Atsuko Tanaka

Slowly but surely some of the important landmark works and figures of post-war Japanese art are being properly recognised in the West. MOMA in New York has a major show and publication in the offing, and already there are pre-events on the horizon. Meanwhile, in the UK last week, a new show opened about the comprehensive legacy of female Gutai artist, Atsuko Tanaka.

It turns out, according to curator Mizuho Kato, that once she left the Gutai group in 1965, she spent the rest of her career trying to seen as an individual artist in her own right, not associated with Gutai. A quite traumatic story concerning her relations with the oppressive leader of the group Jiro Yoshihara underlay her leaving. She was nursed back to good health and productive work by Akira Kanayama, another Gutai artist, who also left the group and married her.



This show, co-curated at the IKON gallery in Birmingham, by Mizuho Kato and leading UK curator Jonathan Watkins, will offer a sumptuously documented retrospective of her work from all periods of her life. Everyone remembers her denki fuku (Electric dress) from 1956, as well as numerous other extraordinary experimental works with cloth, electricity, architectural sketches, wiring and performances from that period, that were largely inspired under the provocative rules and manifesto of Yoshihara. But her later large scale paintings are less well known, although there is clear continuity. There is something extraordinarily contemporary, though, about her early cross-dressing "fashion" performances from the 50s, when she was still in her 20s. Haven't we seen this kind of thing feted as the latest in cutting edge cross/over performance art in the recent work of Viktor and Rolf or Hussein Chalayan in the last couple of years? Yasumasa Morimura was surely right to turn her dress and himself as Tanaka into an icon at last year's Setouchi festival (his 2010 video work that I describe in the blog listed below). The original is an amazing work, on show for real now in Birmingham.

I attended the opening talk for the show at Japan Foundation in London. The show runs until 11th September, before touring to the Espai d'Art Contemporani de Castello, Spain, and then MOT in Tokyo - the first time she has been honoured with a major retrospective in her own country.

My blog on Yasumasa Morimura:
http://www.art-it.asia/u/rhqiun/pb5jrF6E3KZYc1USXvse/



ADRIAN FAVELL
http://www.adrianfavell.com