Tanaka Atsuko

At the 2^nd Gutai Art Exhibition in Tokyo 1956, avant-garde seamstress turned artist Tanaka Atsuko stunned audiences with her formidable, high-voltage, coruscatingly resplendent Electric Dress—an iconic piece that outlived its performance and immortalized itself in art history. Composed of a great mass of wires connecting some two hundred bulbs and tubes that blinked and flashed in neon colors, the elaborate dress-contraption heaved with intense heat and energy, imprinting a dazzling pattern of colors and circles on audience’s retinas. The pivotal performance catalyzed Tanaka’s signature post-1956 abstract language of brightly colored circles and lines: a striking aesthetic that challenged and transcended Gutai’s strict gestural automatism with a unique combination of figurative and mechanical abstraction.

Tanaka unveiled her Electric Dress at a time when Japan was experiencing brisk economic expansion and exhilarating technological development. Uniting art and technology, the Electric Dress celebrated the flashing neon aesthetic of Japan’s post-Hiroshima urban life, embodying the throbbing, pulsating heartbeat of the rapidly industrializing city. In addition to the Electric Dress, other works by Tanaka constitute stimulating ruminations on the unsettling spectacle of technology: most memorably in Work (Bell) (1955), Tanaka invited viewers to activate the raucous ringing of twenty electric bells upon the push of a button, alluding to technological automation as an ambivalent force with destructive as well as creative potential.

Work (Bell) also evoked the immaterial movements of technological media, demonstrating its ability to demarcate space and articulate boundaries. Writing about his experience with the installation, Gutai artist Motonaga Sadamasa described Work (Bell) as “a unique [experience] in which a line is drawn clearly within one’s inner vision”.¹ Indeed, Tanaka considered all the works in her oeuvre, whether installation or performance, as “painting”: in the 1968 film Round on Sand directed by Fukuzawa Hiroshi, Tanaka engraved a vast array of circles and lines along the length of a beach; while in Stage Clothes (1956) she unraveled layer upon layer of connected trains of fabric from her body in a twirling spiral movement. In both pieces, as well as in the Electric Dress, Tanaka was “drawing” or “painting” with her body, inserting herself into the very axis of production of shape, line and color.

Such a method not only engaged critically with the myth of Pollock;² it gave birth to the notion that abstract painting could be indexical to the figure³ - a radical concept that challenged Gutai’s strictly materialist philosophies. In addition, Professor Ming Tiampo writes that “Tanaka’s work was a highly conceptual response to the gestural automatism of Informel and Abstract Expressionism […] As opposed to those artists, who sought to expand the expressive possibilities of painting through the use of gesture and materiality, Tanaka focused on the boundaries of painting and sought to enlarge the definition of this medium to include sound, time, space, alternative materials, and alternative forms of visual representation such as technical drawings”.⁴

 Inspired by preparatory diagrams and sketches for her legendary installations Work (Bell) and Electric Dress, Tanaka’s post-1956 paintings combine figurative and mechanical abstraction with materially inflected conceptualism, transcending the boundaries and restrictions of the predominant gestural automatism prevalent during her time. The transfixing paintings in the current lots (Lot 1068 and Lot 1069) feature jostling, pulsating circles that evoke the frenzied blinking lights of Japan’s neon cityscape, while the fluidly twisting lines represent notsomuch traces of action but the delirious energy and metamorphosis underpinning all aspects of existence. Strident and electrifying, Tanaka’s omnipresent circles and lines are the culminating expression of her groundbreaking, career-long explorations in sound, performance, technology and mixed media, constituting a potent symphony celebrating the all-encompassing sublimity of life and interconnectivity.

¹ Sadamasa Motonaga, A Handbook for Gutai Art, brochure printed for the 1^st Gutai Exhibition, 1955.

² Ming Tiampo, “Electrifying Painting”, in Electrifying Art: Atsuko Tanaka, 1954-1968, Hemlock Printers, Vancouver, 2004, pg. 71.

³ Vivian Ziherl, “Atsuko Tanaka: The Art of Connecting”, LEAP 15, June 2012.

⁴ Refer to 2, pg. 64.