ART-PRESENTATION: Tetsumi Kudo-Metamorphosis

Tetsumi Kudo was a radical and visionary outsider. Almost forgotten until recently, Kudo is being rediscovered internationally due to his foreboding depictions of an ailing world and the emergence of a “new ecology”. By combining found materials and modelled elements into peculiar sculptures, Kudo conspicu¬ously anticipated many of the aesthetic trends we see in contemporary art as well as the present-day penchant for the surreal and grotesque.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Hauser & Wirth Gallery Archive

Tetsumi Kudo never showed in the US in his lifetime, yet his legacy is huge; his influence can be seen in the work of David Altmejd, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Mike Kelley. The exhibition “Metamorphosis” brings together 20 significant works created I the decade following Tetsumi Kudo’s move from Japan to Paris in 1962. The selection includes highlights from the artist’s signature container works (cubes, cages, buckets, and terrariums) comprising meticulously constructed tableaux; a monumental canvas made with a computer, and examples of his drawings and conceptual sketches related to these series. Kudo understood metamorphosis on several levels, as a biological process, a social phenomenon and as a metaphor for the spiritual evolution he believed was necessary. Kudo’s aesthetics and philosophical considerations were influenced by his early interests in biology, set theory, astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and popular culture, and were inflected by post war debates in Japan and Europe about societal evolution after World War II. Kudo’s micro-worlds cultivate an uncanny fusing of imagery derived from the artist’s highly personal visual lexicon that includes eyeballs, crawling penises, cacti, plastic flowers, pills, transistors and thermometers. His ‘visual maquettes’ draw viewers into a world of mutations and self-organizing biological systems that reflect the desolation and decay mankind has wreaked upon the macroscopic world. The exhibition opens with examples from Kudo’s “cubes” and “dice”. Using found and purchased objects he filled small boxes with among other things, plastic dolls, kitchenware, clocks, cocoons (or objects wrapped in cocoons), and a proliferation of fragmented body parts that he constructed in paper mâché and cotton. The dice serve as metaphors for the randomness of fate, and Kudo uses their interiors to present viewers with a portrait of themselves as they are. Kudo arrived in Paris in 1962, and thought of himself as an observer’ of the West, compelled to disrupt the political, economic, and anthropocentric climate of European humanism and its influence on 20th century art and culture. Two large-scale stacked die comprise “Bonjour et Bonne Nuit” (1963). A swollen head with deteriorating-colored flesh occupies the upper cube. In the lower cube, metal cooking steamers hang like celestial bodies. On the door, Kudo has compiled an assemblage of vials, pills, a picture of the Mona Lisa, a miniature chessboard, and a gun. In “Your Portrait – F” (1963), a painted blue box is filled with cocoons and an alarm clock. One chrysalis has hatched, revealing the contents of the pupa: a jumble of wires and small incandescent lightbulbs. In these microcosms of unnatural but inevitable processes of synthetic mutations, Kudo presents a portrait of our position in modern culture, hinting that our free will and individual agency is fiction and that life is controlled by a variety of larger societal mechanisms and forces of chance. From 1965 to 1981, Kudo made works with small animal cages, his longest sustained engagement with a form. These works are significant for their inclusion of an everyday object like the birdcage, which contextualizes his assemblages within the realm of the domestic. In “For Your Living Room – For Nostalgic Purpose” (1966), forms that resemble both pupae and phalluses crawl up and along the sides of a cage, while others sit perched on swings like canaries. Kudo fills their food and water trays with pills rather than sustenance like bird seed. In these environments, Kudo perpetuates the idea that humans, like pets, are being ‘fed’ or controlled by a larger organizing system. In 1967, Kudo began a series of works he called “cultivations”. These artificially colored spatial assemblages include the artist’s buckets, terrariums, and cages. In a series of works individually titled “Cultivation of Nature & People Who Are Looking at it” (1970-71), Kudo utilizes blue plastic buckets to create contained ecosystems. One bucket is filled with artificial soil and four penises, another contains gooey glistening eyeballs and snails, as if just gathered from the ocean. A mirror placed in the bottom of the bucket engages the viewer, allowing us to catch our reflection and see ourselves as part of this biological cultivation. Kudo summarized his evolving concepts in the hand written manifesto “Pollution – Cultivation – New Ecology” ( download here)  which was published in the catalog for his solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1971. Here he posited a new ecology in which humanity, nature, and technology were fusing into a continuous circuit of mutual influence and dependence that rendered Western philosophies emphasis on individuality and human dignity moot.  Works such as “Cultivation” (1972) and “La liberté de l’ étalon” (1972-77) suggest this ongoing metamorphosis. In the latter, phallic snails surround a crucifix within a neon orange cage.

Photo: Tetsumi Kudo, Coelacanth, 1970, Painted cage, artificial soil, cotton, plastic, polyester, resin, pills, 26 x 31/1 x 15,2 cm, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Gallery

Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 542 West 22nd Street, New York, Duration: 5/5-30/7/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00 9 (book here), www.hauserwirth.com