word for stain, and the latter tore apart the work of art.

By the end, the movement left more shiny objects and bright lights, looking quainter and quainter on successive visits, but it partied hardest long before psychedelia. The Guggenheim gives more weight than expected to the performance, while Hauser & Wirth recently, through last October 27, gave more weight to polished works of art. That makes sense, given the priorities of museum revisionism and gallery sales, but one needs them both. For Gutai, the spirit requires a concrete remainder.

Note: I have added this as a postscript to a longer recent review of “Tokyo: A New Avant-Garde” at the Museum of Modern Art, to fill out my latest upload. That show had room for Gutai, the subject an an earlier museum retrospective and review, and this fills out the picture.

In 2001, Zarina Hashmi laid slim black strips of varying lengths, end to end, across a horizontal sheet of paper. Their zigzag course could have arisen by chance, in tribute to Surrealist drawing, or by fate. Indeed, it looks like nothing so much as a mathematician’s random walk. Or it could follow the rough but steady course of nature, in her native northern India or her adopted land, the United States.

Another work from the same year, Dividing Line, has the broader but gentler weaving of a river. A woodcut, it also stains the handmade paper, mounted on a second sheet, with short black traces like the weathering of a great plain.

In reality, those black strips graph the artist’s westward travels. Like her art, the course of her life, too, could have been far more purposive than she lets on—or a surrender to the future. She had married a foreign service officer in 1958 and followed him on his changing assignments, feeling always and never at home.

One might well miss the work entirely on the way to something grander on the museum’s ramp, at the Guggenheim Museum through April 21. Yet it has a central place in her modest retrospective, both in time and on a freestanding wall. She calls it Mapping the Dislocations, and it and her retrospective are the subject of a longer review, in my latest upload.

Zarina, as she prefers to be known, may well have executed the work before September 11 of that year. (So we are on a first-name basis already. How nice.) Still, she has acknowledged how much the day has meant to her, and so much of her work is about dislocation and disaster. Shortly before, she made a print about the loss of her New York studio. Soon after she began a series, . . . these cities blotted into the wilderness, in which the lines map the course of war, in Bosnia and elsewhere.

One of her earliest works, from 1977, came after the death of her husband. The patterning, left by ordinary pins piercing paper, goes just fine with the abstraction of the time. It approaches the rule-driven procedures of Sol Lewitt, much as a pure white composition of nothing but folded paper is so close to Dorothea Rockburne. Paper pulp molded into a picture frame has the thickness of Ralph Humphries, while more paper pulp cast in bronze shares its biomorphic shapes of petals and cocoons with Eva Hesse or Alina Szapocznikow not that long before. At the same time, Zarina’s ritual of creation is like the obsessive act of grieving. More recently, she has carved fine soft wood into Muslim prayer beads.

Maps and rituals are forms of restitution and control. Simply in mapping the dislocation, she locates it. (From another series not at the Guggenheim, Cities I Called Home, I can safely say that her New York home is Manhattan.) The handmade paper derives, naturally enough, from south and central Asia. Other works, too, are suspended between loss and recovery. Some incorporate family photos, while the 1991 Letters from Home start with actual letters between her and her sister, about memories of their parents.

Along with maps, she embraces architecture (and she likes to speak of herself as a “carver” rather than a printmaker). The thick black lines on her letters from home amount to floor plans. Cuts in gold leaf on paper make it look like piled bricks. Shadow House I of 2006 consists entirely of a cutout, with each gap in the shape of an arch, while the whole could function as a window. Each arch casts shadows like a larger structure as well. One way or other, the artist has found a home.

Note: I have added the longer version to a recent review of Huma Bhabha at MoMA PS1. It brings together two women artists of very different generations and hostile nations, not to mention one good and one tacky, but with much in common. One is from India and one from Pakistan, both are women and in New York, and both connect Minimalism and biomorphic abstraction to harsh rituals. In different ways, they ask when terror and loss translate into something spiritual, personal, and true to the present.