Atsuko Tanaka

A young gamine stands on-stage, rapidly removing a series of bright, futuristic-looking chiffon and organdie garments, tearing off removable panels and trick sleeves to expose new clothing beneath. The same performer risks electrocution by donning a pyramidal ‘dress’ made of wires and flashing light bulbs – round and tubular, clear or garishly painted red, blue, yellow or green – that resemble a mass of eyes and drooping phalluses. The artist is Atsuko Tanaka, and these works, props she has used in performances documented on film, are Stage Clothes (1957) and Electric Dress (1956; reconstructed in 1986). She is best known for the latter, a singularly iconic creation that evokes a malevolent Christmas tree and which marries figuration and abstraction by distilling the body’s uneasy place in an industrialized postwar society.
The curators of the Grey Art Gallery’s ‘Electrifying Art: Atsuko Tanaka, 1954–68’, Ming Tiampo and Mizuho Kato, aimed to show how Tanaka’s achievements helped to shape, and diverged from, the goals of Gutai, the exuberant experimental art collective of which she was a member from 1955 to 1965 and with which her work is often associated. Before Tanaka joined Gutai, she had already been part of the Zero-kai (Zero Society) group, which strove for a radical reinvention of painting. As a Gutai member she made provocative, difficult to categorize works such as Work (Bell) (c. 1954), an interactive Conceptual piece in which viewers were invited to press a button, causing a series of shrill electric bells to ring throughout the exhibition space, ‘painting’ it with sound. Work (Bell) may have been more effective five decades ago, when it was first installed in larger spaces for exhibitions of Gutai work in Japan – reconstructions of this work and Electric Dress were presented here – but the violent spatio-temporal rift triggered when the button is pressed still startles.
Other pieces in which Tanaka defied conventional definitions of painting include three unstretched lengths of yellow cotton fabric, which she simply tacked on a wall, and several works on paper in which she crossed out simple geometric shapes. One critic wrote recently that such works ‘betray an elegant Conceptualism’, but they are actually more tough than elegant. Tanaka has remarked that in making them she aspired to ‘destroy safe beauty’, and the destructive urge seems to extend beyond the visual. The crossed-out shapes – a red circle, a yellow rectangle and a wide green stripe – also suggest crudely defaced national flags (in two instances the crossed lines are made with red paint, conjuring up blood). Intentional or not, this veiled critique of nationalism dovetails neatly with the artist’s impatience with high Modernist