Atsuko Tanaka 1932-2005
I was thumbing through my notebook today while I was sitting in a shady spot in the park contemplating my work, my life and where it all goes from here; while my dog enjoys the dogginess of her life. Through my notes, I was reminded of an artists that I discovered two years ago at Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany: Atsuko Tanaka. I was moved by the similarity of our work - materially, conceptually and in spirit. As I researched more, I discovered how early her works were, predating what we have attributed to western conceptual artists of the 1960's. (Not a single art teacher had ever made any mention of her or the Gutai group). It sadden me to know that she had passed away in 2005 and that I would never be able to meet her. But the solace is that I can continue to study the legacy of her work.
Atsuko Tanaka was a member of the Gutai group (gutai = concrete), which was founded in 1954 by Jiro Yoshihara in Japan, ending in 1972. The Gutai group combined diverse artists who all had undergone traumatic experiences during World War II. The artists, and among them specifically Tanaka, prefigured the Western post-war avant-garde movements with their radical conceptual approach. They radically expanded the notion of painting and sculpture into space and performative actions, a development that artists in Europe and the US discoverd much later in the late fities and early sixties.
"electric dress", 1957
(color picture taken at Documenta 2007)
Work, 1955 (yellow cotton)
Simply pinning the cotton directly to the wall, Atsuko Tanaka wanted to illustrate a new definition for the concept of a painting. Every piece of cotton shows one or two cuts of less than ten centimeters. To close them, Tanaka applied pieces of the same fabric or a few millimeters of glue alongside of the fabric's edge. This can be interpreted as an attempt to sharpen the awareness for boundaries; the fabric's edge itself symbolizing the dividing line between "thing" and "world".
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