Untitled
Tanaka Atsuko
TANAKA ATSUKO, 1964. ENAMEL ON CANVAS.
Tanaka Atsuko was a member of the Gutai Art Association, amongst the most famous and significant avant-garde art movements in 20th century Japan. Their guiding credo was to explore the relationship between spirit, body, and material, and they used every medium possible to do so. They shook the artistic foundations of post-war Japan with radical interventions and performance pieces, and as part of a younger influx into the movement, Atsuko became an icon of the radical. In 1952, she created ‘Electric Dress’, a wearable garment of 200 lightbulbs of different colors that at once spoke to the beauty of modernity, the glory of advertising, and served as a metaphor for it’s dangers as the heat and weight of the dress as damaging to the wearer. It became a symbol of the movement, but the fame and celebration it brought caused Atsuko to ultimately abandon Gutai after falling out with it’s founder. The piece, with it’s dazzling concentric circles, can be seen as an interpretation of this ‘Electric Dress’, an experimental and conceptual work brought back to canvas. It loses some of the more tangible commentary but none of the aesthetic power in this translation - it is a reference to a wilder past, a pledge to uphold the philosophy but not fight against the sophistication and wisdom of age.