ART-PRESENTATION: Atsuko Tanaka
Atsuko Tanaka in the 1950s and 1960s, challenged the boundaries of art. In post-war Japan, a period infused by the overhanging threat of nuclear war, Tanaka along with other members of the Gutai* group wanted to break away from academic art and start again from square one. With simple, everyday materials and radical practices, they sought a new art for a new era.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Moderna Museet Archive
An exhibition dedicated to Atsuko Tanaka, the first woman member of the Japanese Avant-Garde group Gutai, that starts in post-war Japan and progresses beyond traditional frames and approaches, is on show at Moderna Museet. Atsuko Tanaka appeared on the Japanese art scene in 1951, when she enrolled at the Art Institute at the Osaka Municipal Museum of Art. Four years later, after studying art in Kyoto, Tanaka joined the newly-formed Avant-Garde group Gutai. Under the motto “do what no one has done before”, the members of Gutai turned away from representational art. Through performative practices and simple, mundane materials, they wanted to dissolve the boundary between art and life. At Gutai’s first exhibitions, in 1955 and 1956, Tanaka presented works that are now considered iconic. Atsuko Tanaka was a member of Gutai until 1965, and one of the group’s most radical artists. In her work, Atsuko Tanaka incorporated the surrounding reality by gathering material from the rapidly industrializing Japanese society. Despite this, Tanaka’s relationship to the new technology was ambivalent. In the cold-war period, and under the looming threat of nuclear war, technology was perceived in Japanese popular culture as both a creative and a destructive force. Tanaka’s performances often involved experimental clothing. Conceiving of her body as a malleable painting, she would strip and peel layers of different colored fabric off to create shifting formal compositions of color. For a performance in Tokyo in 1956, Tanaka designed her ground-breaking “Denkifuku” (Electric Dress), which consisted of hundreds of colored light bulbs. When she wore the dress on stage, the light pulsated as if the blood coursing through her veins had turned electric. Technology and body became one with the hallucinatory lights of the modern city. Although seductively beautiful, “Denkifuku” with its hundreds of electric circuits also posed a potential threat to its bearer. “I had the fleeting thought: Is this how a death-row inmate would feel?” Tanaka said, describing the sensation when the power was turned on. Atsuko Tanaka was one of the artists in the Gutai group who took painting to its utmost limits. She considered her entire practice to be a form of painting, and expanded the concept to include time, space and sound. The installation “Work (Bell)” (1955/2001) consists of 20 serially connected bells; every time someone presses a button, they start ringing one after the other, drawing an invisible line of sound through the room. The intense colors in “Denkifuku recurred for many years in Tanaka’s abstract paintings, where networks of circles and lines are repeated in complex circuit diagrams. The same movement is repeated in “Round on Sand” (1968), where Tanaka instead draws circles in the sand as the ocean waves roll in.
* The Gutai group is the first radical, post-war artistic group in Japan. It was founded in 1954 by the painter Jiro Yoshihara in Osaka, Japan, in response to the reactionary artistic context of the time. This influential group was involved in large-scale multimedia environments, performances, and theatrical events and emphasizes the relationship between body and matter in pursuit of originality. The movement rejected traditional art styles in favor of performative immediacy.
Info: Curators: Matilda Olof-Ors and Jo Widoff, Moderna Museet, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Duration: 14/9/19-16/2/20, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu 10:00-18:00, Fri 10:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.modernamuseet.se
