Atsuko Tanaka at Moderna Museet, Stockholm

Atsuko Tanaka

Moderna Museet, Stockholm

14 September, 2019 – 16 February, 2020

Curators: Matilda Olof-Ors and Jo Widoff

Possibly the first invisible work in the history of art, an electric dress worn by the artist, putting her own life at stake, and paintings in vinyl and sand. #modernamuseet dedicates an exhibition to #atsukotanaka, the first woman member of the Japanese avant-garde group Gutai, that starts in post-war Japan and progresses beyond traditional frames and approaches.

Atsuko Tanaka (born in Osaka in 1932, died in 2005 in Nara, Japan) 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. #atsukotanaka was a member of Gutai until 1965, and one of the group’s most radical artists.

In her work, #atsukotanaka 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. For a performance in Tokyo in 1956, Tanaka designed her ground-breaking Denkifuku (Electric Dress), which consisted of hundreds of coloured 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, Electric Dress 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 Gutai artist Shozo Shimamoto (1928–2013) described Work (Bell) as “perhaps the first ever invisible work in the history of art”.

The intense colours in Electric Dress 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.

Focusing on Atsuko Tanaka’s playful exploration of the relationship between body and technology, and between the work of art and the beholder, this exhibition presents selected works from Tanaka’s time as a member of the Gutai group.

The exhibition is in the left-hand gallery on Floor 2.

modernamuseet.se